The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past 9780300188998

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Yale Studies in English

Yale Studies in English publishes books on English, American, and Anglophone literature developed in and by theYale University community. Founded in 1898 by Albert Stanburrough Cook, the original series continued into the 1970s, producing such titles as The Poetry of Meditation by Louis Martz, Shelley’s Mythmaking by Harold Bloom, The Cankered Muse by Alvin Kernan, The Hero of the Waverley Novels by Alexander Welsh, John Skelton’s Poetry by Stanley Fish, and Sir Walter Raleigh:The Renaissance Man and His Roles by Stephen Greenblatt. With the goal of encouraging publications by emerging scholars alongside the work of established colleagues, the series has been revived for the twenty-first century with the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and in partnership with Yale University Press.

Anthony Welch

THE

R ENAISSANCE E PIC AND THE

O RAL P AST

new haven and london iii

Copyright © 2012 by Anthony Welch. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Perpetua type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Welch, Anthony, 1975– The Renaissance epic and the oral past / Anthony Welch. p. cm. — (Yale studies in English) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–300–17886–9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Epic poetry, European—History and criticism. 2. Epic literature, European—Classical influences. 3. European poetry—Renaissance, 1450–1600—History and criticism. 4. European literature—17th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1303.W45 2012 809.1'32—dc23 2012016208 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

3)CONTENTS)#

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 one Tasso’s Silent Lyre 21 TWO

The Oldest Song: Ronsard and Spenser 50 INTERCHAPTER

The Lutanist and the Nightingale 89 THREE

Harps in Babylon: Cowley, Davenant, Butler 107 FOUR

Milton’s Lament 140 five Epic Opera 172 Coda: The Singer Withdraws 195 Notes 199 Bibliography 227 Index 247 v 3)))#

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3)ACKNOWLEDGMENTS)#

Many of the authors studied in these pages hoped that they might somehow recapture in their writings the glamour of bygone oral models and occasions. It is a pleasure to think back on the many stimulating conversations that have shaped this book itself, and to acknowledge the debts that I have incurred in writing it. Foremost thanks are due to David Quint, who directed the dissertation on which it is based, and whose generous mentorship has enriched the project at every stage. Among the teachers and colleagues who shared their expertise with me and read portions of the manuscript in its changing forms, I should like to thank Lawrence Manley, John Rogers, Ellen Rosand, Joseph Roach, Annabel Patterson, Leslie Brisman, Blair Hoxby, James Kearney, Ayesha Ramachandran, Sarah Van der Laan, Christopher Bond, John Leonard, Suzanne Aspden, G. Fred Parker, Gavin Alexander, the late Jeremy Maule, and my anonymous readers for Yale University Press. At the University of Tennessee, I have benefited from the professional support of the Department of English and the Office of Research, and in particular from my colleagues Robert Stillman, Jane Bellamy, Stan Garner, Chuck Maland, John Zomchick, Katherine Kong, and Daniel Magilow. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Giles F. Whiting Foundation, and the John C. Hodges Better English Fund provided financial support for my work. I also wish to thank Alison MacKeen, Otto Bohlmann, and the editorial staff at Yale University Press for their conscientious work with the manuscript. Portions of this book have been published elsewhere, and I am grateful for permission to republish them here. Material from chapters 1 and 3 appeared in “Epic Romance, Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War,” Modern Philology 105 (2008): 570–602, © 2008 by the University of Chicago. A modified section of chapter 4 formed part of “Milton’s Forsaken Proserpine,” English Literary Renaissance 39 (2009): 527–56. Sections of chapter 5 appeared in “The Cultural Politics of Dido and Aeneas,” vii 3)))#

Cambridge Opera Journal 21 (2009): 1–26, © Cambridge University Press 2009; reprinted with permission. My greatest debts are two: to Heather Hirschfeld, who has shared my writing life with wisdom and joy; and to my parents, who have shown me every kind of support as I found my voice and vocation, and to whom I dedicate this book.

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acknowledgments

5)INTRODUCTION)% A singer steps forward in the third book of Petrarch’s Africa. His king, an African ally of the Carthaginians, presides over a lavish banquet for a delegation from Scipio’s Rome. Petrarch lovingly describes a spacious palace hall, ornate tapestries, glittering vessels of crystal and gold. As the room grows quiet, the singer, arrayed in royal purple, begins to pluck the strings of his lyre. His song chronicles the legendary history of Carthage. He tells of Hercules’ defeat of the giant Antaeus in Libya, of Dido’s founding of the city, and of the late exploits of Hannibal. Answered with applause, the singer promptly vanishes as the visiting Romans give an account of their own storied past. The moment passes quickly. But it is significant that Petrarch’s Africa—the first classicizing epic poem of the Renaissance— assigns to this anonymous singer a story about the origin and growth of a people. The topic is a fitting one because this scene also looks back on its own literary ancestry. Its outlines derive from Dido’s banquet for Aeneas at Carthage in the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil’s episode, in turn, imitates the feast of Alcinous in Homer’s Odyssey, where the blind poet-singer Demodocus entertains the weary hero. Petrarch nods to both sources: the Africa’s narrator alludes directly to the Phaeacian banquet (375–77), while its court singer recounts Dido’s founding of Carthage and laments that future poets will mangle her good name (418–27).1 The scene marks the self-consciousness that was to become a hallmark of the Renaissance epic. Petrarch’s poem and its heirs labor under a burden of imitation that measures every aspect of their vision against the cultural legacy of the ancients. Among the clearest signs of the genre’s obsession with its own history are the many artist figures who populate these texts, proxies for the poet who shares the epic hero’s work of keeping his past alive. Near the end of Petrarch’s poem, the poet Ennius, a Roman precursor of Virgil, reports to Scipio that Homer has visited him in a dream. Homer showed him a vision of a young man: 1 3)))#

Hic ego—nam longe clausa sub valle sedentem Aspexi iuvenem—: “Dux o carissime, quisnam est, Quem video teneras inter consistere lauros Et viridante comas meditantem incingere ramo?” ... “Ille diu profugas revocabit carmine Musas Tempus in extremum, veteresque Elicone Sorores Restituet, vario quamvis agitante tumultu[.]” (9.216–19, 229–31) [There in the distance I could see a youth seated within a valley closed by hills. I asked: “Oh cherished guide, disclose, I pray, who is it I behold taking his rest under the tender laurel? Lo, he seems about to bind his locks with those green fronds.”. . . “That youth [Homer replied] in distant ages will recall with his sweet notes the Muses, long exiled, and though by tribulations sorely tried, he’ll lure the venerable sisters back to Helicon.”]

The young poet, Homer adds, is named Francesco, and the poem that he is writing will be the Africa. Ennius’s dream crowns an epic poem deeply concerned with family history, with questions of origin and filiation. Tellingly, this scene in the Africa’s last book—a kind of secular Annunciation foreseeing the poet’s coming—mirrors an episode in book 1, where Scipio’s dead father and uncle come to him in a dream to survey Rome’s past and future greatness.2 As Petrarch celebrates Roman history, he also traces his own ancient paternity. In this way he binds his fate as a poet together with the history of civilization. The future prophesied in the Africa ends not with Rome’s rise to world empire but with the advent of Petrarch. The glorious telos toward which history moves is the writing of the Africa itself, an act described here in terms that resemble the epic hero’s struggle against adversity. The studia humanitatis, with their arduous task of recovering the past, correspond to Scipio’s defense of his Roman heritage against its adversaries. At the end of the poem, Rome will crown with laurels not only the victorious general but also his poet, Ennius, upon their return from Carthage (9.387–402)—a harbinger of Petrarch’s own laureation at the same site in April 1341 (236–41). Yet these fictions of literary and historical continuity betray signs of strain. For the visionary figure of Petrarch, sitting alone and silent, quill in hand (274–76), is set apart from the oral and public world of the Africa. The historical distance between the poet and his subject can be felt in an ongoing tension between the voice and the book. Throughout the poem, the modern conditions of writing bear down on older fictions of oral performance. 2

introduction

Petrarch describes the Africa as the “carmina” (songs) of the Muses but hopes that “cunta legenti / Forsitan occurret vacuas quod mulceat aures” (in reading the whole thing, perhaps something will present itself that might give pleasure to idle ears) (1.9, 24–25). According to Homer’s prophecy, Petrarch “revocabit carmine Musas” (will call back the Muses with his song) but only in textual form: “grandia facta [Scipionis] / . . . corpus in unum / Colliget” (he will assemble into one body the deeds of Scipio), and later, in his De viris illustribus, he will chronicle the worthy acts of great men in “ampla volumina . . . vario distincta colore” (several ample volumes in varied style) (9.229, 232–34, 265– 66).3 Petrarch seems unsure how to balance the Africa’s two prevailing models of authorship, the ancient and the modern, the courtly singer of book 3 and the solitary writer of book 9. His problem was inevitable. Over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, silent reading and composition had been edging out older oral practices. Humanist texts had begun to adopt recent scholastic innovations, such as chapter divisions and subject indexes, that imply a visual and nonsequential experience of reading. Earlier medieval illuminations had shown authors dictating their work to secretaries or transcribing the spoken words of angels or of God; fourteenth-century images portray the author seated alone at a desk, surrounded by reference books, and writing in silence.4 Petrarch’s self-portrait in the Africa vividly captures this new scene of writing. But even as the first humanists turned away from older oral and communal forms of authorship, they also embarked on a new relationship with Greco-Roman antiquity, which they found to be dominated by speech and song. The modern experience of authorship took shape against an ancient ideal of oral eloquence, but one that could be accessed only through surviving written texts. This paradox attached itself very early to the figure of Homer. The contrasts between past and present in the Africa returned more forcefully some fifteen years after Petrarch began work on the poem, when he finally obtained manuscript copies of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey from the Byzantine diplomat Nicholas Sigeros. This was a signal moment for Renaissance humanism. The West had embarked on its first direct encounter with Homer since late antiquity, ending a thousand years of estrangement and neglect. Yet Petrarch could not read a word. “Homer is silent for me, rather I am deaf to him,” he complained in 1354. “Still I take pleasure in his mere presence and with many sighs I embrace him, saying: ‘O great man, how willingly would I listen to you!”’5 Having long since tried and failed to learn Greek, he could do little but honor the physical manuscript itself, embrace and sigh over it, and concede its silence. Speech functions here as a symbol of longed-for intimacy: if only the two poets could transcend the introduction

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language barrier and talk as friends. But it also acts as a marker of historical distance. Oral poetry was in the early stages of coming to be associated with a lost past, a thing to be wistfully idealized and, with painstaking, bookish labor, lovingly imitated. Over time, a line of separation between (oral) antiquity and (silent) modernity continued to grow and harden. Four hundred years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would argue that the post-Homeric Greeks, when their culture “began to abound in books and written poetry,” could no longer rival the mysterious “charm” of Homer’s oral epics. “The other poets wrote,” Rousseau concluded; “Homer alone had sung.”6 This book explores two tightly interwoven aspects of the Renaissance epic tradition: its changing relationship with antiquity and its complex attitudes toward oral performance. Petrarch’s humanism was shot through with what Thomas Greene has called “historical solitude,” a sense of hopeless estrangement from the ancient world that he revered.7 His burden found a poignant symbol in the contrast between the living voices portrayed in his fictions and the alien markings on a Byzantine scroll that he could not understand. As the rise of Greek studies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries slowly brought the origins of Western civilization into clearer focus, scholars raised more sustained questions about the meaning of an oral past, an era somehow more closely linked with the singing voice than the writing hand. Steeped in a culture of the book, humanist writers struggled to account for ancient models of oral performance. They puzzled over the social status of the artist and the transmission of Homer’s poetry over time. They asked whether the poetry of archaic Greece had analogues in contemporary minstrelsy and popular song. The ancient world became at once more familiar and more alien, an ever-expanding print archive but also a chorus of voices from the darkness. The Renaissance epic, in turn, inherited this double legacy. The studies that follow document the period’s encounters with ancient oral poetry and music and explore their wide-ranging impact on a literary genre that, like Petrarch’s Africa, found its loyalties divided between the voice and the book. “Is Achilles possible side by side with powder and lead? Or is the Iliad at all compatible with the printing press and steam press? Do not singing and reciting and the muses necessarily go out of existence with the appearance of the printer’s bar, and do not, therefore, disappear the prerequisites of epic poetry?”8 Karl Marx saw in Homeric Greece an early stage of human culture, an age of childlike mythmaking that had vanished in the wake of modern technologies like the book and the gun. A transition from oral to literary art 4

introduction

marked the frontier between ancient and contemporary civilization. As the titanic warrior-hero had been replaced by anonymous mass warfare, so had the shamanic singer by movable type and private reading. Such views of Greek antiquity were well established by the time Marx wrote these remarks in the 1850s. Half a century earlier, F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) had proved decisively that the Iliad and Odyssey had been shaped by generations of oral transmission. From Romantic primitivism and ethnic nationalism to the rise of modern archaeology and historiography, literate Europe had begun to “discover” orality and to make it the symbol of a prehistoric past.9 This work culminated in the early twentieth-century research of Milman Parry, who, by unpacking the formulaic composition of ancient epic based on his fieldwork with contemporary oral poets in Serbia, revealed that storytelling in the age of Homer was still more alien to literate sensibilities than had been suspected. By mid-century, scholars in several disciplines—classics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, literary and media studies—were converging on the same theme: a “great divide” separated oral societies from those with alphabetic literacy. The advent of reading and writing had revolutionized the human thought-world. It enabled abstract reasoning, gave rise to philosophy and the natural sciences, promoted skepticism, objectivity, and evidentiary argument, fostered historical thought, and perhaps even engendered political democracy. The emergence of literacy in the West did not just bring civilization as we know it into being; in the bold terms of Walter J. Ong, “writing . . . transformed human consciousness.”10 Many of those sweeping claims have since had to be modified or abandoned. Fieldworkers in oral cultures have not found the clear-cut cognitive differences between literates and nonliterates that the theorists had proposed. The idea that writing technology uniformly transforms the mentality of each community it touches has come to seem deterministic and reductive.11 Rejecting standard models of progress from “primitive” to “civilized” consciousness, scholars have tried to map the unique forms that the transition to literacy takes in each society. It has become customary to speak of a range of literacies, and to situate them within a given community’s institutional structures and cultural norms. Recent studies have found that reading and writing practices take hold slowly and in uneven ways. Their influence is less revolutionary than evolutionary, layered on top of existing social formations and power relations. Different socioeconomic subgroups may have little use for varieties of literacy that do not meet their specific needs. Far from advancing steadily over time, reading skills can spread among a population only to recede again, or can sweep across one region and bypass a neighboring one. The ability to read and write can play a role in weakening traditional introduction

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social hierarchies, but it can also reinforce them, strengthening the power of existing elites. Proficiency in reading might well be learned prior to the skill of writing, and able readers could conclude their formal education without learning to write at all, a practice that makes it notoriously difficult for historians to measure literacy rates in early modern Europe. Even those who achieve literacy in a vernacular language can be stigmatized as illiterates by a clerical or administrative establishment that uses a prestige language, such as Latin or Hebrew, as an instrument of its social authority, and controls the institutions that provide access to that language.12 In any case, literacies of a narrowly utilitarian kind—say, the specialized book-knowledge of the merchant or the apothecary—need not lead to more profound forms of questioning about the self and the world. Just as important, orality does not simply die out when literacy takes root. Instead, it adapts to and coexists with the new technology.13 Oral and literate practices interact with each other to create more complex organisms. A legal dispute might draw on both spoken and written testimony; a popular ballad might be transcribed, disseminated in writing, read aloud, and reintroduced into an oral community somewhere else; a royal proclamation or an epic poem might continue to imitate ancient oral formulae long after it has become a strictly written form. Such an intermingling of oral and literate cultures was felt everywhere during the period we know as the Renaissance. Europe remained at the early stages of its transition to mass literacy; probably no more than 5 percent of its population could read and write.14 Most people’s daily affairs—news, entertainment, commercial transactions, local history and lore—continued to be conducted without writing. But theirs was not the “pure” orality of preliterate Greece; these were oral communities permeated by the written word. A single competent reader could give his or her illiterate neighbors indirect access to a wide range of writings, which could be absorbed into existing oral traditions or spawn new ones. Literate elites, for their part, could not help but grasp that they floated in a sea of oral expression and worked under its influence. Lyric and narrative poetry had not lost sight of their origins in popular song. Spoken forms ranging from adages to ballads and popular romances made their way into manuscripts and printed volumes, which, in turn, further extended their oral circulation. Surrounded by living oral traditions, early humanists (with the pioneering exception of Petrarch) were slow to portray speech and song as a special preserve of the ancients. When Lorenzo Valla translated Homer’s epics into Latin in the 1440s, he could still casually change the Iliad’s opening injunction, “Sing, goddess,” to “I shall write . . . the furious anger of Achilles.”15 Only much later, 6

introduction

when the ability to read and write had more fully saturated Western culture, would the oral poet wholly become the symbol of a bygone past. The “great divide” theory—indeed, any rigid antimony between orality and literacy—therefore misrepresents the far more unsettled, dialectical relationship between these two technologies that has shaped their interactions since Greek antiquity. But the rise of such antinomies remains one of the defining stories of Western modernity. It is a story that leads back through the authors and works explored in these pages. This book seeks to show that a key transition in literate Europe’s perception of oral culture took place in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: an emerging view of orality not simply as a fact of daily social life but as the lost and mysterious preserve of human societies far remote in space and time. Ideas of a distinctively oral past began to take shape in the European imagination well before the age of Vico, Rousseau, and Wolf. To varying degrees, humanism had always felt its commitments divided between the voice and the book. On one hand, the writings of Petrarch and his followers bear witness to their reverence for the material manuscript or codex, with its promise of restoring, archiving, and disseminating the legacy of the ancients. Their core intellectual enterprises, from history to philology to literary imitation theory, depended on the close scrutiny of written documents and, later, on the relative fixity of print. Humanist educators, especially in the Protestant north, devoted themselves to widening the circle of alphabetic literacy. At the same time, such labors rested on a shared memory of the spoken word. Central to humanist letters was a revival of classical rhetoric that never fully lost sight of its roots in oratory. European intellectuals were drawn to literary forms that arose from oral models or occasions, such as the dialogue and the oration. Renaissance Latin prose style, with its paratactic syntax and its rhetorical copia, carried a residue of earlier oral habits of thought.16 Theorists of language argued for the primacy of speech over writing; language norms were to be derived from spoken usage over time, not from the abstract philosophical grammars construed by scholastic logicians.17 Schoolboys were trained not just in reading and writing but in public disputation. Academic drama and poetry sought to breathe new life into the dead languages. These efforts to convey oral presence sometimes harbor a sense of loss. The humanists’ urge to cling to the spoken word marks their distance from ancient voices that now spoke through layers of textual mediation. Literate elites began to construct an ideal vision of an ancient oral world, one that could be accessed only through the rigorous study of old books. In some respects, their melancholy historical consciousness looks much like what introduction

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scholars have described in other contexts as the psychological burden of literacy. Even as the spread of writing allows communication across undreamed-of distances, theorists have argued, it also isolates and separates, displacing the shared, social experience of an oral performance with the solitary, private one of the individual reader.18 Furthermore, because writing enables the permanent recording and archiving of the past, it also seems to change how the past is perceived. If oral societies view history as a loosely defined “not-present,” a living body of memory that continually adapts to changing social conditions, literates learn to encounter the past as a thing set apart from the present and frozen in place. Humanists who longed to call back the voices of classical antiquity seem to have felt something of this alienation and detachment from older communal experiences. Such longings can seem puzzling, even disingenuous, in the works of a tiny literate minority that was surrounded on all sides by vibrant oral and semi-oral traditions. The same early humanists who sighed over the silence of ancient poet-singers tended to pour scorn on their early modern avatars, the cantastorie, juglares, and balladeers of European popular culture. Petrarch himself expressed contempt for itinerant reciters at the Italian courts.19 Poggio Bracciolini mocked a Milanese burgher who heard a singer narrate the death of the chivalric hero Orlando and thought he was reporting a current event.20 Michele Verino conceded that the improviser Antonio di Guido sang of Orlando’s battles so eloquently that it was like hearing Petrarch— until he saw a written copy of the poem: “Then I read those verses of his. God! What baseness! I no longer recognized them!”21 In this way humanist scholars maintained old boundaries between the high culture that was the preserve of the period’s lettered elites and the demotic forms that stood outside their magic circle of social authority. But those boundaries shifted as European intellectuals worked to excavate the oral arts of their ancestors. Scholarly views of ancient song prompted new attitudes toward contemporary oral cultures and interacted with them in complex ways. Writers compared the popular singing of verses from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516, 1532) to the recitation of Homer’s epics in Greek antiquity.22 Others groped toward analogies between local oral practices and those discovered among the nonliterate peoples of the New World. The jurist François Baudouin drew parallels among the oral poetry of ancient Rome, the bardic war epics of medieval German tribes, and the choric songs performed by illiterate natives in the West Indies.23 This ethnographic approach to contemporary oral communities shaped the period’s assumptions about the sung 8

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poetry of the ancients, which, in turn, reshaped their views of oral culture in the present. Edmund Spenser could write of the Irish bards in the same terms that Quintilian had used to describe Homer, even as he used the anthropological methods that he found in an ancient Life of Homer to argue that the Irish were descended from the barbarous Scythians of northeastern Europe.24 The result of these contacts between ancient and modern song, then, was not so much to make the remote past more familiar as to make contemporary oral practices feel more alien. Literate elites observed the vernacular oral cultures around them from a growing analytical distance, blurring them together with lost ancient practices and isolating themselves from both. The perceived gulf between the two communities widened with the spread of print culture, and, ironically, yawned still wider as scholars expanded their knowledge of Mediterranean antiquity. They reached past the already well known civilization of Rome to explore the shadowy world of the ancient Greeks. Their research stretched out to the very boundaries of prehistory. The small library of texts that had been reverently gathered by the Trecento humanists grew to several times its initial size. With the establishment of a largely fixed and authoritative classical archive, authors who sought a place in the literary tradition felt the weight of the past in newly pressing ways. Literary art came to be defined by the labors of imitation and repetition, which many writers began to contrast with the artless inspiration of the oral poet. Poets were quick to embrace the rhetorical pose of the epic singer, but they struggled with its implications. For generations of poets deeply conscious of history, the remote periphery of the Greek world remained half-shrouded in myth, a place of song and ritual that had not lost its air of cultic mystery. This was where the modern writer confronted the alterity of an oral past. It was a foreign cultural landscape but also an inviting one, offering models of authorship which defied bookish labor and craft, and which tapped into sources of primeval, thaumaturgic power. To tread that ancient boundary line, carrying the familiar burden of literary imitation but trying to call up older voices from the darkness, was the task of the late Renaissance epic. This book shows how epic poets from Tasso to Milton constructed models of the past that are characterized by song and oral performance, and how, in turn, those models forced them to reassess their own art and vocation. It will say little about the influence of orality at the level of poetic form—the kinds of residual oralism that linger in the prosodic and rhetorical structures of early modern verse. Instead, it documents something more elusive: the introduction

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ways in which ideas of an ancient oral inheritance shaped the poets’ views of history, their theories of authorship, and their sense of their place within a literary tradition. Their writings capture Renaissance Europe’s double stance toward the ancient world, its mingled thrill of recovery and felt estrangement from a distant age. Like Petrarch’s Africa, this body of poetry ekes out a precarious balance between the claims of the singing voice and the writing hand. The poets, defying the modern scholarly categories of “oral” and “literary” epic, vest their authority in oral forms that are waning or obsolete even as they adapt themselves to the new medium of print.25 They rehearse another of the abiding stories of modernity—the rise of the author as a selfconscious, self-defining creative agent—by clinging to the ancient tropes of a literary genre that was beginning to lose its place at the center of Europe’s cultural consciousness. Over and over, they bind their authorial personae to far-flung sites of historical origin, regions of the remote past that give their art its sanction and idiom. Some model themselves on Homer, but many employ other oral sources and traditions: the psalms of David, or the ancient hymns attributed to Orpheus, or the British chronicles said to have been preserved by Celtic bards. To associate those sources with music and vocality, as these poets do, encodes complex attitudes about literary influence, patronage relations, national identity, the place of the artist in the community, and the place of humanity in the cosmos. A brief example will begin to suggest how this matrix of forces shaped the epic poet’s vocation in the late Renaissance. Interest in the workings of oral communities had grown markedly as global explorers made contact with nonliterate peoples in Asia and the Americas. To study cultural differences across geographical space was also, for some observers, to glimpse change across historical time: so-called savage populations both at home and abroad might mirror the early stages of European civilization. Historians began to reject old legends of national origin in favor of evolutionary models of history, positing the growth of order and civility from primitive and often oral roots. Those who preferred to view history as a decline from idealized origins now sometimes glorified those ancestral peoples as oral societies bound together by their leaders’ charismatic voices. The impact of this cultural shift on epic poetry can be felt in the works of the English poet Michael Drayton, whose career straddled the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. Although now best known as a lyric poet, Drayton was a devoted writer of epic and historical verse in an era when views of British prehistory were in flux. As an alternative to the legends preserved in medieval chronicles, sixteenth-century humanists and antiquarians had turned to Roman accounts 10

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of the early Britons. The Roman sources—Julius Caesar, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and others—remarked on the oral customs practiced in Britain and Gaul. They described bardic singers who, in the words of the fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus, “sang to the sweet strains of the lyre the valorous deeds of famous men composed in heroic verse.”26 Some commentators also reported that this people’s priestly legislators, the Druids, passed on their knowledge in the form of spoken verses, their disciples spending years to commit their secrets to memory. Italian and French commentators took up such stories as proof that poetry had flourished even among barbarian peoples in more primitive times.27 English readers, in turn, tended to draw parallels between these ancient oral communities and their living descendants, the bardic poet-singers of Wales. Celtic bards and minstrels in Drayton’s era were alternately persecuted and celebrated. Sometimes accused of stirring up ethnic resistance against English rule, they could also be portrayed as heirs to an ancient, unbroken British cultural tradition. Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney noted that the Britons’ bardic song “is not yet altogether left off with the Welsh which are their posterity,” marking them as “the true remnant of the auncient Brittons.”28 Such observations were sometimes tinged by cultural nationalism; they suggest the need to find a literary past with its roots in their own native soil, not merely planted there by foreign conquerors. The Romans, according to the historian William Harrison, had written unjustly of the bards because they judged all nations but themselves to be barbarians.29 Henry Peacham marveled at the “valour of our ancient Britons,” their fighting spirit stirred by the bards who compiled “in verse the braue exploits of their nation.”30 George Puttenham argued that the English use of rhyme, a practice found in primitive cultures the world over, proves that “our maner of vulgar Poesie is more ancient then the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines, ours comming by instinct of nature.”31 Samuel Daniel wondered whether the word “rhyme” derived from Latin rhythmus or rather from “Romance, which were songs the Bards and Druydes about Rymes [i.e., Rheims] used, and therof were called Remensi.”32 It was inevitable that the English should start to look for parallels between the songs of their native ancestors and the poetry of ancient Greek authors—Puttenham, for example, compares the verse forms of English romance to those of Pindar and Callimachus—and that they should find in this cultural heritage a new source of authority for their own artistry. Puttenham himself had penned “a litle brief Romance or historicall ditty in the English tong, of the Isle of great Britaine, in short and long meetres . . . to be more commodiously song to the harpe in places of assembly.”33 introduction

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Constructing a British past was also the ambition of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622). The sprawling chorographic poem is at the same time a national history, one that finds a people’s ancestry embedded in the landscape. This history leads back to the ancient Britons, who serve as an idealized source not only for the early modern British polity but also for Drayton’s authorial persona. He had long honored the Celtic bards as a symbol or analogue for his own poetic vocation. In 1619 he likened his lyric odes to the strains of the British bards and encouraged Sir Henry Goodere to have them sung by his harper, John Hewes.34 In the Poly-Olbion the bards supply a model of literary inspiration, a “sacred rage,” that resembles the classical furor poeticus. Skill in oral poetry is their native inheritance; they “scarce have seen a Booke,” yet they are “Addicted from their births . . . to Poësie” (4.188–89).35 Recasting the early Britons in the image of Greek antiquity, Drayton writes of their mysterious vocality in terms that were usually reserved for figures like Orpheus and Pythagoras. The bards inhabited “those first golden times” when even pagan voices had access to divine wisdom (4.171, 179).Their civilization stretched back long before the arrival of their Roman conquerors (6.327–30). For even fragments of their culture to have survived through the ages is testimony of their greatness (330–40). Such attitudes reflect Drayton’s reverence for the past, a “naturall inclination to love Antiquitie,” that is often attended in his writing by a sense of nostalgic regret.36 The distance between the present and the past haunts his poetry, measuring modernity’s exile from its ancient origins.37 In this section of the Poly-Olbion it is Roman civilization that bears the stigma of a forgetful modern age. Drayton reproaches the Romans who slaughtered the Druids and destroyed a culture that they did not understand (6.317–27). He compares their work of destruction to the efforts of modern historians to tear down the traditional story of Britain preserved in the medieval chronicles. A further analogy likens both groups of oppressors to Puritan iconoclasts: These men (for all the world) like our Precisions bee, Who for some Crosse or Saint they in the window see Will pluck downe all the Church: Soule-blinded sots that creepe In durt, and never saw the wonders of the Deepe. Therefore (in my conceit) most rightlie serv’d are they That to the Roman trust . . . Who our wise Druides here unmercifullie slew; Like whom, great Natures depths no men yet ever knew, Nor with such dauntlesse spirits were ever yet inspir’d[.] (301–11) 12

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Drayton’s lines strongly evoke the passing away of a better world. His contemporaries’ turn from native to Roman historians—from “our ancient British Rimes” to “Caesars envious pen” (10.238, 298)—has left a void at the origins of British national identity. That void must now be filled by the poets. For the antiquarian John Selden, who supplied the Poly-Olbion with historical glosses, such poetry amounts to a shift from fact to fiction; Selden’s notes quietly debunk the old chroniclers’ “Bardish impostures,” which he compares to the tales of Ariosto, Rabelais, and Spenser.38 Drayton, by contrast, identifies his work with the mystical voices of a people who lodged their heritage not in “letters” but in “the breasts of men” (267–69). His account of the early Britons shows how his epic’s construction of the past is bound up with its author’s self-representation. Drayton’s failure to secure steady patronage, his sense that poetry in the age of James I had lost its public authority, his concern that a shared British national history was being left behind—all of these find their way into his poem’s portrayal of a lost oral community, even as they define the lonely voices that seek to call it back. Drayton’s portrayal of a lost oral past gives some idea of how such models of the poet-singer shape the story of the late Renaissance epic and its relationship to the cultural legacy of the ancients. It is a story woven together with many other stories about early modernity. The readings that follow touch on several of the familiar cultural changes that vexed the period’s epic literature: a collision of martial heroism with Christian theology and ethics; the invention of gunpowder weapons, and, with them, the unheroic conduct of artillery warfare; the weakening of epic wonder under the pressure of modern rationalism; the transition from an aristocratic to a bourgeois reading public, causing the breakdown of long-established patronage relationships; and the rise of a rigid neo-Aristotelian literary theory that stifled formal innovation.39 All of those developments spawned confusion and insecurity over the place of heroic fictions in a shifting cultural landscape. But perhaps the greatest trial faced by the epic genre was the period’s changing historical perspective on, and relationship with, the ancient world. For all their differences, the writings of Petrarch and Drayton share a troubled, irresolute outlook on their literary paternity. The sites of origin from which they drew their authority were in constant flux, subject to shifting cultural attitudes and widening scholarly scrutiny. Their portrayal of the past mixes themes of reunification and loss, continuity and rupture, familiarity and remoteness. The Renaissance epic straddled a growing divide between antiquity and modernity, and both were shifting under its feet. introduction

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What exactly did the late Renaissance know about ancient orality? The authors discussed in these pages drew on a handful of shared sources and models that can be briefly summarized here.40 Little was known about Homeric Greece in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What passed for knowledge of Homer’s life was furnished mostly by two ancient biographies misattributed to Herodotus and Plutarch. These biographies prefaced the Greek Iliad and Odyssey in the Florentine editio princeps of 1488, and they continued to appear in editions and translations of the Homeric epics well into the seventeenth century. The Lives offer hazy images of a blind sage—his name was said to mean “blind man” in Cymaean Greek—who lived within a few generations of the fall of Troy.41 They report his growing fame but also his rootlessness; in a sequence of gnomic set pieces, they portray him wandering from city to city, singing for his livelihood. Further insight into his life and vocation had to be sought in the Homeric poems themselves. Early modern readers gravitated to Demodocus, the blind singer of the Odyssey, whose tale-telling at the Phaeacian court inspired imitations by Petrarch and his heirs. If children take pleasure in “hearynge minstreles,” asked Thomas Elyot, “what minstrell may be compared . . . to blinde Demodocus, that played and sange most swetely at the dyner, that the king Alcinous made to Ulisses . . .?”42 This figure could easily be viewed as the Greek poet’s self-portrait, celebrating the skills of the courtly bard or aoidos. A more surprising model for the poets was Homer’s Achilles, found at his tent in book 9 of the Iliad, plucking the strings of a lyre and singing the deeds of fighting men (9.185–95). This image, too, recurs in Renaissance epic literature. George Chapman imagined Achilles “loving sacred musicke well,”43 while Torquato Tasso observed that “Homer . . . in the Iliad, when he has Achilles sing of the deeds of the heroes to the accompaniment of the cithara, clearly teaches that the deeds of heroes should be sung.”44 Pierre de Ronsard assured his Cassandre that, although he was obliged by King Henri II to take up the epic trumpet, even Achilles had withdrawn from the battlefield to reach for his golden lute and sing of his love for Briseis, his fingers still stained with his enemies’ blood.45 The Homeric epics thus laid the groundwork for analogies between the poet-singer and the hero, implying a rival form of heroic achievement in the act of singing itself. Homer’s Odysseus, too, is compared by his Phaeacian host to a talented aoidos (11.366–69), and the narrator likens Odysseus’s stringing of his bow to a singer’s skilled handling of his lyre (21.404–9). Images like these often blur together in Renaissance writings with later Greek accounts of the rhapsode (rhapsodos), a professional reciter of epic verse who competed at the annual Panathenaea and other ancient religious 14

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festivals. The term, first attested in the fifth century BCE, was thought to derive from the rhabdos or staff often carried by these figures, or, more commonly, from the terms rhapto (“stitch”) and aoide (“song”), suggesting the weaving together of poetic fragments. Renaissance scholars took a growing interest in the second etymology, since it hinted at the process by which Homer’s epics had been composed and disseminated over time. Many ancient writers traced the extant versions of the poems to the sixth or seventh century. According to several overlapping legends, the rhapsodes transmitted Homer’s poetry to a famous ruler or lawgiver, whose efforts led to its preservation in a more or less fixed, authoritative form. Some sources, including Plutarch and Strabo, attributed this work to the Spartan ruler Lycurgus, who obtained the Homeric poems from the descendants of Creophylus in Ionia and brought them into the Peloponnese.46 For Diogenes Laertius, it was the Athenian lawgiver Solon who had first assembled the poems and arranged for their performance by relays of rhapsodes at festival competitions.47 More common was the belief—prominently endorsed in Cicero’s De oratore—that Peisistratus, the sixth-century Athenian tyrant, had gathered together fragments (“rhapsodies”) of the Homeric poems long scattered across Greece. Under his supervision (or, in other accounts, that of his son, Hipparchus), authorized texts of the poems were prepared and recited by rhapsodes at the Panathenaic festival.48 The historian Aelian merged the most popular of these traditions: Lycurgus, he argued, had brought the Homeric poems from Ionia to Greece; Hipparchus later introduced them to Athens and oversaw their recitation, while Peisistratus “put them together and produced the Iliad and the Odyssey.”49 The Peisistratean Recension raised questions about the origins of the poetry that bore Homer’s name. Had he composed them in their surviving form? How were they passed down during the centuries between Homer’s lifetime and their arrival in mainland Greece? Almost no one before the mid-eighteenth century proposed that the Iliad and Odyssey arose from a culture with no alphabetic writing. Literacy was widely thought to have been introduced to Greece in pre-Homeric times by figures who had since passed into legend, such as Cadmus the Phoenician.50 Both Pseudo-Herodotus and Pseudo-Plutarch refer to listeners writing down Homer’s poetry, and the former proposes that Homer’s portrait of the fictional bard Phemius (Odyssey 1.153–55) was his tribute to a stepfather of the same name who taught the young poet how to read and write.51 Yet the idea that the Homeric texts had been assembled at Sparta or Athens left scholars increasingly concerned about the implications that might follow from this. As early as 1531, introduction

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Juan Luis Vives sought to defend Homer against those who complained of his poems’ many repeated epithets, which, Vives conceded, “only seem to be added for the sake of the meter of verse and not for the meaning or for gracefulness. . . . The way in which the work was composed may excuse these faults, for Homer did not compose the whole at one time when he could have weighed everything carefully and eliminated the faults, but he composed it in separate rhapsodies to be sung for the popular pleasure. These rhapsodies were all collected long afterwards, and arranged by the grammarians at the command and under the supervision of Pisistratus of Athens.”52 In the 1550s, Giraldi Cinzio argued that it was the rhapsodes themselves who had broken the text of Homer’s poems into sections suitable for oral performance.53 Later scholars were to draw more troubling conclusions.Taking up a claim by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus that Homer’s poems had been passed down orally for generations before the coming of writing to Greece, Isaac Casaubon worried that no extant text, however ancient, reflected the authentic Homer.54 Speculation mounted during the seventeenth century. Paolo Beni wondered whether the disunity of the Iliad and the Odyssey was due to their disordered state before Peisistratus.55 René Rapin shrank from the view that Homer had composed his poems “only in fragments, not proposing to himself any continu’d design,” for thisould mean “the absolute destruction of Homers merit.”56 Still more disturbingly, the abbé d’Aubignac proposed in the late 1660s that there had never been a “Homer” at all: instead, some forty short poems about the Trojan War, composed by various rhapsodes, were later gathered together and assigned to a single legendary author. The leading French “modern,” Charles Perrault, gleefully reported this belief before retreating to the more moderate view that the poet himself had composed the epics as fragmentary rhapsodies.57 The views of these men map the rise of a historical approach to Homer that culminated in Wolf’s Prolegomena. For the poets studied here, however, Homer and his age still straddled a remote boundary between history and myth. He often stood alongside legendary musician-poets like Orpheus, Linus, Amphion, and Musaeus, whose vocality was thought to wield occult powers over the natural world. Because ideas about those ancient voices tended to merge together as a broadly shared set of beliefs and attitudes, we shall often draw upon the work of the late Renaissance community most deeply concerned with them, the so-called musical humanists.58 Although these scholars did not coalesce into a formal school or movement, they shared the goal of bringing the humanists’ loving excavation of the GrecoRoman world to the study of ancient music. Their work began in earnest 16

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in the mid-fifteenth century, as they turned from long-familiar medieval musical treatises, such as those of Macrobius and Boethius, toward newly unearthed Greek sources. Those texts, notably the Pseudo-Plutarchan On Music (ca. 1st–2nd century CE), bore witness to the wondrous effects produced by the earliest musicians. Their music had healed the sick, moved warriors to ferocity or cowardice on the battlefield, calmed anger, and disposed souls toward virtue. The excitement sparked by such reports led to an outpouring of editions and translations of Greek source materials, and to widespread efforts to bring contemporary musical practice back in line with the ancients. At the center of the new theory was the union of music and poetry. In effect, music was taken out of the quadrivium, where it had been traditionally grouped with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and placed in the trivium, along with grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, the arts of moving the passions.59 Contrapuntal polyphony gave way to forms that showcased the solo singing voice. Believing ancient song to have been homophonic, scholars called for expressive text-settings that would follow the rhythms and cadences of spoken poetry. Their influence on the arts was profound. From the creation of opera in Italy to the musique mesurée à l’antique of Baïf’s Academy in France to the emergence of the lute song and the quantitative verse movement in England, a “rhetorical Renaissance” spawned new cultural forms and shaped European thought about the lost oral world of archaic Greece. When poets touched by these influences tried to make contact with the ancients, they therefore had a range of historical and legendary sources to adapt to their needs. They were as likely to identify their epic poetry with the songs of Orpheus or David as with Homer. No matter their choice, it will become clear in the ensuing chapters that “voice” functioned for most of them as more than a metaphor. Throughout the early modern era, scholars and poets sought in strikingly literal ways to make the ancients sing again. Marsilio Ficino performed improvised accompaniments for his friends’ Latin poetry with his “Orphica lyra,” while Pico della Mirandola recited his own poems “ad lyram.”60 Late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century composers rendered passages by Ovid, Virgil, and Lucan in monophonic settings.61 Some Italian epic theorists, debating the proper length of an epic poem, focused not on the scope of the plot but on the duration of its oral performance.62 Ronsard described himself reciting the verses of Virgil accompanied by his guitar.63 Almost a century later, Sir William Davenant planned for his heroic poem Gondibert (1651) to be set in stile recitativo so that it might be sung “like the Works of Homer ere they were joyn’d together and made a Volume by the Athenian King.”64 Behind these scattered examples lie complex attitudes introduction

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toward Greek antiquity and its legacy in the modern world. They point to a yearning for revival that had not been fully sated by the recovery of a documentary archive. For many, the idea of an oral past migrated from archaic Greece to become a basis for imagining other pasts, other communities, other forms of human artistry that had once flourished and could be made to thrive anew. The chapters that follow survey the work of several European poets writing between 1570 and 1690—Tasso, Ronsard, Spenser, Marino, Saint-Amant, Cowley, Butler, Milton, and others—whose epic ambitions were shaped by ideas of an ancient oral tradition. Each chapter explores a different configuration of the epic voice that corresponds to a model of the past or a theory of literary origins. Chapters 1 and 2 address the chivalric and dynastic epics of the later sixteenth century. The first chapter deals with Torquato Tasso’s crusader epic, Gerusalemme liberata (1581), and its famous agon with Ariosto’s Orlando furioso—a struggle understood here as an effort to counteract Ariosto’s emerging cultural status as a revived Homer, his poetry sung in the streets and positioned as an “ancient” original to Tasso’s belated literary imitation. Chapter 2 pairs two dynastic epics that take up national origin myths, Pierre de Ronsard’s Franciade (1572) and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Ronsard’s unfinished epic, groaning under the burden of imitating a crowded literary ancestry, embarks on a restless search for ever-older historical models to undergird its fiction, a quest that finally leads to the Orphic Hymns. Spenser’s epic draws instead on the poet’s encounters with the Irish bardic tradition, which force him to confront the primitive oral origins of both British chronicle history and the European epic tradition: a confrontation expressed in The Faerie Queene through fictions of primordial strife and Hesiodic theomachy. After a brief interchapter that surveys the interaction of the epic and pastoral traditions in the poetry of Marino, Saint-Amant, and others, showing how models of an oral past became involved in contrasts between nature and technology, the next three chapters take up major epic subgenres that came forward to rival the traditional martial epic in the first half of the seventeenth century. Chapter 4, exploring the epic poetry of civil war, argues that English poets who supported the defeated Stuart monarchy during the Interregnum era turned to the figure of the charismatic poet-singer to evoke a lost political community, but also to amplify their own authority as an alternative power center in a divided polity. The Christian hexameral epic forms a point of entry into chapter 5, which shows how Milton’s Paradise Lost weaves together the sixteenth-century hexamera of Guillaume du Bartas and 18

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Tasso with the waning Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres to evoke the apocalyptic return of a lost golden age. Such patterns strain against Milton’s deeply proprietary attitude toward his own voice as a site of creative origin in its own right, an idea of artistic “vocation” that his poetry anxiously identifies with the mortal body, with the mythological fictions of Ovid and Claudian, and with early opera and monodic song. A final chapter turns from epic poetry to baroque opera, a child of musical humanism and in some respects the heir of a literary epic tradition that had fallen under the spell of ancient song. This chapter traces the cultural reception of Virgil’s Aeneid through a reading of Nahum Tate’s and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (ca. 1689) and other European responses to the Dido story. In taking up an ancient “chaste Dido” tradition, which accused Virgil of mangling Dido’s historical reputation in the service of imperial propaganda, these works speak for a European culture that still compulsively returned to its ancient source texts but sought new voices within them to express a sense of estrangement from their founding myths. One of the aims of this book is to show just how diverse and wide-ranging were the forms of literary expression labeled “epic” in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. These poems pose fundamental questions about the genre: What is epic? How does it differ from other genres and discourses? What social functions does it serve? What sort of relationship does it mandate between author and audience? Between the present and the past? By almost universal consent, the nucleus of the epic tradition was the ancient poetry of Homer and Virgil, but read through a screen of allegorizing commentary that gave their works a wider moral and cosmological dimension. Alongside these, Renaissance humanists had unearthed a canon of lesser Greco-Roman poets, from Apollonius Rhodius to Statius and Nonnus, who attracted imitation in their turn, while the ideological demands of Christian epic further roiled the genre’s ancient narrative models and codes of value. The genre’s absorption of later literary forms such as chivalric romance, historical chronicles, pastoral verse, and hexameral writings made its boundary lines still more elastic. The late Renaissance epic therefore offered the poet an extraordinarily wide field of vision. It posed a choice among many possible pasts, many rival sites of origin, and many competing forms of cultural authority. The poetry discussed in these pages, finding its models not just in Homer and Virgil but also in Hesiod, Pythagoras, the Psalms, Apollonius, Claudian, the Orphic Hymns, Celtic bards, and other far-flung sources, captures the genre’s vast inclusiveness, and also its uncertainty—its restless search for a stable point of contact with an increasingly alien ancient heritage. introduction

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Early modern conceptions of authorship and literary history therefore reveal themselves with unusual clarity as they shape and are shaped by the life of epic poetry over time. Epic literature is obsessed with origins. It returns again and again to stories of fathers and sons, the descents of clans, lines of ancestry that trace the roots of the self and the polity.65 In the era of Tasso and Milton, such sites of origin became harder to trace. Fictions of historical continuity gave way to anachronism and difference. Poets called upon fantasies of oral presence just as the author was becoming a modern legal and economic entity, both immersed in and detached from a literary marketplace governed by the printed book. In their pages we shall often notice tensions like those in Petrarch’s Africa, with its felt contrast between the ancient courtly singer and the writing author. Epic poets were compelled to measure their authorship not just in the present but across historical time. Looking into the past, they saw their uncanny mirror image in ancient artists who turned their faces back to predecessors of their own. Their poetry holds a unique place in the larger story of Renaissance historical consciousness, a story that reaches beyond the limits of their troubled literary genre to trace the legacy of European humanism and the emergence of the modern world.

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5ONE% Tasso’s Silent Lyre

versions of the past In the summer of 1582, Torquato Tasso sent to Ferrante Gonzaga, Count of Guastalla, a group of sonnets concerning an inkwell. The vessel, decorated alla moresca, had come into the hands of Tasso’s father at Tunis when he accompanied the siege of the city, led by Gonzaga’s grandfather, in 1535. This spoil of war prompts a meditation on the act of writing: Fra l’altre spoglie il generoso Achille Ebbe ne l’Asia già sonora cetra, Che da famoso stil sua grazia impetra Tra le fiamme di Troia e le faville; Ma questo vaso, il qual di mille e mille Penne era quasi e pur sarà faretra, È quasi fonte in cui per viva pietra Il suo dolce liquor Parnaso instille. Preso in Africa fu tra pompe ed arme, Che, quale Alcide o Scipïone, il vostro Avo ella vide già co’ duci invitti. Ma quella è muta, e sol da’ chiari scritti 21 3)))#

La gloria prende; e questo il puro inchiostro Per novo eroe conserva al novo carme.1 [Among the other spoils that the magnanimous Achilles once won in Asia was a resonant lyre, which for its famous style obtained a reprieve amid the flames and embers of Troy; but this urn, which has served and will continue to serve as a quiver for many thousands of pens, is like the spring from which Parnassus pours out its sweet liquor through living stone. It was taken from Africa amid pomp and arms, when in former times it saw your ancestor, like Hercules or Scipio, among the conquering captains. But the former is silent; it takes its glory only from illustrious writings, while the latter preserves its pure ink for a new hero and a new song.]

The poem’s two symbols of artistry, the lyre and the inkwell, mark out a complex relationship with the literary past. They are held together by a sustained analogy: as Achilles’ lyre bore witness to his great story, so this new artifact commemorates the siege of another Troy. The elder Gonzaga ranks with the conquering heroes of Greece and Rome. The inkwell, given to Tasso by his father—who was, like him, a poet—evokes a long, unbroken literary tradition. In its “pure ink” Tasso finds a communal fountain of inspiration that has nourished generations of writers and traces its origin back to the mystical wellsprings of all poetry. But these patterns of continuity expose deeper contrasts. The emblem of the inkwell hints at a request for patronage: Tasso stands ready to chronicle Gonzaga’s heroism at Tunis, or the future exploits of his young grandson. The effect of the image, though, is to lay down a boundary between ancient music and modern writing that turns the “new song” of the sonnet’s final line into an empty metaphor. The adversative swivels in lines 5 and 12 challenge the poet’s claims of historical or figurative likeness. If the ever-flowing inkwell is proof against the passage of time, the now silent Greek lyre seems consigned to the past. Like the ruined Troy, it has yielded to new forms of civilization, even as its memory lingers in the otiose reference to song that ends the poem. The tools and symbols that have taken the lyre’s place fail to root themselves so deeply in the imagination; they must find a past for themselves only through literary allusion or analogy (“quasi fonte”; “quale Alcide o Scipïone”). Nor do they confer the same noble status on those who wield them. The charismatic authority of the warrior-poet Achilles has given way to the anonymity of unnumbered pens toiling in silence. Tasso’s sonnet, reaching for analogies between ancient and modern poetry, grasps instead the fact of their discontinuity, the historical distance between the songs of Greek antiquity and his own silent art. 22

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Much the same plight confronted European epic poetry in the last half of the sixteenth century. The recent recovery of Aristotle’s Poetics had begun to change the face of late Renaissance poetry and its criticism.2 The neoclassicists who worked in Aristotle’s shadow called for the strict imitation of Greco-Roman models. With regulatory zeal they laid down the formal laws that would bring modern poetry into conformity with the ancients. An outpouring of commentaries on the Poetics established rigorous canons of taste and hierarchies of literary value. For the epic poets, the supreme model was Virgil’s Aeneid. In it the neoclassicists found the most perfect embodiment of their demand for aesthetic unity and discipline. The dominance of Virgil was bolstered, moreover, by the rise of authoritarian political institutions—an expansionist papacy in southern Europe, centralizing monarchies in the north—that looked to the poets to chronicle their visions of empire. The classicizing epic poems written under these influences, works like Vida’s Christiad (1535) and Trissino’s Italia liberata da’ Goti (1547–48), met with mixed success. But they show what was at stake in the effort. Although Virgil had been a commanding figure throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, many neo-Aristotelians asked for something new when they urged the systematic reproduction of the Aeneid’s form and style. They sought, albeit in limited and selective ways, to roll back historical change. The rules of poetry, they argued, were like the laws of nature, fixed and immutable, and the ancient poets were their best students. It was intolerable that the aesthetic norms those authors laid down should vary over time. In practice, this position had to be constantly refined to deal with questions at the heart of literary imitation theory: Which aspects of the ancients’ style and idiom is the poet supposed to imitate? Could some elements be adapted to changing historical conditions while others remained fixed? Should the poet take a single classical author as an exemplar, or develop a composite model based on the best writings of several authors? By what criteria should such models be chosen?3 Moreover, certain realities of the historical process, such as the decline of Latin as the language of Western high culture, could not but be acknowledged; other changes, such as the rise of Christianity, actually privileged modernity over its pagan ancestors. Nonetheless, the critics’ ultimate goal was to cut through the modern cultural accretions that blocked their access to the ancient and authoritative laws of art. Other strains in the intellectual history of this era, however, took a different view of the past that found clear expression in scholarship of ancient music. Mid-sixteenth-century Continental humanists and musicians devoted intense effort to reconstructing Greco-Roman music theory.4 Their studies ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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led them to remote corners of the archive in search of musical practices that had long since been lost. They founded their recovery work on indirect, fragmentary sources that forced them to acknowledge the historical process. In this they resemble the early humanists of the Trecento, whose delight at making fresh contact with the ancients was tempered by their recognition of its fragility and incompleteness. The musical humanists took less interest in Virgil’s Rome, furthermore, than in archaic Greece; most of the knowledge that they could gather came from ancient writers who were themselves drawing on prior sources to reconstruct a world from which they already felt far removed. Reports of the magical effects produced by the earliest music tended to cluster around figures from legendary prehistory, such as Orpheus, Amphion, and Musaeus. Almost no examples of Greek musical notation remained. Surviving technical accounts of the Greek modal system were vague and poorly understood. Those who addressed themselves to this work could not avoid the alterity of the past. The revival of ancient music and poetry became a goal for humanist scholars like Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo Galilei precisely because the undertaking, if successful, might shrink the vast historical distance between remote antiquity and its modern heirs. To recreate the magical vocality of the ancients would lessen these scholars’ alienation from a past that they revered but could no longer recognize in the cultural environment around them. Poets who came of age in the middle of the sixteenth century were swept up in both of these intellectual movements. The ascendancy of neoAristotelian letters and the most vigorous period of humanist musical research closely overlapped in time and involved some of the same scholarly voices. Those poets who were attracted to both found themselves facing competing historical visions. In their extreme forms, these amounted to a choice between Virgil or Homer; between continuity or rupture; between eternal laws or historical contingency; between close intimacy with or wide separation from the ancients; between, in effect, the flowing inkwell or the lost lyre. Such tensions animate the epic poems discussed in this chapter and the next: Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Ronsard’s Franciade (1572), and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). These were among the first European vernacular epics inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid and shaped by humanist and neoclassical poetics. Each of these poems interrogates the grounds of its own authority and its relationship to its literary predecessors. Each claims direct descent from ancient sources even as it nervously measures the historical gulf between them. And each expresses its concerns about origin and authority through tropes that draw on ancient oral performance and the figure of the poet-singer. 24

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Such anxieties were probably most acute in the work of Tasso. Writing his epic in creative conflict with his predecessor Ariosto, he sought to cast off the modern innovations of chivalric romance and to return epic poetry to its native Greco-Roman roots. Yet the Gerusalemme liberata is haunted by a sense of its own modernity. It struggles against the role of belated successor to Ariosto’s “ancient” original, which had not only established itself in some elite circles as a Virgilian literary monument but also enjoyed a wide-ranging oral afterlife that invited comparisons to ancient Greek sung poetry. Recited in the streets by itinerant cantastorie, embraced by Cinquecento madrigalists, and sung by professional musicians in the learned academies, Ariostan romance was hailed by the musical humanist community as a revived Homeric song. In response, we shall find that Tasso’s writings strain to link Ariosto’s art to the corruptions of modern vocal music, corruptions whose origins Tasso traces back to post-Homeric musical innovators in the ancient Mediterranean. His epic poem extends this strategy even into the realm of myth, associating both literary romance and contemporary vocal music with the Sirens of Homer’s Odyssey, whose songs lure the hero to a false homeland of their own making. Determined to portray the Cinquecento romance epic as a false site of origin, the Liberata seeks its own authority in a more distant prehistory, one that seems, however, to recede at its approach. The neoclassical epics of the sixteenth century come to be aligned in complex ways with ancient oral models, even as they manifest, and often celebrate, the lettered traditions of humanist learning and imitatio that form the bridge between them and those models. In doing so, they expose the paradoxes of a cultural moment that found in the ancient world both intimacy and remoteness, both a lasting monument and a half-remembered song.

homer and ariosto The epic hero’s task is to exert control over his world. “His life as a hero,” writes Thomas Greene, “is devoted to informing his name with meaning.”5 The hero imprints his identity on an alien landscape and expands the small circle of his community into the surrounding darkness. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the master text of the European epic tradition, this work culminates in universal empire. The collective identity of the hero’s tribe is stamped onto the plot of human history. In the poem’s vision of Roman ascendancy, its civilizing conquerors bring unity and law to the unruly peoples of the Mediterranean. Rome finds its origins in the Homeric past and projects itself to the remote edges of futurity. Yet the greatest trial for Virgil’s hero is not to impose romanitas on the ancient world but to achieve an anguished self-mastery. ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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Aeneas’s struggle to found the empire that he will never see is also a struggle to bear the terrible personal burden of his people’s destiny. Forced to renounce, one by one, the props and solaces of selfhood—home, family, erotic love—he lashes himself to the mast of a severe and desolate selfdiscipline. To the epic tradition Virgil bequeathed a hero whose struggle to master his world is equally a quest to conquer himself, to empty out his individual will and commit to his epic imperative in the face of enormous loss. Stranded between Troy and Rome, Aeneas must seek his home within the mysterious purposes of history itself. This epic vision was especially congenial to Torquato Tasso. His lifework, the Gerusalemme liberata, took shape in the cultural climate of the Italian Counter-Reformation, a reactionary front in the century’s showdown between the forces of institutional authority and reform across Europe. The Council of Trent had launched an era of militant Catholic revival in Tasso’s Italy, enforced by an apparatus of authoritarian repression and censorship. The post-Tridentine Church called each believer to strict doctrinal conformity and, in return, offered a vision of European Christendom united and made holy in its submission to the spiritual stewardship of Rome. Although Tasso chafed at the real or imagined restrictions that others imposed on his restless will, he was drawn to authority figures.6 Again and again he offered himself up for their judgment and discipline. He repeatedly fled the service of his patron, Duke Alfonso II d’Este of Ferrara, only to plead abjectly to be taken back into his household. He subjected his unfinished epic to the humiliating criticism of the Roman literati. He twice demanded the scrutiny of the Inquisition, which he accused of not treating him harshly enough. His instinct was to expose his troubled conscience for public examination, as if the only way to resolve his wrenching inner divisions were to perform them for external tribunals, to embrace punishment, and to seek peace in submission to a higher authority. It is not surprising that Tasso should have chosen to write an epic poem about the First Crusade. The conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 could both represent the triumph of European Catholicism and act as the setting for a psychomachia, a struggle for self-mastery within the Christian soul. In recapturing the Holy Land, the Christian West was driving out its Muslim adversary, but it was also purging its internal divisions. The CounterReformation’s true ideological enemy was within itself, in the heresies and schisms that had divided the body of the church. For Europe to close ranks and turn toward the east was to heal the broken Catholic polity. Near the beginning of Tasso’s epic, Goffredo of Buglione is installed as supreme 26

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commander of the crusader army in a passage that portrays his totalizing authority as the key to reintegrating Christendom’s fragmented psyche: “fate un corpo sol de’ membri amici, / fate un capo che gli altri indrizzi e frene, / date ad un sol lo scettro e la possanza” (make but one body of your cooperating limbs, make but one head that may direct and restrain the others; give to one man alone the scepter and the power) (1.31).7 In turn, the Christians fighting under Goffredo’s banner will learn to repress their autonomous desires and find peace in their shared conformity to the divine will. In several senses, then, the fantasy of taking Jerusalem held out a promise of reunification. It suggested the closing of a great circle: the Church of Rome reaching back to reclaim the city that was its historical point of origin and its typological alter ego. In that long-delayed embrace could be found an end to self-division, a dream of unity and rest. At the same time, Tasso labored under another form of authority. The neo-Aristotelian critical environment of the Cinquecento, arising in the wake of Alessandro de’ Pazzi’s popular 1536 Latin edition of the Poetics, approached the art of poetry with a conformist zeal that has sometimes been compared to that of post-Tridentine Catholicism. The critics mined their ancient sources in search of prescriptions for epic writing. The period’s narrative poems were pored over, picked apart, tested by rigid formal criteria derived from Aristotle and Horace, and measured against the example of Virgil’s Aeneid. With their thick scaffolding of formalist rules, the critics tried to span the historical rupture between literary modernity and its revered classical ancestors. Their anxious policing of the epic form was a natural, if extreme, effort to fend off the “historical solitude” felt by an earlier generation of humanist writers, their acute consciousness of cultural exile from the ancient world that they idolized.8 For his part, Tasso thrashed about inside the neo-Aristotelian critical regime, but he never threw it off. From his first theoretical writings of the 1560s to his mature Discorsi del poema eroico (1594), he was bent on vindicating himself by the fastidious standards of neoclassical poetics. Both forms of authority, literary and religious, preside over Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and shape its plot into patterns of return to sites of origin. The city at the poem’s center is at once Jerusalem, Troy, and Ithaca, evoking both the epic tradition’s archetypal city and its first heroic quest for home. The campaign to liberate the Holy Land from the pagans suggests a journey backward through history. It is a quest for religious renewal, but also an effort to recover the aesthetic vision of the Greco-Roman epics. One of the core substructures of Tasso’s poem is a fantasy of moving back from modern corruption to ancient purity. Yet the poem’s motifs of homecoming ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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strain against other patterns that lead away from the past. Tasso was haunted by the antihumanism of Tridentine reform, and his epic shares its suspicion of pagan antiquity. The Liberata’s pagans belong to a cultural past that the poem portrays as regressive and outmoded. They cling to a code of chivalry that, Tasso suggests, has become a historical anachronism: the preserve of a dying order of feudal princelings doomed to be swept away by the advancing tide of an imperial papacy. At a deeper level, though, as Sergio Zatti writes, the archaic ethos of Tasso’s pagans evokes “the ideals of secular, materialist, and pluralist humanism.”9 Their local cultic worship and their commitment to personal glory are a distorted memory of the Italian humanists’ long embrace of the Greco-Roman world. The poem insists that their voices, too, must be repressed or superseded. Even as the Liberata seeks a home in the ancient past, it proclaims a new historical dispensation that has left the past behind. All of these concerns over origin and authority govern Tasso’s relationship with his great predecessor and rival, Ariosto. Tasso and his readers were unsure whether to view Orlando furioso as a primitive cultural form in need of refinement or as an avant-garde novelty that had lost sight of the old ways. On one hand, Ariosto’s champions as well as his detractors felt that, in grafting the episodic, interlaced love plots of medieval romance onto the humanists’ epic canon, he had created something distinctively modern. Critics attacked Ariosto for breaking the newly recovered rules of Aristotle.10 Tasso shared their view that romance was not a new literary form to which Aristotle’s Poetics did not apply but merely an “errant” modern epic, bloating and disfiguring the genre’s ancient models. He therefore took it upon himself to reconcile the Furioso with Homer and Virgil. Romance variety would be set inside epic unity; the epic genre would be stripped of its modern excrescences and returned to its original purity. For other commentators, though, Ariosto was a kind of Homer in his own right: garrulous, unruly, but naturally gifted and endlessly inventive. His defenders justified his leisurely, loosely structured plots by citing precedents in the Iliad and the Odyssey.11 His poetry showed a native vigor and charismatic sparkle that seemed, like Homer’s, to stand outside the formal laws of neoclassical art. Onto Tasso, from this point of view, fell the historical role of Virgil; he was the poet of enlightened modern civility whose task was to rein in his precursor’s archaic individualism. Tasso himself contrasted the “tedious and disagreeable” customs of Homeric Greece with “the gentleness and decorum of this age.”12 He saw it as his work to impose discipline on the romance epic, to bring its chaotic feudal vision into the 28

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service of church and state. But taking on that role also meant acknowledging Ariosto’s precedence over him, his firstness. Tasso’s own epic poem was consigned to the status of a secondary imitation, dependent on the prior source that it sought to overgo. In a 1577 letter to Orazio Ariosto, the poet’s nephew, Tasso expressed unease over clutching at the laurels of the “Ferrarese Homer.”13 Figurations of the poet’s voice in the Gerusalemme liberata are bound up with these questions of literary origin and influence. Even as Tasso revised the “primitive” Ariosto for a new Virgilian era, he struggled to portray his own art as somehow prior to the Furioso, closer to its ancient sources. To do this he had to grapple with an emerging view of Ariostan romance that was sponsored by Italian musical humanism. Witnessing widespread oral performances of Ariosto’s poem, both by cantastorie in the streets and by trained vocalists in the learned academies, observers had long drawn analogies to the Homeric bards. The singing of Ariosto, some argued, showed the way back to the sung poetry of the ancients, renowned for its power to move the passions. In response, Tasso insisted on the modernity of Ariostan romance by divorcing the Furioso from an oral past. In the Liberata and other writings, Tasso portrays Ariosto in two senses as a false or surrogate Homer: he is linked historically with the practices of modern Italian vocal music—especially with the voices of female singers and stage actresses—and he is linked symbolically with the Sirens of Homer’s Odyssey, who try to seduce the hero away from his true homeland. Central to Tasso’s epic are patterns of exile and homecoming; its characters find themselves constantly pressed to discern true from false origins. Around its core fantasy of a return to an authorizing source spring up competing fictions of home, deceptive harbors, false genealogies, proxies, and doubles that make their own pretense to epic authority. These fictions, governed by female voices, expose the modern origins of romance and overturn the humanists’ claims for Ariosto’s “ancient” vocality. They also mark an ideological strategy of European literate culture, which was learning to portray modern oral performance traditions in hierarchical and gendered terms. Like Tasso’s pagan women, the vernacular oral cultures evoked in his epic are characterized as feminine, undisciplined, passionate, and modern, as against the masculine, unified, lettered translatio studii that bound epic poetry to its ancient origins. But Tasso’s strategy is a troubled one. Even as it separates Ariostan romance from the pristine, primeval verse of Homer, it also exposes a gulf between Tasso’s own literary art and its idealized ancient oral models, which come to be walled off in an inaccessible past. As he widens the distance between all modern poetry and its historical sources of origin, ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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Tasso only intensifies his personal exile from the ancient harbor that eluded his homecoming. Some readers of the Liberata have noticed a feeling of strain in Tasso’s narrative voice: “from the first to the last line,” Francesco De Sanctis complained, “he blew the trumpet.”14 Tasso’s full-throated epic idiom was not, however, meant to draw attention to its author’s personality, it was meant to efface it. Tasso had long shared the critics’ hostility to the chatty, aggressive narrator of the Orlando furioso.15 The smiling figure of the poet loomed over Ariosto’s fiction, coyly plaiting together its various plots, admiring his own handiwork, and forcing his readers to confront the artificiality of his poem’s world. This infuriated the neoclassicists. They argued that the Greco-Roman epic poets had suppressed their own personalities in order to set forth a pure Aristotelian imitation of heroic actions. The critic Lodovico Castelvetro accused the Ariostan narrator of “a certain pride and self-righteousness,” a kind of romance egoism that we find reflected in the stubborn self-assertion of Tasso’s pagans.16 Castelvetro acknowledged that Virgil and Lucan had sometimes been guilty of the same vice; it was above all Homer whose modest reticence the critics took as their model. Tasso sought this kind of anonymity in the Liberata. Curbing his authorial presence by immersing himself in the ancient epics’ rhetoric and form, he made the renunciation of voice a central theme of his poem. Committed to repression, the Liberata is haunted by images of bridling and binding.17 Over and over Tasso draws parallels between the crusader army, struggling to maintain its unity of purpose, and the poet, imposing classical restraint on Ariosto’s flamboyant narrative voice. These shared acts of will come together in a processional return from the romance of modernity back to the epic’s ancient origins. It was therefore a frustrating irony for Tasso that Ariosto should be hailed by some as the Homer of his age. In Ariosto’s hands popular chivalric romance had merged with the Greco-Roman epic canon. Orlando furioso also negotiated a complex relationship between vocal and written art. In the tradition of the Franco-Italian cantari cavallereschi, Ariosto maintained the rhetorical pretense of oral delivery, but the performing singer often yielded to other metaphors for authorial craft, such as the weaving of a tapestry or the sure-handed piloting of a ship. Always conscious of its own status as a made object, the Furioso thrived in the new world of print. The author’s final 1532 edition was reprinted sixteen times in its first eight years; new editions soon ran into the dozens. Ariosto’s advocates worked to distance him from the popular oral milieu of the cantari. Mid-century Venetian publishers 30

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issued the poem in monumental folios, festooned with glosses and paratexts usually reserved for the work of classical authors. Learned prefaces stressed parallels to Virgil’s Aeneid and canonized Ariosto’s poem as a modern rival to the Greco-Roman classics.18 Yet the printed monument did not simply displace a prior oral tradition. Instead, the Furioso was absorbed back into the sung repertoire of the cantastorie. Some of their pastiches, adaptations, and parodies of the poem were later printed in their own right.19 On at least one occasion, according to G. B. Pigna, Ariosto made revisions to his poem after hearing the common people sing a version of a line that he preferred over his original.20 Public oral performances of the Furioso were widely reported. Torquato’s father, Bernardo Tasso, observed in 1559 that Ariosto’s poem was sung everywhere.21 Girolamo Ruscelli praised its ottava rima stanzas as ideally suited for oral recitation. A 1560 letter from Bartolomeo Ricci to Ariosto’s sons claims that the poem “is often eagerly repeated in reading or in listening,” and twenty years later Francesco Caburacci still saw it “handled by the old, read by the young, . . . prized by the learned, [and] sung by the ignorant.” Traveling through the Tuscan countryside, Michel de Montaigne was struck by the sight of local villagers with lutes in their hands and Ariosto on their lips. Giuseppe Malatesta’s 1589 defense of Ariosto remarked that the Furioso was constantly to be heard being sung in the streets, in salons, even in country hovels: “The common people [are] so engaged with this poem that there are many among them who, not knowing how to read, want to mangle verses of the Furioso all day long and to learn some of its stanzas by heart so that they can sing them along with a rebeck or a harpsichord.” Such accounts extend well into the nineteenth century. For some, the popular singing of the Furioso proved that Ariosto appealed only to the vulgar and the illiterate. Others pointed to the poem’s musical reception as proof of its universal appeal. The latter was Malatesta’s view. Whether in the courts, the academies, or the public square, he wrote, “you never hear anything but Ariosto being read or recited.”22 In the Furioso—recited, chanted, and sung across Italy—some heard echoes of the Greek rhapsodes who had preserved the Homeric epics. Comparisons to the sung poetry of the ancients began to spring up in the 1550s. For the Furioso’s partisans, this was a way to play down the poem’s debts to the medieval cantari cavallereschi and to trace its origins directly to antiquity. Giraldi Cinzio’s Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi (1554) made the case that the structure of Ariosto’s poem—specifically, its division into cantos (“songs”) like those of the popular cantari—had nothing to do with the influence of “those nowadays who with lyre on arm sing their idle nonsense to earn their ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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bread.” Instead, Ariosto owed the practice to the ancient rhapsodes, who, according to Cicero and others, had sung fragments of the Homeric poems at the courts of the great. From them, too, must have arisen the tradition of opening each canto with an exordium to stir the listeners’ attention.23 Some critics, Cinzio claimed, objected to ottava rima stanzas because they lent themselves to singing with a lyre, but this was no less a characteristic of Homer’s hexameters. Bernardo Tasso, the poet’s father, was attracted to Cinzio’s theory; critics of Ariostan romance, he agreed, “should consider that this sort of poetry could be that same kind used by those who sang of the courageous deeds of heroes at the tables of the great princes among the ancient Greeks and Romans; and that in the disposition of his narrative Ariosto proposed to imitate the artifice of these rhapsodes rather than Homer’s or Virgil’s.”24 It is no coincidence that claims like these began to take shape alongside the rise of Italian neoclassical criticism. In effect, Ariosto’s was an ancient oral art that stood outside the literary epic tradition and could not be judged by its laws. The musical humanists, however, had other motives. By now the ranks of professional cantastorie were shrinking. Few still had ties to the northern Italian courts.25 Oral epic performance had begun to shift from the streets to elite academic coteries, where humanists’ readings of the Greco-Roman archive filled them with wonder at the reputed power of ancient music to move the passions of the soul. In 1558, the pioneering music theorist Gioseffo Zarlino argued that the lost music of the passions was not wholly out of reach: Even in our times we see that music induces in us various passions in the way that it did in antiquity. For occasionally, it is observed, when some beautiful, learned, and elegant poem is recited by someone to the sound of some instrument, the listeners are greatly stirred and moved to do different things, such as to laugh, weep, or to similar actions. This has been experienced through the beautiful, learned, and graceful compositions of Ariosto: when among other passages, the sad death of Zerbino and the tearful lament of his Isabella are recited, the listeners, moved with compassion, cried no less than did Ulysses hearing the excellent musician and poet Demodocus sing.

Advocating ancient monody, Zarlino goes on to contrast this soul-stirring music with the “jumbled din of voices” in contemporary madrigals, which “move the soul but little.”26 Giovanni de’ Bardi, the Florentine academician who later oversaw the first operas, developed this view of Ariosto as a Homer redivivus in a 1583 lecture to the Alterati of Florence. He argued that because the earliest poetry had been composed for singing, Ariosto’s was a 32

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great epic on the grounds that its octaves were so singable. They were, after all, performed everywhere, by both the vulgar and the learned.27 Fifty years later, a return to oral epic was still being championed by Giovanni Battista Doni, the classicist and member of Florence’s Accademia della Crusca whose prolific correspondence helped to disseminate the Italians’ research on Greek music throughout Europe. In imitation of the Greek rhapsodes, Doni wrote in his Compendio del trattato de’ generi (1635), epic poetry should be declaimed in stile recitativo by a solo singer accompanied by a harp or similar instrument, perhaps at meetings “in qualche Academia.” Doni remarked on the popular singing of stanzas from the Furioso to repeated melodic formulae, and he proposed a musical performance of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.28 For such commentators, Ariosto’s octaves acted as a bridge between remote antiquity and the modern scholars who struggled to recover its music. Tasso closely followed the humanists’ arguments. Yet when he touches on their ideas in his theoretical writings, his tone becomes wary and uncertain. Although he endorses setting poetry to music—dozens of his lyrics were set by northern Italian madrigalists—he shrinks from the prospect of reviving oral epic. He offers shifting excuses for leaving the practice in the past. Behind his qualifications and evasions looms the figure of Ariosto. Tasso seems at pains to fence off the ancient bards from the romance poet whom he views as a modern pretender to Homeric primacy. His efforts to imagine sung epic repeatedly turn into attacks on contemporary music, which serve in turn as oblique attacks on Ariosto. Tasso’s dialogue on Tuscan lyric poetry, La Cavaletta, overo de la poesia toscana (1587), exemplifies this pattern. Prompted by a speaker’s claim that music is the soul of poetry, Tasso’s spokesman in the dialogue urges the marriage of music to various lyric forms. But epic poetry, he quickly adds, “does not need to be sung”; indeed, it “fares better without singing.” His interlocutor notes that she has heard the verses of Virgil sung a la lira; Tasso disapproves. The plot, he argues, is easier to follow without musical accompaniment, and an epic’s hendecasyllabic verse does not convey passionate feeling as well as other metrical forms that are better suited to musical text-setting.29 Tasso then shifts the conversation to modern vocal music, which he claims is in need of reform. He urges composers at Ferrara to replace the madrigal with the chastened homophony of the ancients; their lyric settings should adopt “that grave mode . . . that Aristotle calls Doric, which is magnificent, steady, and solemn, and best suited of all others for the lyre.” Modern music, he complains, has become “soft and effeminate,” and now pleases only lascivious young men.30 ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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The later Discorsi del poema eroico returns to the question of sung poetry. “Homer himself in the Iliad,” Tasso announces, “when he has Achilles sing of the deeds of the heroes to the accompaniment of the cithara, clearly teaches that the deeds of heroes should be sung.”31 Heroic poems “can quite appropriately be sung in the Doric or a similar harmony—if we now have any such thing” that can compare to the monody of the ancients. Reversing his earlier view, Tasso now prefers hendecasyllabic meter for epic poems precisely because he feels that this meter can most easily be sung in the Doric mode, poor for tragedy but congenial to the epic. Yet this section of the Discorsi is marred by errors and confusions. Although Aristotle himself refers to onstage recitals of epic poetry by actors, Tasso calls the practice “superfluous and wrong.”32 He carefully cordons off epic verse, which is “made for reading,” from tragic verse, which is composed for oral recitation; and this line of argument soon grows into an attack on all forms of oral epic performance. If, according to Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists, a famous rhapsode recited Homer’s epics in the great theater of Alexandria, “so too the history of Herodotus was performed by the comic actor Hegesias. But performance was no more suited to one than to the other. . . . Indeed, if there were any imperfections in the poetry of Homer, such as that some few lines are too weak, others lack a beginning, and still others are almost truncated at the end, they come from the music to which he fitted his lines, as the same Athenaeus says.”33 Here ancient epic in performance begins to resemble modern romance. Recent editors of Athenaeus assume that “Herodotus” is an error for “Hesiod,” but Tasso would have been unaware of this.34 The false reading probably appealed to him, for Herodotus’s loosely structured prose Histories, incongruously recited by a comic actor, can serve him here as a proxy for the Franco-Italian chivalric romances heard on the lips of the cantastorie. Indeed, the first European vernacular translation of the Histories, often reprinted, was penned by the romancer Boiardo. In other ways, too, this passage absorbs the polemical energy of Tasso’s agon against modern romance. Athenaeus had pointed to the occasional irregularity of Homer’s verse rhythms as a sign of the easy, flexible relations between poetry and music in ancient times.35 For Tasso the anecdote becomes a cautionary tale. It yields the vivid picture of an epic poem violated by song, the integrity of its verse structure split and torn—“weak,” “lack[ing],” “truncated”—in the process of being adapted for vocal performance. Tasso expands the idea into a brief history of early Greek music. He shapes his account, based mostly on Athenaeus and on the Pseudo-Plutarchan On Music, into a story of decline and fall. The idealized songs of Homeric Greece, 34

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Tasso reports, suffered a series of corruptions from the sixth through fourth centuries. Simplicity and purity were lost. The number of scalar modes multiplied; musical tastes split along ethnic lines; musicians added more strings to the cithara, but could not rival the songs of their ancestors. True heroic poetry demands the musical idiom that prevailed before the “superfluous” innovations of Timotheus, notably his experiments with a twelve-stringed lyre; these won blame from the playwright Pherecrates, “who put Music on stage complaining to Justice that Timotheus had torn her apart.”36 Images of accretion, dispersion, dismemberment: all of these recall Tasso’s criticisms of Ariostan romance. Both his music history and his genre history tell of modern decadence mangling ancient purity. Tasso’s most striking misreading of his sources in this section of the Discorsi extends the parallel. Ancient music, he claims, “remained fairly simple up to the time of Phryne, the famous courtesan, who adulterated and contaminated music by making whatever was pleasing lawful”; here began the long chain of corruptions described above. Yet Tasso’s source text refers not to Phryne, the notorious Athenian prostitute, but to Phrynis, a shadowy sixth-century musician whose innovations are recorded by other ancient writers.37 Again the error was congenial to Tasso. It conforms to his view in La Cavaletta that modern vocal music has become “soft and effeminate,” prostituted to popular tastes, and it echoes his typology of literary genre: epic poetry is ancient, natural, unified, disciplined, and masculine; romance is modern, degenerate, diffuse, lawless, and feminine. Moreover, the courtesan’s goal to make “whatever was pleasing lawful” recalls a key claim made by Ariosto’s defenders—and demonstrated by the widespread singing of the Furioso—that the poem gave universal pleasure and therefore proved the obsolescence of Aristotle’s “laws” of poetic form. For Tasso the phrase evoked false visions of the past that his Christian epic was to reject. The Chorus in his pastoral drama, Aminta (1573), had famously extolled the joys of the legendary golden age, when shepherds and nymphs could enjoy their loves without the burden of sexual shame; they were subject only to the “legge aurea e felice, / Che Natura scolpì: S’ei piace, ei lice” (golden and happy law engraved by Nature: “If it gives pleasure, it is lawful”).38 The Liberata, we shall see, portrays this ideal of a primeval state of nature as a pernicious illusion, a counterfeit past erected in the image of a decadent modernity. Tasso was an intimate friend of music and musicians, but these writings portray all songs since Homeric times as Phryne’s legacy. By disparaging contemporary music Tasso draws a firm line of separation between Ariosto and the ancients. The music of Homer is remote and inaccessible, pristine and ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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virile, and its belated imitators will always bear the stain of their modernity. Figurations of song in the Liberata trace a similar contest over origins. The poem’s female voices relentlessly draw its heroes toward false homecomings, elaborate fantasies of going back to their origins, even as Tasso shows growing pessimism over all such dreams of recovery and return.

fictions of homecoming Early in the Gerusalemme liberata, Tasso takes up the metaphor of a sea voyage that will become one of the master tropes of his poem. He offers his work to Duke Alfonso II, asking that he “guidi in porto / me peregrino errante, e fra gli scogli / e fra l’onde agitato e quasi absorto” (guide me into port, a wandering pilgrim tossed among the reefs and amid the waves, and almost overwhelmed) (1.4). This is partly a request for the security of patronage: the castaway longs for the safe harbor of his prince’s regard. At the same time, the image triggers a series of analogies between the poet’s authorship of the Liberata and the journey of Homer’s Odysseus. Tasso writes in Discorsi del poema eroico that the epic poet must “steer clear of Scylla and Charybdis, the Syrtes, the Sirens, and all the other monsters of this deep sea that enchant whoever harkens too attentively to the harmony of their amorous words and rhythms, which can lull the mind asleep and soften it with pleasure.”39 The Odyssean geography conveys the danger of stylistic excess of all kinds. But the passage is dominated by Homer’s Sirens, and also by the rhetorical vices of Ariostan romance.40 The same fear of poetry’s seductive musicality surrounds Tasso’s pagan enchantress Armida, who lures the crusaders away from their epic purpose “in voce di sirena a i suoi concenti / addormentar le più svegliate menti” (with a siren’s voice to lull asleep with her harmonies the minds most wide awake) (4.86). Throughout the Liberata, the Odyssey’s Mediterranean voyage forms a symbol for the epic poet’s journey backward through historical time. Romance episodes in Tasso’s poem, standing between the epic and its classical models, find their recurring emblem in Siren-like female voices that call the Christian army away from its fated homecoming. Like Ariosto among the humanists, these figures falsely claim for themselves an ancient authority that mimics the true sources they aim to supplant. Tellingly, the “porto” in Tasso’s proem alludes to the last canto of Orlando furioso, where the narrator observes with relief that his port is now in sight and his poem’s long wandering near its end.41 By opening the Liberata with this echo, Tasso implies that Ariosto’s was a premature ending, and the Furioso a false haven in the Cinquecento epic’s quest for its ancient port of origin. 36

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The Liberata’s closest analogue to the wanderings of Odysseus lies perhaps in canto 15, where the crusaders Carlo and Ubaldo journey to the Fortunate Isles in a boat piloted, appropriately, by Fortune. Their divine mandate is to rescue the knight Rinaldo from his amorous thralldom to Armida. Tasso has enlisted Fortune’s wandering skiff, a favorite narrative device in the chivalric romances, to do the work of epic teleology.42 Fortune makes clear to her passengers that she serves a higher authority; God has appointed her to be their minister and guide, and their voyage will bring about a double homecoming: Rinaldo will rejoin the Christian fold and, as the executive arm of Goffredo’s crusader army, will lead his forces through the gates of Jerusalem. This exchange in canto 15 between Fortune and the two knights ramifies throughout the poem, organizing its digressive romance wanderings into providential patterns of exile and return. Surrounding the sea voyage in this canto, in turn, is a network of allusion linking Ariostan romance to the Sirens in book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey. Greeted by the wanton nymphs of Armida’s island, Carlo and Ubaldo resolve to close their ears “al dolce canto e rio / di queste del piacer false sirene” (to the sweet and sinful singing of these false Sirens of pleasure) (15.57). A canto earlier, they learned of Rinaldo’s seduction by a phantom singer in the likeness of a Tyrrhenian Siren (14.61), and they will later grant him Odysseus’s prerogative to hear and resist Armida’s Siren song (16.41). To her Homeric ancestry—in Tasso’s revised Gerusalemme conquistata her mother is a Siren of the Euphrates—Tasso’s Armida is linked by a line of descent that runs through other female characters in the Italian romance epics: notably Ariosto’s Alcina, but also such figures as the Sirennymphs who serve the enchantress Carandina in Francesco Cieco da Ferrara’s Mambriano (1502), and the Siren in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1495) who fails to seduce Orlando in the garden of Falerina.43 This female genealogy is one of many elements that link Tasso’s Armida and her romance world to sites of maternal origin. In the false story of exile with which she seduces the soldiers of Goffredo’s camp, she tells of a forced departure from her Syrian homeland that derives from the ancient Greek romances but also parodies the flight of Virgil’s Aeneas from the burning Troy. Where the Aeneid’s fiction stresses the bonds of paternal ancestry and filiation, Armida dwells instead on the relations of mother and daughter. Aeneas’s ghostly visitation by Hector, warning him to leave the doomed city, is replaced here by “l’ombra materna” (the maternal spirit) of Armida’s mother Cariclia (4.49), whose name evokes one of the most venerable romance heroines, the distressed Chariclea of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. Armida’s entry into the poem spawns counter-narratives of exile and homecoming that compete ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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with the crusaders’ mission to reunite European Christendom with its lost paternity. The pleasures of romance in the Liberata repeatedly take the form of illusory fictions of origin, fictions bound up with women’s voices and structured by motifs of female sexuality and maternal generation. The idyll of Rinaldo and Armida in the Fortunate Isles is the Liberata’s most sustained fiction of homecoming. Armida’s locus amoenus is a zone of static repose, sealed off against epic statecraft. It advertises itself as a return to nature, to childhood, to the roots of the self. This romance enclave takes its contours from the lush pleasure gardens that Tasso found in the poems of his Italian predecessors. Yet its emphasis on music and vocality reaches still further back to Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens. Tasso portrays a moody, somnolent musical world presided over by female voices. On an island in the Orontes River, Rinaldo has been ensnared by a beautiful figure rising out of the waters: Così dal palco di notturna scena o ninfa o dea, tarda sorgendo, appare. Questa, benché non sia vera sirena ma sia magica larva, una ben pare di quelle che già presso a la tirrena piaggia abitàr l’insidioso mare; né men ch’in viso bella, in suono è dolce, e così canta, e ‘l cielo e l’aure molce. [So from the flooring of a stage at night a nymph or goddess, rising slowly, comes into view. This one, although she be not a true Siren but a magic shade, seems truly one of those that formerly close by the Tyrrhene shore inhabited the treacherous sea; nor is she less sweet to hear than lovely to see, and thus she sings, and calms the wind and sky.] (14.61)

Homer’s Sirens may derive their name from a Greek term (seira) for a rope or bond, and Tasso’s false “sirena” draws Rinaldo into an inward-looking universe of the passions that is the most enthralling of the poem’s forms of bondage.44 She urges the hero to lay down the burden of epic teleology. Her song, an inset lyric nested inside Tasso’s narrative, holds open a false dream of autonomy. Public glory, she sings, is an empty abstraction, “un’ecco, un sogno, anzi del sogno un ombra” (an echo, a dream, the shadow of a dream) (63.7). In its place, she sings of bodies that are self-enclosed, appetitive, rooted in sensation: “Goda il corpo sicuro, e in lieti oggetti / l’alma tranquilla appaghi i sensi frali” (Let your tranquil souls enjoy your bodies, free 38

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from care, and pleasure the fragile senses with grateful objects) (64.1–2). Her Epicurean music is an embrace of the sensual world. She asks Rinaldo to hear the song of nature not as a divine symbolic order but as a private experience of the senses. Offered this dream of freedom, Rinaldo falls asleep. The nymph’s song has effectively reversed the flow of historical time: in the hero’s collapse, Christian civilization returns to pagan individualism, sinks from consciousness, and finds its way back to the native condition of the beasts.45 This journey back in time is also a solipsistic journey into the origins of the psyche. Armida’s romance garden is surrounded by a labyrinth, suggestive of a descent through the tangled root system of individual consciousness; the garden is its primeval core. By contrast, Ariosto’s realm of Alcina is a public and social world, a place of communal feasting, masquing, hunting, dancing and singing, poetry reading, and amorous play. Tasso’s locus amoenus offers no such festive community. The Liberata instead portrays romance fictions as a projection of human inwardness; they are the fevered, gauzy fantasies of a mind untethered from external structures of identity and value. Defying the totalizing order of the epic, Armida’s island garden takes as its purview an inner life of feeling that claims for itself the status of universal truth. The crowded sociability of earlier romance gardens is stripped away, leaving the landscape to generate its own ambient music whose agency is hard to pinpoint: Vezzosi augelli infra le verdi fronde temprano a prova lascivette note; mormora l’aura, e fa le foglie e l’onde garrir che variamente ella percote. Quando taccion gli augelli alto risponde, quando cantan gli augei più lieve scote; sia caso od arte, or accompagna, ed ora alterna i versi lor la musica ora. [Among the green leaves the charming birds modulate their wanton melodies in contest; the breeze goes murmuring and makes the leaves and waters whisper as variously it catches them. When the birds are silent, clearly it makes response; when the birds are singing it blows more softly; whether it be art or chance, the musical breeze now companies, now counterpoints their verses.] (16.12)

It is an eerily inward-looking tableau, asking the mind to discern patterns of motive and volition in the natural world but obscuring whether those ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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patterns exist by caso or arte, whether they have objective reality or are merely imagined by the perceiver. Tasso repeatedly stresses sense perception in these cantos, destabilizing the boundary between subject and object.46 In reality, the narrator reports, all of the garden’s phenomena are the product of Armida’s magic: “L’aura, non ch’altro, è de la maga effetto” (the very breeze, not to mention the rest, is the work of the sorceress) (10). The whole natural world, in this languid and solipsistic dream, is an extension of human art. The garden’s landscape of the mind exposes a yearning for homecoming that takes a range of forms. Rinaldo’s journey into the inner reaches of the self is at the same time a fantasy of historical and political regression. For the hero it offers a return from the epic of religious nationhood to the primitive feudal individualism of the chivalric romances. Rinaldo’s initial defection from the crusader army takes place when Armida uses her wiles to seduce the Christian soldiers away from Goffredo’s siege of Jerusalem. Rinaldo’s own desertion, though, is the result not of any amorous enchantment but of an honor killing. Finding himself slandered by a jealous rival knight, Rinaldo slays him. Rather than submit himself to Goffredo’s judicial arbitration— “Libero i’ nacqui e vissi,” he insists; “morrò sciolto / pria che man porga o piede a laccio indegno” (Free was I born and I have lived free, and freely will I die before I set hand or foot in ignoble shackles) (5.42)—Rinaldo abandons the crusaders’ camp and their cause. In effect, he returns to his native condition as an Ariostan romance hero, an aristocratic free agent pursuing solo adventures in a world of aimless contingency. In this posture he falls victim to the nymph of the Orontes, who initiates his amorous captivity on Armida’s island. In setting up the Rinaldo-Armida plot, therefore, Tasso has bundled together two stock tropes of the Italian romance epic. Tasso’s predecessor Trissino, argues Jo Ann Cavallo, “superimposed the hero’s rebellion from the cantari carolingi onto the episode of the hero and the seductress, thereby replacing the hero’s inner conflict between duty and pleasure with an external conflict between an indignant knight and a blameworthy ruler.”47 In Tasso’s case, the political dynamic of the Rinaldo plot does not quite “replace” its erotic and psychological dimensions but merges with them, so that each of these elements expresses itself in terms of the others. Rinaldo blends Virgil’s Aeneas, held in thrall to Dido, with Homer’s Achilles, a slighted executive hero who abandons his epic work to sulk in his tent. Armida’s locus amoenus therefore acts as a kind of wilderness preserve for obsolescent warrior-heroes who pine for a lost feudal ego ideal. Rinaldo has walked away from Goffredo’s totalizing epic polity, yet he cannot 40

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bring himself to strike a blow against it.48 His flight from the camp marks a political impasse, reflected by the eerie feeling of stasis in the garden. He views himself as a rebel against illegitimate authority, but his submission to Armida ironically positions her as a romance proxy for Goffredo, whose determination to impose a centralized, top-down military structure onto his client knights is crucial to the ideological ambitions of Tasso’s Counter-Reformation epic. Rinaldo has been emasculated both sexually and politically. Appropriately, his rescuers, passing into Armida’s palace garden, see two images sculpted on the gates: one depicts Hercules spinning at his loom, and the other shows Antony’s defeat at Actium (16.2–7). In the lovers’ famous mirror scene—where Armida “del vetro a sé fa specchio, ed egli / gli occhi di lei sereni a sé fa spegli” (makes herself a mirror out of glass, and [Rinaldo] makes himself mirrors of her limpid eyes) (16.20)—Tasso brilliantly links the narcissism of the disaffected magnate, chafing against the authority of his epic chieftain, with the self-regarding introversion of the Petrarchan lover. Rinaldo’s rescuers eventually free him from Armida’s toils by showing him his reflection in another mirror, his diamond shield, in which the errant knight of feudal romance is forced to recognize his own debilitating solipsism. His claims of aristocratic self-sufficiency have become his prison. The poem’s Siren motif extends this fantasy of regression still deeper into the history of civilization. Since at least the third century, patristic writings had adopted Homer’s Sirens as a symbol for the pagan culture of Greece and Rome. The author of the Exhortation to the Greeks warned that the wise Christian, encountering Greek philosophy, should not “prefer the elegant diction of these men to his own salvation, but . . . according to that old story, stop his ears with wax, and flee the sweet hurt which these sirens would inflict upon him.”49 Against such views, Clement of Alexandria and other church fathers with humanist sympathies could complain that “most of those who are inscribed with the Name [of Christian], like the companions of Ulysses, handle the word unskillfully, passing by not the Sirens, but the rhythm and the melody [of ancient Greek culture], stopping their ears with ignorance; since they know that, after lending their ears to Hellenic studies, they will never subsequently be able to retrace their steps.” But Clement, too, argued that “Odysseus alone”—in other words, only a select few initiates—could profit from the Siren song of pagan wisdom.50 For many Christian readers, the literature of Greco-Roman antiquity was the ultimate false origin. Tasso’s Sirens call for a return to a pagan past that, like Armida’s magical vocality, is identified in the Liberata with the ancient cultural roots and motive structures of poetry itself. ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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The Sirens of Homer’s Odyssey offer the hero forbidden knowledge of the past, “everything that the Argives and Trojans did and suffered in wide Troy.”51 Tasso’s female voices reach for still older stories, drawing on the Greco-Roman world’s own dreams of a prehistoric golden age. The theme is made explicit when a Siren-like nymph sings to Carlo and Ubaldo in Armida’s garden: Questo è il porto del mondo; e qui è il ristoro de le sue noie, e quel piacer si sente che già sentì ne’ secoli de l’oro l’antica e senza fren libera gente. L’arme, che sin a qui d’uopo vi foro, potete omai depor securamente e sacrarle in quest’ombra a la quiete, ché guerrier qui solo d’Amor sarete[.] [This is the haven of the world; and here is surcease from your troubles, and that pleasure known that once was known in the Golden Age by the ancient race of men, free and unbridled.Your weapons, that up to here have been of need, you can lay aside safely now and consecrate them in this shade to Quiet; for here you will be Love’s warriors only.] (15.63)

The nymph presents her garden world as a porto, a harbor of rest, which is also in effect a porta, a portal or doorway that leads outside the flow of epic time. Her lost pastoral age sponsors a competing configuration of history and a rival genealogy for European literary culture. The epic model of translatio imperii—the westward migration of political and cultural authority from the ancient world— is peeled back to expose a deeper historical pattern, an older authorizing source. The nymph seeks out the roots of Western culture in an era prior to Homer’s age of heroes. Portraying warfare and state-building as belated modern innovations, she urges a return to the ways of the “antica . . . gente”: love, pastoral otium, and moral freedom. The literary legacy of this age is to be found not in epic verse but in works like Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Pastor Fido, in the simple Arcadian lives and loves of their adolescent shepherds. This is the world in its cultural childhood, before the imposition of law and the rise of political strife. It is a world, the nymph adds, that is ruled by a queen, and related patterns treat the hero’s submission to female authority as a kind of infantile regression. Rinaldo here becomes a “nobil garzon” (16.34, rendered by the Elizabethan translator Edward Fairfax as “the noble infant”). The garden lies “nel più chiuso / grembo” (in the most secret womb) of Armida’s 42

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walled palace complex (16.1); its Siren song is also the voice of the mother, calling the ego back to the fertile source of its being. A lifelong exile from his parental home of Naples, Tasso seems to have associated the Siren myth with his own earliest childhood. His troubled autobiographical poem, Canzone al Metauro, fleetingly imagines Naples as a ruined Troy, with himself in the role of “Ascanius or Camilla,” a Virgilian child refugee from his father’s homeland. But the poem’s stronger impulse is to view the city as a site of maternal ancestry. Born near the legendary tomb of the Siren Parthenope in the Bay of Naples, Tasso has been ripped from his mother’s breast and made a wandering victim of Fortune: di sua man soffersi Piaghe che lunga età risalda a pena. Sàssel la glorïosa alma sirena, Appresso il cui sepolcro ebbi la cuna: Cosí avuto v’avessi o tomba o fossa A la prima percossa! Ma dal sen de la madre empia fortuna Pargoletto divelse.52 [By Fortune’s hand I have suffered wounds that long years have struggled to bind up again. She knows it, the glorious Siren near whose grave I had my cradle. If only I had likewise found my own tomb or ditch at the first blow! But wicked Fortune tore me, a boy, from the breast of my mother.]

Armida’s garden recreates the dark fantasy of a female origin that is also a tomb. Rinaldo, lying in his lover’s “grembo molle” (soft lap) (16.18), does not take nourishment at her maternal breast, but gives it: “[Ella] s’inchina, e i dolci baci ella sovente / liba or da gli occhi e da le labra or sugge” (She leans down and now from his eyes repeatedly drinks in sweet kisses, and now sucks them from his lips) (19). This place where the primitive ego exults in its renewed sway—a return to pre-oedipal centrality in its mother’s regard—threatens a dissolution rather than a consolidation of the self. The hero’s return to childhood suggests a melting away of those boundaries between self and other that the poem finds at the heart of personal identity and religious vocation.53 Tasso stresses the transfer of Rinaldo’s adult masculine agency from the hero to Armida. Domesticated and effeminized, he “di servitù, l’altra d’impero / si gloria” (glories in his servitude, the other in her power) (21). Romance in the Liberata therefore arranges itself into a chain of origin myths whose ultimate source is the mother’s lap or womb. In Tasso’s rigid ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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system of hierarchies, these fictions will be made to submit to a higher set of ideological myths: romance wandering will serve a providential epic plot; female sexuality will be brought under male dynastic control; and the originary haven offered by Armida’s nymphs will be exposed as a false proxy for the sepulcher of Christ in Jerusalem, figured as the poem’s true port of origin and its terminal point of rest. As the sun rises on the crusaders’ first sight of Jerusalem in canto 3, they share their collective joy: “ecco da mille voci unitamente / Gierusalemme salutar si sente” (behold Jerusalem greeted by the voices of thousands in unison) (3.3). Tasso models their salute on the cry of Aeneas’s shipmates when they first glimpse the shores of Italy in Virgil’s third book (521–24). Compared in a simile to sailors reaching land, they can now leave behind “la noia e ‘l mal de la passata via” (the trouble and the pain of the voyage past) (3.4). Tasso is already preparing us to see Armida’s garden—“il porto del mondo, e . . . il ristoro / delle sue noie” (the haven of the world and . . . surcease from its troubles) (15.63)—as a belated parody of epic homecoming. With its totalizing vision of Christian purpose, the crusaders’ cry of greeting stands close to the poem’s own earliest origins, for it represents one of the deepest strata of the Liberata’s composition.54 The impromptu Te Deum that follows (3.8) marks out the sacramental community of the crusader army just as it signals the rigorous self-control of the poet, who vanishes behind the institutional voices of Roman epic and Roman liturgy alike. The voices of Armida and her nymphs, by contrast, betray their modern origins. A layer of artifice hangs over their appeal to a distant, primeval nature. Tasso everywhere links their songs to the forms of contemporary musical performance that he condemns in the Discorsi and La Cavaletta. The Siren who arises from the waters to seduce Rinaldo is compared to a stage actress rising through a trap door at an evening’s performance (14.61); the voices of the nymphs who tempt Carlo and Ubaldo are like the harmonies of stringed instruments accompanying a dance (15.65). Armida’s bravura lament upon Rinaldo’s departure opens with a prelude of warbling sighs that make her resemble a concert singer: Qual musico gentil, prima che chiara altamente la voce al canto snodi, a l’armonia gli animi altrui prepara con dolci ricercate in bassi modi[.] [As a gentle musician, before he lifts his clear voice high in song, prepares his listeners’ minds for harmony with sweet ornaments and low warbles(.)] (16.43) 44

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The musician’s “ricercate” refer to the improvisatory, ornamental melodic passages often inserted by sixteenth-century singers and instrumentalists as a prelude to the set musical score. Probably representing older, unwritten performance traditions, they might be compared to the brief instrumental introductions with which the cantastorie began their recitals.55 Here they frame the lament that follows as a studied rhetorical performance, a piece of self-conscious melodrama. Tasso easily fell in love with singers; in the 1560s he became attached to two noblewomen, Lucrezia Bendidio and Laura Peperara, who later sang with the celebrated concerto delle donne at Ferrara.56 The scores of lyrics that he wrote for these women, poems populated by sweet Sirens, angel voices, and bewitching chains of melody, often anticipate his portrayal of the Liberata’s pagan women. In envisioning Armida’s garden as a realm of female artistry, inward-looking lyricism, and contemporary song, Tasso was probably influenced by the hundreds of courtly madrigals based on stanzas from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Courtly readers of Ariosto by now experienced the poem not only in private or communal reading but also through the vocal music repertoire, which sometimes took the form of madrigal cycles that recast the Furioso as a semi-narrative tissue of contiguous lyric episodes.57 But the musicality of Tasso’s Armida and her nymphs also marks a significant stage in the rise of Western European literacy. Michel de Certeau has sketched some ways in which writing, once it is established as the dominant mode of knowing, tends to mystify its oral “other”: “Orality becomes something else from the moment when writing is no longer a symbol, but rather a cipher and the instrument of a ‘production of history’ in the hands of a particular social category. . . . It is isolated, lost, and found again in a ‘voice’ which is that of nature, of the woman, of childhood, of the people. . . . It is music, the language of the indicible and of passion; song and opera, a space where the organizing power of reason is effaced, but where the ‘energy of expression’ deploys its variations within the framework of fiction and speaks of the indeterminate or of the depth of the self.”58 Such arguments tend to focus on the later eighteenth century, when the extent and significance of the gap between ancient oralities and modern literacies had sunk more deeply into Europe’s cultural consciousness. Already in the age of Tasso, however, some literate elites have learned to stigmatize contemporary oral cultures not by treating them as primitive and backward but by setting them apart from the main lines of Western historical development altogether, in an inert, rootless psychological present. While some humanists saw Ariosto as a modern Homer, his inspired musicality tapping into long-lost human experiences, ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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Tasso places him in a different kind of oral environment—a static world of female passion, of brooding introspection and indifference to history. It is orality imagined as pure music, cut free from the chains of learned tradition that bound literate Europe to its Greco-Roman paternity. In other ways, too, the Liberata’s feminizing of Ariostan romance seems intended to deny the genre’s deep historical roots. It has been argued that Tasso portrays his pagans as bound to local culture in ways that contrast with the crusaders’ universalizing Christianity. The pagan forces stubbornly cling to their ethnic and regional diversity, and their forms of worship are tied to material objects or to local sites of demonic power, making Islam “an idolatrous, cultic religion that becomes the dark double of Catholicism itself.”59 While Counter-Reformation Christianity claims to transcend cultural difference, its enemies’ religious identities are tied to their native landscape. We have seen that this landscape is sometimes identified with the female body and with maternal origins. It might be further suggested that Tasso’s insistence on the local, feminine, and modern character of Ariostan romance builds on another related habit of early modern thought. In an era of burgeoning literacy, not all literacies were found to be equal. Learned discourse still privileged the so-called universal ancient languages over the vernaculars—and, within each vernacular, an elite standardized form of the language over other forms viewed as “illiterate,” regional, and dialectal— which, whether spoken or written, were commonly described in gendered terms.60 A feminized “mother tongue” implied cultural immaturity, a closer proximity to speech than to text, and a need for standardization and discipline. By tying the Furioso to modern oral poetry and song, Tasso removes Ariosto from the pantheon of classic authors and associates him with the unstandardized, demotic lingua volgare. By extension, Ariosto is identified with his female readership, less likely than elite men to be schooled in Latinate high culture; Tasso’s own epic, with its rule-bound classicism and its thematizing of unity and self-discipline, stands with the community of learned males who preside over the canons of literary history. Like Tasso’s pagans, whose ethnic and cultural diversity stands opposed to the totalizing uniformity of the Christian host, Ariosto’s “oral” art belongs to the vernacular patchwork of modern popular culture while Tasso’s epic claims its place in the high precincts of Greco-Roman letters. This pattern forms a sociolinguistic counterpart to the Liberata’s religious politics, which link Ariostan romance to the refractory feudal principates that have so far resisted absorption by a universalizing papal authority. The irony of Tasso’s approach is that, by ranging his own ancient bookish inheritance against Ariosto’s oral modernity, Tasso pushes Homer’s lost 46

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oral art out of the reach of both poets. Each belongs to a belated cultural order, separated from its prehistoric origins by layers of mediation and corruption. The Liberata’s true port of rest is elusive. The plot takes shape as a series of anguished deferrals, postponing the promised entry into Jerusalem. The triumphant capture of the city in the poem’s final canto signals the most profound deferral of all: when Goffredo at last hangs up his arms to worship at Christ’s empty tomb, we are reminded that the poem itself, a work of human art, can only gesture toward the final, transcendent source of its meaning—a divine locus of origin that is absent and unrepresentable.61 Tasso’s poem suggests with growing urgency that the dream of safe harbor is always an illusion. Only death will bring an end to the human condition of pilgrimage and exile. In a 1584 sonnet, it is the monastery of San Benedetto near Mantua that the poet calls his “porto del mondo.” The Liberata’s final promise of rest from worldly cares, fleetingly glimpsed in Goffredo’s canto 14 vision of the “dive / sirene” (holy Sirens) (14.9) singing over the heavenly Jerusalem, remains outside the poem’s fiction. Nor did the epic’s publication in 1581 mark the end of Tasso’s quest for an ideal form. For the rest of his life he would defend, dissect, and dismantle the poem under the censure of his Roman critics and the demands of his own exacting art. His heavily revised Gerusalemme conquistata (1593) strives for even greater conformity to the ancient epics, above all to Homer’s Iliad; impersonal and remote, the poem lays a still darker moral stigma on all contemporary voices.62 Tasso’s art, then, is an early response to the confrontation between neoclassical poetics and musical humanism. Always striving for greater discipline, Tasso pushed his poem’s ancient models further from him even as he struggled to advance toward them. He was finally to turn away entirely from the Greco-Roman epic tradition in favor of a different authorizing source. In his hexameral creation epic, Le Sette giornate del mondo creato (ca. 1594), he gave his voice over to the ultimate institutional authority, the Hebrew Bible. There is a kind of man, he wrote, returning to a cluster of favorite tropes, who all’armonia di vari accenti, O pure al dolce suon di cetra o d’arpa, Che l’alme acqueta, e il cor lusinga e molce, E gli tien lenti, o mesti in varie tempre, Oblia le cure. Altri carole e balli Lieto rimira e d’impudica donna, Che ‘n varie guise, e quasi ‘n varie forme ta s s o ’s s i l e n t ly r e

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Le pieghevoli membra e muove e cangia, Mira i lascivi salti, e i modi, e l’arti Lusinghieri e vezzosi, e parte agogna. ... Ma noi, che ‘l Re del ciel, Fattore e Mastro D’opre meravigliose invita e chiama A contemplare ‘l magistero e l’arte Divina, e questo suo lavoro adorno, Ch’è di cose celesti e di terrene Con sì diverse tempre in un contesto; Sarem pigri a mirarlo? . . . E non piuttosto rimirando intorno Questa sì varia e sì mirabil mole, Ciascun per sè con la sua mente indietro Ritornerà, pensand’ al primo tempo Ch’ebbe principio ‘l tempo e ‘l nuovo Mondo?63 [at the harmony of varied tones, or at the sweet sound of the lyre or harp, which soothes the soul and calms and gladdens the heart, making them cheerful or sad in various style, forgets his cares. Another merrily attends to songs and dances; observing an immodest woman, whose flexible limbs move and gyrate in changing forms, he gazes at her lascivious leaps and her conduct and wiles, seductive and enticing, and he yearns for her. . . . But we, whom the King of Heaven, maker and master of wondrous works, calls to the contemplation of his divine art and skill, and of this creation which alone is beautiful, which has brought together in one both heavenly and earthly things of such diverse kinds, shall we be slow to admire it? . . . And shall not each of us rather, surveying this great mass so full of wonder and variety, turn his thoughts backward and ponder that first of times, when the world and time itself had their beginning?]

Old reflexes return here. Secular and modern art is bound up with sexual dissipation, its seductive “armonia” calling men’s hearts to forgetfulness and an escape from care. The transition from contemporary music to the allurements of the female body has by now become automatic for Tasso, reflected here in the dancer’s undulating form. Resemblances to the Liberata’s Siren-nymphs and their erotic enclaves are easily found. At the same time, elements of Tasso’s aesthetic theory are now made explicit in ways that they were not in his earlier fictions. A relentless emphasis on the key term “variety” (“vari accenti . . . varie tempre . . . varie guise. . . . varie forme”) gives way in this passage to a greater synthesis—elsewhere used to describe the epic poet’s art, here referring to God’s creation—of variety within unity (“questo 48

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suo lavoro adorno / Ch’è di cose celesti, e di terrene / Con sì diverse tempre in un contesto”). In giving himself over to praising God’s work, the true “meraviglia” to which heroic poetry has vainly aspired, Tasso relinquishes his authorial autonomy and finally enables himself to return to the beginning of things, the “primo tempo,” where his word can mingle with the biblical Word of God and the poet’s voice can find rest. The search for ancient Greek music reveals a strain in late humanist culture that also shapes the perspective of its epic literature. As classical scholarship extended deeper into antiquity, the magical songs of the ancients exposed the limits of a historiography based on extant written texts. Their documentary sources were fragmentary and their secrets unrecovered. They could be said to symbolize those elements of culture that would not wholly yield to the dream of collapsing history and effacing difference. The Homer of Tasso’s Discorsi evokes a remote, idealized oral idiom that has since fallen away. He figures as a reminder of distant realms of experience that lie outside the reach of the book. Tasso sought both to master his classical ancestry and to preserve a sense of its alterity. The Liberata insists that the modern embrace of the ancient world remains incomplete, even at the expense of cutting off Tasso’s own poem from its authorizing sites of origin. We shall find a similar double vision in the epic poetry of Ronsard and Spenser. Their search for the prehistoric roots of their literary tradition faces related conflicts between rupture and continuity, loss and preservation, oral songs and written texts, as they struggle to ground their authorship in a newly recovered, but also newly elusive, archaic past.

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5)TWO)% The Oldest Song Ronsard and Spenser

dynastic epic and deep history The late sixteenth-century epic was, above all, dynastic epic. It told of families and their origins. The poet’s goal was to place individual heroic achievement inside a larger story about the life of a clan or bloodline over time. Epic poetry insists on the presence of the past, and dynastic epics sustained that argument by tracing the heroic patrimony of the period’s ruling elites. They modeled themselves on Virgil’s Aeneid, with its celebration of Rome’s paternity, but their concern for family history also stemmed from pragmatic questions of patronage. Poets scoured their patrons’ family trees for ancestors fit to be memorialized in verse. A growing collection of writings offered the aristocratic magnates of Europe their own reflected image in Virgilian dress. Such poems mingled the classical heritage of Renaissance humanism with the fading feudal mentality of an earlier age. The character they took on in parts of northern Europe, however, was different from that in the south. The emerging nation-state gathered up political and economic power in centralized monarchies, weakening the landed aristocracy and bringing forth a body of dynastic epics devoted to the praise of royal sovereigns.1 Its poets, tasked with chronicling the rise of a whole people, spun a national destiny out of their monarch’s ancestral past. This double undertaking—binding 50 3)))#

together the fates of ruler and nation—meant that both the polity and the royal family’s genealogical line had to be pushed far back in time, to be made in some sense coeval with history itself. The origins of nations, tightly threaded around a lineage of hero-kings, became a legendary affair that led back to Troy. Both Pierre de Ronsard and Edmund Spenser groomed themselves to write these epics of nationhood. They were not the first sixteenthcentury poets to attempt the task, and neither fully realized his ambitions, but their efforts had a lasting influence on the tradition.2 Although Ronsard was almost thirty years Spenser’s senior, the question of his direct influence on the English poet matters less for our purposes than does their shared cultural predicament.3 In certain ways the two men’s literary careers ran in parallel to each other. Both were courtier-poets, possessed of a distinguished humanist education and an unusual lyric gift, who sought to raise the standing of vernacular literature by imitating Italian and Greco-Roman models. Each hoped to crown his achievement with a heroic poem that would trace his nation’s legendary past, glorify its royal line, and locate its greatness inside a providential vision testifying to its status as a chosen people. For this work both poets turned to Trojan origin legends that had circulated since the early Middle Ages. The stories of Francus and Brutus, putative descendants of Hector and Aeneas and founders of France and Britain, became the scaffolding for Ronsard’s Franciade (1572) and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Yet the same humanist impulses that sponsored the epics of Ronsard and Spenser also prompted the rise of a new sixteenth-century historiography, a skeptical, demythologizing approach to the past that placed heavy weight on documentary evidence and preferred the Roman historians to the medieval chroniclers. Both poets seem to have been aware that the historical claims on which they founded their poetry were coming under hostile scrutiny. Their dynastic epics are intensely concerned with problems of genealogy and origin as they take the measure of an ancient frontier where history crosses into myth. How to account for the nation’s ancestry was a question not just of collective identity but also of the poet’s vocation. As the documentary record gave way to remote prehistory, it became the prerogative of the poet to fill the widening void. While Tasso’s epic tradition begins with Homer, the epics of Ronsard and Spenser reach further back in time. They share an attraction to deep history, to those primeval regions of the past where the poet ceases to be a chronicler of nationhood and becomes a cosmic mythmaker. Yet their encounters with antiquity, far from simply ratifying the inherited the oldest song

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myths of origin that had led them there, show signs of a changing historical consciousness. While both poets idealize the origins of civilization—identified in their writings with Trojan dynastic legend and with fables of a lost golden age—their epics also begin to harbor a view of the remote past as a more primitive stage of human culture: a foreign domain of archaic tribalism, myth, and magic. To view the past in this way bears implications for these writers’ own art, for it recasts the earliest origins of their literary tradition. The myths that they honor are powerful but alien, bound up with ancient cultic mysteries and half-remembered shamanic rites that are as much the uncanny other of modern civilization as they are its fountainhead. The Franciade and The Faerie Queene bind the poet’s voice and vocation to this complex of attitudes toward the past. Ronsard, fascinated by the ancient union of music and poetry, tended to identify himself with the legendary singers of Greek antiquity. In his long effort to compose a national epic, Ronsard’s early models of Neoplatonic inspiration strained against the neoclassical demands of literary imitatio, which called for the patient verbal reproduction of a library of classical texts. In the Franciade, a poem haunted by themes of repetition and regression, the burden of imitating a crowded literary archive leads the poet on a restless search for ever more ancient sites of origin, older authorizing sources: a quest that leads away from the martial epic tradition of Virgil and Homer to the fragmentary Orphic Hymns. Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene generally avoids the rhetoric of oral performance, in part because Elizabethan historians were locked in debate over the shadowy oral sources of British chronicle history. But the 1596 installment of Spenser’s epic, seeking out more autonomy for a poet disappointed in his courtly ambitions, moves further back toward the archaic roots of civilization, concerning itself with cosmogonic strife and with the remote origins of the European epic tradition. With this change of emphasis comes a more aggressive, but also more troubled, exploration of the poet’s voice—one that overlaps in significant ways with Spenser’s portrayal of the Irish bards in his contemporaneous View of the Present State of Ireland. Spenser’s writings about the bards, we shall see, point to a new sense of the primitive foundations of his own literary canon, and to a new conception of history itself as a long, uneven evolution from a barbaric past. Both Ronsard and Spenser set out to write epics about the origins of families and nations. Yet their configurations of voice trace complex genealogies of their own, as they follow the story of their people into the primeval darkness. 52

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the singer of crete While Cinquecento Italy labored under the weight of its long intimacy with the Greco-Roman past, French humanism stood at an earlier phase of its own classical revival. Pierre de Ronsard, assessing the state of French poetry in the ode A sa lire (1550), captures the thrill of renewed contact with the ancients: quant premierement Je te trouvai, tu sonnois durement, Tu n’avois point de cordes qui valussent, Ne qui répondre aus lois de mon doi pussent. Moisi du tens ton fust ne sonnoit point, Mais j’eu pitié de te voir mal empoint, Toi qui jadis des grans Rois les viandes Faisois trouver plus douces & friandes: Pour te monter de cordes, & d’un fust, Voire d’un son qui naturel te fust, Je pillai Thebe’, & saccagai la Pouille, T’enrichissant de leur belle dépouille.4 [When first I found you, your sound was harsh; your strings were of no value, nor could they answer to the law of my fingers. Your shaft, moldy with time, did not resonate at all; but I pitied you, seeing you in such bad condition, you who formerly made the meals of great kings more sweet and savory. To restore your strings and shaft, and even the sound that was once natural to you, I have pillaged Thebes and sacked Apulia, enriching you with their lovely spoils.]

Based on famous odes by Pindar and Horace, the poem embodies the classicizing spirit of the Pléiade. For Ronsard, the group’s desire to bypass the French literary past and seek its models in Greece and Rome found its most potent symbol in the remarriage of poetry to the music of the lyre, a practice that he claimed had recently been revived in Italy.5 This ideal union of music and poetry drew him especially to the Greeks, whose myths about the power of ancient song haunt Ronsard’s poetry. The mid-sixteenth century saw a flowering of Hellenic studies in France, led in part by Ronsard’s Greek tutor, the celebrated philologist Jean Dorat. Under Dorat the poet mastered the extant corpus of Greek texts and developed a view of history that was to inform his mature writings. His ode A Michel de l’Hospital (1552) portrays the literary tradition as a long course of decline from idealized origins.The career of poetry from archaic Greece through the Middle Ages is a story of fading inspiration and growing estrangement from the divine. At the tradition’s mystical source stands a group of poets—Musaeus, the oldest song

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Orpheus, Linus, Hesiod, Homer—who straddle the remote threshold between history and legend, aloof from the corruption of later times.6 Ronsard’s stated eagerness to marry his own writings to the lute, harp, and lyre is bound up with this model of history. Heralding a new beginning in the works of the Pléiade, he associates himself with the inspired art of those poets who once stood closest to the ancient wellsprings of his literary tradition. By uniting poetry and song, he also gracefully obscures the fact that he can make contact with these ancestors only through laborious study of the fleeting traces they have left in a written archive. The preface to Ronsard’s 1550 Odes, with its heady promise to “revive the use of the lyre . . . which alone can and must enliven poetic verses,” marks a watershed in the rise of musical humanism in France.7 His earliest biographer reports that Ronsard delighted in “singing his verses and hearing them sung, calling Music the younger sister of Poetry,” and his writings repeatedly urge the singing or spoken recitation of lyric verse.8 He describes the wondrous effects of ancient music in terms that echo the Italian humanists, and he draws on the same conventional examples. The extent of Ronsard’s practical knowledge of music, however, remains unclear.9 He confessed that he had a bad singing voice, and an illness in the early 1540s left him partially deaf. There is no evidence that he wrote musical compositions of his own or that he had more than a glancing acquaintance with the technical study of Greek music. To the contrary, his one large-scale effort to secure musical settings of his lyric poetry was unexpectedly naïve in its conception, and it was not repeated.10 Dozens of references to musical performance in Ronsard’s later poems rarely amount to more than conventional rhetorical figures. The 1550 preface to his Odes, calling for the revival of the lyre, was dropped from subsequent editions of the book. After the first flush of excitement, Ronsard’s ambition to marry poetry and music seems to have faded. Significantly, his waning commitment to ancient song coincides with the two decades of labor that he devoted to another work of recovery, the humanist epic that was to take up many of the same concerns about the poet’s vocation, inspiration and originality, and the legacy of the ancient world. A poem devoted to literary imitatio, one of its central concerns was how to reach into a sea of written predecessor texts and to recover an authentic “ancient” voice. Ronsard’s Franciade is a notorious failure. Its story is that of many Renaissance epics: a poem begun with great fanfare, highly anticipated, long toiled over, received with disappointment, and abandoned in perplexity. But the Franciade remains a landmark, the first vernacular epic in France to take its subject from national history and its formal design from Homer and Virgil. 54

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Ronsard began to refer to the project in 1550, a year after Joachim du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse called for a French epic to rival the Greco-Roman classics. Almost a quarter of a century later appeared the first four books of Ronsard’s unfinished poem, amounting to some six thousand decasyllabic verses. No more were to follow. A sheepish preface began the long work of warding off criticisms that Ronsard clearly shared. Like Tasso, he would continue to revise his troubled epic for the rest of his life. Some of the reasons for its failure, to be sure, lay outside the poet’s control. Binding itself to the dynastic history of the Valois monarchs, the Franciade became a prisoner of royal politics. Four successive kings held the French throne while Ronsard struggled with his poem. His frequent pleas for patronage came to little. King Charles IX, the epic’s eventual dedicatee, imposed conditions in exchange for royal support that marred the poem’s structure and style. The ill-fated timing of the Franciade’s first appearance in print—less than a month after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre—was just one more indignity for an epic poem whose celebration of French national destiny had long struggled against the painful reality of historical and political change. Ronsard himself was also to blame. He rightly worried that his “petite lirique muse” could not sustain a narrative of epic length.11 The poem’s hero is thinly realized, and its plot fails to hold the reader’s interest. Its style, striving for Homeric clarity and spaciousness, often feels bare. Ronsard’s own flagging commitment to his poem reveals itself in indirect ways, not only in the defensive postures of its various prefaces, but also in its frigid language and idiom, far removed from the sensibility of his best lyrics. The Franciade also stands apart from Ronsard’s lyric canon in almost entirely abandoning tropes of sung performance, a mainstay of the earlier odes and hymns. An account survives of Ronsard’s secretary, the Greek scholar Amadis Jamyn, reciting the Franciade’s fourth book for Charles IX at the Château de Blois, and the poet’s 1572 preface asks that his epic be read aloud: “I will request just one thing of you, reader, that you pronounce my verses well and suit your voice to their passion, not as some might read them, more in the manner of a missive or some royal letters than a well-enunciated poem; and I ask you, furthermore, that where you see the mark ‘!’ you raise your voice in order to lend grace to what you are reading.”12 Ronsard’s request draws on a classicizing model of rhetorical pronuntiatio endorsed by Du Bellay and others. Yet the roots of the practice are also local and medieval. Ronsard’s encouragement to intone his words aloud does little to set the Franciade apart in an era when oral reading, both among the learned and at the royal court, was still commonplace.13 His silence on the union of music and poetry in the oldest song

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ancient epic is more strange still in light of Ronsard’s membership in JeanAntoine de Baïf’s Académie de Poésie et de Musique, founded in 1570 to bring about a thoroughgoing revival of “l’antique chanson” by applying the theories of the musical humanists. Ronsard’s Franciade shares little of his peers’ vigorous embrace of ancient song and remains bound to the printed page. The poem’s retreat into silence corresponds to other signs of strain in its relationship with the legendary past. The Franciade’s stated goal is not so much to sing a hero as to trace the ancestry of the French nation and its royal line: Ronsard calls on his muse to recount “la race / Des roys françoys yssuz de Francion / Enfant d’Hector Troyen de nation” (the race of French kings issuing from Francion, the son of Hector of the Trojan nation) (1.2–4).14 His poem of Francus was doubly a work of historical recovery; it sought both to claim the ancient epic genre for France and to consolidate the prestige of the Valois dynasty by seeking out its legendary origins in Troy. According to this medieval foundation myth, Hector’s child Astyanax (or, in other early accounts, a second son of Hector) escaped with Andromache during the sack of Troy. In adulthood, he sailed for central Europe, took the name Francus, established a Trojan settlement, raised the walls of Paris (named for his uncle), and came to reign over a Frankish nation in large areas of modern Germany and France. His descendants were the Merovingian kings, ancestors of Charlemagne and the later French monarchs.The story enjoyed wide popularity for several centuries, finding a home in pseudo-historical Troy romances such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie and Jean Lemaire de Belge’s Illustrations de Gaule, the latter a direct source for Ronsard’s epic. It was Ronsard’s misfortune that the legend was rapidly crumbling around him as he worked on the Franciade. The Trojan origins of France, already disputed by a handful of writers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were decisively swept away in the 1560s and 1570s by a wave of historians who sought a new, more rigorously documented basis for French national identity. A year after the publication of Ronsard’s unfinished epic came François Hotman’s Franco-Gallia, which confirmed the Germanic origins of the French people, followed in 1579 by the first installment of Claude Fauchet’s myth-dismantling Antiquitez gauloises et françoises.15 Ronsard’s 1572 preface glumly backs away from the historical record. Consigning Francus to the realm of patriotic legend, Ronsard insists that the poet has no obligation to the facts of history. His task is to craft probable fictions, and it is enough to base his work on the long-held beliefs of the French people. Ronsard’s position, one that will later be developed in Tasso’s Discorsi del poema eroico, draws on Aristotle’s distinction in the Poetics between history, which must chronicle things as they are, and poetry, which deals in the 56

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probable and verisimilar. But his appeal to truth-like fictions at the expense of historical fact sits awkwardly with his mandate to tell the authoritative story of the French nation. Bogged down in its final book by a thousand-line roll call of the French royal line, his epic poem both clings to and retreats from the nation’s unstable documentary archive. Such mixed messages also measure a failure of confidence in the historical vision of Ronsard’s earlier ode A Michel de l’Hospital. Early in his Greek studies, he had boldly projected a story of origin onto the blank screen of the remote past. In the humbler, wearier Franciade, he merely stretches an acknowledged fiction across the clutter of history. Ronsard’s poem is burdened not only by the disputed historical record but also by obligations to his literary ancestors. The Franciade casts about for ancient predecessor poets to cast their authority over its own art even as it shrinks from losing itself in a mass of prior texts. Distancing itself from Virgilian neoclassicism, its 1572 preface seeks authority elsewhere: “I have patterned my work,” Ronsard writes, “on the naïve facility of Homer rather than the curious diligence of Virgil.” The contrast between Homer’s natural artlessness and Virgil’s refined art goes back to Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, which most Renaissance readers chose to interpret in Virgil’s favor.16 Ronsard’s choice to identify himself with Homer suggests an effort to reach past Virgil and return to the epic tradition’s inspired and unmediated source. Embedded in that choice is a residue of Ronsard’s early interest in Ficinian Neoplatonism, with its mystique of poetic furor.17 But the turn to Homer also marks a desire to break free from the crowded Virgilian epic tradition, with its chain of meticulous imitations of predecessor texts. Ronsard’s preface is in any case disingenuous, for the Franciade owes much more to Virgil’s historical epic than to Homer. In both content and form, the poem is a study in neoclassical imitation—a patchwork of allusions to the GrecoRoman archive and a monument to Ronsard’s wide learning.The poet’s work on the Franciade seems to have drawn him deep into claustrophobic intimacy with the vast extant corpus of ancient writings, an oppressive legacy from the past that sometimes emerges in his poetry as the dark side of Ronsard’s humanism: On ne scauroit . . . desormais inventer Un argument nouveau qui fust bon à chanter, Soit haut sur la trompette, ou bas dessus la lyre: Aux Ancians la Muse a tout permis de dire, Si bien, que plus ne reste à nous autres derniers, Que le vain desespoir d’ensuyvre les premiers.18 [One hardly knows anymore how to invent a new subject worth singing, whether on high upon the trumpet or down below with the lyre; the Muse the oldest song

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allowed the ancients to say all things so well that nothing is left to us latecomers except the vain despair of following those who came first.]

A new preface, published posthumously with the revised Franciade in 1587, takes a more sympathetic view of Virgilian artistry and of its own patient craftsmanship. Ronsard now declares that the best poets are those who, “through artifice and a natural spirit developed by means of long study, especially by reading the good old Greek and Latin poets, express their conceptions in a measured style, full of venerable majesty, as Virgil did in his divine Aeneid.”19 Here the “natural spirit” of inspiration is viewed as a byproduct of the work of studied imitation; in this preface the poet pointedly shifts his focus from rhetorical inventio to dispositio, and concerns himself exclusively with matters of form and style. After three decades of fastidious work on his poem, Ronsard could no longer sustain the fiction that he had freed himself from his predecessors and returned the epic genre to its primeval origin, an era when the unmediated “spirit,” rather than long and patient reading, presided over the poet’s art. The plot of the Franciade shows how the weight of literary tradition bore down on the poem’s world. Ronsard begins with an account of the sack of Troy, narrated by the god Jupiter and modeled on book 2 of the Aeneid. The god has rescued Hector’s son Astyanax, he explains, and replaced him with a ghostly decoy whom the Greek Pyrrhus threw from the battlements. Like this doubled child of Hector, Ronsard’s epic stands as a simulacrum or uncanny twin of Virgil’s poem, a parallel story of empire that takes life from the same mythical source. In this role it less closely resembles the rescued Astyanax than it does his shadowy double created by Jupiter, a counterfeit figure that depends for its identity on a prior likeness and can never free itself from the storied flames of Troy. The poem’s action opens in Buthrotum, the community of Trojan refugees which Virgil had portrayed as a land that history forgot: a miniature replica of Troy inhabited by a people lost in mourning for the past. This place of sterile retrospection frames the Franciade’s own compulsion to repeat, as it returns again and again to scenes from predecessor texts or folds back upon itself in startling internal echoes and doublings. Its plot is a sequence of episodes drawn mostly from Virgil’s Aeneid and Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica. Ronsard’s Astyanax, also called Francus, learns that his destiny is to leave his new homeland to found the kingdom of the Franks. Setting sail from Buthrotum, Francus is shipwrecked almost at once in a storm at sea, but, with a handful of survivors, scrambles ashore on the island of Crete. Welcomed by the local king, Dicée, he goes on to prevail in single combat against a giant who has imprisoned the king’s son. Later he wins the love of the king’s two daughters, Clymène and 58

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Hyante, each a composite of Virgil’s Dido and Apollonius’s Medea. From Hyante, who is also a priestess of Hecate, Francus obtains a vision of his royal descendants before the poem breaks off. Ronsard’s twin heroines, whose closely paralleled love stories dominate his third book, are only the most obvious example of structural repetition in his poem. Indeed, Clymène and Hyante seem vaguely aware that their story is not taking place for the first time. They note that Francus takes after his uncle Paris (3.1140; cf. 4.1429) and they ponder whether they will share the fate of Ariadne, “qui d’amour violente / Oza son pere et son païs changer / Pour un Thezée, un parjure estranger” (who, through violent love, dared to exchange her father and country for a Theseus, a foreign perjurer) (1226–28; cf. 3.113, 4.340). Francus must repeatedly protest that he is not another Hercules or Jason, stealing women away from their homelands (4.327; cf. 3.360, 560), and that he will not reenact the disastrous crime of Paris (3.1375). Despite these assurances, he will, in fact, follow in their footsteps. His rejection of Clymène’s love leads her to despair and death; he then woos Hyante in order to obtain her prophecy of his future exploits—a prophecy that awkwardly foretells his marriage to another woman (4.751–58). Such moments embody the mood of the poem as a whole: a deep sense of its own helpless derivativeness, a feeling that it is bound to tell the same old stories once again. While Ronsard openly acknowledged his debts to Homer and Virgil, he was much more circumspect about the influence of Apollonius’s Argonautica. His prefaces scarcely mention the poem, citing it only to justify his choice to narrate the Franciade’s events in chronological sequence rather than begin in medias res. But he closely imitates long sequences from the maritime epic of Apollonius, including the launching of the Argo, the single combat of Polydeuces and Amycus, and Medea’s densely psychologized love for Jason, as well as many shorter passages.20 It is fitting that Ronsard kept returning to Apollonius, for in some ways the two poets shared the same dilemma. The Argonautica emerged from the small community of Greek elites in thirdcentury Alexandria. Like the early Renaissance humanists, the Alexandrians were tireless gatherers, codifiers, and curators of texts. The scholars who exhaustively archived the ancient world’s writings in their famous library and produced the great Homeric scholia were mindful of their own role in the institutionalization of a literary tradition. This cultural environment makes Hellenistic poetry acutely conscious of its belatedness. Ranging across the swollen corpus of earlier Greek literature, it faces the past with both the oldest song

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reverence and resentment. At its back it always hears the voices of forebears whom it feels compelled to imitate but unable to rival. This outlook on the past shapes the writings of Apollonius and his peers into an uncertain mixture of tradition and independence, imitation and revision. Their most striking habits of style—preciosity, artifice and pedantry, exotic puns and neologisms, far-flung allusions, a taste for unfamiliar myths and etiologies—stem from the Alexandrians’ sense of cultural insecurity, their need to prove their mastery over the inheritance that stretched out behind them. Their most characteristic literary forms are highly polished fragments and miniatures, or genrebending hybrid forms that colonize the margins of the tradition, adapting their ancient models in subversive or parodic ways.21 All of these patterns can be found in the Argonautica. Writing in the shadow of Homer, Apollonius pointedly seeks out a story that concerns a generation of heroes who lived before the siege of Troy. Even Homer’s Odyssey had referred to the voyage of the Argo as a familiar old tale (12.69– 70). Like Milton after him, Apollonius asserts his poem’s priority over an epic tradition that he portrays as belated and derivative. In a scene emblematic of his relationship with Homer, the Argonauts pass by the fatal shore of the Sirens in book 4.22 Their heroic journey, modeled on the twelfth book of the Odyssey, becomes a prior literary model in its turn, laying out a path that Odysseus will later trace on his way to Ithaca. But this crew’s encounter with the Sirens takes a very different shape. They do not stop their ears against the Sirens’ voices and are easily seduced to sail toward their death. Orpheus, one of Jason’s companions, takes up his lyre and drowns out the Sirens’ music with his own potent melody, saving the ship from destruction: “Thracian Orpheus, Oeagrus’ son, strung his Bistonian lyre in his hands and rung out the rapid beat of a lively song, so that at the same time the men’s ears might ring with the sound of his strumming, and the lyre overpowered [the Sirens’] virgin voices.”23 It is a bold, but characteristically oblique, confrontation with the poet’s Homeric source. The call of his predecessor’s voice and literary example is irresistible, but those who give themselves over to it are lost. If the Sirens embody Homer’s ancient art, Apollonius counters them with Orpheus, a legendary singer of even greater antiquity. His music, and by extension the Argonautica itself, prevails over Homer’s Sirens and claims the right to sing alongside them. This historical depth of field, the constant measuring of the poet’s voice against a chorus of earlier voices, is typical of Apollonius’s epic and its Hellenistic milieu. Unable to forget his reliance on the authority of earlier models, Apollonius constantly returns to the past in the act of claiming independence from it. 60

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The Franciade lacks most of the Alexandrians’ stylistic habits, but it shares their obsession with the past.24 The poem’s hero seems barely interested in his historical destiny; his thoughts keep drifting back to Buthrotum or Troy. Ronsard colludes with Francus in his longing to go backward, for the hero’s outward journey unexpectedly becomes a return home. Shipwrecked in Crete, he learns that he has unwittingly found his way to the Trojans’ ancestral homeland. This is the birthplace of Teucer, who set out from here on his own ancient journey to found the city of Troy. From this new perspective, Troy itself, the seat of the Western epic tradition, becomes a belated, secondary home—a kind of Buthrotum in its own right— preserving the memory of a still older place of origin. Virgil’s Aeneas had also passed through Crete, tempted to resettle his Trojan refugees on the island, but a plague had signaled that his imperial future lay elsewhere. Ronsard, however, lingers here. Like Apollonius, he has found his way to a realm of stories that predate the ancient epics on which his own poem depends. He stresses the extreme antiquity of this region. It is a place of cultic worship, devoted especially to the gods Bacchus and Cybele. The king Dicée traces his own royal line back to Briareus and Cymopolia, a daughter of Poseidon; the sea god has also fathered the giant fought by Francus. In book 2 we see an ornamental bowl that depicts the goddess Rhea (traditionally identified with Cybele) hiding her newborn Jupiter in Crete from his consuming father, Saturn (2.911–26). A place of child gods—Bacchus too was first created in the form of a young boy— Crete is the Trojans’ “ancienne mere” (ancient mother) (2.618), a nurturing refuge and point of contact with the deepest sources of the hero’s familial and religious identity. Ronsard’s imagination seems most lovingly engaged at such moments of reaching back for earlier times, whether he describes Francus’s parting with his mother Andromache (1.721–808), a tapestry showing the history of the Corybantes (2.897–910), or a dream in which the hero’s drowned shipmates plead for a grave to be consecrated in their name (2.641–76). In this Cretan setting, too, Ronsard stages the traditional epic encounter with the hero’s dead ancestors, a scene modeled on the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Hyante, in a sibylline frenzy, unfolds to Francus a vision of the coming kings of France. Her one-thousand-line narrative points toward a triumphant future. But it is significant that here, lodged at Crete, in the dark reaches of Hecate’s temple and in the company of the dead, Ronsard’s poem comes to an end. If Ronsard seems unwilling to move on from this most ancient of civilizations, one of his characters leads the poem back to an even more remote site of origin. In book 2 we encounter the figure of a Cretan bardic singer. The minstrel Terpin leads a festive dance with a hymn to Eros: the oldest song

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Dieu (disoit-il) qui tiens l’arc en la main, Fils de Venus, hoste du sang humain, Qui dans les cueurs, tes royaumes, habites, Qui ça, qui là, de tes ailes petites Voles par tout jusqu’au fons de la mer, Faisant soubs l’eau les dauphins allumer[.] [O god, he sang, who holds the bow in your hand, son of Venus, guest within our human blood who lives in our hearts, your kingly realms; who here and there with your little wings flies everywhere, even into the depths of the sea, where under the waters you make the dolphins flare up with love(.)]

The theme at first seems a trivial one—a decorative and playful account of Cupid as a fluttering Alexandrian putto. Moments earlier, Ronsard has imitated a scene from Apollonius, also adapted by Virgil, in which Venus bribes her mischievous son to inflame Medea’s heart with love for Jason. But the minstrel’s song expands into something more cosmic and more primitive: Pere germeux de naissance, & qui fais Comme il te plaist les guerres & la paix, Prince invaincu, nourricier de ce monde, Qui du Chaos la caverne profonde Ouvris premier, &, paroissant armé De traits de feu, Phanete fus nommé: Double, jumeau, emplumé de vistesse, Porte-brandon, archer, que la jeunesse Au sang gaillard, courtize pour son Roy[.] ... Sans toi n’est rien la pointe de nostre age, Faveur, honneur, abondance de bien, Force de corps sans ta grace n’est rien, Ny la beauté: & mesmes notre vie Est une mort, si de toy n’est suivie, Ensemble Dieu profitable et nuisant. Vien doncq icy, comme un astre luisant, Donner lumière à si belle enterprise Et ceste feste heureuse favorise. (959–75, 986–94) [Germinal father of birth, who makes war and peace as it pleases you, unconquered prince, nourisher of this world, who first opened the deep cavern of Chaos, and, emerging armed with arrows of fire, was named Phanete: 62

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O double one, twin, plumed with swiftness, firebrand-bearer, archer whom the hot-blooded youth honor as their king: . . . Without you the prime of our lives comes to nothing; favor, honor, abundance of goods, bodily strength and beauty are as nothing without your grace; and even our life itself is death, if you do not attend upon it, O god both benign and harmful. Come here, then, like a shining star, to give your light to this lovely undertaking and to lend your favor to these joyful festivities.]

Other bardic figures, such as Iopas in Aeneid 1.740–46 and Orpheus in Argonautica 1.496–511, had sung of natural history and mythical etiologies, and resemblances to the opening invocation to Venus in Lucretius’s De rerum natura can also be found here. But Ronsard’s song reaches back to more distant sources. Its cadences resemble the poetry of Hesiod’s Theogony or the Homeric Hymns. The Eros who is celebrated here belongs to an older framework of myths, a half-remembered body of ancient story that tells of a world prior to the Olympian gods. The song’s primary sources lie in Orphic literature, a collection of mostly fragmentary texts dating from the late Hellenistic and early Roman era but long attributed to the legendary singer Orpheus. These writings, which stood at the center of Renaissance hermetic thought, fascinated Ronsard.25 His praise song probably derives its outline and some of its details, including the name Phanete (from Greek phanes, light-bringer), from the sixth Orphic Hymn.26 Manuscripts of the Hymns reached Italy in the early fifteenth century and entered print in 1500; later printings include a 1517 Aldine edition. Several poems by Ronsard draw on these texts, which the poet seems to have associated with the mystical pre-Homeric period honored in the ode A Michel de l’Hospital. With other, supposedly later texts such as the Homeric Hymns and the hymns of Callimachus, they had furnished a source for Ronsard’s own experimental hymns of the 1550s. Those efforts had also absorbed the example of the fourteenth-century Greek scholar Michael Marullus, whose influential Hymni naturales also show debts to the Orphic poems and helped to guide Ronsard through this ancient corpus.27 Two of Ronsard’s hymns in particular, L’Hymne de Calaïs et de Zetes (1556) and L’Orphée (1563), dwell on the figure of Orpheus, linked in both poems with the story of the Argonauts and portrayed in Neoplatonic terms as an inspired prophet and agent of divine harmony. There and elsewhere Orpheus symbolized the transcendent authority of the poet’s singing voice, which colored Ronsard’s own self-presentation in the hymns: Remply d’un feu divin qui m’a l’ame eschauffée, Je veux mieux que jamais, suivant les pas d’Orphée, Decouvrir les secretz de Nature & des Cieux[.]28 the oldest song

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[Filled with a divine fire that has inflamed my soul, I desire more than ever, following in Orpheus’s footsteps, to disclose the secrets of nature and the heavens.]

In the Franciade, Terpin’s song finds its subject at the dawn of creation, when primordial Chaos yielded to Love, maker and destroyer of all things. In the Orphic fragments, Phanes-Eros is the mystical source of procreation, the grandfather of Uranus and progenitor of the later Olympians. Ronsard stresses the god’s antiquity and universality. It is a principle embedded in the materials of life itself, and the song evokes a seething, vitalist cosmos far more ancient than the local Mediterranean history recorded in dynastic epics. It is properly evoked not through conventional narrative but through ritually accumulated epithets, lists of divine attributes that echo the incantatory rhetoric of the Orphic Hymns. The vastness of its scope is reproduced in the symbol of the cosmic dance, figured in the rhythmic movements of the young Cretans who surround the singing bard. Ronsard associates this song of creation, too, with Orpheus’s legendary, semidivine voice, a source of motive power that predates the surviving written canon of Greco-Roman poetry. The minstrel’s name, Terpin, derives from the Greek terpo, to delight or charm, a verb used by Homer to describe the irresistible songs of the Sirens. The word recalls the cognate Latin term carmen, the magical charm or spell that lies at the etymological root of all songs (French chansons). This brief episode in the Franciade, recalling Ronsard’s earlier lyric hymns and odes, binds the singer’s voice to a primeval origin not yet constrained by libraries of later texts, a source of inspiration largely free from the burdens of imitation and repetition. It was with evident difficulty that Ronsard turned back from this cosmic vision to the parochial ancestry of Charles IX. Writing a dynastic epic meant imposing fixed patterns on history, and he had long felt more at home portraying natural flux and mutability: the ripple of a river current, the flicker of torchlight, the swirling motion of a dance.The death of Charles IX in 1574 probably gave Ronsard a welcome pretext to abandon his poem. Like the Hellenistic poetry that his work in some ways resembled, the Franciade was to remain a highly polished miniature. We saw that its first preface tried to align the poem with Homer’s natural artlessness against Virgil’s belated craft. This was one of many ways that the poet chafed against the demands of the Virgilian neoclassical epic, which called for imitating a host of prior texts and making room for a long historical roll call of his royal patron’s forebears. Ronsard complained that Virgil, who had to chronicle only a brief lineage of past Roman rulers, “little needed to stretch out his paper, while I have the fact of sixty-three kings on 64

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my hands.”29 This reference to the physical manuscript is significant. Ronsard’s attraction to Homer points to a felt need to distance himself from the substantial library of ancient writings that formed the basis for his poem. He had long set Homer’s epics apart as relics of a privileged earlier time, before the divine furor of the Muses gave way to the merely human work of literary imitation. But his relationship with Homer seems to have changed during his long years of writing and revising the Franciade. The Homeric epics became less a symbol of inspiration than a set of texts to be imitated in their turn. This seems to have been literally the case during the poem’s composition; Amadis Jamyn, who was completing a French translation of the Iliad, provided the poet with lists of similes and other rhetorical figures in the epic to be duplicated in the Franciade.30 Ronsard’s 1587 preface tends to refer to “Homer and Virgil” as a unit, a single body of raw material out of which the poet fashions his work. In Terpin’s minstrelsy we witness, briefly, a different kind of epic idiom. This human voice, rising out of Ronsard’s sea of texts, honors lyric song as the original art, prior to all dynastic fictions that would try to control the flow of history. Seeking a source of authority that predates even Homer, Ronsard reaches through the epic tradition to grasp a deeper order of myths.The Franciade is a poem oppressed by the sheer clutter of the past. Here it fleetingly grants an Orphic vision of the poet as shaman, unfolding a cosmos that has not yet yielded up all of its mysteries.

spenser and the bards There is at least a passing resemblance between Terpin’s singing in book 2 of the Franciade and the mysterious rite at Acidale in the sixth book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.The poet-musician presides over a festive dance; his music taps into occult forces that are older and vaster than the European epic tradition, with its narrow tribal conflicts and its parochial claims of empire. If Ronsard’s Virgilian plot allows him only a passing glimpse of this deep history, Spenser’s Faerie Queene expands the dynastic epic’s depth of vision. The poem sets the traditional concerns of epic history inside a larger syncretic field, one that embraces global exploration, Protestant eschatology, and cosmogonic myth. In Acidale Spenser fuses the motif of the cosmic dance with more primitive kinds of magical ritual or priestly incantation. The luminous figures who surround Colin Clout imply that the artist has come closer than Ronsard’s Cretan minstrel to the primordial sources of being. Yet this scene of inspiration, even more than Ronsard’s, is a fugitive one, vanishing at Sir Calidore’s approach. As John Guillory has shown, such numinous moments in The Faerie Queene are often portrayed in retrospect, the oldest song

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as the lingering traces of a divine presence that has been lost: their emblem is the shepherd’s pipe broken in vexation, or the memory of pressed grass in a meadow.31 Such images take up the cyclical logic of the poem’s writing of history, its many evocations of a lost golden world that lingers in human memory and will someday return. Students of Spenser, like those of Ronsard, have in general found little of the historical consciousness—the sense of a diachronic longue durée holding the author at a melancholy distance from Greco-Roman antiquity—that haunted many of their peers on the Continent.32 The Faerie Queene’s mode is eclectic, assimilative, governed by claims of likeness and presence. Spenser approaches his ancient predecessors through an allegorical tradition that tended to read their poetry sub specie aeternitatis. His favored models of history are abstract and schematic ones: providential patterns of loss and restoration, or the mysterious dialectic of mutability and permanence. These patterns tend to portray history as a long decline from a sacred origin; each new quest holds out a glimpse, however fleeting, of its eventual recovery. Where the European humanist epic constructed an idealized past and yearned to revive it, Spenser’s poem more tightly entwines the past and the present, history and myth, in ways that thwart chronology and elide historical difference. Nonetheless, the translator of Du Bellay’s Antiquités de Rome clearly pondered the question of cultural change. The transience of empire, the fleeting grandeur of the human will at work in history, finds repeated expression in The Faerie Queene. Alongside Spenser’s traditional historical models—ideas of history that begin with a primeval fall from grace— there begins to emerge a newer set of attitudes toward the past. Their structure is not cyclical but evolutionary. These attitudes portray history not as a fall or loss but as progress from primitive origins. Fantasies of a prior golden age are set against the idea of a remote past that is alien, menacing, demonic, a place of dark tribal magic and cultic mystery.The clearest form that this historical model takes in Spenser’s poem is Hesiodic cosmogony, stories of aboriginal chaos and elemental strife. In the primeval darkness Spenser explores the archaic sources of his own literary tradition, and he finds their alterity somehow linked to a historical transition from oral to written poetry. Unlike Ronsard’s, Spenser’s sense of deep history did not spring primarily from his study of Greece and Rome. Sixteenth-century England’s historical revolution took shape closer to home, in controversy over the origins of the English people and the Tudor royal line. For more than a generation, the body of national legend associated with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1153), long the dominant account of British prehis66

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tory, had come under assault by humanists and antiquarians who were determined to bring new documentary rigor to their study of the early Britons. The resulting debate hinged in part on the relationship between oral and written history. The new historians argued that there could be no sure knowledge of the nation’s remote past, since no written records remained from the period before the first Roman invasions. In reply, partisans of Geoffrey of Monmouth maintained that his chronicle derived from a native oral tradition, initiated by the ancient Druids and long preserved by their heirs, the Celtic bards. Bound up with this debate was a tangle of ideological conflicts: a showdown between the cultural prestige of Roman civilization and the ethnic, vernacular identities of Britain, between the traditional authority of Latin letters and the linguistic patchwork of a regional past. Onto these conflicts the humanists imposed a set of familiar antinomies, pitting permanence against historical discontinuity, civility against primitiveness, universal community against local culture. At issue was the legitimacy of native vernacular traditions, both written and oral, that stood opposed to the hegemony of Latin letters, defined by European scholarly elites as the only authoritative mode of cultural transmission. The advent of modern English historiography—and, with it, early stirrings of the “historical solitude” that had troubled Continental humanism—was therefore closely tied to questions about the nature of oral poetry. The musical humanism that shaped the poetic imagination of Tasso and Ronsard was slower to reach England.33 Elizabethan writers were less disposed to look for sung poetry in Greek antiquity than in contemporary Europe and the Americas. Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy bears witness to the custom of Hungarian poets to sing praise songs for their chieftains in the manner of the ancient Spartans, and maintains that poetry can be found among the “most barbarous and simple Indians where no writing is.”34 George Puttenham concurs that “the American, the Perusine, and the very Canniball do sing and also say their highest and holiest manners in certain riming versicles.”35 Accounts of oral poetry in distant lands prompted analogies to similar traditions nearer home, whether in British antiquity or in contemporary ethnic enclaves like Ireland and Wales. William Harrison saw “small difference” between the Welsh bards and the traditional poet-singers of Hispaniola.36 Puttenham’s comparative ethnography led him to infer that the native English “vulgar Poesie,” governed by natural instinct and rooted in a “sauage and vnciuill” cultural past, emerged well before the arrival of Greco-Roman literature on the island. Such glimpses of earlier stages in their own civilization were often measured by these writers with a kind of pride. Sidney praised the the oldest song

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Welsh bards for their resilience in the face of political change: “In Wales, the true remnant of the auncient Brittons, as there are good authorities to shewe the long time they had Poets, which they called Bardes, so thorough all the conquests of Romaines, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, some of whom did seeke to ruine all memory of learning from among them, yet doo their Poets, euen to this day, last; so as it is not more notable in soone beginning then in long continuing.”37 The bards were perhaps the Elizabethans’ main emblem of an oral tradition. They stood as symbols of historical continuity, linked to vaguely articulated beliefs about the origins and transmission of the English people’s cultural identity. This view of the bards was among the first casualties of sixteenth-century England’s historiographical revolution. From Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (1534) to William Camden’s Britannia (1586), historians sought a firmer archival basis for their study of British origins. Absorbing the influence of humanist classical philology, they appealed to early writings, monuments and ruins, conjectural etymologies of place names, and other textual remains to authorize their histories. Under their corrosive scrutiny the body of patriotic legend known to Elizabethans as the Brut was slowly eaten away. A historical void began to open as the legend of Brutus’s Trojan settlement faded into fiction. Geoffrey of Monmouth was set aside in favor of Roman historians—Caesar, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus—who offered competing accounts of the early Britons and Gauls. Since, according to Caesar and others, the ancient Druids had preserved their laws and culture orally, all remnants of their civilization were lost when the Druids were eradicated by the Romans.38 Humanist and antiquarian historians took up this claim and explored its implications. Camden notes that the ancient bards, who “sang all valorous and noble acts,” “thought it not lawfull to write and booke any thing.” Even if some written record of their culture had survived, it could hardly have withstood the ravages of time, which has worn away “the very stones, pyramides, obelisks, and other memorable monuments, thought to be more durable than brasse.”39 Many argued that oral memory contaminated true history with errors and lies in any case, and was therefore an intolerable substitute for ancient writings. Historians from Raphael Holinshed to John Selden lamented that the fables of bards were as fanciful as those of Ariosto and Rabelais.40 A great wall began to rise up between the distant oral past and a later historical record founded on written texts—and, by extension, between a “primitive” local vernacular tradition and the universal authority of the Latin archive. In the face of such attacks, the Galfridians pondered the idea of a native oral tradition with new care and urgency. Geoffrey of Monmouth had portrayed his Historia as the translation of a lost “ancient book” from Wales, in which, according to his partisans, the oral history of the British bards had at 68

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last been set down on the page.41 How, then, could the bards have preserved a true and full account of the ancient Britons that extended long before the Roman conquest? That bards could still be found in modern Wales and Ireland offered at least circumstantial evidence of their ability to resist historical change. William Harrison’s “Historicall Description of the Iland of Britaine” dwells on the story of Bardus, purportedly the fifth king of the Celts, whose disciples, the musician-poets known as the bardi, flourished despite waves of foreign occupation and “are not yet extinguished among the Britons of Wales, where they call their poets and musicians Barthes, as they doo also in Ireland.”42 Others held that the ancient bards underwent long periods of training in specialist schools that maintained the Britons’ collective memory.43 Bardic singing competitions were sometimes said to play the same role, monitoring the bards’ fidelity to the unwritten historical record. Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), drawing on many of these claims, argued that the bardic tradition preserved the past more faithfully than the written archive. Oral memory lingers while material records pass away: when injurious Time, such Monuments doth lose (As what so great a Work, by Time that is not wrackt?) Wee utterly forgoe that memorable act: But when we lay it up within the minds of men, They leave it their next Age; that leaves it hers agen: So strongly which (me thinks) doth for Tradition make, As if you from the world it altogether take, You utterly subvert Antiquitie thereby.44 Drayton’s syntax is awkward but his strategy is clear. Where the documentary historians described the oral past in terms of discontinuity and rupture, Galfridians stressed ideas of fixity and conservation.They took up the antiquarians’ concern for the perishability of all ancient monuments and turned it back against them. Bardic poetry, they argued, was handed down through the generations in a disembodied, mystical form that transcended the limits of the time-bound written artifact. Although committed to the Galfridian history and the Brutus legend, Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene strikingly blends the rhetoric of both groups of historians. Spenser draws on the claims of unbroken continuity made by the defenders of a British oral tradition.Yet he transfers those claims from the voice to the book. After its opening stanza, the first half of The Faerie Queene rarely adopts the stance of the poet-singer, a favorite rhetorical posture in Spenser’s lyric poetry. Instead, like the documentarians, Spenser prefers to attach his the oldest song

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authority as dynastic poet to written monuments, the manuscript roll or codex, the archive, the writing hand.The historical chronicles pored over by Arthur and Guyon in book 2—Briton moniments and Antiquitie of Faerie lond—are only the most prominent of these appeals to the written archive. Avoiding reference to a remote oral past, Spenser looks for other ways to stress the extreme antiquity of the British history that his poem preserves. His description of Eumnestes’ chamber of memory tries to capture the vast depth of the documentary record even as he insists on its immunity to loss or decay: That chamber seemed ruinous and old, And therefore was remoued farre behind, Yet were the wals, that did the same vphold, Right firm and strong, though somewhat they declind; And therein sate an old oldman, halfe blind, And all decrepit in his feeble corse, Yet liuely vigour rested in his mind, And recompenst him with a better scorse: Weake body well is chang’d for minds redoubled forse. (2.9.55)45 The passage, crowded with antitheses (“Yet . . . though . . . Yet”), strains to convey both extreme antiquity and transcendent continuity. The strain resolves itself in the final lines, which begin to anticipate Drayton’s contrast between the transient material book and the enduring “minds of men.” The “lively vigour” of Eumnestes’ mind hints at the ageless, living memory associated with the oral tradition, while his enfeebled body evokes the profound span of historical time stressed by the antiquarians. Spenser’s next stanza brings these elements together again in the image of Eumnestes’ “immortal scrine,” the treasury where his patiently gathered historical writing “for euer incorrupted dweld” (56). Punningly conflating “script” or “scroll” and “shrine,” this repository imitates the figure of Eumnestes himself: it is a timeworn material vessel that mystically stores an everlasting inner core of memory, much as the human body harbors the soul.46 Related patterns stretch out across the 1590 Faerie Queene, where books and reading tend to substitute for the traditional singing voice as the source of the poet’s authority. Again and again the narrator consults the “record of ancient times” (3.2.2) or gleans his story from “antique bookes” (3.6.6), or finds Gloriana’s court “enrold” in the “immortall booke of fame” (2.10.4, 1.10.59). He has scarcely called forth the Muse to aid his song when we learn that she, too, is a kind of Eumnestes, her epic memory locked in a trove of old manuscripts: 70

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“Lay forth out of thy euerlasting scryne / The antique rolles, which there lye hidden still” (1.Pr.2). Spenser compensates for the loss of oral presence by identifying the material archive itself with organic memory and immanent spirit. He stresses the “hidden” quality of his dynastic history, as if to argue that the torn, fading pages of old books, however imperfectly preserved, point toward a greater mystery, a divine truth whose code is imprinted on the events they record. This is history’s mythic core, the secret soul of time itself.The Muse’s “volume of eternitie” (3.3.4), touched with a mystical vitality whose source lies somewhere beyond the written page, comes to resemble the “sacred Booke, with bloude ywrit,” whose contents are revealed to Redcrosse in the House of Holiness (1.10.19). The Muse’s book of history darkly traces the sacred patterns encoded in the Book of Life, patterns that will be fully revealed only at the end of history. If Spenser’s poem, then, takes up the posture of the documentary historians, its portrayal of the British past has its roots in a deeper stratum of myth. From the Galfridians Spenser inherits a belief in the providential arc of the nation’s history, reaching from its Trojan origins to its eschatological triumph over Catholic Europe. The Faerie Queene moves steadily away from the tangled genealogical particulars of the Briton moniments and toward purer, more schematic visions of British ancestry. Guyon’s Antiquitie of Faerie lond amounts to a fantasy of seamless royal descent, traced back to its ultimate origin in a pseudo-garden of Eden. More than seven hundred years of unbroken succession are reflected in a sequence of kingly names—Elfinell, Elfant, Elfinore, and so on—that carry inside them, like a genetic code, the name of their clan’s founding patriarch, Elfe (2.10.71–75). This idealizing Faerie story contrasts with the messy realism of Arthur’s Briton moniments, but also hints at an underlying likeness. Somewhere deep inside the dense thicket of the British past lies the same mythic clarity, an explanatory blueprint which, like Spenser’s allegorical epic itself, waits to be deciphered by the initiated. As this providential design begins to reveal itself more fully in the poem, Spenser’s Tudor chronicle eventually breaks free from the written book altogether, expanding across a larger domain of oral myth and magic: first in the prophecy of Merlin, then in the seductive oral performance of a Trojan refugee, Paridell. Before we turn to those later scenes of vocal utterance, though, it should be noted that even as Spenser lays bare the mystical patterns at work in the British past, he shows some discomfort over such fantasies of collapsing history into myth. His poem’s inset chronicles are flanked by parallel histories that expose the motives and prejudices underlying dynastic epic fictions. These stories often reveal glimpses of a primitive, chauvinistic, and strife-filled past that jars against the idealized chronicle history of the Antiquitie of Faerie the oldest song

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lond. They are characteristically portrayed as oral utterances, the fictions of bards and storytellers. Bards are mentioned only three times in The Faerie Queene; Spenser uses the term more or less interchangeably with “minstrel,” “rhymer,” “chronicler,” and “herald,” courtly servants who celebrate their noble patrons’ lifestyle and ancestry. Tellingly, all of these figures appear together at a tournament held under the auspices of Lucifera’s House of Pride: There many Minstrales maken melody, To driue away the dull melancholy, And many Bardes, that to the trembling chord Can tune their timely voices cunningly, And many Chroniclers, that can record Old loues, and warres for Ladies doen by many a Lord. (1.5.3) The account is backward-looking, ostentatiously medieval and feudal. The first line, alluding to the singing birds of Chaucer’s General Prologue, suggests a return to literary origins: Spenser goes back to the pristine native source of his art, the “well of English vndefyled” (4.2.32). Yet the rest of the stanza troubles this fiction of original purity, for these bards and chroniclers seem devoted to an uglier kind of mythologized past. Their subject, “Old loues, and warres,” echoes that of Spenser’s epic: “Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song” (1.Pr.1).47 These would-be Spensers, however, strip away the ethical qualifiers and reduce his argument to its primitive essence: violence and strife, amorous rivalry and dynastic pride. The medieval warrior culture that they memorialize seems to point back to still earlier, cruder stages in the history of civilization, stretching out a lineage of “many” contentious lords whose quarrels have long since become an old tale. In this stanza’s courtly voices Spenser begins to acknowledge the tribalism, the archaic pride, that might underlie his own poem’s celebration of literary and political origins. He treats these motives more fully in book 3, where the motheaten chronicles of Eumnestes’ library are set aside and the task of narrating dynastic history is given over to the tongues of living men. First Merlin and then Paridell bring the story of Britain to its furthest limits in time, those farflung reaches of the past and future where the historical record gives way to legend and prophecy. With this shift from written to oral history come signs that the British past is devolving into something more purely myth-like, a shift that Spenser seems to portray as both desirable and threatening. The pattern becomes clearest in Spenser’s account of the Trojan settlement. The story is set 72

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forth in book 3 by Spenser’s Paridell, scion of the Trojan race, whose love affair with his own paternity makes him a primitive double for the dynastic epic poet. Paridell harbors a “kindly pryde / Of gracious speech” (3.9.32) that is both a native pride in his oral eloquence and a nativist “pride of kind,” an impulse to bask in his pure tribal ancestry. His direct line of descent from Paris, linked by a chain of patriarchs with like-sounding names (36–37), parodies the dream of endogamous purity that governs Guyon’s Elfin chronicle, and, by extension, all dynastic histories. The common root of these names, pari-, “equal,” “alike,” not only highlights their shared origin but dissolves their family identity into something like an abstract principle of likeness itself. Indeed, Paridell is so much in love with his Trojan ancestor that he reenacts his ancient crime, the rape of Helen that launched the Trojan War. The flight of Paridell and Hellenore suggests that such fantasies of endogamy produce not fertility and growth but sterile repetition.48 This is perhaps the closest Spenser comes to the psychology of Ronsard’s doomed Franciade, where both the poet and his hero are compelled to repeat the achievement of their forebears in a shrunken, backward-looking form. The anxieties released here are different from Ronsard’s, however, and take shape in other details. Paridell’s narcissistic preening at first obscures something more menacing, more elemental, that his ancient ancestry brings to Spenser’s poem. Harry Berger has suggested that driving Paridell’s seduction of Hellenore are primeval forces that have been suppressed by the rise of civilization but still seethe and churn beneath it, struggling to “restore their ancient dominion.”49 A simile compares Paridell to the chthonic energies released by an earthquake, geyser, or volcano: Tho hastily remounting on his steed, He forth issew’d; like as a boisterous wind, Which in th’earthes hollow caues hath long bin hid, And shut vp fast within her prisons blind, Makes the huge element against her kind To moue, and tremble as it were agast, Vntill that it an issew forth may find; Then forth it breakes, and with his furious blast Confounds both land and seas, and skyes doth ouercast. (3.9.15) Berger sees a parallel with the mock-heroic “flatus” of Spenser’s Bragadocchio. But the closest analogue is rather the figure of Orgoglio, son of Aeolus and Earth, who is described in book 1 as a windy eruption from the “hidden caues” of his mother’s womb. This nightmare of overblown self-love, the oldest song

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like Paridell’s obsession with his epic ancestry, finds its motive power in an “arrogant delight / Of th’high descent, whereof he was yborne” (1.7.9–10). The irony in both cases, captured in the oxymoron “high descent,” is that these proud scions do not come down to Fairyland from on high in any sense of the expression. Their origins are lower, more primitive, less fully evolved than the civilization into which these figures now intrude; in Orgoglio’s case, those origins lie literally in the bowels of the earth. Similarly ancient and monstrous forces are released by Paridell’s Trojan mythmaking, and the epic simile suggests that he functions in Spenser’s poem as a principle of regression that threatens a return to aboriginal chaos. The collapse of modernity into more primitive social formations guides the rest of the Paridell episode. Symbols of human civilization—marriage, household life, communal festivity, material wealth, and domestic comfort— are assaulted by turns. The Trojan’s tale of his origins is also a seduction plot that dissolves Hellenore’s marriage and carries her into the wilderness. The poem leaves her in the semi-human society of the satyrs, enjoying free love and reverting to an early pastoral phase of culture. Stripped of his wife and his wealth, Malbecco loses his human personality and devolves into a wholly allegorical figure, Jealousy, in much the same way that British prehistory, in Paridell’s retelling, has flattened itself into a pure, archetypal myth of origin. Spenser makes clear, furthermore, that this chain reaction of social regress has to do not just with dynastic history but also with the nature of European epic literature. Hellenore’s gleeful immolation of Malbecco’s treasury reenacts the ancient burning of Troy: “As Hellene, when she saw aloft appeare / The Troiane flames, and reach to heauens hight / Did clap her hands, and ioyed at that dolefull sight” (3.10.12). This return to the epic tradition’s primal scene points to the lawless, destructive origins of Spenser’s literary heritage. At the core of the Trojan story treasured by Paridell is the breaking of familial and political bonds, a descent from civilization to anarchy. Such are the archaic forces that the epic poet seeks to raise and harness.

ireland, mythmaking, and cosmogony These lines of argument were to be developed some years later in Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland. For it was the poet’s contact with Irish culture that seems to have prompted his most sustained thinking about the historical roots of his own literary canon. Even more than The Faerie Queene, this tract clings to the rhetoric of the humanists and antiquarians as Spenser works to debunk the native history preserved by Irish oral tradition. The bards hold a prominent 74

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place in the View’s gallery of villains. Their poetry, accused of falsifying history, stoking ethnic pride, and keeping their culture mired in a barbaric past, is deemed spurious because its sources are unwritten. The New English partisan Irenius grumbles that the bards’ tales, by now encrusted with generations of lying fables, retain only scant “reliques of the true antiquitie.”50 Throughout the tract, in turn, Spenser draws on—and often invents—philological and documentary evidence to support his colonial version of Irish history. He makes frequent use of speculative etymologies to expose traces of British rule in Ireland. He relies heavily on the flimsy Galfridian claim that both King Arthur and, later, his successor Gurguntius conquered Ireland and thereby established a continuing English claim to the land: a view that is supported by an unnamed “good record yet extant” (52). Elsewhere he falsely observes that the Roman historians Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, both popular sources for the English antiquarians, had referred to Ireland as “Britannia, and a part of Great Brittaine” (52).51 Weighed against these authorities is a credulous Irish reliance on oral fables. Irenius warns—citing a nonexistent passage in Caesar’s Gallic Wars—that the bards “delivered no certaine truth of any thing, neither is there any certaine hold to be taken of any antiquity which is received by tradition, since all men be lyars” (47). The double standard is acute, for Spenser’s attack on Irish chronicle history precisely mirrors the antiquarians’ attack on Geoffrey of Monmouth. As we have seen, the Galfridian history—including the story of Ireland’s conquest by King Arthur—was itself said to derive from the oral tradition of the British bards. Even as Spenser insists on the documentary basis of his colonial historiography, therefore, he projects the antiquarians’ critique of his own national history onto the Irish oral tradition. The strain of maintaining this posture shows in a variety of ways. A passage in some manuscripts of the View, attacking Irish claims of ethnic descent from the Spanish, startlingly compares the story of Gathelus of Spain, Ireland’s legendary founding father, to the account of Brutus’s Trojan settlement of England—a belief held by “our vaine English-men” despite the lack of any proof that Brutus ever existed (44).52 This double standard points to wider patterns of resemblance between the colonizer and the colonized, patterns that threaten to collapse the cultural distinctions on which the tract depends. Some critics have argued that Spenser’s assault on the bards owes something to professional envy. His portrayal of these poet-singers, writes Richard McCabe, harbors “an element of peculiarly demonic wish-fulfilment.”53 Their high esteem in Irish culture, the oldest song

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the honor paid to them by popular audiences and aristocratic patrons alike, represented everything that he had failed to achieve as an aspiring Elizabethan laureate. The bard acts as a distorted ideal of the poet, a figure of charismatic authority and the steward of an ancient cultural tradition. Nonetheless, Spenser’s covert identification with the bards cuts two ways. When he wrote of Irish culture, Kenneth Gross suggests, Spenser was “confronting something like his own unconscious.”54 If the bards haunt Spenser, they do so less as an aspirational ideal than as a mirror reflecting the origins of his own literary tradition: not just the oral prehistory of the Britons, indeed, but also, more tentatively, the epic poetry of Homeric Greece. For Spenser’s account of the Irish bards signals a growing consciousness of the alterity of an ancient world that Spenser was coming to associate with oral poetry. Spenser’s Irenius is strangely intrigued by the poetry of the bards. He talks of their cultural tradition with a mixture of dismay and sympathy, treating them by turns as uneducable thugs and as instinctive poets untrained by art but capable of better things. He claims to have had several of their songs “translated unto me, that I might understand them,” and he acknowledges that they have a certain crude merit: “Surely they savoured of sweet wit and good invention, but skilled not of the goodly ornaments of poetry; yet were they sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their naturall device, which gave good grace and comliness unto them, the which it is great pitty to see abused, to the gracing of wickedness and vice” (77).This is one of the core strategies of Spenser’s View, to portray an ideal, depoliticized Irish “nature” as the victim of a corrupt Irish culture. But Irenius’s backhanded compliment also seems indebted to a much older meeting of cultures: Quintilian’s famous contrast in the Institutio oratoria, earlier cited by Ronsard, between Homer’s crude but natural poetic gifts and Virgil’s patient, civilized artistry. Sixteenth-century critics of Homer, notably Girolamo Vida and J. C. Scaliger, sharpened this opposition with attacks on Homer’s handling of character and style, and they laid the groundwork for generations of critical complaint that Homer had wasted his talents on glorifying tribal warfare and bloodshed.55 The implicit memory of such responses to Homer’s epics turns Spenser’s critique of the bards into a more sustained pattern of likenesses between modern Ireland and archaic Greece. Irenius goes on to paraphrase what he describes as a typical bardic poem in praise of “a most notorious thief and wicked out-law,” the bard claiming that he was none of the idle milke-sops that was brought up by the fire side, but that most of his dayes he spent in armes and valiant enterprises, that he did never eat his meat, before he had won it with his sword, that he lay not all 76

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night slugging in a cabbin under his mantle, but used commonly to keepe others waking to defend their lives . . .; that he loved not to be long wooing of wenches to yield to him, but where he came he tooke by force the spoyle of other mens love, and left but lamentation to their lovers; that his musick was not the harpe, nor layes of love, but the cryes of people, and clashing of armor; and finally, that he died not bewailed of many, but made many waile when he died, that dearly bought his death. (76–77)

This is a catalogue of Irish savagery, a primitive warrior culture celebrating its own brutality. Many of these details, though, could as well be parodic forms of familiar motifs in the European martial epic. They suggest Homer’s Achilles as seen through the eyes of a Scaliger or a Paolo Beni, or as skewered by the mock-heroic and burlesque tradition.56 Are these crude ethnic chest-thumpings the source of all epic literature? Spenser’s Ireland seems frozen at an early stage of cultural history; in its old songs can be found the reflection of other pasts, other sites of literary origin that Spenser’s poetry aims to supersede yet depends on for its authority. Seeking to turn such resemblances to its advantage, Spenser’s View lays out a carefully restricted set of parallels between the Irish present and the Continental European past. Irenius explains that, in the absence of written records, the origins of the Irish people must be recovered by means of comparative ethnography—by studying their culture alongside the cultures of other European peoples: “By these old customes,” he argues, “the descents of nations can only be proved, where other monuments of writings are not remayning” (61). Irenius sets out to show that the Irish ultimately derive not from the Spanish, as they claim, but rather from the ancient Scythians, who colonized the region in a series of invasions from northeastern Europe.57 Tracing Irish culture back to the Scythians has two main attractions for Spenser. First, he weakens any claim of kinship between the Catholic Irish and their Spanish coreligionists, whose involvement in Ireland would threaten English colonial policy. Just as important, by identifying the Irish with the nomadic warrior peoples of the north he holds them apart from a Mediterranean cultural history that stretches back to Troy. The “Scythian” customs that Irenius seizes on—tribal war cries, barbaric religious ceremonies, ritual wailing over the dead—seem at first to portray the Irish as the archetypal other of Greco-Roman civilization. Unexpectedly, though, these remarks are framed by the View’s only direct reference to the epics of Homer. Irenius draws on the Pseudo-Herodotean life of Homer (misidentified here as Pseudo-Plutarch’s Life) to support the idea of a comparative study of cultures:58 the oldest song

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Plutarch (as I remember) in his Treatise of Homer, indeavouring to search out the truth, what countryman Homer was, prooveth it most strongly (as he thinketh) that he was an Aeolian borne, for that in describing a sacrifice of the Greeks, he omitted the loyne, the which all the other Grecians (saving the Aeolians) use to burne in their sacrifices: also for that he makes the intralls to be rosted on five spits, which was the proper manner of the Aeolians. . . . By which he inferreth necessarily, that Homer was an Aeolian. And by the same reason may I as reasonably conclude, that the Irish are descended from the Scythians; for that they use (even to this day) some of the same ceremonies which the Scythians anciently used. (62–63)

Again difference fades into likeness. The focus on Homer’s pagan rites of sacrifice probably hints at “barbaric” Catholic priestcraft and highlights the ongoing backwardness of the Irish. But it does so at the cost of redefining Europe’s literary heritage. This comparison of archaic practices hints at an evolutionary view of culture. The ancient Greek epic is stripped of the aesthetic fixity in time that the neoclassicists accorded it, and is reduced, if only for a moment, to a primitive cultural datum, the sacrificial rituals that it records viewed as equal in kind to the barbaric religious practices of the Scythians. Irenius approaches Homer from the cool anthropological distance that the View reserves for the study of a colonial population. What, then, is at stake for Spenser, himself honored as “the only Homer living,” when he vilifies the Irish bards for preserving ancestral practices that resemble those of his own ancient literary sources?59 The question is of course never openly raised in the tract, but it can be felt in Spenser’s worry over the stubborn tenacity of Irish oral tradition. The View, we saw earlier, sets the documentary history of the English against the oral fictions of the bards. Properly speaking, the Irish can hardly be said to have a cultural tradition at all, since the bards’ songs are a changing patchwork of false tales and half-truths. There is, however, a strong countermovement in Spenser’s tract that faults the bards for preserving their native past all too well. Irenius laments the persistence of an oral culture that the English colonizers have been unable to silence. A typical case is his account of the traditional Brehon law, prohibited by the colonial authorities.The Irish Parliament formally declared Henry VIII king of Ireland in 1541; nonetheless, Irenius complains, the Irish refuse to recognize this binding statute, signed by their ancestors, because they claim that their system of tanistry confers no inherited legal obligations on a clan when its government passes from one chieftain to the next. Instead, they secretly continue to observe their own Brehon law, “a rule of right unwritten, but delivered by tradition from one to another” and sustaining a barbaric system of communal 78

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justice (14). Here, as elsewhere, written codes and practices seem all too transient, while oral traditions doggedly endure. Spenser’s Eudoxus marvels that the Irish have sustained “customes so ancient” for “so long a continuance of time, and so many ages” (64). There is something ancient and intractable about the arts and customs of the Irish. Spenser finds in their voices a lingering residue of deep history, a trace of primitive origins that cannot be cleansed from the region’s cultural memory. The View finds this understanding of tradition to apply well beyond Ireland. “[I]t is the maner of all barbarous nations,” observes Irenius, “to be very superstitious, and diligent observers of old customes and antiquities, which they receive by continuall tradition from their parents, by recording of their Bards and Chronicles, in their songs, and by daylie use and ensample of their elders” (64).60 The claim carries some irony. Criticizing those who clung to outmoded forms of language and culture was a poet who had devoted himself to Chaucer and whose archaic diction struck some contemporaries as bizarrely retrograde. Yet there are wider issues at stake. Some of the core strategies of the View—its documentarian rhetoric, its insistence on the artless and warlike quality of bardic poetry, its efforts to link the Irish to the Scythians—seem designed to ward off resemblances between modern Ireland and British antiquity. From those efforts, in turn, emerge more complex forms of likeness, extending not only to the Britons but to Homeric Greece as well. The same terms of reference drift back and forth among these civilizations, opening up new lines of kinship and filiation. The View’s colonial vision extends out of Ireland to affix itself to other sites of origin, other preserves of “old customes,” that begin to carry a similar stigma of barbarism. Some decades were to pass before these fleeting, unspoken attitudes expressed themselves openly in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Nonetheless, the View portrays the archaic past from a growing cultural distance. Traces of this changing perspective on the ancients can also be found in the last books of The Faerie Queene, which begin to ask what it means for a poet to venerate, and strive to preserve, a primitive cultural consciousness. The 1596 Faerie Queene often feels at once more personal and more cosmic in scope than the poem’s earlier books. Spenser struggles against the narrow confines of royal panegyric in search of a larger ethical vision. Praise for Elizabethan policy vies with strains of skepticism and disillusionment. If the Queen’s urban, courtly milieu remains at the poem’s idealized center, the final books tend to seek out the wider vistas offered by British chorography, pastoral retreat, and cosmogonic myth. Spenser’s authorial stance in the poem also changes to reflect the oldest song

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his growing alienation from Elizabeth’s court. Voice and music now seem to replace the written monument as primary symbols of the poet’s authority. Spenser celebrates song—and, implicitly, his own vocal art—as an instrument of divine creation. His models include the psalmist David and the Orpheus of Apollonius’s Argonautica, 1.492–518. “Wicked discord,” he writes, None but a God or godlike man can slake; Such as was Orpheus, that when strife was growen Amongst those famous ympes of Greece, did take His siluer Harpe in hand, and shortly friends them make. Or such as that celestiall Psalmist was, That when the wicked feend his Lord tormented, With heauenly notes, that did all other pas, The outrage of his furious fit relented. (4.2.1–2) Orpheus and David appear here in their popular roles as healers and civilizers, musician-kings with a sacred mandate to bring comity out of discord.61 Again Spenser brushes against the Orphic episode in Ronsard’s Franciade, with its implicit link between cosmic order and the poet’s song. These sustained claims for the thaumaturgic force of the artist’s voice are a new development in the poem. Spenser preferred to portray his task in books 1–3 as the copying of a prior text or the painting of an image: metaphors for mimesis, for faithful imitation, that suited his role as a servant of royal authority. In books 4–6 he prefers to describe his poetry as instrumental; it is not simply a made object but a shaping agent whose sources are more potent and mysterious. The changing rhetoric points to a newly pressing demand for artistic autonomy. Even as he honors Eliza, the poet asserts his prerogative over a fictive world that has grown beyond the political ideology that once sponsored it. New power centers emerge in the poem to rival or decenter the Faerie Queene’s court: the cultic temples of Venus and Isis; the vast chorographic spectacle of the river marriage; the theophany at Acidale. The mythic scale of such visions contrasts with the tense, constricted world of court politics in these books, which finds its apt symbol for the poet in the spectacle of the speechless Malfont, his tongue nailed to a post. It is a more spacious terrain, and in some respects an older one. Spenser draws openly on archaic forms of myth and magic, Hesiodic cosmogony, Orphic and Pythagorean lore, Celtic ritual, the fertility cults of the eastern Mediterranean. The poet’s art seems no longer to find its origin in 80

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the Queen’s regard, and now depends on more ancient sources of creative energy. He calls for his readers to “looke backe to former ages,” where they will find the primordial wellsprings of love that fuel his “song” (4.Pr.1); he is “rauished” by his own creation and asks the Muses to fill him with the “goodly fury” of sacred wisdom (6.Pr.2). The rhetoric of inspiration has begun to disentangle itself from the rhetoric of imitation as the poet’s song becomes more fully his own. His word is fleetingly identified with the divine fiat itself, the sacred utterance that gave law and form to the cosmos. In the poem as in the wider world, “All in the power of their great Maker lie: / All creatures must obey the voice of the most hie” (5.2.40).62 At the same time, there are signs of uncertainty, indications that his art has begun to move beyond Spenser’s authorial control. He strives to liberate himself from his role as servant to the royal court, but he finds himself beholden to other forces that he cannot fully master. This is at least one way to account for Colin Clout’s troubled response to the vanishing of the nymphs on Acidale: “[Them] by no meanes thou canst recall againe, / For being gone, none can them bring in place, / But whom they of them selues list so to grace” (6.10.20). The origins of inspiration seem elusive and arbitrary. And the myths that he calls up impose their own mysterious demands on the mythmaker. In a sense the poem’s widening scope has started to overmaster the poet, who, toiling at the “endlesse worke” of naming his creation, feels overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of teeming life that his song has brought forth (4.12.1). The dark side of this new emphasis on the poet’s autonomous voice is a pressing concern over unregulated or injurious speech. The recurring enemy in the poem’s last books becomes slander, calumny, presumptuous speaking, the voice that threatens the bonds of community. This threat takes its clearest form in the Blatant Beast with its thousand tongues, its name deriving from the Latin blatero, to speak volubly. But the motif extends from the Egalitarian Giant’s rabble-rousing (5.2.30 ff.) and the backbiting of the hags Envy and Detraction (5.12.28–36) to the fateful laughter of the “babbler” Faunus (7.6.46)—a figure seen from this point of view as an alter ego for the poet, whose audacious urge to “areed” or publicize his own “conceit” leads to his chastisement and his country’s desolation. Significantly, critics have linked each of those episodes to Irish contexts. Andrew Hadfield has suggested that the poem’s portrayal of Elizabeth’s rule becomes more troubled, more unstable and vulnerable, as the territory that she covers expands.63 The widening geographical scope of Spenser’s Britain brings with it a greater preoccupation with ethnic and political rebellion. Such tumult in Spenser’s poem is the oldest song

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a sign not only of colonial struggle but also of an encounter with past times. As in the View, ethnic and geographic difference becomes a projection of historical difference. The poem’s later books show an intense interest in primitive cultures and in the origins of civility. “Salvage” nations are juxtaposed against and intermingled with courtly society. Spenser explores whether rudimentary social forms can be shaped into more complex ones, whether education can shape instinct into art.These questions amount to a study of the historical process; they seek the lines of development that connect Spenser’s civilization to its archaic sources. Claiming for himself a magical vocality that belongs to deep history, Spenser returns to the origins of human culture in ways that fill the 1596 Faerie Queene with signs of encroaching violence and instability. As he wrote in the View, “it is but even the other day since England grew civill” (70).64 The poet’s gathering historical consciousness finds its clearest expression in Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, first printed in 1609 but probably composed around the time of Spenser’s View.65 This poetic miniature concerns itself only in passing with matters of voice and oral tradition. But it takes a vital interest in the larger implications that these themes raised for Spenser, especially the troubled perspective on the ancient past that we have seen in his writings on the Irish bards. In the Cantos, and in the later books of The Faerie Queene as a whole, two competing models of history emerge. One view continues to sponsor the traditional idea of an aboriginal golden age, a sacred point of origin that shapes subsequent world history into a mythic pattern of moral and political decline, even as it holds out the promise of an eventual return to idealized beginnings. Against this model, though, emerges a contrasting pattern of historical progress, tracing an arc from primitive or chaotic origins to modern order and civility—but, once again, raising the prospect that the older dispensation might someday return. The two models jostle against each other throughout Spenser’s epic with signs of growing strain. The poem’s last books bemoan the loss of “the image of the antique world” in modern history (5.Pr.1), but the assorted brigands, cannibals, and other representatives of primitive cultures in these books offer a darker view of natural man. And the Paridell episode in book 3 has already shown the narcissistic folly of those who fall in love with a mythologized past.66 The second of these two historical perspectives, viewing the remote past as a time of archaic barbarism, tends to take indirect expression in Spenser’s later books in the form of Hesiodic theomachy and cosmic strife. This model of history rejects the Saturnian age of gold described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1.89–112, and substitutes the strife-filled reign of Saturn portrayed by Hesiod. The bulk of Spenser’s allusions to the Theogony, likely drawn from the Basel 82

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edition of Hesiod’s Works with parallel Latin translation, appear in books 4–6 of The Faerie Queene.67 Extending the poem’s interest in family history, they furnish genealogies for figures like the Graces who dance for Colin Clout (6.10.22; Theog. 907–11) and the Nereids attending the river marriage (4.11.48–51; Theog. 240–64). But if they visit the poet at these moments of visionary inspiration, they also lead him to envision monstrous creatures whose threat to civility is symbolized by their demonic voices: Spenser’s Ate, “mother of debate,” seems to draw in part on Hesiod’s Strife (4.1.19; Theog. 226–32); the Blatant Beast is portrayed as the offspring of Hesiod’s Echidna and Typhon (6.6.9–12; Theog. 295–318). In this way Spenser links their destructive menace to primeval forces that reach back to the origins of the cosmos. A primordial chaos, seething and churning since the beginning of things, can be felt rising up again in the primitive, feral voices of these books. Such voices act as distorted echoes of the poet’s own oral performance—the pestiferous barking of the Blatant Beast, for example, or the wild cultic rites of the cannibals who would make a human sacrifice of Serena: the Priest with naked armes full net Approaching nigh, and murdrous knife well whet, Gan mutter close a certaine secret charme, With other diuelish ceremonies met: . . . Then gan the bagpypes and the hornes to shrill, And shrieke aloud, that with the peoples voyce Confused, did the ayre with terror fill, And made the wood to tremble at the noyce[.] (6.8.45–46) The scene once again evokes Irish Catholic priestcraft, but it characteristically mingles its colonial ethnography with more ancient forms of magical utterance and Corybantic frenzy, symbols of an age before civilization when clamor and confusion reigned. The singer in these books is shadowed by primitive doubles whose vocality wells up from a prehistoric chaos—whether it lies at the origin of the cosmos or of human culture—and threatens its return. The Cantos of Mutabilitie, too, are framed as an oral utterance. Although Mutabilitie’s ancient ancestry is “registered of old / . . . mongst records permanent,” the narrator describes her rebellion against the Olympian gods as a story that “I heard say,” and, in another passage that may draw on Hesiod, he calls on the Muse for “bigger noates to sing” a tale of “things doen in heauen so long ygone / . . . far past memory of man that may be knowne” (7.6.1–2, 7.1–2).68 Spenser portrays the poem’s events much as the humanist the oldest song

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historians had described the days of the early Britons; the Cantos evoke an ancient era where oral memory and myth rise up to supplement or to displace the written record. The poem is Spenser’s most sustained meditation on The Faerie Queene’s competing models of history. As before, one key pattern in the Cantos—a mythic version of the past urged by Jove, endorsed by Nature, and worked out at length in the Faunus episode—clings to a fantasy of idealized historical origins. World history can be traced back to a sacred golden age whose loss is either threatened in the present or already effected and therefore to be mourned. At odds with this view, and gathering strength throughout the Cantos, is a vision of violent anarchy and strife that recedes into the furthest reaches of prehistory. Is the history of civilization to be understood in terms of evolutionary progress or decline? Casting the problem in this way, the poem attempts to resolve it by way of a belief in the cyclical structure of history, a plan of eternal recurrence that draws on Christian kairos. The apparently linear sequence of historical events, whether improving or deteriorating over time, is in fact a circular pattern of recovery and renewal. Its apocalyptic endpoint will bring a return to Edenic origins and the end of time itself. This is the position set forth by Dame Nature at the end of the Cantos: all things shall return in time to their “first estate” as change at last gives way to changelessness (7.7.58). Nature’s verdict elegantly blends the competing models of progress and decline; both are set inside a providential system where every falling away from lost ideals becomes a stage in the journey back again. But this cyclical model studiously avoids the more urgent problem at stake. By quietly adopting a key premise of the first view—the idea of a lost golden age at the origin of history—it fails to come to terms with the prospect of a primitive origin that must not return.This is the version of the past, fleetingly visible in earlier books, that looms over the Cantos. Not coincidentally, Spenser ties its role in the poem to the landscape and history of Ireland. This view of history as a fitful, reversible rise from chaos to civilization emerges slowly and seems at first to yield to other patterns. Its converse model of history—the myth of decline from sacred origins—organizes the initial phase of the Cantos, including the Faunus episode at the heart of the poem. Spenser presents the story as an etiology, recounting the goddess Cynthia’s flight from Arlo-Hill and her parting curse upon the land. Ireland was once the blissful dwelling place of gods, a region “flourish[ing] in fame / Of wealths and goodnesse.” With Cynthia’s neglect the land has become a barren haunt for “Wolues and Thieues” (7.6.38, 55). Faunus’s plot to see the goddess’s nakedness acts as a sort of fall into original sin. His quest for forbidden knowledge results in a loss of divine immanence that has been reenacted throughout The Faerie Queene, 84

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whether in Arthur’s fugitive dream of Gloriana or in the flight of the Graces from Acidale.This desacralization, a fall from an original state of grace, is just the threat that Jove claims to see in Mutabilitie. A creature of the earth, she aspires, like the woodland god Faunus, “To see that mortall eyes haue neuer seene.” By “touch[ing] celestiall seates with earthly mire,” Mutabilitie will force time and change into the precincts of the divine (32, 29). Her rebellion threatens to corrupt the ancient “heritage” of the gods and, in so doing, to disenchant the world (30). The Cantos’ story of Ireland as a primeval paradise will startle readers of the View, which portrays Irish history as a bloody and haphazard affair, a seemingly endless sequence of invasion, conquest, and rebellion that stretches back to remote antiquity. The polemicist Spenser treats history as a slow process of civilizing primitive origins. Indeed, his tract makes a point of dismantling all idealizing origin myths, such as the story of Ireland’s legendary founder, Gathelus. But a similar perspective also haunts the Irish landscape of the Cantos, where Mutabilitie’s claim to power is no less than an argument for such an evolutionary view of history. Her rebellion rips apart the illusion of golden age fixity that Jove has stretched over the Olympians’ own contested origins. Again Spenser draws on Hesiod’s Theogony. Spenser’s Mutabilitie is a descendant of Titan, Saturn’s elder brother. Jove, as the usurping child of Saturn, has doubly encroached on the inherited rights of those who ruled before him. Throughout the Cantos are scattered signs of an era prior to the Olympians, an older site of origin associated with chaos and elemental strife. Mutabilitie traces her maternal line back to Jove’s grandmother, “Earth, great Chaos child,” and her onslaught awakens ancient memories among the gods, who begin to fear “least Chaos broken had his chaine, / And brought again on them eternall night” (7.6.26, 14). In response, Jove must recast his authority on new grounds that acknowledge Mutabilitie’s version of the past. When he justifies the Olympians’ title both “by Conquest of our soueraine might, / And by eternall doome of Fates decree” (33), temporality strains awkwardly against eternity, primitive violence against a myth of sacred origins.69 The Faerie Queene takes a growing interest in Mutabilitie’s account of history. In the Cantos, as in the epic as a whole, fantasies of a primal state of innocence steadily lose ground to a view of the past as struggle and conquest, a long chain of internecine warfare stretching into prehistory. At such moments the prospect of a cyclical return to a golden age turns into the nightmare of civilization sliding back to primordial chaos. A comparison of two closely related passages in The Faerie Queene’s later books captures this shift of perspective. Both conjure up an idealized past, a benign first age that has been the oldest song

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assaulted by a wicked race whose “seed” threatens its destruction. But here the two accounts diverge. In the first of these stanzas, the narrator describes the end of the lost golden age of Saturn: Though virtue then were held in highest price, In those old times, of which I doe intreat, Yet then likewise the wicked seede of vice Began to spring which shortly grew full great, And with their boughes the gentle plants did beat. But evermore some of the virtuous race Rose vp, inspired with heroicke heat, That cropt the branches of the sient base, And with strong hand their fruitfull rancknes did deface. (5.1.1) The forces of chaos have triumphed, making a wilderness of the original Edenic garden. The lost golden age, however, persists in a different kind of “seed.” The stanza’s metaphor of organic growth is transferred from the “wicked seede of vice” to a new “virtuous race” that has risen up to fight for a return to original purity.These are figures like Guyon and Artegall who still carry the ancient flame and devote themselves to restoring the lost virtue of “old times.” In the Cantos of Mutabilitie, Jove draws on the same imagery when he recounts the Olympians’ defeat of the giants in the ancient Gigantomachy: Harken to mee awhile yee heauenly Powers; Ye may remember since th’Earths cursed seed Sought to assaile the heauens eternall towers, And to vs all exceeding feare did breed: But how we then defeated all their deed, Yee all do knowe, and them destroyed quite: Yet not so quite, but that there did succeed An off-spring of their bloud, which did alite Vpon the fruitfull earth, which doth vs yet despite. (7.6.20) Here, too, a “cursed seed” has taken root to threaten the immemorial divine order. In this case, by contrast, the rebellion has been crushed and the righteous reign securely once more.Yet not altogether. Book 5’s remnant of virtuous workers in the field has now become a terrorist insurgency, a crop of outlaw “off-spring” that roams the fruitful earth in an ongoing rebellion against order and civility. To unsettle matters further, the context of this stanza implies 86

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a link between the Gigantomachy—Jove’s battle against the rebel offspring of Earth—and the still earlier Titanomachy, Jove’s own revolt against his father Saturn and the rest of the Titans in a bid for “heauens regiment” (7.6.2).The creation of the giants, after all, was Earth’s revenge against the usurping Olympians after their toppling of Saturn, and it is from Earth that the “Titanesse,” Mutabilitie, claims her descent. Jove’s argument that the giants’ revolt shattered an earlier pax universalis is therefore easily reversed: Jove himself was once a “cursed seed” who, protected in his infancy by Rhea and the Corybantes, survived to topple Saturn’s empire—an empire that Saturn had violently wrested from his own father, Uranus, child of Earth and grandson of the original Chaos. Ovid’s golden age of Saturn has given way here to Hesiod’s primordial family romance, a strife-torn site of origin that continues to scatter its seeds abroad, spawning new revolutions, awaiting another return to a violent past. The final stanzas of the Cantos of Mutabilitie return to the belief in a providential cycle that will guide history back to an originary state of bliss.Yet the poem’s conclusion seeks this longed-for rest outside history altogether, in the atemporal perspective of the “great Sabbaoth God” (7.8.2). Spenser’s turn away from the historical process, although a conventional enough homiletic gesture, also suggests his dissatisfaction with the myths of former times that his poem had set out to erect. The dynastic elegance of the Antiquitie of Faerie lond is strained by the poet’s changing historical consciousness, which invests itself in other versions of the past and other putative sites of origin. If Spenser’s sense of the alterity of the ancient world did not take the form that it did for many Continental humanists—a longing for the union of two cultures whose embrace across time was doomed to be incomplete—this was partly due to his colonial experience in Ireland, where he found a model of primitive origins, frozen in time, that could equally be projected back onto early Britain or archaic Greece. The last cantos of Spenser’s epic put all fantasies of an idealized origin for history under severe strain; it will be remembered that Artegall’s sword, portrayed in book 5 as the instrument of a return to the golden world, is the very sword once used by Jove in his “great fight / Against the Titans” to bring an end to Saturn’s reign (5.1.9). Informed by a widening historiographical gap between modern written monuments and ancient voices, both the View and The Faerie Queene form a complex mesh of origin stories that extend the turmoil of present times ever further into antiquity. And each of the forms that those primitive origins take—they characteristically involve oral utterance—interacts in unstable ways with Spenser’s vocation as an English poet: an artist both attracted and repelled by the cultural legacy of the Greco-Roman world, both eager to the oldest song

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mark out his own authority and wary of the ancient power that resides in the poet’s voice. In Ronsard’s Franciade and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the sixteenth-century dynastic epic confronts deep history. The genealogies of family and nation are made to cross into older precincts of archaic magic, cultic mystery, and cosmic myth. The poets’ reaching for these sites of extreme antiquity is partly a response to humanist historiography and its changing relationship with the past. It is also a reaction against the received neoclassical epic tradition. After generations of patient humanist endeavor, the literary inheritance of the ancient world was now more intimately known to the poets, and loomed more oppressively over them, than ever before. Both men had a capacious classical education that made them intensely conscious of their debts to predecessor poets, even as it enabled them to reach for more esoteric literary models like the Theogony and the Orphic Hymns. The need to deepen the dynastic epic’s imaginative scope, furthermore, was also a reaction against writing in service to the crown. Each poet, striving for greater autonomy from his royal court, sought out alternative genealogies for his own role as a maker—a search that led to new and often troubled configurations of voice in their mature writings. The first half of the seventeenth century was to witness a series of political developments that would push some would-be heroic poets outside the center of state power altogether. Behind the local political upheavals that shaped their fictions, however, unfolded the continuing story of their shared estrangement from the ancients: a process that drove the poets to unearth new ancestral traditions, new sources of origin, and forced them into a more open confrontation with the fact of cultural change.

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5)INTERCHAPTER)% The Lutanist and the Nightingale

the machine in the garden The epic poetry discussed so far has been martial and dynastic in character. Although other forms of writing had found their way into Europe’s epic canon—from Jacopo Sannazaro’s syncretic De partu virginis (1526), recounting the birth of Christ, to the hexameral Semaines (1578, 1584) of Guillaume du Bartas— sixteenth-century authors modeled themselves above all on an ancient body of war epics that they believed had been pioneered by Homer and perfected by the AugustanVirgil, the poet who sang the history of his polity for an imperial patron. This paradigm was to linger for generations, with diminishing returns, in the work of minor poets across Europe. But the boundaries of the epic form steadily widened in the first half of the seventeenth century. A list of epic poems and related cultural forms drawn up in 1650 might include Ovidian epyllia, hexameral poetry, Christiads and saints’ lives, versified chronicle histories, topographical poems, stories of colonial discovery and conquest, allegorical and philosophical poetry, mock epics and burlesques, and more. Although not all of those works formally adopted the name of epic, most of them tried to annex the genre’s ancient prestige. They also absorbed the epic genre’s obsession with its own origins, an urge to draw lines of filiation and genealogical descent that might lessen the burden of historical anachronism. As epic writing took on a growing range 89 3)))#

of forms, its imagined sites of origin also multiplied. Moving beyond Homer and Virgil, seventeenth-century poets found different stories to tell about the ancient roots of civilization and of their own art. The rest of this book explores some of those stories, tracing the new lines of literary ancestry that led the epic genre away from war and empire building in search of other pasts. We shall see that even as poets distanced themselves from a martial epic tradition that began with the songs of Homer—and as the spread of popular literacy and vernacular print culture invited them to leave such oral models behind—they still gravitated toward ancient oral sources and occasions to sanction their writings. From the Psalms of David to the teachings of Pythagoras, they found models that they felt could accommodate their own cultural sensibilities better than the Greco-Roman war epics. The effect of those choices was to put still more emphasis on the oral-textual divide that marked a historical rupture between the ancients and the moderns. By seeking out literary sources whose social and aesthetic values could more easily be made to resemble those of modern readers, poets had to convey the deep antiquity of those sources mainly through other means— including their formal conditions of speech and song. The ancestral traditions that they adopted for their poems therefore made these poets vulnerable to new kinds of anachronism, new perspectives on the gulf between their sophisticated literary artistry and its lost archaic prototypes. This brief excursus shows how a range of seventeenth-century epic poets sought alternative models of an oral past in the pastoral tradition. In doing so, it aims to sketch some of the core strategies and anxieties that the next three chapters address as they chart the genre’s search for new sites of historical origin. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the journey away from Homer and Virgil often led into the realm of literary pastoral. The pastoral mode could be found everywhere in this era, whether in the drama of Tasso and Guarini, the prose romances of Sidney and d’Urfé, early operas such as Dafne and Orfeo, or, later, in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. The myth of a lost golden age, woven into the pastoral tradition from the early Renaissance, enabled epic poets to root their fictions in ancient soil without recourse to Jerusalem or Troy. The body of epic poetry discussed below found a home in the pastoral landscape between 1620 and 1670. In reaching back to a fabled Arcadia or Eden, these poems typify the epic genre’s effort to cling to models of primeval song even as it pulled itself free from its conventional literary-historical moorings. Looking at the past through the idealizing frame of “soft” primitivism, poets imagined a human community innocent of warfare and barely touched by modern 90

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political or economic institutions.1 The stylized depiction of country life enabled them to set aside the labors of empire in favor of more intimate psychological concerns and the quiet portrayal of rural or domestic affairs. Their pastoral visions owed less to the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil than to the medieval locus amoenus tradition, those rural enclaves and pleasure gardens which had functioned in the romance epics as a way station on the epic hero’s journey, and which now swelled in size and moved to the center of these poems. Here the poet could take a leisurely, ruminative survey of human passions, stripped of the cumbersome luggage of political action that freighted heroic poetry in the era of early modern state formation. It has been argued that pastoral writing, in contrast with the epic, concerns itself less with the idea of history than with the relationship between “literature and life” in the present. Pastoral, writes Kathleen Wine, “establishes a distance that is aesthetic rather than temporal: to the mundane orbit of its readers, it opposes a roughly contemporaneous, but unmistakably fictional, Elsewhere.”2 If this distinction can be maintained—if, as in Virgil’s Eclogues or Sannazaro’s Arcadia, pastoral fictions are set apart from the modern urban world mostly in terms of space rather than time—then the late Renaissance poetry that merged the pastoral and epic traditions added a strongly historical dimension to the journey from the city to the countryside. In these poems, the natural landscape evokes not only a mode of life untainted by a distant urban mentality but also a lost version of human community that once existed prior to the rise of political civilization. The relationship between culture and nature becomes inseparable from the relationship between the present and the past. Since ancient times, human craft or techne had been a hallmark of the stories told by epic poems, where new technologies had often acted as symbols of historical change. From Homer’s Odyssey to Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, the genre had chronicled new discoveries brought about by advances in maritime exploration; Ariosto and Milton pondered the invention of gunpowder; Lucan and Tasso lingered over the felling of ancient groves for timber to build siege engines. Weaving pastoral elements into the epic tradition created tensions between this fascination with the artificial handiwork of human culture and a fantasy of returning to simpler “natural” origins. Among the triumphs of culture over nature was the epic poet’s own artistry, itself a product of the technology of literacy. Poets who brought epic poetry to Arcadia only intensified a paradox that had clung to the pastoral tradition since Theocritus: its use of all the complex resources of art to construct the myth the lutanist and the nightingale

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of a place where art was unknown.To understand how these epics grappled with the idea of an oral past, we must therefore explore the interplay of nature and technology in their pastoral fictions. We shall find that motifs of human art and artistry repeatedly find their way into the natural landscape in ways that express the poets’ historical belatedness, the failure of their literary art to give credence to its own dream of a return to primeval origins. In an iconographic set piece in Giambattista Marino’s vast mythological poem L’Adone (1623), the god Mercury introduces Adonis to two female figures representing poetry and music. The former, winged and bare-breasted, holds a laurel wand and a golden book; the latter wears a variegated robe covered with figures of notes, keys, and verses.This passage exemplifies the literary technique of the Neapolitan poet, who was for a time the toast of Europe. His sprawling Adone was the product of three decades of patient labor. Just under forty-one thousand lines long, the poem dwarfed its epic predecessors and has earned a reputation as the longest poem in Italian literature. Its main plot is glancingly slight: Cupid, angry that his mother Venus has given him a spanking, arranges for her to fall in love with the huntsman Adonis.The goddess and her followers bring the chaste youth to her garden realm and initiate him into the pleasures of love. After various adventures—including his imprisonment by a rival enchantress and his victory in a male beauty contest—Adonis secures Venus’s permission to go hunting in her enclosed park at Cyprus, where he is mortally wounded by an amorous boar. The poem concludes with laments, obsequies, and funeral games for the dead youth. Around this meager narrative core Marino raises a vast scaffolding of descriptive set pieces and digressive episodes that cover the full array of his wide-ranging interests. His poem delights equally in recounting the myth of Cupid and Psyche, eulogizing Galileo’s astronomy, describing the coats of arms of the great Italian dynasties, investigating the anatomy of the human nose, and lavishing fifty ottave on a game of chess. It is a poem with everything and nothing to say. Swaddled in layers of learned sources and traditions, the Adone becomes a vast meditation on the idea of literary imitation itself. In canto after canto, Marino’s encyclopedic poem explores the conditions of writing in an era that prized heroic poetry as the highest of literary forms but was unsure how to shape its vast array of textual models into a story of lasting significance. Its most probing questions about the relationship between the present and the past involve not just the legacy of old texts but a contest between oral and written art. The allegorical symbolism of Poetry and Music in the Adone’s seventh canto probably derives from Cesare Ripa’s popular Iconologia, fleshed out in 92

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this passage with Marino’s usual preciosity.3 His nimbly woven verses blend an easy musicality with a surprisingly intricate structure of thought, creating a taut network of competing forces. Mercury describes Poetry first: Quella ch’innanzi alquanto a noi s’appressa e più nobil rassembra agli occhi miei, seben ritrovatrice è per se stessa e l’arte del crear trae dagli dei, con la cara gemella è sì connessa ch’i ritmi apprende a misurar da lei, e da lei, che le cede e le vien dietro, prende le fughe e le posate al metro. Colei però che accompagnar la suole ha del’aiuto suo bisogno anch’ella, né sa spiegar se si rallegra o dole senon le passion dela sorella; da lei gli accenti impara e le parole, da lei distinta a sciolgier la favella; senza lei fora un suon senza concetto, priva di grazia e povera d’affetto. [The one who in the lead approaches us—and to my eyes she appears the nobler one—though she is an inventor in her own right and derives her pregnant art from the gods, yet with her twin she is so close entwined that she learns to measure rhythms from that mate; from her, who yields and follows after her, she imitates the measures, flights and rests. That one who is wont to accompany her likewise requires the other’s aid, nor knows she how, without her sister’s moods, to show if she rejoices or is sad. From her she learns the accents and the words, from her in phrase distinct to loose the tongue. Without her aid a sound would be senseless, deprived of grace and poor in its effect.] (7.67–68)4

Marino stresses the intimate reciprocity of these sister arts. Each twin derives her expressive power from the other in a helix of mutual imitation and interdependence. The writing is steeped in the rhetoric of musical humanism, drawing on the familiar tropes of the laus musicae tradition and celebrating the union of poetry and music in former times. Here Marino is probably thinking specifically of Italian monody, the word-centered practice of accompanied solo song that had arisen near the end of the Cinquecento as an effort to recover the lost music of the ancients.5 Mercury observes that although the sisters’ primal rays now shine in ancient Greece, they will grow the lutanist and the nightingale

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dim in the barbarism of later ages; “Sola l’Italia alfin fia che possieda / qualche reliquia degli antichi danni” (it will be for Italy alone to hold some relics of that ancient loss) (71). The harmonious union of music and poetry in Marino’s epic embraces the humanists’ dream of cultural revival, and it acts as a central symbol in the poem for the many forms of literary kinship, hybridity, and miscegenation that sustain the Adone’s eclectic vision. Yet the passage also hints at rivalry, a struggle for primacy that is also a contest over origins. Mercury deems Poetry the nobler of the sister arts, and she appears to be the older of the two; she is the first to approach these observers, and, unlike Music, who seems to depend wholly on her sister for her expressive being, Poetry has received the gift of creative invention directly from the gods. But Marino promptly adds that she is an imitator in her turn, learning from her twin how to express her ideas in rhythmic utterance. Music trails along behind a sister who is prior to her—insofar as poetry could be understood as thought dressed in musical form—but who is also her pupil and dependant. Their sisterhood exposes tensions between hierarchy and mutuality, between chronological sequence and simultaneity. The relationship between Music and Poetry in this passage begins to suggest how Marino positions the modern literary epic against an oral past. Marino’s celebration of the word as somehow anterior to musical form seems to reverse the logic that had usually governed the period’s humanist responses to antiquity: a pattern that saw ancient songs giving way to modern texts, living speech immured in fragmentary extant manuscripts. Instead of deprecating modern culture as belated and secondary, Marino asserts its preeminence over the cruder, less articulate songcraft of an earlier age.Yet passages like this one hint that the Adone’s own claims of priority over the ancients, like Poetry’s over Music, are offset by deeper patterns of likeness and dependence. Similar tensions animate the rest of this section of the Adone, which takes place in one of Venus’s pleasure gardens dedicated to the sense of hearing. The canto’s best-known episode, an inset tale of a musical contest between a lutanist and a nightingale, takes up the rivalry of oral and written art in the form of a confrontation between nature and technology. The story is told by Mercury. A melancholy lover takes to the woods to allay his sorrows with the music of his lute; hearing his strains, a nearby nightingale descends branch by branch to listen and eventually perches on the musician’s head. The nightingale begins to echo the lutanist’s melodies, and imitation soon turns into rivalry as the musician tries to outperform the bird with all the resources of his art. There follow hours of fierce combat between the hand and the beak. At last the exhausted nightingale, unable to mimic an especially 94

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virtuosic passage, faints and dies. Full of remorse, the musician resolves to bury the bird in the belly of his lute. Here Marino stages a showdown between art and nature that results in the triumph of art. The technological artifice of the lute overgoes the music of the natural world by raising its expression to a higher order of complexity. The poet’s highly technical language throughout this passage shows a connoisseur’s knowledge of music theory that speaks to the artisanal pride of the musico and other culture bearers. Moreover, the ordering of this scene boldly inverts the customary logic of imitation theory since Plato: in Marino’s fiction, the artist does not try to copy birdsong, but the reverse. A similar strategy governed his account of Poetry and Music above, where the superior virtues of poetry were coupled with the illusion of its firstness in time. The arts of civilization, the poet suggests, have surpassed and dislodged the more primitive natural forms that had once held them in awe.6 Critics have noted that the story also functions as a parable of literary history. The lutanist’s defeat of the nightingale suggests the victory of marinismo, with its intricate, virtuosic artistry, over prior generations of poets. “È del poeta il fin la meraviglia” (the poet’s goal is the marvelous), Marino wrote in a famous passage.7 His poetics depended on reinvigorating the set themes and tropes of a seemingly exhausted Italian lyric tradition, a task that, in his view, largely meant adding new layers of complexity at the level of rhetorical style. He found novelty in far-flung, highly wrought conceits, in elaborate formal schemes of parallelism and antithesis, in the play of witty ingenuity and the synthesis of earlier traditions. Marino’s poetry made a virtue of its belatedness. It rested on a thick platform of literary convention but claimed to surpass its models by adding more density of thought, more layers of rhetorical embellishment, more resourcefulness of verbal design. From this point of view, the duel of the lutanist and nightingale suggests a confidently progressive view of culture: older, more rudimentary forms of artistry yield to more sophisticated ones over time. Indeed, the nightingale’s effort to mimic the musician, rather than the reverse, recalls Milton’s strategy of portraying the ancient epic poets as tardy imitators of his own primordial story in Paradise Lost. As Harold Bloom has written of Milton, Marino orders his materials here “to make his own belatedness into an earliness, and his tradition’s priority over him into a lateness.”8 This inset story captures the paradox of Marinist pastoral, which evokes an age of natural innocence that is saturated with the artificial delights of high culture, and whose very structural fabric depends on modern technologies. It is therefore a fitting irony, and a deliberate one, that Marino’s tale of the lutanist and the nightingale is itself a close imitation of an earlier literary text: the lutanist and the nightingale

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a fifty-eight-line Latin poem in Famiano Strada’s Prolusiones academicae (1617).9 Tellingly, the poem forms part of a debate in Strada’s treatise over humanist imitatio and the ancient epic canon. Strada portrays a critical discussion of poetry by a group of early Cinquecento literati, including Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, and Ercole Strozzi. As part of their exchange, these men recite short poems in the style of the Roman epic poets Claudian, Lucan, Lucretius, Ovid, Statius, and Virgil. Castiglione’s offering is the story of the musical duel, composed in the style of Claudian. Despite the pleasure that the tale gives them, Strada claims, the listeners raise objections to its style. Some dislike Claudian’s use of foreign words; others find his tone pompous and affected. Strada’s criticism of the late antique poet, Giovanni Pozzi has suggested, also took oblique aim at the writings of the secentisti, associated here with a cloying, decadent modernity.10 Strada’s denigration of Claudian would therefore have been doubly an affront to Marino, who looked to the Roman poet’s work as one of the Adone’s guiding models, alongside the poetry of Ovid and Nonnus. By appropriating Strada’s poem, Marino champions his own baroque style and affirms his kinship with Claudian, whose De raptu Proserpinae had equally reveled in its mastery of rhetoric and had cultivated the erotic, mythological aspects of the epic tradition at the expense of heroic warfare. The lutanist’s victory over the nightingale amounts to a miniature ars poetica, demonstrating the poet’s ability to absorb and rework less sophisticated cultural forms. So far this contest appears to end with the ascendancy of art over nature, and of the present over the past. But matters become more uncertain when Marino comes into contact with the boundary between modern literary culture and ancient orality. The Adone’s narrator describes his work in terms that are typical of this era in their muddled blend of speech and textuality: “per voi scrivo, a voi parlo,” he tells his courtly audience, “or voi prestate / favorevoli orecchie al cantar mio” (for you I write, to you I speak, now lend your favoring ears to my enchanting song) (8.1). The poet took great interest in the material layout and condition of his poem in print, and he habitually refers to the Adone in imagery that evokes the written text; these verses are his spun web (1.4), his woven veil (1.10), his pages (8.6), and, in a favorite trope, the work of his “penna” (pen/ pinion). In patterns like these, the rhetoric of writing and printing encroaches onto ancient tropes of authorial voice and begins to displace them.11 The oral roots of the European epic have not, however, been wholly forgotten. Depicting his epic as a written transcription of the Muse’s divine word, Marino punningly ties his authorship to the cautionary myth of Icarus: “Aura di tuo favor mi regga 96

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l’ale / Per sì alto sentier sì ch’io non caggia. / Movi la penna mia tu che ’l Ciel movi, / E detta a novo stil concetti novi” (Oh, let thy breath of favor lift my wings that on so steep a course I may not fail. Guide thou my pen/plume, O thou who movest heavens, and to a new style dictate new conceits) (10.2; cf. 1.6). The gesture is repeated in the Adone’s final stanza, where the sad tale of Adonis’s love that we have been reading is now portrayed as the oral narrative of Apollo to the listening fisherman Fileno, Marino’s alter ego inside the poem’s fiction, who records the story on paper (20.515). In these scenes of dictation by a god or muse, Marino accords an ancient priority to speech over writing—the divine breath comes before the belated work of textual transcription—and, in effect, reverses the fantasy chronology of Poetry and Music in his seventh canto. The triumph of technological novità is shadowed by a stubborn sense that older, more resonant myths have not yet lost their mysterious sway. This shadow also looms over the encounter between the musician and the nightingale. As early as Augustine’s De musica the nightingale had symbolized a natural music that stood in contrast with the artificial music played on instruments of human manufacture.12 Hinting at such contrasts, Marino links the bird’s melody to ideas of unmediated inspiration, forms of contact with mysterious sources of creativity that the musician cannot access. Its song resembles that of the divine Muse as the poet marvels at its strange beauty: “spirto il dirai del ciel che ’n tanti modi / figurato e trapunto il canto snodi” (’tis sure a heavenly sprite that weaves the song so figured and embroiled in all its modes) (7.36). In an earlier work Marino had further associated the nightingale with the legendary music of ancient Greece by suggesting that the bird was first taught to sing by the musician-poet Orpheus, a long-standing symbol of the mystical ancient vocality that awed the musical humanists.13 In the Adone, a bond between the bird’s silenced music and the songs of the ancients emerges at the end of the tale, in a detail that Marino adds to Strada’s poem. Mercury describes the lutanist’s response to the bird’s death: ammirando il generoso ingegno, fin negli aliti estremi invitto e forte, nel cavo ventre del sonoro legno il volse sepelir dopo la morte. Né dar potea sepolcro unqua più degno a sì nobil cadavere la sorte. Poi con le penne del’augello istesso vi scrisse di sua man tutto il successo.

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[In admiration of that genius rare, unconquered even in its final breath, within the bosom of the silent lute the youth desired to bury him in death. Nor could the fates assign a sepulcher more worthy of so honorable a corpse. Then with the feathers of the bird itself he wrote the history of the event.] (56)

In Marino’s striking final gesture of turning the nightingale’s “penne” into quill pens, the “natural” condition of vocal song gives way to the technology of writing in an atmosphere of mourning and loss. Bathing the bird’s corpse with his tears, the lutanist rages at destiny and at himself for having destroyed his rival (55), as the musical instrument designed to emulate nature becomes its tomb. Both the nightingale and the lute fall silent, replaced by the act of transcribing their battle in written language. The bird evocatively described as “vestito di penne un vivo fiato, / una piuma canora, un canto alato” (a living breath in feathers dressed, or a canorous plume, a winged song) (37) now loses its metaphorical dynamism, and, literalized, becomes a mere “penna” in the writer’s hand. This process of disenchantment, recording the same passage from “living breath” to written transcription that elsewhere marked the poet’s relationship with his muse, suggests that the contest between birdsong and the lute is only a symptom of a larger conflict between modern technology and a more ancient order of myths. If the nightingale’s death, for all its bathos, reflects a sense of loss or diminishment in the wake of a bygone oral past, that sense is further reinforced by Marino’s literary debt to Strada. For the nightingale’s spontaneous music—the “living breath” that dies with the bird—is not after all the unmediated song of nature but a secondhand imitation in its own right, loosely copied from a neo-Latin poem that was itself an exercise in imitating the style of a late antique poet who was viewed as a belated, minor figure in the European epic canon. Art triumphs over a nature that in turn derives from prior forms of art, in a mise en abyme of imitations where every site of origin discloses an earlier act of writing. In a final irony, Pozzi has shown that the terms Strada uses to describe the nightingale’s song echo a passage elsewhere in his tract that wages an attack on modern music and literature. In a complaint that recalls Tasso’s Discorsi, Strada inveighs against contemporary poetry by drawing an analogy with Italian music, which in its restless search for novelty has strayed far from the pure sonority and gravity of ancient song. The era’s faulty musical taste, its attraction to irregular phrasing, excessive ornamentation, sudden leaps, and awkward suspensions and dissonances, creeps into Strada’s account of the nightingale’s florid melody in ways that challenge any simple opposition between nature and culture. In this contest, 98

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“artem / Arte refert,” art responds to art, much as the literati in Strada’s courtly dialogue compete with one another in their game of imitating of the ancients.14 Marino’s Adone inherits a rivalry between the natural order and human craft that is already thoroughly contaminated by modern modes of experience and expression, so that its celebration of technological change is laced with nostalgia for older cultural forms that can no longer be fully recovered. The allegory at the center of Marino’s seventh canto seems to portray Music as the younger sister and handmaiden of Poetry, but his poem has other stories to tell about the historical belatedness of all written texts.

some versions of pastoral: segrais, saint-amant, milton A monument to the dynamics of literary imitation, Marino’s poetry was widely imitated in its turn. Adaptations and translations of his work colonized the European literary scene from Spain to Sweden. In England, his posthumously printed religious epic La Strage degli innocenti (1632) was partially translated by Richard Crashaw and his Adone won praise from the young Milton.15 Marino had an especially warm reception in France, where he had lived for several years enjoying the patronage of Maria de’ Medici and Louis XIII. His wittily elegant style gave his work a natural home in the précieux literary culture that had begun to emerge in the Parisian salons. This was the age of the French roman pastorale, and the pastoral elements of L’Adone, as well as the idylls collected in Marino’s La Sampogna (1620), bear some affinities with the prose romances of Honoré d’Urfé, Marin le Roy de Gomberville, and their acolytes. These took less interest in Marino’s rhetorical virtuosity than in the leisurely, recreative atmosphere of his verse; they were attracted to his delicate eroticism and his courtly galanterie, which in some ways resembled their own efforts to turn ancient motifs of pastoral repose into a space for amorous intrigue and psychological self-analysis. Their increasingly female readership took pleasure in finding its own polite conversation reflected in the mannered courtship of shepherds and nymphs. The popularity of these fictions suggests that the literary circles of Paris were ready for an alternative to the warriorheroes of an earlier era. The young critic Jean Chapelain, later a leading member of the Académie Française, heralded Marino’s Adone in a preface to its first edition as a “new kind of poem about peace”—one that found its models in Musaeus and Claudian rather than in the ancient poets of war. Chapelain struggled to distance the poem from contemporary literary romance, mostly by declaring the Aristotelian unity of its plot, but resemblances were unavoidable. the lutanist and the nightingale

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For all its novelty, he suggests, the Adone did not abandon the ancient epic but only widened its traditional boundaries. Having arrived at a subject, he claims, that is “simple rather than complicated, turns entirely on love, and is seasoned with the sweet circumstances of peace and the moderate salt of mirth,” Marino has enabled epic poetry to discover beauties of thought and expression that might “have gone astray and been buried in the ruins of antiquity” for lack of a fitting genre to house them.16 Although Chapelain applauds the Adone’s innovative approach, his goal is to invent a prior tradition for the poem, reconfiguring the literary past to match new practices of writing that had already begun to coalesce into the modern novel. In an era that still regarded heroic poetry as the most august of literary forms, readers like Chapelain clutched at whatever aspects of the traditional epic they could to argue that their chosen works met its formal criteria. Chapelain’s preferred strategy was to claim a poem’s descent from ancient so-called epic texts that lay outside the customary borders of the canon. A more daring approach relied on a different way of deploying the pastoral mode: rather than try to seek their poems’ origins in the Greco-Roman archive, poets might argue that their work arose from a kind of cultural memory that was preserved in the natural landscape itself, in local legendary and chorographic lore. Jean Regnault de Segrais, whose translation of Virgil’s Aeneid would later influence John Dryden, left his native Caen for Paris in 1647, where he entered the service of La Grande Mademoiselle, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans. His two-thousand-line pastoral poem, Athys (1653), included a preface insisting that this slight work had “followed the rules of an epic poem” in the arrangement of its materials. Nonetheless, Segrais announces that his poem “has no model among the ancients or the moderns,” although he acknowledges the influence of d’Urfé’s Astrée and the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil (83, 86).17 In practice, his story has a more Ovidian provenance. Segrais narrates the tragic love of a shepherd and a chaste huntress, who, upon their untimely deaths, are transformed into yew trees. What is most striking about his new genre is its creation of a mythology rooted in the regional landscape of northern France. All of his characters, Segrais explains, derive their identities from ancient place-names near the poet’s hometown of Caen. His hero Athys, for example, is named for a nearby hamlet on the Orne River, and the poem ends with a series of metamorphoses that act as etiological myths, tracing the origins of the area’s topography and wildlife. In effect, Segrais erects his own local cult; the pastoral allows him to access an ancient past that still survives, “Sans ordre, sans hauteur, & se sentant encore / De la simplicité de l’heureux âge d’or” (without order, without arrogance, and 100

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still experiencing the simplicity of the happy golden age) (100), in the countryside of Basse-Normandie. Throughout his poem, Segrais highlights the regional, indigenous quality of these origin myths. He goes so far as to attach a map of the area to the poem’s first edition, a visual guide to his homeland’s cultural memory. This local history is pointedly set against a literary tradition centered in ancient Greece and Rome: Docte & superbe Grece, & toi belle Italie, Que tant de beaux esprits ont encor embelie, Vous qui méprisés tout, altieres Nations, Qui vantés seulement vos propres fictions, Et seules présumés avoir été capable De rendre à votre gré les choses mémorables, Apprenés, que les Dieux nous aimant comme vous, Ont aussi quelquefois habité parmi nous. [Learned and proud Greece, and you, lovely Italy, whom so many excellent spirits have adorned; you who scorn all others, you haughty nations, who boast only of your own fictions and assume that you alone have been able to bring forth memorable things for your liking, learn that the gods, loving us as they do you, have sometimes lived among us as well.] (99)

The region’s history seems to be conveyed by oral transmission, handed down to the narrator by the district’s “plus vieux Habitans” (90, 148). Although the distant age evoked by Segrais is not a wholly unlettered one, the only prominently described acts of writing in the poem are tragically undermined or uncompleted. Athys and his beloved, Isis, arrange a secret elopement on a winter night; her letter to him is discovered by a jealous rival lover, who kills Athys on his way to their meeting place. Isis discovers the shepherd’s bleeding body, and next to it a final message that he had tried to write in the snow: “Souvenez-vous, qu’au moins, c’est pour vous que j’expire; / Je quitte sans regret la lumiere du Jour, / Mais non pas . . . (il vouloit ajoûter) mon amour” (Remember that at least I am dying for your sake; without regret I leave behind the light of day, but not . . . he wished to add—my love) (140). The love that could not be written in the snow is recorded on the landscape in a different way, as the principal characters undergo their Ovidian transformations and merge with the natural world around them. Memory in Segrais’s poem takes organic, living forms that bypass traditional literary history, whether in the stories of old townsfolk or in the twining branches of yew trees near the banks of the Orne. the lutanist and the nightingale

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The idyllic, musical, and psychologically introspective world of Athys conjures up a distant past untouched by the concerns that dominated the European epic tradition. It also suggests a flight from the political turmoil in Paris during the Fronde. Civil conflict and statecraft have no place in the affairs of these rustic shepherds. Segrais’s preface instead links his private mythography of provincial France to his own childhood: “If it were in my power to ennoble one region or another,” he writes, “I’d doubtless choose the one where I was born. . . . [O]ne is always more able to feel touched by places where one passed one’s first childhood than by other places where one finds oneself in the course of one’s life” (85). The retreat from epic to pastoral is also a return to the poet’s personal and local past, a source of cultural authority that stands opposed to the received epic canon and to the universalizing claims of empire that it had come to espouse. This view of childhood shaped another epic published in the same year as Athys, one that shared its attraction to pastoral themes. Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant, also a frequent guest of the précieuses at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, called his Moyse sauvé (1653) an “idyle heroïque,” a label that captures the divided ambitions of its hybrid genre. An admirer of Marino, Saint-Amant had interpreted the idylls of La Sampogna as “petits essais de Poëmes heroïques,” and he drew on their pastoral lyricism to tell a sacred story—the fortunes of the infant Moses in his basket of reeds—while unfolding the saga of Israelite history in the poem’s background.18 In Moyse sauvé and other seventeenth-century biblical epics, pastoral elements formed a counterweight to the stories of Old Testament strongmen who often figured in the period’s heroic poetry. They offered access to competing models of literary history and different forms of authorial self-presentation. Saint-Amant’s framing technique, envisioning the ancient Israelites as a pastoral community, allowed him to write a highly selfreflexive poem that constantly measures itself against the traditional protocols of Europe’s epic literature. Like many such poems that stood outside the Virgilian epic lineage, Moyse sauvé concerns itself with family relations. Its account of Moses’s early life dwells on the bond between parent and child. Saint-Amant’s leading figure is the infant’s mother, Jocabel, whose domestic cares form the ethical core of the poem. Offering a sort of feminine antitype to Virgil’s role as the epic tradition’s presiding patriarch, she is the maternal origin of the “divine poet” Moses, and the poem lingers over her loving care for her offspring.19 Whereas the father-son bond in Virgilian epic tends to symbolize the continuity of empire across historical time, Jocabel’s sufferings become occasions to reveal the work of God’s providence in shaping human history. She laments her child’s absence and is comforted by a prophetic dream of his future; her tears are miraculously transformed into 102

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a nourishing drink for the infant and are brought by an angel to sustain him in his floating cradle. In these scenes, Saint-Amant’s lyric idiom sometimes seems like a gentle parody of Virgilian epic. A swarm of wasps buzzing near the baby Moses is likened to the attacking harpies of Virgil’s third book, while a storm brewing over the Nile, faintly resembling the Aeneid’s opening tempest, threatens to shipwreck Moses’s basket of reeds until God’s angel calms the waters. As the clamor grows silent at his approach, all that can be heard provient des Sons De mille Rossignols perchez sur les Buissons, Où faisant retentir leur douce violence, Ils rendent le Bruit mesme agreable au Silence, Et d’accents gracieux luy forment un Salut Qui se peut égaler aux charmes de mon Lut. [issues from the sound of a thousand nightingales perched on the branches, where, making their sweet violence ring out, they make their noise pleasing to Silence, and they form it into a greeting of graceful tones comparable to the charms of my lute.] (5.571–76)20

Saint-Amant’s focus on the workings of providence makes what could have been a poem about religious and political conflict into a more abstract contest between humanity and nature—a battle waged against rain, flies, and crocodiles—where the gift of God’s grace means that humanity’s victory is assured. The poem’s few hints of epic strife are as brief and evanescent as summer storms, hardly touching its pastoral serenity.21 The narrator’s “luth” in the above passage is a carefully chosen symbol for the epic poet’s art, one that is sustained throughout the poem. A talented lutanist, Saint-Amant exploited the image to challenge inherited epic norms. Renaissance editions of Virgil’s Aeneid typically opened with a four-line proem announcing that the poet has put down his pastoral reed to sing of war; the most familiar of its many imitations is Spenser’s pledge in The Faerie Queene “For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds.”22 Saint-Amant’s preface to Moyse sauvé reverses the gesture as he marks out a space for his mixed genre: “I have neither an active central hero to offer,” he warns, “nor great battles, nor sieges of cities. . . . The lute will resound here more than the trumpet; the lyric makes up the larger portion of it. Nonetheless, . . . nearly all of the figures I portray here are not only heroic, but holy and sacred” (8). The poet cites Sannazaro’s De partu virginis as a precedent for its mingling of Holy Writ with verisimilar fictions but the lutanist and the nightingale

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also, implicitly, as a poem with epic pretensions that finds no shame in telling the intimate story of a mother and child. Saint-Amant’s recurring image of the lute celebrates the arts of peace and domestic life as the rightful preserve of Christian epic. At the same time, the motif seeks to tie Saint-Amant’s own poetic art to a sacred natural order, as in the poem’s comparison above—which, of course, we have seen elsewhere—between his lute and the music of the nightingale. Like Marino, the author of Moyse sauvé reveals a deep consciousness of its own literary artifice. His feeling for the strange anachronism of baroque pastoral, the juxtaposition of natural artlessness and complex human craft, reveals itself in the primitive technologies that keep cropping up in the poem’s landscape. Again and again, Saint-Amant’s epic offers analogues of itself in miniature scenes of human artistry: the weaving of a tapestry, the plaiting of a birdcage by a riverbank, the carving of a beloved’s portrait on a tree. Such activities had always formed part of the pastoral tradition, where they acted as symbols for the creative activity of the poet.23 But it is telling that the closest parallel to Saint-Amant’s own songcraft—“Sur le Luth éclatant de la noble Uranie / . . . joignant aux accords qui naissent de mes doigts / Les saints et graves tons de ma nombreuse Vois” (upon the resonant lute of the noble Urania, joining the chords that arise from my fingers to the holy and solemn tones of my harmonious voice) (1.1–4)—is found not among the Israelites but in the opulent royal courts of their Egyptian rulers. In a Memphian palace flanked by ornate pleasure gardens, the princess who will later adopt the infant Moses consoles herself for her childlessness by plying the arts of painting, sewing, and music: Elle faisoit gemir, mais d’un air plus qu’humain, Sur l’ébene d’un Luth l’yvoire de sa main; Et joignant aux beaux sons des cordes agitées Les graces de sa voix, par les Vents respectées, Elle avoit tant d’appas qu’il n’etoit point de coeurs Donts ses divins accens ne se fissent vainqueurs. [With a more than human air, she made her ivory hand moan upon a lute’s ebony; and joining to the beautiful sounds of the vibrating strings the charms of her voice, to which even the winds deferred, she was so beguiling that there was no heart which her divine accents could not conquer.] (10.231–36)

The barren princess, idling away “les ennuis de sa Couche inféconde” (218), is an Egyptian foil to the maternal Jocabel. In this passage, she also supplies a model 104

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of the poet that contrasts with the divinely inspired singer of the poem’s opening lines. Surrounded by other artifacts of elite culture, hers is a song of melancholy indolence; her “divine accents” do not give voice to the heavenly muse but instead seek a merely human distraction from the fact of her infertility, which isolates her from the flow of dynastic history. If Saint-Amant portrays his poem as a sacred song that stands aloof from the European epic canon, he acknowledges that there are other, humbler ways to understand the modern poet’s art. In his sympathetic portrait of the infertile princess he hints at his reluctance to break free from the genre’s more traditional family ties. At such moments the poem suggests that the compromised fiction of an ancient pastoral life was not enough to replace other forms of continuity with the past. The encroachment of writing and other technologies onto the natural landscape, we have seen, is a common feature of epic poems that draw on pastoral themes. It is a motif that reflects their growing alienation from the ancient sites of origin to which they still felt the need to bind their fictions. Their turn toward a pastoral golden age was an effort to lessen that alienation by swiveling from the old Greco-Roman war epics to a different model of the archaic past, one more hospitable to the cultural norms of their own age. The urge to find a literary tradition that led back to Arcadia rather than to Troy was especially acute for the Christian epic—designed in at least some of its forms as a “new kind of poem about peace”—where Arcadia could take the form of Eden. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, devilish inventions such as metallurgy and artillery weapons loom as symbols of the fall, marking the end of a primeval relationship between a creator-god and his human creatures. Yet even in Milton’s Paradise, where Adam and Eve actively tend the garden for their livelihood and experience creative growth, symbols of human artistry that evoke the poet’s own craft of writing can still carry overtones of loss and alienation from God. As Eve eats the fruit of knowledge, Adam the while Waiting desirous her return, had wove Of choicest Flow’rs a Garland to adorn Her Tresses, and her rural labors crown, As Reapers oft are wont thir Harvest Queen. (9.838–42)24 The poignant image evokes all of the paradisal joys that have already begun to fade into the past, as the flowers of the garland will fade when it later drops from Adam’s hand. But Adam’s own craftsmanship here is not wholly untainted by the fall. His woven garland faintly recalls the body of the serpent, who “of his the lutanist and the nightingale

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tortuous Train / Curl’d many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, / To lure her Eye” (516–18).The passage’s themes of reaping and harvest time carry ancient connotations of death and seasonal change, already signifying the garden’s passage from “Eternal Spring” (4.268) into historical time. The same imagery later returns in Milton’s portrayal of the first murderer, the “sweaty Reaper” Cain (11.434), and it reaches back to the poem’s ominous analogy between Eve and the harvest goddess, “Ceres in her Prime, /Yet Virgin of Proserpina from Jove” (9.395–96). The garland-weaving passage itself almost certainly alludes to a poignant episode in Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae—in the hours before her ravishment by Pluto, the doomed goddess “linked a chain of flowers and crowned herself unknowingly, a fateful presentiment of the marriage-bed”—and therefore reminds us that Milton’s own writing of primeval innocence is, like Marino’s, everywhere mediated by prior cultural visions and revisions.25 It should so far be clear that across Western Europe, seventeenth-century epic poets hunted down new ancestral origin stories that raised fresh questions about their own modernity. The problems of cultural belatedness and anachronism were expressed in many forms, but they repeatedly took shape as a contest between ancient song and modern writing. In epic poems influenced by the pastoral tradition, that contest often took the oblique form of a disparity between nature and technology. The poetry explored in the following chapters more explicitly confronts the idea of an oral past as an object of both nostalgia and apprehension. For the poets to whom we next turn, the dilemma was not just to maintain an uneasy contact with ancient oral models but also to rebuild the poet’s authority in the wake of civil war.

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5)THREE)% Harps in Babylon Cowley, Davenant, Butler

seventeenth-century epic and civil war The 1650s should not have been an auspicious decade for epic poetry. Throughout Western Europe, bloody social upheavals—the French Wars of Religion and the later uprisings of the Fronde, the Thirty Years’ War in the German states, the Puritan Revolution in England—had spawned an epic literature acutely conscious of its material conditions. This communal butchery was not like the patriotic warfare celebrated in heroic poems. In conflicts that divided neighbors and coreligionists, partisans on all sides were unsure whether heroic violence should be exalted or deplored. Factional interests colonized the period’s artistic production and shaped its arguments about aesthetic value. Public debate spread beyond the control of traditional social elites, while new literary forms sprang up outside the established canon. The subversive and bloody civil war epics of Lucan and Statius took on new prominence. Poets from Virgil to Spenser had made the epic an instrument of praise for a ruling sovereign, but the war years weakened royal authority in much of Europe and exposed the fragility of all such political myths. Epic poetry had always held out a vision of community: an economy of shared beliefs and values that composed a clan, or a religious polity, or a fledgling nation. To many observers, its appeal to a common identity now seemed a 107 3)))))# 3)))#

lost cause. The civil conflicts of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cast a long shadow over the epic genre—not just because they forced the poets to face the devastation wrought by war but also because they attacked the genre’s core premise, its implicit bond of kinship between poet and audience. The English epics of the 1650s offer a vivid example. Most early modern literary theorists stressed the political dimensions of heroic poetry, and the epic genre’s changing relationship with antiquity was shaped in part by the poets’ local political circumstances. To capture that dynamic, this chapter narrows its focus to a body of poems written by a single close-knit group of Englishmen in the wake of their king’s overthrow and execution in 1649. These poems, now little studied, have long been viewed as casualties of war.1 Fragmentary, inward looking, apparently stunned into political quietism, they seem to shrink from public affairs and to lament the passing of an earlier age of peace. The defeated royalists who wrote most of these poems sometimes compared their plight to the Babylonian captivity of the Israelites.The silenced harps of Psalm 137, “By the waters of Babylon,” became a shared symbol for a community in bondage. The psalm took pride of place at the beginning of the slim volume of Select Psalmes by George Sandys and Thomas Carew that was published in 1655: “Our neglected Harps . . . hung / On the Willow Trees,” went Carew’s translation, for “our holy Strain / Is too pure for Heathen Land.”2 Broken instruments and muted voices are hallmarks of the royalist literature of these years. Robert Herrick wrote of hanging his own instrument on a willow bough, the “untuneable times” having left “my Harp unstrung; / Wither’d my hand, and palsie-struck my tongue.”3 Isaak Walton’s Compleat Angler (1653) compared the quiet repose of English fishermen to the condition of the Israelites who sat down on the riverbanks to mourn their lost homeland.4 In the same elegiac key, William Davenant’s unfinished epic, Gondibert (1651), referred to a group of disbanded musicians whose “Lutes did seem on Willows hung, / Where near some murmuring Brook dead Lovers lye.”5 Taking root in the royalist imagination, the psalm evoked a people exiled from its cultural heritage and consigned to grief and silence. Or if not silence, then a song of other, better times. Some cavalier epics withdrew from current hardships to imagine happier worlds elsewhere, literary enclaves of leisure and rest.These poems’ tendency to retreat from public life was noted as early as Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663), which mocks their escapist nostalgia. Early in the poem, the Presbyterian knight Hudibras breaks up a bearbaiting. The bear, injured in the ensuing brawl, is led away to a pastoral locus amoenus: 108

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a grassy Bed, As Authors write, in a cool shade, Which Eglentine and Roses made, Close by a softly-murm’ring stream Where Lovers us’d to loll and dream. There leaving him to his repose, Secured from pursuit of foes, And wanting nothing but a Song, And a well-tun’d Theorbo hung Upon a Bough, to ease the pain His tugg’d ears suffer’d, with a strain.6 The medley of images suggests a royalist dreamworld, a fictional refuge where a vanquished ruling class can retire to lick its wounds.The unwieldy theorbo—the only thing lacking, Butler notes, to perfect this dream of repose—recalls Psalm 137 and looms as a comic emblem of the royalists’ years in the wilderness. At least one modern critic has suspected that Butler’s bear stands for King Charles I.7 But this passage implies that the poets’ sense of exile was cultural as well as political. Butler crowds the scene with trappings from the old pleasure gardens of epic romance, exposed here as backward-looking fables, the customary platitudes that “Authors write.” Many poets now viewed the literary past from a widening, and increasingly disillusioned, distance. Time-honored conventions were obeyed with some embarrassment or quietly abandoned. Those who wrote in an epic style found themselves mapping the gulf between their heroic models and their own more constricted outlook on human action. Not only did the hostile times stifle their voices, some began to question whether there remained any native song for them to sing. Under these conditions, it is a little surprising that the beleaguered royalists should have written heroic poetry at all. Yet the 1650s produced an unusually large crop of epic verse. In England, epic-length narrative and heroic poems included Joseph Beaumont’s Psyche (1648), Samuel Sheppard’s Faerie King (ca. 1648–54), William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651), Edward Benlowes’s Theophila (1652), Richard Fanshawe’s translation of Camões’s Lusiads (1655), Abraham Cowley’s Davideis (1656), and William Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida (1659).8 All of these were written by Stuart loyalists. To that list we might add royalist translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, in whole or in part, by John Ogilby (1649), John Denham (1656), Sidney Godolphin and Edmund Waller (1658), and others, as well as translations of Homer’s Iliad by Thomas Grantham (1659) and the industrious Ogilby (1660). One harps in babylon

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Thomas Ross was also at work on a translation of Silius Italicus’s Punica, dedicated to King Charles II and published in 1661, and Samuel Butler probably began his Hudibras during this decade.9 Moreover, many of these works, for all their escapist gestures, openly resisted the new political establishment. The author of Gondibert refused to “sit idle, and sigh with such as mourn to hear the Drum,” and Edmund Waller praised him for singing in captivity: “The drooping Hebrews banish’d Harps unstrung / At Babilon, upon the Willowes hung; / Yours sounds aloud, and tell’s us you excel / No lesse in Courage, then in Singing well[.]”10 Epic poetry took a more activist stance in the 1650s than has usually been claimed.11 Whatever its varied forms from year to year, the royalist epic took to the field in an emerging culture war. The revolutionary era taught English elites that the very idea of literature was politically contestable.12 To construct a literary tradition or to delineate a canon was to make claims about the nation’s cultural identity, to define its values and to assert ownership over its past. Adopting a genre or imitating a source text could mean taking a topical stand or signaling partisan allegiances. These were not new developments. But they grew in importance during the wars and their aftermath, as a widening rift separated many of the country’s cultural elites from its political leadership. Defeated on the battlefield, the king’s party set about laying claim to the nation’s arts and letters. In his manuscript Faerie King, Samuel Sheppard declared that “I, in this cursed, cruell, monstrous Age / doe chaunt it, to the musick of the Drum,” insisting that royalism had not lost its public voice upon the king’s death.13 Establishing themselves as guardians of England’s cultural heritage, these poets sought new forms of authority for a social group removed from the center of state power. The poetry examined below shows how a range of royalist writers both embraced and shrank from that cultural authority. Their epic poems animadverted against the English Commonwealth, but also pondered the role of the artist in the polity. Even as Cowley and Davenant clung to a lost ideal of Stuart courtly civilization, they found themselves groping toward an aesthetic sphere no longer tethered to any authorizing ruler or patron. Their search for legitimacy led them instead to ancient voices: Orpheus, Pythagoras, Homer, David. Both royalist poets take their stand in an idealized prewar past that they associate with oral communities and legendary musician-kings. The central hero in these epics is the poet himself, struggling with his materials, bringing order to historical complexity, interrogating the nature and value of his art. Yet at the same time the poets balk at the full implications of the vision they have called into being, the portrayal of the author as a figure of 110

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regal or priestly authority in an England without a king. Samuel Butler, we shall see, satirizes just this myth of the artist-hero as an alternative power center in a fractured society. Nor was he alone in doing so. In their figurations of voice, all of these poets show a strained, uncertain relationship not just with the Commonwealth regime but also with the epic sources from which they draw their sanction and idiom. Distancing themselves from war and empire, they struggle with the protocols of heroism, explore the psychological origins of violence, and struggle to define the sources of poetic inspiration. These and other tendencies in the English epic have often been blamed on the civil wars. But related patterns stretch across Europe during the same period. Setting the poetry of Cowley, Davenant, and Butler against a broad European backdrop, this chapter suggests how their troubled rethinking of the genre parallels larger trends shaping the epic tradition during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, as poets struggled to make their ancient inheritance sing in a strange land.

the harp and the scepter Civil war was a political and professional calamity for Abraham Cowley. At the outbreak of the wars, he was one of the most celebrated poets of his generation. Prolific and precocious, having groomed himself for a distinguished literary career under the Stuarts, he entered his maturity in defeat and exile. Cowley had a lifelong habit of linking his own artistry with ideals of cosmic order, and, upon the trial and execution of the Earl of Strafford in 1641, Cowley felt with many royalists that the bedrock of that order had been shaken. The encroaching anarchy turned his thoughts to the myth of Orpheus, a figure later used to similar purpose in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Wrote Cowley of Strafford’s death, In sencelesse Clamours and confused Noyse, We lost that rare and yet unconquered voice. So when the sacred Thracian Lyre was drown’d In the Bistonian Woemens mixed Sound, The wondering stones that came before to heare, Forgot themselves and turn’d his Murderers there.14 Although Cowley refers here to Strafford, the death of Orpheus also suggests the fate of the artist in a time of revolution. In Cowley’s poetry, England’s civil conflict amounts to an assault on the foundations of civilization. When the voices of elite culture are smothered by the sectarian gabble of the mob, when the natural order itself seems to yield to madness and bloodshed, what role for the harps in babylon

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poet? “A warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of,” Cowley later complained, “but worst to write in.”15 He began, but soon abandoned, an epic poem about the war years. The passage quoted above comes from Cowley’s The Civil War (ca. 1643), a poem so narrowly topical that scholars have traced many of its details to the pamphlets, proclamations, sermons, and newsbooks that brought news of the war to Cowley in royalist Oxford.The poem also owes its bristling partisanship to the propaganda wars that shadowed the military conflict. Cowley may not at first have realized that his Civil War would take on the scope and formal trappings of a literary epic in the tradition of Lucan’s De bello civili.16 But it soon became clear that the poem was growing into a cosmic theomachy, a divine contest of force between order and rebellion. Its close account of events, from the early rumblings of parliamentary revolt to the first battle of Newbury, tries to coax the raw material of history into a providential vision. To portray the rebels Cowley uses ancient images that he found in both the Virgilian epic tradition and the royalist pamphlet press: tropes of familial self-division, madness and bodily illness, the clash of dissonant voices. The king’s enemies have violated the harmony of the world: The Drummes grave voice, and sullen noyse of Gunnes, With the shrill Trumpets brighter accent runnes, (A dismal Consort!) through the trembling aire; Whilst groanes of wounded men the Burthen beare. (3.343–46) Attracted to Laudian ceremonialism, Cowley elsewhere mocks the rebels’ hostility to high-church ritual, their rejection of liturgical set forms, and their suspicion of organ music.The poem’s contrast between their nightmare music of war and the Caroline music of devotion amounts to a symbolic showdown between the forces of civilization and chaos. Cowley assumed, at first, that civilization would triumph. As history began to turn against Charles I, the poem’s vision darkened. Its satirical outbursts against the parliamentarians became more shrill, its elegies over the royalist dead more anguished. Its confident assurances that God would humble the king’s foes gave way to a view of the war as a divine punishment upon the English nation. Rationalizing, exhorting, grieving, the voice of the narrator looms over the action, struggling to fill the lengthening gaps between royalist victories.The ever more subhuman rebels are joined by ranks of furies and devils, whose meddling on the battlefield is Cowley’s attempt to explain the waning fortunes of the king in terms compatible with his providential frame. Eventually the plot of history could no longer support his epic design. When the poem reaches the bloody 112

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stalemate at Newbury in September 1643, its narrative comes to rest in a long passage of gloomy stocktaking. A final lament over the death of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland—a young man long admired by Cowley as a model of Stuart civility—confirms the poem’s growing sense that no future triumph could make amends for what has been suffered and lost.17 Cowley later acknowledged that the design of his Civil War had been overtaken by events. The preface to his 1656 Poems explains that “the succeeding misfortunes of the party stopt the work; for it is so uncustomary as to become almost ridiculous, to make Lawrels for the Conquered.”18 By now the royalists were defeated and the king was dead. Cowley had returned to England in 1654 after a sojourn in Paris with the Stuart court in exile. Making what appears to have been an uneasy peace with the new regime, he declared himself for quietism and withdrawal. His 1656 preface notoriously announces that he and other poets of royalist resistance “must lay down our Pens as well as Arms.” Like a fallen soldier in the wars, Cowley resolves “to make my self absolutely dead in a Poetical capacity,” and he gloomily compares himself to the exiled Ovid of the Tristia as he ponders retiring to the American plantations.19 Cowley’s unfinished Davideis, printed in the 1656 Poems, takes a bolder political stand than his preface would lead us to expect. Based on the conflict between Saul and David in 1 and 2 Samuel, his epic was literally shaped by the reversals of the 1640s: Cowley lifted several passages into the poem directly from his abandoned Civil War.20 In many respects, Cowley’s Davideis returns to the arguments and animosities of the earlier poem. A showdown between cosmic order and discord pits David, God’s chosen agent, against the forces of satanic madness, factionalism, and violence. This time, however, God fights on the side of the rebels. The poem cries out to be read as an allegory of Interregnum politics, a fantasy of anti-Cromwellian resistance.21 In mid-century England’s culture wars, royalists never tired of identifying the Stuart monarchs with the persecuted David. The hugely popular apologia of Charles I, Eikon Basilike (1649), cast the martyred monarch as a David in affliction, a prophet-king seeking comfort in prayers that echoed the Psalms. John Milton—who considered writing his own biblical drama on the subject “David revolted”—recognized the propaganda value of this strategy, and was appalled by such a pose from a king whom he viewed as “more unexcusable then Saul,” “sooth[ing] himself in the flattering peace of an erroneous and obdurat conscience, singing to his soul vain Psalms of exultation.”22 The first book of Cowley’s Davideis seems to speak this coded language of royalist political typology. David takes up his lyre and soothes Saul’s spirits with a verse paraphrase of Psalm 114 (1.483–515). Celebrating the harps in babylon

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Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the lyric had long been read by Christian commentators as an allegory of the spirit’s ascent from the flesh. In Cowley’s hands its theme of deliverance spoke to exiled or temporizing royalists: When Isra’el was from bondage led Led by th’Almighties hand From out a foreign land, The great Sea beheld, and fled. As men pursu’ed, when that fear past they find, Stop on some higher ground to look behind, So whilst through wondrous ways The sacred Army went, The waves afar stood up to gaze, And their own Rocks did represent, Solid as Waters are above the Firmament.23 Cowley omits his source text’s mention of Egypt and universalizes its tropes of liberation from bondage. The awkwardly handled central simile, evoking the relief and joy of a fugitive people no longer pursued, conveys something of the anxiety felt by the royalist underground in the wake of failed uprisings in the mid-1650s. Cowley’s curious description of the fleeing Israelites as a “sacred Army” acts as a corrective to the New Model Army’s militant piety—elsewhere he had mocked their practice of singing Psalms on the march—or perhaps a fantasy of rewriting the martial history that went wrong in The Civil War.24 But the poem’s politics are shifting and equivocal. Cowley dwells on the prophet Samuel’s gloomy warning to the Israelites who demanded a king to rule over them (1 Samuel 8.10–17), a politically explosive text in the 1650s, yet his David describes their desire for a king as “just and faultless” (4.148) and makes a Hobbesian claim for kingly power as a crucial check on the Israelites’ propensity for “Civil War . . . / (The frequent curse of our loose-govern’d State)” (96–97).25 Cowley openly ponders the nature of authority and the duties of ruler and subject, but in studiously abstract terms. His poem gives an impression of wary reticence, a deeply felt awareness of the limits of political speech under tyranny. Cowley’s Samuel warns, “you’ll all sigh, but sighes will Treasons be; / And not your Griefs themselves, or Looks be free” (252–53). Cowley’s primary goal, like Milton’s in Paradise Lost, was to raise his political argument to the plane of myth. David’s psalm paraphrase issues from the same royalist politics of music that had animated Cowley’s poetry of the 1640s, where the rebels’ contempt for high-church hymn and liturgy showed their wanton abuse of the natural order: “No Organ; Idolls to the eare they be: / No 114

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Anthemes; why? Nay aske not them nor me: / Ther’s new Church Musique found instead of those, / The womens sighs tun’d to the Preachers nose.”26 Cowley’s Civil War had tried and failed to impose its polemical design—the idea of a cosmic conflict between divine harmony and sectarian discord—upon the raw material of history. In the Davideis, topical politics are largely set aside, but the outlines of the old argument remain intact. In a long digression on music in the poem’s first book, Cowley praises harmony as God’s fundamental creative principle, binding the musica mundana of the created universe to the human microcosm in a “measur’d Dance of All” (1.464).The cosmos, he writes, drawing on a trope as old as Plato’s Timaeus, is “Gods Poem” (451); upon its unformed matter the divine intellect has imposed rule and discipline, thereby ending its “artless war” (454) and bringing all things into musical concord. Cowley’s opening invocation asserts the sacred power of human creativity, and, taking up the role of the inspired singer, prays for the same “blest rage . . . / As mov’d the tuneful strings of Davids Lyre” (25–26). Against Satan’s forces, who mock David as a “Boy and Minstrel” (256), the poem ranges the angelic chorus, the music of the spheres, David’s psalmody, and Cowley’s own literary art, all taking their stand together for civilization. Cowley was long drawn to neo-Pythagorean ideas of universal correspondence and natural sympathy. Because those beliefs had their roots in number theory, music could form a bridge between the cultural past and scientific modernity. Elsewhere David visits a “Prophets’ College” at Ramah, a miniature Royal Society that was perhaps modeled on similar institutions in Bacon’s New Atlantis or Davenant’s Gondibert. Here eager students “Great Natures well-set Clock in pieces took” (744) as the prophets dedicated themselves not just to “Musick and Verse” (1.762) but also to Baconian experimentalism. It is evident from Cowley’s 1661 Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy—he was a founding member of the Royal Society— that he viewed learning and rational inquiry as the fulcrum of social progress. This modern ideal of knowledge as power blends together in his epic with traditional kinds of poetic and prophetic utterance. Drawing on all of these patterns, the Davideis offers a model of the poet in a pagan bard at the court of Moab whom Cowley’s notes place in the tradition of Homer’s Demodocus and Virgil’s Iopas: “At solemn Feasts, . . . Princes had some eminent Poet (who was always then both a Philosopher and Musician) to entertain them with Musick and Verses, not upon slight or wanton, but the greatest and noblest subjects” (381). Accordingly, this court poet sings of “Natures secrets” (3.277), in a long Lucretian disquisition upon natural history and lore. For Cowley, poets are experimentalists and philosophers, discerning the deep structures of God’s harps in babylon

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created order. Both vocations share the mystical authority of the ancient epic singers and are venerated as the true music makers, the new priesthood of modernity. David’s inset psalm paraphrase above, therefore, has less to do with topical allegory than with the display of literary virtuosity, an insistence on the poet’s creative power. Cowley, who pioneered the English Pindaric ode during this decade, clearly took pride in his lyric achievement. “For this liberty of inserting an Ode into an Heroick Poem, I have no authority or example,” he writes in a note. “We must sometimes be bold to innovate” (919).27 The artist governs and builds, flaunting his prerogative as a maker. Corresponding to the poem’s many temples of learning is Cowley’s epic itself: Lo, this great work, a Temple to thy praise, On polisht Pillars of strong Verse I raise! A Temple, where if Thou vouchsafe to dwell, It Solomons, and Herods shall excel. (1.33–36) Readers have deprecated the poem’s clumsy bridging of pagan and Christian sources, its mingling of mystical religiosity with secular rationalism.28 Yet in identifying himself with the rebel-king David, Cowley lays claim to literary artistry as an alternative site of Interregnum authority, one removed from the center of temporal power. It was an authority drawn from the ideals of scientific modernity, but vested in the fiction of an ancient singing voice, which tells of a cosmos where harmony is law and the artist is king. Abraham Cowley’s choice of the musician-poet David as his hero followed a wider trend across Europe. Models of epic heroism had been changing. Where the great epics of the sixteenth century had generally taken up chivalric and patriotic subjects, the seventeenth century was to be the age of the religious epic. Its inspiration came from Tasso’s poetry of holy war, but also from earlier biblical and hagiographic poems such as Girolamo Vida’s Christiad (1535) and Guillaume du Bartas’s Judith (1574). Scores of poets addressed themselves to the problem of reconciling the neoclassical war epic with Christian theology and ethics. Their efforts led them in two broad directions. Many chose the path of religious militancy, writing martial epics about Old Testament heroes and medieval warrior-saints. In theory—the neo-Aristotelian critical theory that by now dominated Western European letters—a morally flawless military hero was the axis around which the epic’s ideological structure revolved.29 Striving against huge adversity to conquer the enemies of God, the hero, unblinking and incor116

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ruptible, served as both a vessel of divine providence and a didactic model for flawed humanity. In practice, the neoclassical hero was morally pure but aesthetically bland. Other religious epics followed a second path: suspicious of heroic violence, they sought out more complex, passive, and introspective models of character, their plots loose and episodic, their tonal quality idyllic and meditative. These divisions cannot be sorted neatly along national or confessional lines. Reformation and Counter-Reformation piety alike spoke a language of spiritual inwardness that shaped the epic idiom of Diego de Hojeda’s La Christiada (1611), Marcantonio Laparelli’s La Cristiade (1618), Nicolas Frénicle’s Jésus crucifié (1636), and even Giles Fletcher’s allegorical Christ’s Victory and Triumph (1610). Cowley’s Davideis belongs to a third group of religious epics, hybrid forms that tried to follow both paths at once. Milton’s Paradise Lost is the greatest of these, retrofitting the martial epic to demolish the glory of war and to map the intimate workings of the human will. More representative is the case of Jean Chapelain, the prominent French critic who published the first twelve books of his epic La Pucelle in 1656. To the surprise of his contemporaries, Chapelain chose to make his poem’s hero a woman. Chapelain defended his doomed Joan of Arc on the grounds that heroism depends not on military action but on magnanimous suffering—in other words, on character and its ability to move the affections. “Who can deny,” he asked, “that a Regulus or a Socrates, a Paetus Thrasea or a Helvidius Priscus, are just as heroic, on account of the sufferings they have endured with such fortitude, as a Cyrus or an Alexander, a Scipio or a Trajan are by virtue of their courageous deeds?”30 La Pucelle was a flop, and Chapelain’s self-justifying preface suggests that he knew what was coming. Turgid and doctrinaire in its neoclassical orthodoxy, Chapelain’s poem at least braved the critics in its effort to capture something of the erotic pathos, the rich density of affective response to character, that had lately found expression in précieux romance. Indeed, this growing interest in private feeling seems to have fueled the cult of pastoral and heroic prose romance in both France and England over the 1640s and 1650s. The influential preface to Madame de Scudéry’s Ibrahim (1641) highlights the mid-century concern for the hidden pathways of human inwardness. For Scudéry, the nature of the hero should emerge not just through plot action but also through dialogue: “It is not sufficient to say how many times they have suffered shipwreck, and how many times they have encountered Robbers, but their inclinations must be made to appear by their discourse,” she writes; “it is not by the caprichioes of destinie, that I will judge of [the hero], it is by the motions of his soul, and by that which he speaketh.”31 When set against the formal harps in babylon

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demands of the neo-Aristotelian epic plot, this cultural fascination with character, motive, and feeling shaped the seventeenth-century epic into a range of forms. Different expressions of that tension can be found in the erotic antiheroism of Marino’s Adone (1623); in the vast allegorical self-analysis of Phineas Fletcher’s Purple Island (1633) and Beaumont’s Psyche (1648); in Saint-Amant’s nearly plotless Moyse sauvé (1653); in the static and sensuous pictorialism of Joost van den Vondel’s Joannes de Boetgezant (1662); and in Milton’s Paradise Regained, where Jesus’s moral resistance to Satan is also an aesthetic resistance to the temptations of a martial epic plot.32 Cowley’s Davideis registers the same formal tensions. Its Old Testament hero points to the neoclassical war epics, but the poem also shares something of the meditative lyricism of Saint-Amant. Cowley transparently tries to marry pristine exemplary heroism with the psychological inwardness of the French romans. Sometimes his David is a masculine, chivalric soldier-prince, an exemplary hero in the martial epic mold. At other times, he is a feminized, amorous musician-poet, stirring his readers to erotic sympathy. The close apposition of his two personalities sometimes feels schizophrenic. Cowley’s Lucifer burns with jealousy over David’s “female sweetness, and his manly grace” (1.110). In David’s battle with Goliath—his single aristeia in the unfinished poem—Cowley swivels between describing him as a ruthless warrior and an amiable child. David’s looks “might move / Fear ev’n in Friends, and from an En’emy Love. / Hot as ripe Noon, sweet as the blooming Day, / Like July furious, but more fair then May” (3.551–54).33 The Israelites’ reaction to David’s victory also unfolds in gendered terms: “some his Valour praise, / Some his free Speech, some the fair pop’ular rayes / Of Youth, and Beauty, and his Modest guise; / Gifts that mov’ed all, but charm’ed the Female Eyes” (3.607–10). The shift from David’s soldierly “Valour” to his bashful beauty is typical of the poem’s method, its focus oscillating from a male Israelite audience to a female one, and, implicitly, to a contemporary female readership. The influential Restoration critic Thomas Rymer faulted the Davideis for its uneven balance of love and war. Taking the neoclassical hard line, Rymer insists that “it is rather the actions than his sufferings that make an Heroe.” Criticizing Cowley’s choice of “the Troubles of David” as his subject, he protests the hero’s passivity. David fails as a didactic exemplar because “in the principal actions all is carried on by Machine”; God personally manages the hero’s dynastic destiny while David himself moves aimlessly from scene to scene striking affective poses.34 Rymer was a shrewd reader of Cowley.The Davideis portrays heroic warfare rarely and obliquely, through prophecy or retrospective narration. In the present tense, Cowley’s David seems capable of only one significant action: parting. He takes 118

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leave of Saul’s daughter, Michal, as Saul’s troops arrive to arrest him (1.560–75). Having returned to court, he tenderly parts twice with Jonathan (2.128–221, 419–32), whereupon he flees to Nob, hastily departs (3.25–29), and makes his way through Philistine territory in books 3 and 4, at which point the poem breaks off. Since David intends to leave his parents in safety there (3.169–72), another leave-taking would soon have followed. These valedictory moments dwell on what Cowley describes (more truly than he knows) as “the tedious Zeal of endless Love” (2.430), as David evokes loving pity at the expense of martial action. Rymer was also unhappy about Cowley’s inset lyrics. “Mr. Cowley is not content to mix matters that are purely lyrical in his Heroick Poem,” he complains, “but employs the measures also.”35 By singling out Cowley’s “purely lyrical” subject matter as a problem, Rymer intuits a relationship between the private, affective aspects of David, which violate the ideological demands of the neoclassical epic, and the formal arrangement of David’s inset songs, which violate the structural demands of its prosody. Rymer’s complaint probably refers to the epic’s second and final inset lyric, the hero’s wooing serenade for Saul’s daughter (“Awake, awake my Lyre,” 3.785–812). Within some three hundred lines, the “more than manly” slayer of Goliath (456) has become a “timorous youth,” the very strings of his lyre “Trembling” with “awful fear” at the sight of his palpitating bride (779, 794–95). Epic grandeur gives way to the intimate preciosity of a cavalier love lyric: Weak Lyre! Thy vertue sure Is useless here, since thou art onely found To Cure, but not to Wound And she to Wound, but not to Cure. Too weak too wilt thou prove My Passion to remove, Physick to other Ills, thou’rt Nourishment to Love. (3.799–805) The epic’s shrinking scope is clear enough in a song that addresses not the beloved herself but the singer’s own lyre. Cowley’s Pythagorean rhetoric, portraying the artist as prophet and healer, has given way to a Petrarchan game of killing looks and heart wounds. The poem’s political conflict is quietly recast as a domestic one. Of a piece with David’s pose of simpering powerlessness is Michal’s role as the wounding victimizer, a romantic double for David’s political enemy, Saul. David’s musicianship gradually moves the Davideis in this way from the battlefield to the bedchamber, from heroic exemplarity to lyric affect. The harps in babylon

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growing passivity of Cowley’s musician-hero marks an erosion of confidence in the artistic authority that he was erecting for himself. His opening invocation was not unusual in laying claim to David’s vatic authority. Robert Aylett’s David’s Troubles (1638), like many other predecessor poems, began with a similar formula—although without Cowley’s emphasis on the poet’s vocality: “I Tell the divers tryalls of the King, / Who hevenly hymns did to his Maker sing: / Blest Spirit that infus’d on him such skill, / Dispose aright thine humble servants quill[.]”36 But the gesture was unusual in Cowley’s hands, for royalists in revolutionary England widely condemned the rhetoric of poetic inspiration. Davenant’s Gondibert rejected any epic invocation as a superstitious anachronism, and Thomas Hobbes applauded the decision: “Why a Christian should thinke it an ornament to his Poeme; either to profane the true God, or invoke a false one, I can imagine no cause, but a reasonlesse imitation of custome . . . by which a man enabled to speake wisely from the principles of nature, and his owne meditation, loves rather to be thought to speake by inspiration, like a Bagpipe.”37 Samuel Butler’s mock invocation in Hudibras—to a muse of “Ale, or viler Liquors” (1.1.639)—shares their contempt for the poets’ furor poeticus. Their attack on inspiration grew out of a widespread conservative horror of religious enthusiasm, the claims of personal illumination by the Holy Spirit that had sprung up among some of the Protestant sects of the civil war era.38 Royalists habitually traced the nation’s political and religious divisions to the reckless antinomianism of the so-called mechanic preachers and their cult of the inner light. Political dissent was linked with the tyranny of the mob and defined as madness or demonic possession. Cowley was among those who mocked the king’s opponents as wild-eyed, low-class sectaries, seized with “furious zeale” to “preach Damnation and the Parliament” (Civil War 3.425, 410). Like Tasso’s pagans, Cowley’s rebels were by nature self-divided and endlessly proliferating, breaking with the sacred authority of the Laudian church to seek after false gods of their own making. It was perhaps inevitable that the inspired poet of Cowley’s Davideis should struggle to ward off the stigma of radical religion. Throughout the poem, Cowley’s textual notes weaken and demystify the poem’s sacred witness. They assure the reader that its opening prayer is a mere literary formula, the epic poet’s customary “Invocation of some God for his assistance” (1.146). In passage after passage, Cowley reports that he has taken “Poetical Licence” (365) in adapting Holy Writ, that he has added here and there “a stroke of Poetry” (481–82), “whether it be true or no” (183), and that the reader should not “judge of my opinion by what I say” (166). Traditional epic topoi that connect humanity with the divine—prophecies, visions, angelic visitations, heavenly councils—are 120

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hedged about with apologies and qualifications. Cowley everywhere stresses the narrowly literary reach of his ambitions.The result is a hymn to the power of the artist that compulsively retreats from its own claims to authority. More was at issue than radical Protestant enthusiasm. Cowley’s unease over the vatic claims of epic poetry suggests a growing pessimism about all forms of temporal power. Strikingly, his poem gradually transfers its rhetoric of inspired “rage” from Cowley’s David to the tyrant Saul. In a familiar topos early in Cowley’s poem, the allegorical figure of Envy rises from hell to incite the sleeping Saul against David: “Place to his Harp must thy dread Scepter give?” (1.264). Cowley models the scene on a favorite source passage for Renaissance epics, Allecto’s nocturnal visit to Turnus in Virgil’s Aeneid (7.406–66). Cowley had earlier imitated this episode in his Civil War—there, however, making his Virgilian furies inspire the parliamentary opposition (2.1–32, 4.1–58). He was not alone in using the figure of Allecto to portray the madness of anti-Stuart rebellion. In A Sermon Touching Schisme (1642), Richard Watson warned against the discord personified by “Ancient Poets” as Allecto and now embodied, Watson argued, in “our homebred schismatical Sectaries.”39 The influential royalist churchman Henry Hammond later drew Virgil’s Allecto into a complaint about the false preaching of the sects: “There are evill Spirits that come into the world, and which many times are by God permitted to seduce men, and that they may doe so the better, they constantly pretend to come from God, and assume divine Authority to recommend and authorize their delusions; (a thing so ordinary in all Ages, that the Poet that would express the Imbroyling of a Kingdome, thinks he cannot doe it better then by bringing in Alecto, a Fury, with a Message from Heaven, to avenge such or such an injury).”40 Cowley’s figure of Envy, stoking Saul’s rage against his subject David, transplants these motifs of religious radicalism and popular sedition onto the figure of Saul, the epic king. Demonic and selfdivided, “barb’arous” and “bloody,” envious Saul has absorbed the symbolism of sectarian rebellion that haunted the royalist imagination (1.526, 2.164). If David stands for Cowley’s ideal of the poet as king, Saul is his troubling mirror image: the king as a mad poet-priest, using the apparatus of the state to give shape to his own dark dreams. Saul’s “Tyrant-Frensie” (4.341) projects not just Cowley’s anxiety over the fate of the poet in an oppressive regime but also his discomfort over his own posture of prophetic counter-authority. His rebel hero is oddly apolitical. The prophet Samuel generalizes Saul’s tyranny as the practice of all kings—“though a king / Be the mild Name, a Tyrant is the Thing” (238–39)—and David shows no ambition to take his place. Cowley’s 1656 preface suggests that he could not quite foresee ending his poem with David’s coronation at Hebron, his transition harps in babylon

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from “best Poet” to “best of Kings” (1.3).41 All forms of political agency are tainted by the tyrant Saul’s “obscure fantastick rage” (1.440), which only David’s lyre is able to soothe. David’s music acts as a kind of refuge or inoculation against public statecraft; his “artful sounds did violent Love inspire, / Though us’ed all other Passions to relieve” (3.736–37). But he can sing, Cowley adds, only until “wars began, and times more fit for rage,” times when Saul is called to the battlefield, David fades from the scene, and “wars loud noise strikes peaceful Musick dumb” (353–56). This fleeting return of the nightmare vision of Orpheus in The Civil War—the divine singer’s voice silenced by the clamor of violence—confirms Cowley’s loss of faith over the artist’s place in the polity, where madness inevitably gathers at the seat of power. Cowley’s later works held out a dream of studious retirement. The collapse of the young royalist’s hope for an academic career at Cambridge seems to have been a defining event for him, and his 1662 volume of Essays, drawn to titles like “Of Liberty,” “Of Solitude,” and “Of Obscurity,” portrays his guiding motive during these years as a longing for autonomy and rest. Such a longing is already clear in Cowley’s Davideis. In its most ambitious vision of cultural production, the college of prophets at Ramah, Cowley strips away the religious and political functions of Old Testament prophecy and insists only on seclusion from the public life of the nation. These holy men of David’s Israel, he argues in a note, “were not properly called Prophets, or foretellers of future things, but Religious persons, who separated themselves from the business of the world, to employ their time in the contemplation and praise of God. . . . They are called by the Chaldee Scribes, because they laboured in reading, writing, learning and teaching the Scriptures” (184–85). The simultaneous need to claim a public voice and to retreat altogether from political affairs divides Cowley’s poem against itself. But it also reflects the intense, searching scrutiny of political obligation and power relations that can be found in Cowley’s Brutus ode and other more familiar writings. Mid-century royalist fictions were extraordinarily self-conscious in their concern for the status of the artist, the relationship between high culture and civil authority, and the psychology of political defeat. It is fitting that the last half of Cowley’s poem should take place in a series of exile communities. This troubled royalist epic was also stranded between ancient and modern visions of the artist, between the charismatic authority of the biblical prophets and the collective truth seeking of the Royal Society. Cowley’s Davideis took form in the 1650s as an ambitious manifesto for the poet as priest and king. But sacred rage could not sustain him, because it brought the artist too close to the madness at the heart of mid-century civic life. 122

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davenant’s oral history In an age drawn to stories of origin and filiation, the epic remained a backward-looking genre. Seventeenth-century critics devoted themselves to literary genealogies and canon building. Poets clung to the cultural prestige of Homer and Virgil, and a burst of epic translations and adaptations shows that the works of other poets—Apollonius, Statius, Claudian, Ariosto, Vida, Tasso, Spenser, Du Bartas—had been or were coming to be viewed as exemplary models in their own right. But as we have seen, the period’s readers looked backward with discontent. Like many other forms of cultural and political authority, the Greco-Roman epic tradition came under hostile scrutiny. Vernacular translations of Virgil’s Aeneid were shadowed by mock translations and travesties like Scarron’s Virgile travesti (1648–52) and Furetière’s L’Énéide travestie (1648–53). Signs were everywhere that fictions of imperial conquest and holy war were losing their appeal for a European readership exhausted by self-division. Yet the Virgilian travesties, often “translating” their famous source text line for line, show that even the antagonists of the martial epic tradition could not quite free themselves from its founding models. Most poets carefully followed the conventional norms of the genre even as they subjected them to ideological critique. A popular solution for those unhappy with the poetry of war and empire was to claim their descent from a different stock of founding fathers. Many writers recovered or invented counter-traditions to authorize their work. Homer’s Odyssey and Apollonius’s Argonautica offered models for epic poetry of maritime exploration and trade. Encyclopedic creation epics sought their origin in the fourth-century hexamera of Basil and Ambrose. Lucan’s anti-epic, De bello civili, underwrote both the literary art and the oppositional politics of poems from d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Serenely pious religious epics such as Saint-Amant’s Moyse sauvé and Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Esther (1673) turned to biblical story to justify a concern for domestic intimacy that pointed toward the modern novel. The latter poems’ focus on family relations may tell a political story. David Quint has suggested that the seventeenth-century epic’s turn inward, its attraction to rural retreat and repose, speaks for a European provincial aristocracy that found itself displaced by centralized national monarchies. Often set in country estates and pleasure gardens, steeped in the protocols of feudal chivalry, and claiming to cultivate an inner virtue that has been lost at the court, these fictions preserve the ideology of a disenfranchised nobility “alienated from the ‘epic’ schemes of state-building kings.”42 Their preoccupation with kinship harps in babylon

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relations and household affairs may well draw on the fading ideals of the landed aristocracy, even as they exploit a wide cultural fascination with psychological inwardness and the passions of the soul. All of these features apply to William Davenant’s unfinished Gondibert (1651), a poem heavily influenced by the romance fictions of the French salons. Of obscure bourgeois origins—he claimed to have been the bastard son of Shakespeare—Davenant scrambled his way into Stuart courtly circles and became attached to the household of Queen Henrietta Maria. He became a prolific court poet and wrote the last of the Caroline masques. At the outbreak of war, he served Charles II in various military roles before following the queen into exile at Paris in 1645. In 1650, while sailing to the Americas to serve as Charles II’s governor in Maryland, he was captured by an English privateer, imprisoned for two years, and briefly put on trial for his actions in the royalist war effort. Described by Henry Jermyn as “infinitely faithful to the King’s cause,” he wore his aristocratic class solidarity like a badge, and he wielded the cavalier epic as a tool of opposition to the Interregnum political establishment in London.43 Davenant’s preface to Gondibert, published in Paris in 1650, is preoccupied with questions of origin and authority. Critics both then and now have felt that the bulky preface outweighed the poem.44 The most elaborate English ars poetica since Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, Davenant’s essay opens with a sweeping survey of the European epic tradition. Most of his predecessors meet with the cool disdain of the literary “modern.” Like Cowley, with whom he shared the patronage of Lord Jermyn in Paris, Davenant had come under the spell of Baconian experimentalism, and he sought to throw off the supernatural errancy of Ariosto and Spenser—to “drive the Monsters thence, and end the Charms,” as Cowley wrote in a dedicatory poem—in favor of a historical study of human nature, grounded on reason and ethics.45 The preface is full of metaphors for progress taken from Bacon and Hobbes: the poet is a cartographer, a military scout, a follower of new paths. Davenant portrays the prior epic tradition as a chain of error and superstition forged by the poets’ slavish imitation of their predecessors. Poets are no more answerable to those who came before them, he writes, than “Lawmakers are lyable to those old Lawes which themselves have repeal’d.”46 Imagery of biological paternity and inheritance is conspicuously avoided. Yet Davenant seems ambivalent about breaking with the authority of the classics. He complains that the servile imitation of earlier poems has stunted the growth of epic poetry, but he also claims that poetic tradition is a civilizing influence, a check on the poet’s wayward imagination. In straying from earlier literary models, the epic poet risks falling into “wickednes and . . . erour” (9) of a kind that also haunted Cowley: an undisciplined furor poeticus that 124

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resembled the mad violence of the radical sectaries.47 In other ways, too, Davenant’s modern celebration of progress strains against nostalgia for earlier and better times. Explaining why he chose a distant historical setting for his poem, Davenant contrasts the moral purity of “a former age” with the corruptions that have crept into all modern institutions—corruptions that, he notes in passing, “who ere compares the present with the Primitive times, may too palpably, and with horrour, discerne” (22). He grants that the ancient pagan poets claimed divine inspiration as a way to overawe the common people and clutch at political power, but, he argues, the same tactic has been used by “these who now professe the same fury” (22). For all its insistence on originality, Davenant’s preface sets itself against the self-authorizing regicides and tries to portray his own work as somehow sponsored by the ancients. The search takes Davenant back to Homer. His preface begins by imagining Homer as the epic tradition’s stern legislator—in Davenant’s cartographic imagery, a “Sea-marke” setting the boundaries for those who come after him (1). Later, though, this construction falls away, to be replaced by a more historicizing view of Homer as an archaic poet-singer or rhapsode. Davenant explains that he has designed Gondibert’s cross-rhymed quatrains for musical setting: “The brevity of the Stanza renders it less subtle to the Composer, and more easie to the Singer; which in stilo recitativo, when the Story is long, is chiefly requisite. And this was indeed (if I shall not betray vanity in my Confession) the reason that prevail’d most towards my choyce of this Stanza . . . for I had so much heat . . . as to presume they might (like the Works of Homer ere they were joyn’d together and made a Volume by the Athenian King) be sung at Village-feasts” (17). Davenant’s “Athenian king” is Peisistratus, reported by Cicero and others to have overseen the assembly of the written texts of Homer’s epics in the sixth century BCE. Taking up the musical idiom created by the Italian humanists to mimic ancient Greek song, Davenant tethers his heroic poem to an imagined oral community. No composer rose to his challenge to set his poem in declamatory stile recitativo, a fact that cannot be much deplored. But he was eager to convey the illusion—ironically enough, through the visual arrangement of his rhymed quatrains on the printed page—of a return to primary epic. Thomas Hobbes’s Answer to Davenant lauded his goal: “The ancient Poets chose to write in measured language . . . [because] their Poems were made at first with intention to have them sung, as well Epique as Dramatique,—which custom hath been long time laid aside, but began to be revived, in part, of late years in Italy.”48 The idea of an oral past is closely tied to Davenant’s literary and political ambitions in Gondibert. The poem is about looking backward, a meditation on grief and memory. Davenant was among the first English poets to harps in babylon

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take an idealized, nostalgic view of an ancient oral culture that he portrayed as fundamentally different from his own lettered media environment. Its loss is bound up in his poem with the damage wrought by civil war on family and kinship networks, and with the structural deformation of epic into romance. Davenant shows no awareness of “pure” orality—the thought-world and cultural practice of a society wholly without alphabetic literacy—but, as will become clearer when we turn to his poem, he wants to envision a form of community that knows and preserves itself primarily in oral rather than written forms. Turning from shared heroic action to private mourning, Davenant’s Gondibert elevates love and domestic affairs over state politics. The male singers of the traditional epic give way to a range of female voices, fictional proxies for the disenfranchised poet. But the poem’s gloomy turn inward also acts as a basis for political resistance, as Davenant seeks to define a royalist community with its roots in the aristocratic family, in the clandestine exchanges of speech and song, and in the long reach of oral history. Like Paradise Lost, Gondibert attacks the ideology of heroic warfare, and most of the poem’s action takes place in a secluded locus amoenus. Gondibert, an eighth-century Italian nobleman, has won the favor of Aribert, King of Lombardy, and the love of his daughter, Rhodalind. In an initial battle, Gondibert defeats Oswald, his ambitious rival for the crown. Wounded in the melee, Gondibert is removed at the end of book 1 to the country estate of the philosopher Astragon, where he spends the remaining two-thirds of the unfinished poem. Despite its advertised function as a school of natural philosophy, Davenant’s House ofAstragon serves the same role as the pastoral hideaways visited by Tasso’s Erminia and Spenser’s Calidore: it is a sanctuary for refugees from epic history.49 The rest of the poem concerns a love triangle, as Gondibert faces a choice between the beautiful Rhodalind (and, with her, the Lombard dynasty) and the equally attractive Birtha, a kind of impecunious graduate student and daughter of Astragon. State politics crowd at the edges of Gondibert’s romance retreat, seeking a way in; the entire court party eventually finds its way to the hero’s place of rest.Yet we soon realize that Gondibert is an exemplary hero not because he overcomes great obstacles in a struggle for empire but because he abandons heroic action for this private world of aristocratic self-scrutiny. When the poem breaks off, Gondibert has fallen in love with Astragon’s daughter, and is apparently ready “to leave shining Thrones for Birtha in a shade” (2.8.46.2).The wording is silly but significant: the hero has left his dynastic epic environment for the protective “shade” of pastoral romance. Overturning the norms of the Virgilian epic, he throws off the burden of statecraft and “undoes the world in being true” (3.4.Arg.6). 126

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This region of domestic interiors is dominated by female voices. Gondibert’s early readers poked fun at the poem for its appeal to the ladies.50 As they recognized, Davenant views the court as a feminine sphere of mannerly sensibility where the lyric is the prevailing literary mode. Gondibert’s female characters also anchor the poem’s obsession with grief. Their world is steeped in melancholy. The poem has scarcely begun when “sadly it is sung” that Rhodalind pines “in secret tears” for Gondibert (1.1.43).The amorous Birtha no less “believ’d / Such sighing Songs, as tell why Lovers dy, / And prais’d their faith, who wept, when Poets griev’d” (2.7.27). Such a play of love and despair is more than Petrarchan hyperbole, for mourning over affairs of the heart in this poem almost always means mourning the casualties of war. After the clash between the forces of Gondibert and Oswald in book 1, the rest of the story is a chain reaction of passionate responses from different characters as they hear about the battle and its consequences. Its weeping hero sends word to an aptly named Petrarchan mistress, Laura, of her two rival lovers’ deaths: Tell her now these (Love’s faithful Saints) are gon, The beauty they ador’d, she ought to hide; For vainly will Love’s Miracles be shown, Since Lovers faith with these brave Rivals dy’d. Say little Hugo never more shall mourn In noble Numbers, her unkind disdain; Who now not seeing beauty, feels no scorn; And wanting pleasure, is exempt from pain. (1.5.66–67) The pangs of disprized love have been horrifically literalized on the battlefield, erotic rivalry swollen into civil war. Davenant’s dead soldiers are invariably lovers, bridegrooms, husbands. Little Hugo will no longer write love poems, a clear symbol of the damage wrought by war on both human relationships and cultural production. With its martial plot scuttled by Davenant’s lovelorn women, his epic settles into a tone of brooding retrospection. The poem’s bardic voices are characteristically female ones—the men strive on the battlefield to perform “those deeds our Ladies songs admire” (1.5.3.4)—and its narrator habitually identifies himself with the poem’s noblewomen. Others can sing of martial heroics; his concern is for “the gentler sex, whose Story Fame / Has made my Song” (1.5.9.3–4). His vocation, like that of the poem’s bereaved women, is to memorialize dead lovers (2.8.89). Anticipating Milton’s somber harps in babylon

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proem in book 9 of Paradise Lost, he is “Grief’s Chronicler” (1.6.80.3), with a tale of loss that “thou shalt weep to read” (1.2.2.3). The poet’s tears have a clear polemical purpose. His epic’s turn inward, its choice of weeping over war, indicts a Commonwealth regime that has killed off both elite culture and the traditions of patriotic warfare. Davenant makes no secret of his contempt for the mob mentality of Puritan populism.51 Collective action in his poem is tyrannous and stained with blood. Even the standard epic set piece of a royal hunt ends in mourning, as the poet laments the “wanton sacrifice” of a “Royal Stagg” at the hands of “the Monarch Murderer . . . / Destructive Man” (1.2.57.1, 53.4, 52.1–2), in terms that recall John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill. In the aftermath of the English Revolution, heroism has been forced out of public life and into the private struggle of a poet with his own grief. Davenant fills his poem with proxy figures who share his political victimhood. One of these, Oswald’s sister Gartha, is Davenant’s Lady Macbeth, prodding the poem’s villain to compete with Gondibert for dynastic marriage and empire. After Oswald’s death and the defeat of his forces, Gartha flies to their camp at Brescia, where she urges the surviving troops to march against Gondibert. But her exhortation to war promptly softens into a dirge for her fallen comrades. She imagines how her enemy, the princess Rhodalind, might taunt her over her brother’s death: From Rhodalind I thus disorder’d flie; Least she should say, thy Fate unpity’d comes! Goe sing, where now thy Fathers Fighters lie, Thy Brothers requiem, to their conqu’ring Drums! The happy Fields by those grave Warriors fought, (Which from the Dictates of thy aged Syre, Oswald in high Victorious Numbers wrot) Thou shalt no more sing to thy silenc’d Lyre! (2.3.57–58) Collective political action crumbles into private feeling. Davenant’s Gartha registers her defeat as a fear of singing the wrong music, turning her brother’s “Victorious Numbers” into a funeral lament or a bereaved silence. Her speech shows extraordinary self-consciousness in its recognition that a new lyric idiom has been forced upon her. In the spring of 1644, amid royalist setbacks in the civil wars, Davenant had written to the queen in similar terms. Lamenting the breakdown of an older courtly honor culture, he urged Henrietta Maria to lend her own patience in adversity to her restive followers: “Your patience, now our 128

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Drums are silent grown, / We [must] give to Souldiers, who in fury are, / To find the profit of their Trade is gone, / And Lawyers still grow rich by Civil Warr.”52 The glory of war is gone and its elite cultural trappings abandoned. Davenant’s Gondibert, in deep frustration over the failure of the royalist cause, finds itself in an age too late for the old epic drumbeat and joins the song of the defeated. But what of Oswald’s listening troops? Gartha’s oration whips up the fury of the soldiery, yet as soon as the army has been primed for its assault, an old counselor arrives and quietly persuades Gartha to take her revenge by guile rather than by force. We are not told how this change of plan is greeted by her followers. In fact, they simply disappear. The politically charged image of an angry multitude poised for conflict is blotted out, and the reader’s attention diverted elsewhere. In the unruly crowd at Brescia, Davenant’s royalist audience likely recognized itself. As he dramatizes Gartha’s suffering, Davenant models a readerly response to it in the violent fury of Oswald’s army, simmering with the grief and anger of defeat. The vision of what he is doing to such readers looms for only a moment before Davenant dispels it. But the implications of that vision pervade the poem. By opening a sudden narrative lacuna where an angry soldiery had been, Davenant shifts his focus from their vengeful royalist anger to his own exercise of authorial agency. He transforms his Gartha into a figure of passive victimhood, but he turns that transformation into a spectacle of controlled rage: epic violence sublimated and diffused through the indirect channels of romance pathos. Motifs of concealment, storage, and preservation run through the poem. In the dedication to his final canto, completed while Davenant was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he looks back with longing at the cavalier community shattered by the civil wars: Dead to Heroick Song this Isle appears, The ancient Musick of Victorious Verse: They tast no more, than he his Dirges hears, Whose useless Mourners sing about his Herse. Yet shall this Sacred Lamp in Prison burn, And through the darksom Ages hence invade The wondring world, like that in Tullia’s Urn, Which tho by time conceal’d, was not decay’d. (3.7.2–3) The comparison of his epic to “Tullia’s Urn” refers to the apocryphal tomb of Cicero’s daughter, which, when opened, was found to contain a candle that had harps in babylon

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been burning for some fifteen hundred years. Again Davenant identifies himself with the poem’s women, as he echoes an earlier description of Rhodalind’s secret love for Gondibert: “She would not have it wast, nor publick grow; / But last conceal’d like that in Tullia’s Urne” (2.2.87.1–2).53 Davenant implies that he has not abandoned the communal politics of epic but merely incubates them in a hidden and intimate form, like a flame burning in a tomb. For the poem quietly insists that the private world of the passions does not function outside political history but, through secret and inscrutable means, forms the engine of history. Gondibert begins with the personal conflicts of select nobles—notably Oswald’s sexual rivalry with Gondibert—which amplify into a public factional struggle with widening political stakes. The poem repeatedly takes note of this process (e.g., 2.1.75.2, 73.4). Its deliberate entanglement of public and private forces—a transfer of interest from top-down nationalist politics to the personal, lateral relationships among individual nobles—suggests that political power derives from regions of experience normally thought to be disengaged from history: the passions of heroic romance and the shared social rituals of grief and memory. For all his attraction to tropes of oral intimacy, Davenant cannot fully decide whether this strategy of political resistance should be tied exclusively to speech and song or also to written books. References to the poem’s textuality keep breaking into its bardic rhetoric: “what ere thou art, who dost perchance / With a hot Reader’s haste, this Song pursue” (3.1.44.1–2). In a work where the word “fame” appears seventy-six times, there are dozens of references to books, records, rolls, and writings—and, indeed, to tombs, museums, libraries, and other repositories of cultural memory. One of Gondibert’s longest set pieces records a visit to Astragon’s shrine-like “Monument of Vanished Minds,” described as a storehouse for “heaps of written thoughts (Gold of the Dead, / Which Time does still disperse, but not devour)” (2.5.36.4–38.2). Elsewhere in his poem and its preface, though, Davenant hints at the primacy of living speech over the dead letter. “Lawes, if very ancient, grow as doubtfull and difficult as Letters on bury’d Marble, which only Antiquaries read” (33); historians “worship a dead thing” (10); scholars morbidly plunder books like “treasure belonging to the Dead, and hidden under ground,” rather than spend their time in the company of living friends (23). By aligning his epic with the songs of Homer “ere they were joyn’d together and made a Volume by the Athenian King,” Davenant imagines his lost community as a network of affective bonds among loving nobles, bonds that exist outside the written law codes and chronicles that form the administrative apparatus of the modern state. The poem takes a less schematic outlook than the preface on writing and song, and broadly portrays high culture as an organic relationship 130

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between the dead and the living. Gondibert’s theme of incubation returns in book 3, when the narrator asks future bridegrooms to visit his tomb with their brides: shew her where my Marble Coffin lies; Her Virgin Garlands she will offer there: Confess, that reading me she learnt to love; That all the good behaviour of her heart, Even tow’rds thy self, my doctrin did improve; Where Love by Nature is forwarn’d of Art. She will confess, that to her Maiden state This Story shew’d such Patterns of great Life, As though she then could those but imitate, They an Example make her now a Wife. (3.3.5.3–7.4) This is a new model of literary succession to replace the masculine genealogy of Virgilian martial epic. By locating his epic’s manifesto in a wedding scene—the bride is to view his tomb on her way to the altar—Davenant implies the traditional royalist analogy between the monarchical state and the patriarchal family, yet in an indirect and feminized form. In the bride’s transition from “Virgin” to “Wife,” Davenant finds the origin of an intimate parallel history, one that can stand as a bulwark against the official history that the Commonwealth was writing for itself. Davenant’s “Patterns of great Life”—that is, the cultural life of an idealized Stuart community memorialized in both his song and his funeral monument—will be passed between lovers, and from parent to child, in an ever-widening, organic network of royalist resistance. Davenant hints as much in a prose postscript to the poem, where he notes that the heroic poet “gives a greater Gift to Posterity, then to the present Age; for a publique benefit is best measured in the number of Receivers; and our Contemporaries are but few, when reckon’d with those who shall succeed” (251). Set pieces like this one show that Davenant’s desire to have his epic sung in stile recitativo was more than a foppish affectation.The poem’s orations, songs, laments, and whispered conversations in corridors portray oral history in the making. Identifying his chronicle of royalist memory with the “old Greeks sweet Musick” (2.6.49), Davenant links the bygone world of the Caroline court with a more ancient community gathered around the voice of the poet. His Homer is not yet the noble primitive of eighteenth-century classicists like Anne Dacier or Thomas Blackwell. But Davenant is nonetheless drawn to the idea of the harps in babylon

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prehistoric wandering singer, a figure who stands apart from a modern literary culture that is all too quick to absorb the poet into its politically tainted institutions. He notes with some ambivalence that “Pisistratus, (though a Tyrant) liv’d with the praise, and dy’d with the blessing of all Greece, for gathering the scatter’d limbs of Homer’s Workes into a Body” (27). His hope that his own epic “might, like the Works of Homer . . . be sung at Village-feasts” comes with a caveat: “though not to Monarchs after Victory, nor to Armys before battaile. For so (as an inspiration of glory into the one, and of valour into the other) did Homer’s Spirit, long after his body’s rest, wander in musick about Greece” (17).This is a confusingly worded claim. It appears, though, that Davenant, like Cowley, both endorses and shrinks from the poet’s power to shape the public destiny of his people. His Homer is finally more a fugitive voice than an authorizing text, more a spirit than a body. Davenant’s primary concern, here and elsewhere, is the artist’s ideological independence. Breaking away from a literary tradition held in thrall to its violent past, his royalist epic prefers to “wander in musick” as a lingering elegy for its creator and his lost courtly world.

the king of the minstrels Writing epic poetry in the 1650s, it is clear, meant taking a double perspective on the literary past. In the wake of historical rupture, Cowley and Davenant saw their art as a form of continuity with earlier times. Although their epics animadvert against the Commonwealth regime, the lost civilization to which they bear witness is at least as much a literary ideal as a political one. At the center of their vision stands not the dead English king but a sovereign artist whose authority derives from sources older than the bloodstained public offices now held by the regicides. In other ways, though, both of these poets sought to distance themselves from the epic tradition that they had inherited. Both saw themselves as modernizing skeptics, wary of martial glory and casting aside archaic fictions that had not kept pace with their own cultured civility. They alternately claim and disown the rhetoric of inspiration, embrace and suppress the poet’s prerogative to move an audience to violent action. Royalist poets identified their work with the heroic community of a prior age, but their myths were self-conscious illusions. They portrayed themselves as privileged heirs to the ancients even as they viewed their predecessors with a mixture of condescension and distrust. Central to all heroic poems in this era was a disparity between life and art, the need to preserve cultural myths straining against the urge to dismantle them. The trauma of chronicling modern civil warfare was just one face of epic poetry’s struggle with historical anachronism. 132

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This widening division between art and life was the engine of the European mock epic. Spreading from Italy to France and England in the first half of the seventeenth century, hugely popular burlesques, travesties, parodies, and pastiches sprang up around the traditional epic and forced it to acknowledge modernity. Whether they deflated the old epic stories or wrote of everyday life in an inflated style, they based their genre on a startling disjunction of form and content. In so doing, they flaunted their status as literary fictions. The artist’s hand could be seen everywhere in these poems, manipulating the raw materials of history and exposing the epic poet as a maker of illusions. A Virgilian bard in Charles Cotton’s Scarronides (1664–65), narrating the fall of Troy, fails to impress the listening Aeneas, who insists on separating heroic story from sordid reality: if he that wrote this Ditty, Had been with us i’ th’ midst o’ th’ City, When Foggot-sticks, flew in Folks Chopps, And knock’t men down, as thick as Hopps, I do believe for all’s fine Chiming, He would have had small mind of Riming[.]54 In poems like this one, the genre’s aspiration to timeless myth collided with historical contingency. Ancient forms were demystified and pushed into incongruous modern settings. In this way English mock epic and burlesque showed the failure not just of a literary attitude but also of the nation’s collective memory. A single body of heroic story could no longer command broad assent when all discourses had been colonized by partisan interests. Butler’s Hudibras (1663), complaining that its contentious age is “found, / With nothing but Disputes t’abound,” grumbles at those “Heralds” who “stickle, who got who, / So many hundred years ago” (3.3.471–82). James Scudamore’s Homer A La Mode (1664) dismissed the Iliad’s catalogue of Greek troops as a meaningless “bead-roll of hard Names” and found fault with the leaders who led them to their deaths.55 There could now be no shared cultural past, no universal myth of origin, to unite a fractious modern polity. The English political landscape of the early 1660s was profoundly changed from a decade before, when Cowley and Davenant published their unfinished epics. Both poets had made an ambiguous peace with the Commonwealth authorities. Cowley kept a low profile after his return to England in 1654, and some royalists seem to have suspected him of collaborating with Cromwell’s security apparatus.56 Davenant secured official permission to produce operatic spectacles in London, most of a heroic cast and putatively in support of the harps in babylon

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Protectorate’s foreign policy agenda, although recent scholars have found political subtexts addressed to “inactive, temporizing, or pragmatic royalists” in his audience.57 With the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, the English royalist underground reclaimed its public voice. A shower of panegyric verse rained down upon the newly installed court of Charles II. His devotees proclaimed the return of arts and letters after the lean years of the Interregnum. “This day the Muses doth anew inspire,” wrote one Restoration panegyrist; “Your sight great Prince renews their sacred fire, / Quench’d almost with continual tears for you.”58 By such measures, the conditions should have been right for a neoclassical epic revival, perhaps drawing on the French war epics of the 1650s and speaking for an English courtly culture that was eager to rival its Continental peers.Yet a string of mock-epic and burlesque poetry in the early years of the Restoration shows that the rebuilding of the genre would not be so easy.The damage inflicted on English royalist culture by twenty years of civil conflict had not yet healed. Writers continued to struggle with the role of the artist in a divided, strife-torn community, and to feel the burden of anachronism that attended their relationship with the ancients. The crisis of confidence in the martial epic tradition that had afflicted Davenant and Cowley lingered after the return of their king. Few poets were ready to take up the traditional epic and embrace its heroic norms while the nation still assessed its losses and mourned its dead. It was easier, in the early 1660s, to approach the genre through a protective screen of irony than to grasp it with unblinking assurance and risk facing the fact of its obsolescence. Despite the political sea change of the Restoration, then, royalist epic and mock epic held much in common during these years. Personal ties also connected many of their authors. Cowley became acquainted with Davenant through their shared patron, Lord Jermyn, when both poets joined the exiled Stuart court in Paris.59 Both wrote under the personal influence of Hobbes, who scoffed at the “impenetrable Armors, Inchanted Castles, invulnerable bodies, Iron men, flying Horses, and a thousand other such thinges” feigned by the old romances.60 Davenant, praised by Cowley for rescuing heroic poetry from the “fantastique Fairy-land” of Ariosto and Spenser, dedicated the last part of Gondibert to Cotton, the future author of Scarronides. Butler, for his part, was among Davenant’s “most intimate friends,” according to John Aubrey, and Hudibras directly alludes to both the preface to Gondibert and Hobbes’s “Answer.”61 In any case, the boundaries between the genres were not always clearly marked, and poets often moved back and forth across them. Davenant had tried his hand at epic burlesques in the 1630s—including a mock-heroic Jeffereidos, featuring Jeffrey Hudson, the queen’s dwarf—and we have seen that Cowley’s Civil War blends martial epic with topical satire. Taken together, this 134

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body of poetry shared many elements, including a suspicion of political authority and its literary apologists and a turn toward unstable, hybrid forms that express the breakdown of an older cultural consensus. Butler’s Hudibras stands apart from the poetry of Cowley and Davenant, however, in its refusal to idealize the artist. The royalist epic had set out to make the poet’s voice a source of far-reaching authority. The singing voice conveyed a lost sense of community and acted as a means for its restoration. Although neither author could wholly sustain such a vision, each offered fleeting glimpses of an alternative social order where the poet holds sway as a heroic creator and steward of high culture. Butler takes a bleaker view.The chief event in part 1 of Hudibras is the bumbling hero’s overthrow of a group of bearbaiters, led by a musician called Crowdero.This plot action may refer not just to the Parliamentary ban on bearbaiting and other old recreations in the early 1640s but also to a law passed in 1649 forbidding the singing of street ballads.62 The Presbyterian Hudibras, acting as a champion of Puritan repression, singles out the street fiddler as a “chief / Author and Enginier of mischief / That makes division between friends” (1.2.669–71). His pun on “division”—a technical term for a heavily ornamented melodic passage—singles out the musician as a symbol of political resistance. Popular balladry and song would seem to reach back to older forms of community that threatened the new regime. Although minstrelsy had long ago fallen into disrepute, Butler wrote elsewhere of the links he saw between regional oral traditions and the earliest epic poems: “The Heroicall Poetry of the old Bards of Wales and Ireland (and perhaps[s] all other Barberous Nations) who at publique Solemnities, were wont to sing the prayses of their valiant Ancestors, was the Originall of all the more Elegant Greeke and Roman Epique Poems.”63 A musician hostile to the new establishment, Butler’s minstrel might therefore call to mind the royalist poet-singers who saw their art as an alternative site of authority in a divided nation. Yet Crowdero’s fate—he is assaulted by Hudibras and his squire, ingloriously defeated, and led in triumph to the stocks, his fiddle and case confiscated as war trophies—evokes the nightmare trope that had haunted the royalist epic: the silencing of Orpheus, the victimization of the artist under tyranny. Poetry, Butler seems to imply, is no match for the machinery of state power. As so often, though, Butler’s satire adds a further twist of the knife. The persecuted musician’s allies soon regroup, give Hudibras a thrashing, and make him take Crowdero’s place in the stocks. Butler coolly strips away the artist’s glamour: this poet figure is both a victim and an agent of oppression. His name, Crowdero, derives from his fiddle or “crowd” (from Welsh crwth), but it also suggests mob uprising. The poet of resistance does not harps in babylon

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stand aloof from the chaos of the Interregnum era, nurturing a dying flame of civility, but takes an active part in the destruction. Hudibras abounds with favorite royalist tropes—motifs of anarchic violence, contagion, and sectarian discord—but here they reach across the political spectrum to stain everyone they touch. The carnival misrule of the fiddler and bearbaiters is a distorted mirror image of their quarrelsome Presbyterian rulers. The poem’s opening lines, pondering the outbreak of “civil fury” in England, faintly recall the proem to Lucan’s De bello civili: Butler, like Cowley before him, evokes Lucan’s bleak vision of total social fragmentation. Crowdero wields his musical instrument as a weapon in the poem’s mad Babel, where hostile factions endlessly multiply and fill the landscape with the din of clashing voices.64 The figure of the musician played a key role in Hudibras from the poem’s inception. In a 1663 letter, Butler claimed that he had based his plot on a scuffle between a Parliamentary colonel and a fiddler in the West Country. Their combat, he wrote, “is upon record, for there was a svite of law upon it betweene ye Knt, & ye Fidler, in wch ye Knt was overthrowne to his great shame, & discontent.”65 An allegorical key to Hudibras, published by Roger L’Estrange in 1715 and of uncertain reliability, offers more details: Crowdero is said to be based on a Parliamentary army veteran, a milliner in the New Exchange who was reduced to fiddling in taverns after he lost a leg in the service of the roundheads.66 If this account can be trusted, Crowdero’s skirmish with Hudibras is meant to suggest infighting within the revolutionary camp rather than a principled royalist resistance. Other signals, too, tie Butler’s musician to the new regime. The poem gives Crowdero an origin story of its own, this one linking his injury to a different kind of civil conflict. He broke his leg, Butler reports, while “vent’ring at a Crown”: that is, competing for the title of King of the Minstrels in Staffordshire (1.2.139). Butler’s story blends two regional customs. A royal statute dating from the reign of Richard II provided for Staffordshire minstrels to elect a so-called king and other officials each year from among their ranks to keep their activities in good order. After the annual election ceremony, the minstrels took part in the running of a bull for the amusement of the locals.67 Collapsing these into a single event, Butler claims that “Bulls do chuse the Boldest King / And Ruler, o’re the men of string” (135–36). Crowdero has been wounded “by chance of War” while taking part in the ritual (140). Where Cowley and Davenant made the singer stand for civilization against anarchy, Butler’s figure belongs to a primitive social order, a contentious realm in which the bull and the bear set the terms for human affairs. Butler portrays the musicians’ contest as a brutal power struggle that hides 136

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under the pretense of a liberal meritocracy. This is an electoral system “where Vertuous worth / Does raise the Minstrelsy, not Birth” (133–34), but where—as in the Rump Parliament of the regicides, Butler hints—every man strives to be king. If Butler did model Crowdero on a veteran of the Parliamentary army, he might have noted resemblances between the musician and the Independents who dominated the London soldiery. Opposed to any established state church, the Independents were widely viewed as unhinged fanatics who threatened sectarian division and social collapse. Their standard-bearer in Butler’s poem is Ralpho, Hudibras’s illiterate squire, who claims to be guided by the “dark-Lanthorn of the Spirit, / Which none see by but those that bear it” (1.1.499–500). Drawing again on familiar royalist imagery, Butler mocks the radicals for arrogating divine authority to themselves. He deflates their prophetic witness by insisting on its gross material origins. Gluttony, graft, and sexual excess choke the poem. Butler’s epic narrator, we saw earlier, finds his inspiration in the alehouse (639–42). The oracular Ralpho, seeking a mystical vision of the “First Matter,” “took her naked all alone, / Before one Rag of Form was on” (554–56). Tropes of digestion and excretion hint at the lower bodily sources of the saints’ divine afflatus: as in Bodies Natural, The Rump’s the Fundament of all, So in a Common-wealth, or Realm, The Government is call’d the Helm, With which, like Vessels under Sail, Th’ are turned and winded by the Tail. (3.2.1597–1602) The same tactics that Butler uses to malign these sectaries are also deployed against his Crowdero. The poem stresses the materiality of his trade. Here is no celestial harmony; Butler has no patience for Pythagorean hermeticism.68 The fiddler owes his music not to the divine organization of the cosmos, as for Cowley, but to the entrails of dead animals: For Guts, some write, e’re they are sodden, Are fit for Musick, or for Pudden: From which men borrow ev’ry kind Of Minstrelsy, by string or wind. (1.2.121–24) Like the Protestant radicals, Butler’s Crowdero is self-authorizing and selfgenerating. His musical instrument seems to emanate out of his own body: harps in babylon

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His grizly Beard was long and thick, With which he strung his Fiddle-stick: For he to Horse-tail scorn’d to owe, For what on his own chin did grow. (125–28) His refusal to acknowledge external authority, his grotesque mingling of the human and the animal, and the reduction of his artistry to a kind of bodily excrescence—all of these link the musician with his zealous Puritan oppressors. Like the warmongering priests whose “Pulpit, Drum Ecclesiastick, / Was beat with fist, instead of a stick,” he is just another combatant in the poem’s universal scramble for power (1.1.11–12). Pervading Butler’s poem is the feeling that all sources of authority have been fatally compromised. To celebrate the heroic deeds of long ago, Butler wrote elsewhere, “signif[ies] no more than the Statues upon dead Men’s Tombs, that will never make them live again.”69 The Stuart monarchy was toppled and restored, but there could be no return to the old myths. Art was neither a safe haven in times of national strife nor a site of principled opposition for the dispossessed. Both of those fictions drew on the ancient mystique of the poet’s voice, a belief in the artist’s charismatic power that Butler set out to shatter. The royalists’ effort to seize the commanding heights of English literary culture had only made the babble of partisan voices louder and more violent. As Earl Miner observes, Hudibras “constantly rubs our faces in artistic muck . . . lest we deceive ourselves that this one human accomplishment is uniquely free from pravity and folly.”70 The poem’s narrator is unable or unwilling to carry the burden of social authority. At the same time, Butler rejects all romantic belief in a harmonious political community that had flourished before the war years and might someday thrive again. That lost paradise, if it had ever existed, was gone for good. The nation now spoke too many rival languages; no shared ideology could bring together a people hopelessly given over to discord. This sense of fragmentation was the result not just of civil war but also of seventeenth-century Europe’s changing relationship with its own history, its growing alienation from the ancient sources and guarantors of its cultural identity. Hudibras itself, clogged with a bewildering stock of specialist terms, neologisms, and other “hard words,” testifies to the failure of any single voice to impose order on a divided civilization.71 Like the later Cowley, Butler distrusts all claimants to temporal power and seems only to long for a retreat from the bedlam of opposing voices.

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Readers have sometimes looked for resemblances between Samuel Butler and John Milton. Although they gravitated toward opposite poles of England’s political universe, both poets composed modernizing anti-epics in the aftermath of civil war. Both felt that the political reversals of the 1640s and 1650s called for a new scrutiny of the literary past. They asked whether they had entered an age too late for heroic literature as they picked apart the genre’s ancient protocols. Their poetry recast the nature of heroism and condemned the epic’s quest for beauty in the shedding of blood. Moreover, Paradise Lost, like Hudibras, is obsessed with problems of origin. Milton’s epic unearths the roots of human sin and political tyranny, but also seeks out the foundations of poetic authority. Like Butler, Milton traces the rising din of partisan myths that compete for primacy in the modern polity. Milton’s devils, like Butler’s fiddler, set themselves up as musician-kings: claiming to be “self-begot, self-rais’d,” they “sing . . . / Thir own Heroic deeds” in defeat, composing ideological fictions and false etiologies that sanction their rebellion.72 Paradise Lost portrays their efforts as a failure. Milton strives to preserve a totalizing mythic vision that neither Butler nor his royalist predecessors could maintain with conviction. We shall see that Milton casts the entire martial epic tradition as a false origin, a belated outgrowth of the truly originary genre, the epic hexameron. Facing his own political exile after 1660, he insists in his own way on the mystical counter-authority of the poet’s voice. Yet Milton, even more than Cowley and Davenant, openly struggles with its troubling implications: the fear that there is no going back to a shared origin, and the threat that his voice, becoming a false site of origin in its own right, will plunge him into Butler’s world of mad self-delusion.

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5)FOUR)% Milton’s Lament

milton and pythagoras And indeed why should not the heavenly bodies produce musical vibrations? . . . But Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony—unless he was a good genius or a denizen of the sky who perhaps was sent down by some ordinance of the gods to imbue the minds of men with divine knowledge and to recall them to righteousness. . . . If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras’ was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars. Then indeed all things would seem to return to the age of gold.1

From its earliest outlines in this university oration, John Milton’s embrace of the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres was both ardent and a little defensive. His “De sphaerarum concentu” was in one sense a deeply personal credo, anticipating central motifs in his later life and writings. As a mortal being whose virtue sets him apart for special grace, Pythagoras of Samos is Milton’s earliest figure of the “one just man,” those lonely servants of God who were to populate Milton’s mature vision of human history. At the same time, Pythagoras’s quasi-divine stature—perhaps he was a “good genius or a denizen of the sky” sent down from the heavens with saving knowledge—looks ahead to the musical demigods and angelic beings who haunted Milton’s poetry, perhaps as 140 3)))))#

surrogates for the figure of Christ, whose descent into the flesh he had such trouble portraying in verse. Like many of those later figures, Milton’s Pythagoras is also a symbol of the artist. In his idiosyncratic emphasis on Pythagoras’s chastity, Milton begins to craft an autobiographical model of the divine poet, who, according to Elegia 6, “must live sparingly, like the Samian teacher,” consecrating his body to God in exchange for the gift of song (59–60). Throughout his career, Milton returned to the doctrine of world harmony in ways that bound the idea to his own poetic voice and vocation. Interweaving his Protestant millennial hopes with cherished Greco-Roman fables of a lost golden age, the music of the spheres came to embody a dream of exceptionalism: a desire to be set apart in sanctified purity and to tread the boundary between the human and the divine. European religious epics had been gathering along that boundary for generations. Their often stated goal, set forth as early as Vida’s seminal Christiad (1535), had been to make the pagans’ greatest literary form speak the language of God. Part of this work meant recasting the epic hero in the image of the suffering Christ. Poems such as Johannes Klockus’s Christiados priscae et novae (1601) and Diego de Hojeda’s La Christiada (1611) strove to adapt the traditional postures of epic glory to make them commensurate with his sacrifice. Other biblical figures emerged to fill out a Christian counter-pantheon, championed in poems from Jacopo Sannazaro’s De partu virginis (1526) and Guillaume du Bartas’s Judith (1574) to Ansaldo Ceba’s La reina Esther (1615) and Antoine Godeau’s Saint Paul (1654). With revisionary zeal the poets cast their project as a return to the epic genre’s sacred foundations. They reimagined world history in the idiom of Christian kairos and pushed aside the European epic’s traditional origin story, the translatio imperii that had its roots in ancient Troy. Whether militant or quietist, anguished or serene, they set individual human achievement inside a totalizing cosmic vision that often, as for Milton, traced its origins back to God’s creation of the universe and found its emblem in the music of the spheres. Yet Milton’s tone in this Cambridge exercise feels insecure. He is sometimes combative, sometimes flippant. “I hope, my hearers,” he begins, “that you will take what I say as being said, as it were, in jest.” He concedes that the ancients’ musica universalis is perhaps no more than an allegorical fiction, merely the “universal interaction of all things . . . poetically symbolized as harmony.” Most of Milton’s learned contemporaries viewed Pythagorean world harmony in just this way, as a bookish anachronism. John Hollander has shown how seventeenthcentury Europe presided over an “untuning of the spheres,” the waning tradition of musica speculativa giving way to mechanistic and rhetorical accounts of the effects of music on the body.2 Medieval and humanist beliefs about the m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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network of sympathies and correspondences that animated the natural world were dismantled. The modern sciences of astronomy and acoustics shattered the ancient links binding music to cosmology and ethics. Milton’s youthful prolusion feels torn between these two intellectual systems. Committed to the Christianhumanist belief in a cosmos held together by music, Milton also felt drawn to a newer vision, a fascination with individual human feeling and craft, symbolized by the voice singing alone. The seventeenth-century biblical epic arose in an era when the human creative imagination was disentangling itself from ancient discourses of imitation and inspiration, when the artist began in earnest to lay claim to God’s prerogative as creator.3 One of the central concerns explored by these poems is the story of their own making. What is the place of the literary artifact among the created works of God? Like its peers, Milton’s Paradise Lost restlessly inquires after its own origins, confronting the “ifs” posed by the artist’s craft: “fables true, / If true, here only” (4.250–51); “if all be mine, / Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear” (9.46).4 Drawing on a popular subgenre of hexameral creation epics, Milton frames Paradise Lost as a poem of restitution and return, one that submerges the poet’s voice, joins the choric song of the created universe, and lays its handiwork at the altar of God. Yet Milton’s epic also conveys a deeply proprietary attitude toward his work of creation, an urge to lay claim to the poet’s own singing voice, even as he recoils from its intimacy with the body and organic death.These conflicting ambitions can already be felt in Milton’s Pythagoras, a mortal man whose purity the gods reward with music—yet who is also, in some shadowy sense, a god-man in his own right, a Christ-like intercessor whose magical vocality might redeem humanity and bring back the golden age. This chapter explores how competing forms of speech and song in Milton’s Paradise Lost speak for rival ways of imagining the history and origins of human art. The shared choric song of the angels and of the created universe, linked in the poem with the Pythagorean music of the spheres, strains against a recurring motif of the single human voice singing alone, linked both with the charismatic authority of the poet-narrator and with contemporary Italian monodic song. These two patterns, in turn, are tied to two competing literary traditions. Paradise Lost associates choric song with Christian hexameral and cosmological poetry, which celebrates God’s creation of the universe and humanity’s sinless origins. The poem’s solo voices, by contrast, drawing on mythological source texts from pagan antiquity, are bound up with figures such as Orpheus and Proserpina whose stories reach back through the Roman poetry of Ovid and Claudian to shadowy origins in Greek cultic worship. Such voices in Milton’s poetry tug against the collectivist trope of the music of the spheres, assert their 142

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unique charismatic presence, and resist assimilation. Even as Paradise Lost gives itself over to a hexameral tradition steeped in Pythagorean tropes of world harmony that evoke a return to sacred origins, the poem relentlessly portrays voices in mourning. These evoke darker visions of a pagan past, ancient myths of exile, death, and abandonment that expose the fragility of human achievement and cast the singing voice as the frail organ of a body that must die. In this way they capture abiding tensions at work not just in Milton’s own artistry but in a hexameral epic tradition that sought to marry the attractions of human creative achievement with the urge to submit to the mystery of God’s will.

the minstrelsy of heaven The tropes of world harmony expounded in Renaissance hexameral poetry reached back to the ancient Mediterranean some two centuries before Plato, where the Pythagorean harmonia mundi became the fulcrum of a larger set of beliefs about the structure of the universe. The legendary experiments of Pythagoras, measuring the pitches produced by a plucked string of varying lengths, grew into a vision of a cosmos bound together by a network of mathematical proportions and concords, a vision that came to encompass human biology, psychology, political philosophy, cosmology and astrology, and theology and ethics. Theories of world harmony in Greek antiquity coalesced into two cosmological models.5 The dominant tradition held that the eight concentric spheres of the universe generated musical tones as they rubbed against one another in their revolutions. In a more fanciful variation attractive to the poets, Plato’s Republic placed a singing siren atop each of the heavenly spheres as these revolved around the distaff of Necessity, their eight tones creating harmonia. Early Neoplatonism, absorbing the occult mysticism of Hellenistic Pythagorean thought, charted resemblances between the music of the cosmos and the human microcosm. The Neoplatonists asserted the musicality of the individual soul, which, they argued, cannot hear the music of the spheres due to the frailty of the body’s sense organs, but which delights in all forms of earthly music because these trigger faint memories of the forgotten divine song. It became customary, too, to replace Plato’s celestial sirens with the nine Muses, and thus to tie the music of heaven to human arts and customs. The Pythagoras known to Milton had long since been absorbed into Christian thought and cultural expression. As Pythagorean doctrine spread across the late antique Roman world, it interacted and blended with other forms of esoteric religio-philosophical lore. The hugely influential fifth-century writings of Boethius and Macrobius drew this scattered body of ideas together and bequeathed the doctrine of world harmony to early Christian Europe. Ambrose, m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, and a host of later medieval commentators held that the church rituals of hymn and liturgy could mimic the ordering harmony of the cosmos. Whereas the Greeks understood the music of the spheres in terms of static, linear relations—a set of perfect ratios governing the intervals or “steps” between tones in a diatonic scale—the emergence of Western polyphony enabled the Middle Ages to imagine harmonia as the simultaneous blending of consonant tones, an architectural unity made out of many voices. Plato’s singing sirens were gradually assimilated to the angelic choruses of scripture; Dante’s angels “notan sempre dietro a le note de li etterni giri” (are attuned forever to the music of the spheres),6 while Milton’s Nativity Ode asks that the “crystal spheres . . . with your ninefold harmony / Make up full consort to the angelic symphony” (125–32). The musical world-soul of Plato’s Timaeus could now be understood as an instrumental accompaniment to the angels and part of a shared song of the created universe.World harmony became sacred harmony; to take part in psalm singing and hymnody was to attune the heart to God and to participate in a cosmic liturgy of praise. Encyclopedic Renaissance music theorists like Gioseffo Zarlino and Marin Mersenne joined these inherited strains of musica speculativa into a thoroughgoing intellectual system, which included scraps of medical theory, Neoplatonic esoterica, mathematics and number symbolism, acoustics, and assorted biblical and legendary fragments on music and musicians. Versions of these beliefs extend into the England of Milton’s youth, where they routinely appear in defenses of church music. Richard Hooker, for one, urged that congregations should “sound forth hymns to God, having his angels intermingled as our associates.”7 Tropes of Christian world harmony found a congenial home in the sixteenthcentury hexameral epic.This vast, encyclopedic creation poetry was popularized by the Semaines (1578, 1584) of the Huguenot poet Guillaume du Bartas, translated into English by Josuah Sylvester as Devine Weekes and Workes (1598, 1605). Du Bartas describes how God on the seventh day “Appointed Earth to Rest, and Heav’n to Dance”: For (as they say) for super-Intendent there, The supreme Voice placed in every Spheare A Syrene sweet; that from Heav’ns Harmonie Inferiour things might learne best Melodie: And their rare Quier with th’Angels Quier accord To sing aloud the praises of the Lord[.]8 Among the century’s most widely read literary works, the Semaines went through dozens of editions and spawned many imitations. These poems’ popularity can 144

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be traced to a range of causes. Their homely Christian piety stretched across confessional lines and could stand as a response to the pagan world’s monopoly on epic achievement. The heroic warfare and empire building of the classical epics was answered with an organic, open-ended, hymn-like poetry of divine world making, celebrating the immense creative scope and complexity of the cosmos. Du Bartas’s poem has been described as “an epic of the divine plan in the physical universe, with God the Maker as its epic hero.”9 It traced the sheer diversity of the created world with endless curiosity, picking up and admiring each of its teeming elements like shiny pebbles on a beach. Such writings offered both sprawling plenitude—the unfinished Semaines stretch out to more than twenty thousand lines—and a deep sense of the interconnectedness of all things. No matter how trivial or arcane, the materials of the cosmos were gathered together, revealed as components of a divinely ordered whole, and turned to the collective praise of their creator. The genre’s appeal lay in its combination of the old and the new: traditional beliefs were bundled together with cutting-edge speculative inquiry, medieval credulity with modern rationalism. Its restless search for knowledge of the natural world was safely nestled inside a rhetoric of piety and wonder. Its core premises differed little from those of the fourth-century hexameral writings of Basil and Ambrose on which the genre was ultimately based. For all the dynamism of the world that it portrayed, this epic idiom was essentially static and descriptive, its structural architecture built up by slow, dogged aggregation and committed to the belief in a changeless cosmic order. Like other aspects of that order, the traditional harmonia mundi by now found itself besieged on many fronts. Advances in the empirical sciences, and especially in astronomy, weakened the traditional doctrine. Those who referred to the music of the spheres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to muffle their claims with evasions and disclaimers.10 An increasingly lonely and eccentric line of thinkers continued to insist, in their different ways, on the literal reality of world harmony—Robert Fludd, Johannes Kepler, Athanasius Kircher—but the dismantling of the ancient ordering systems that had propped up the music of the spheres tended to flatten the tradition into allegory. Cowley’s Davideis, for example, notes that celestial harmony refers to the mathematical relations of number, weight, and measure by which God orders the universe, not to a system of audible sounds that “Pythagoras, Plato,Tully, Macrob[ius] and many of the Fathers imagined, to arise audibly from the circumvolution of the Heavens” (176–77).11 If the music of the spheres was losing its hold by the end of the sixteenth century, the hexameral epic, too, struggled to shore up traditional orthodoxies against cultural change. Like other exponents of Pythagorean doctrine in this m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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period, the hexameral poems that gave themselves over to such beliefs often show hints of bad faith, as if measuring the poets’ unease over the creaky ideological architecture that structured their genre. It became a defensive reflex for them to contrast their own sacred argument with the mischievous lies of their pagan predecessors, with special animus reserved for the materialist creation myth set out in Lucretius’s De rerum natura.12 At the same time they repeatedly worried over their own prying into divine mysteries and paused to ponder the sources of their inspiration. Alonso de Acevedo’s La Creación del mundo (1615), in a passage closely imitating Du Bartas, shrinks from flying too high, for “infunde temor en mi memoria / Del atrevido Icaro la historia” (the story of audacious Icarus inspires fear in my memory).13 As if to screen themselves from the charge of impious overreaching, poets adopted postures of elaborate self-abasement. Some took up the ancient conceit employed in Tasso’s Mondo creato (ca. 1594): Signor, tu se’ la mano, io son la cetra, La qual mossa da te, con dolci tempre Di soave armonia, risuona, e molce D’adamantino smalto i duri affetti. Signor, tu se’ lo spirto, io roca tromba Son per me stesso a la tua gloria; e langue, Se non m’ispiri tu, la voce, e ’l suono.14 [O Lord, you are the hand, I am the harp, which, touched by you, resounds with the sweet tempering of gentle harmony, and softens the hardened affections of an adamantine shell. O Lord, you are the breath, while I am but a raucous trumpet for your glory, and my voice and sound fade away if you do not inspire me.]

The Puritan poet Lucy Hutchinson went further in her Genesis paraphrase, Order and Disorder, to drain from the poem all traces of her own creative agency: In these outgoings would I sing his praise, But my weak sense with the too glorious rays Is struck with such confusion that I find Only the world’s first Chaos in my mind. ... Quicken my dull earth with celestial fire, And let the sacred theme that is my choice Give utterance and music to my voice, Singing the works by which thou art revealed.15 Hutchinson portrays her self-immersion in God as an escape from the Lucretian turmoil of human authorship; her hexameron itself serves as an act of 146

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reparation to atone for her translation of the De rerum natura in the 1650s. Her poem’s margins are laden with hundreds of biblical tags that lead the reader away from the author’s literary activity—“I tremble,” she writes in her preface, “to think of turning Scripture into a romance”16—toward the authority of God’s revealed word. The citation keyed to the last line of the passage above refers to Romans 1:15, Paul’s account of his desire to preach to both Greeks and barbarians, both the educated and the ignorant. The poem prostrates its learning before God’s inscrutable wisdom and everywhere stresses the shaping action of Providence in correcting and redeeming the work of the human will. Hutchinson’s approach to the book of Genesis exemplifies the hexameral epic tradition as a whole, with its animating tension between the author’s assertive voice, searching, gathering, and questioning, and the deeply felt need for pious self-effacement and restraint: an ongoing sense of strain, in other words, resulting from the poet’s double status as creature and creator. Milton’s debts to Du Bartas and the hexameral tradition are well known.17 Weaving itself and its own telling into a cosmos held together by harmonia, Milton’s Paradise Lost sometimes feels like a throwback to an earlier cultural era. His epic, as I indicated earlier, is organized by themes of restitution and return.18 Its obsession with going backward, with recovering what has been lost, is bound together with traditions of Pythagorean musica speculativa. The proem to book 3 casts the gift of song as a recompense for the physical infirmity of blindness: Yet not the more Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt Clear spring, or shady Grove, or Sunny Hill, Smit with the love of sacred Song; but chief Thee Sion and the flow’ry Brooks beneath[.] ... Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid Tunes her nocturnal Note. (3.26–30, 37–40) Several forms of recovery work are imagined in this famous passage. The blind poet compares his “Harmonious numbers” to the music of the nightingale, the bird mythically rewarded with music for having suffered the agony of bodily violation (37–40). This divine compensation involves nightly visits to the primeval source of poetry itself, portrayed by turns as a conventional Pierian wellspring and as an animistic golden age landscape, infused with creative m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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life. Milton’s scene of literary inspiration is at the same time a sacred site of origin, linked to the “flow’ry Brooks” that flow beneath Mount Zion; his gift will be to sing of first things, a return to the creation story in Genesis, as Milton’s epic emulates the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The passage’s dominant metaphor for divine inspiration is a loss of sight exchanged for the gift of insight. But also at stake in Milton’s imagery is a pivot from the book to the voice. To his sightless eyes the “Book of knowledge fair” has been blotted out and supplanted by oral forms—the “sacred Song” of the divine muse, the warbling of the nightingale, and the mandate to “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (47–55).While his predecessor Du Bartas had called the world “a Booke in Folio, printed all / With God’s great Workes in Letters Capitall,”19 Milton eschews the metaphor and returns to the oral mode of the ancient bards and prophets, Thamyris and Phineas, Tiresias and Homer, whose wisdom belongs to the earliest, pre-textual dawning of Western thought. Behind this rhetoric of compensatory song, a dream of returning to the ancient oral wellsprings of human knowledge, lurks the teaching of Pythagoras; in Milton’s early prolusion on the music of the spheres, he had argued that the nocturnal trilling of nightingales was an effort “to harmonize their songs with that heavenly music to which they studiously listen.”20 The doctrine of world harmony has a long history in Milton’s poetry, which, as in Paradise Lost, is bound up with motifs of bodily restitution and a return to a prehistoric past. Milton’s writing on the music of the spheres never shows much interest in the allegorical abstractions of Cowley, still less in hermetic number theory. Perhaps because of his father’s amateur musicianship, perhaps because of his own gathering commitment to monist materialism, claims for world harmony in Milton’s poetry are vested in the sensuous apprehension of musical sound. They cling to human bodies, to the physiology of hearing and voice. This means that they are also bound together with the body’s infirmities and limitations. Original sin became the core ethical premise of Milton’s musica speculativa. Already in “De sphaerorum concentu” he had reached a synthesis that held for the rest of his career. In this account, the divine song is an empirical reality, symbolizing the loving relationship between creation and creator; the human inability to hear that music constitutes a legacy of the primal transgression of Adam and Eve—symbolized in Prolusion 2 by Prometheus’s theft of fire—that is carried by the mortal body. In Milton’s writing, the corporal burden of “earthly grossness” forms the predicate of celestial harmony. Our spirit is “warped earthward” (Prolusion 2); we long for divine music to melt the “lep’rous sin” from our “earthly mould” (“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” 138); but our “disproportion’d sin” has stripped humanity of its part in the song of creation (“At a Solemn 148

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Music,” 19), and the “heavenly tune” can now be heard by “none . . . / Of human mould with gross unpurged ear” (“Arcades,” 72–73). The human condition after the fall is that of Milton’s Comus: embodied and imbruted, with neither “ear nor soul to apprehend” the voice of sanctified purity (A Maske at Ludlow Castle, 784). Milton’s world harmony therefore became inextricable from the structure of Christian salvation history. Because sin made the music of the spheres inaudible to mortal ears, Milton in effect pushed that music back into prehistory and forward into an eschatological future. Perhaps this was a defensive gesture, needed to rescue the doctrine from fading into allegory. Milton saved the reality of world harmony at the cost of cutting it off irrevocably from mortal life. His descriptions of celestial music habitually pivot into acts of deferral. His first great poem, the Nativity Ode, exposes the failure of the poet’s dream to hear the “holy Song” of the cosmos before his time: “wisest Fate says no, / This must not yet be so” (133, 149–50). Such a union of heaven and earth will come about only through the violence and pain of the historical process, culminating in the terror of final judgment. In Paradise Lost, Adam’s casual reference to hearing the songs of the angels as they stroll by night in Paradise, lifting their “Celestial voices to the midnight air” (4.682), is one of Milton’s most evocative glimpses of an unfallen golden age; yet the passage resembles an earlier dream in which a lost music has been fleetingly heard—and wept over—by that other figure of the natural man, Shakespeare’s Caliban.21 This restless peekaboo of indulging and then retracting apocalyptic fantasies exposes a second, competing impulse embedded in Milton’s musica speculativa. Milton spent his literary career both walling off the celestial music from human life and nursing a fantasy of tearing down the wall. In De Doctrina Christiana, insisting that some remnant of the divine image remains in fallen humanity, he cites Psalm 19 (“The heavens declare the glory of God”), “which could not be,” he infers, “if man were incapable of hearing their voice.”22 We saw in Prolusion 2 that he identified himself with Pythagoras, the sole mortal to hear the music of creation, even as he speculated that the man had been a “good genius” or heavenly emissary sent by the gods to share holy wisdom. Milton returned obsessively to such figures: musical beings who embodied his own deeply felt exceptionalism, a sense of vocation so strong that it came close to believing himself set apart for privileged access to divine grace. The Genius of the Woods in Arcades had boasted of hearing a divine music forbidden to grosser ears: “in deep of night when drowsiness / Hath locked up mortal sense, then listen I / To the celestial sirens’ harmony” (61–63). Such fictions anticipate the mature poet’s nightly visits to those regions “where the Muses haunt / Clear spring, or shady Grove, or Sunny Hill, / Smit with the love of sacred Song” as he composed Paradise Lost m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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(3.27–29).The motif of participating again in a choric song lost to human history haunts Milton’s poetry. This fantasy structure is linked to Milton’s fascination with bodily purity. We have seen that he associates his epic song in Paradise Lost with the music of the nightingale, with its evocations of sexual ravishment and restitution. In his poetry both early and late, a chain of relationships binds together the poet’s voice, the human body and its life cycle, and the shape of history itself. Whether or not he identified his poetic gifts from an early stage with his own chastity, as E. M. W. Tillyard has argued, Milton’s early writings connect his poetic vocation to the fate of his body.23 William Kerrigan has poignantly traced the young Milton’s concern for sexual purity to a regressive fantasy of evading death: by turning his body into a fortress, by rigidly restricting its intercourse with the material world, Milton sought to wish away the corruptibility of the mortal body. His early poetry repeatedly indulges in visions of divine cleansing and purifying, painless dissolution, and winged ascent. The Younger Brother in A Maske is the purest example of this reflex: outlining the masque’s notorious theme of faith, hope, and chastity, he explains that, after death, the soul of the unchaste is condemned to linger among the tombs, chained erotically to its discarded corpse—“as loath to leave the body that it lov’d”—while the chaste soul somehow skirts the death of the body altogether, simply rising “in clear dream” of heavenly bliss (452–74). In Kerrigan’s view, Milton’s later adoption of the mortalist heresy, the doctrine that the soul dies with the body and will be raised with it at the Last Judgment, accords with this lifelong refusal to come to terms with the death of the body. By positing the temporary death of the soul, Milton no longer has to imagine a state after corporal death when the soul will be forced to witness the body’s corruption in the grave. He allows himself to leapfrog over the crisis of the mortal body and proceed directly from the moment of dying to the Second Coming, thus “transforming Christian mortality into a perfection of Ovidian metamorphosis.”24 The dream of hearing the music of the spheres is bound up with such mechanisms of denial. It is founded on a wish that human mortality might somehow be overcome if one could just exercise enough self-discipline, if one were only chaste enough. Such impulses in Milton’s writing easily weave together with his Pythagorean thought, since they have a striking tendency to form themselves into motifs of moving backward through time. When Milton wrote of apocalypse or the afterlife, he habitually depicted these as a form of return: “all things would seem to return to the age of gold” (Prolusion 2); “O may we soon again renew that song / . . . and sing in endless morn of light” (“At a Solemn Music,” 25–28); “if such holy song / Enwrap our fancy long, / Time will run back, and fetch the age of 150

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gold” (“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” 133–35). Precedents can be found in patristic, Neoplatonic, and Protestant millenarian writings, but they do not fully account for this tendency to look backward, to cast eschatological expectation as a return to sinless origins. Milton’s habit of describing endings as reprised beginnings—imagined recoveries of a lost golden age prior to sin and corruption—suggests another form of his desire to project an exceptional purity. Especially in his early poetry, such gestures hint at a deep, unspoken conviction that although the laws of sin nominally apply to him, it is not wholly just that they should do so. The young Milton, Stephen Fallon suggests, could not quite persuade himself that he carried the taint of original sin, and, despite a lifetime of failures and setbacks, he struggled against facing the consequences of the fall in himself.25 Although this formulation may overstate the case, Milton’s early writings suggest a longing to stand apart from sinful humanity as a recipient of special grace. Hurrying past scenes of final judgment, his imagination recurs to fantasies of painless repristination, running time backward to erase the stain of postlapsarian impurity. His instinct to frame the last things as the restoration of a lost heavenly song can be understood in these terms as a psychological defense against mortality. To share in the divine song—whether in a general return to a lost “age of gold” or through the special dispensation granted to Milton’s Pythagorean heroes—is to bypass the effects of the fall in the human body. At the same time, it attests to an unspoken desire for restitution: a demand to be compensated for having endured the indignity of original sin, with all of the frustrated postponements and deferrals that it has forced upon human life. All of these patterns come together in Paradise Lost, which postpones its own account of cosmic creation in order to portray it as a compensatory response to war and suffering. The narrating angel Raphael makes the hexameron not a spatial and descriptive form but a dynamic and temporal one, focused on the sequential process of repairing the damage wrought by the rebel angels. Patterns of return to an undefiled beginning stretch across the poem’s middle books.The songs of Milton’s angels draw much of their poetry from the heavenly choruses in the book of Revelation; Milton takes those hymns back from the end of time and stretches them across prelapsarian history to suffuse the whole timescape of his poem with the eschatological music of the saints.26 Their liturgy of praise both celebrates and participates in the work of creation. As the Godhead infuses its “vital virtue . . . and vital warmth” into the darkness (7.236), so the angelic song pours itself into the abyss and animates it with praise: “with joy and shout / The hollow Universal Orb they fill’d, / And touch’d their golden Harps, and hymning prais’d / God and his works” (256–59). Laced with the language and imagery of Revelation, these songs of universal concord anticipate the order to m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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come at the end of time, when all creatures will come together in worship and “God shall be All in All” (3.341), but they are shown to have been latent in the poem’s cosmos from its beginning. The making of the universe, in turn, looks back to a prior order of things before the rebellion in heaven. Milton’s Raphael describes the angelic “song and dance about the sacred hill” (5.619) that was broken by the rebellion of Satan, whose breach with God is marked at its outset by a refusal to take part in these rituals of loving praise: all “slept / Fanned with cool winds, save those who in their course / Melodious hymns about the sovereign throne / Alternate all night long: but not so waked / Satan, so call him now” (654–58). Raphael pauses to draw an analogy between such rites and the dancing stars of the created universe, to whose “harmony divine . . . God’s own ear / Listens delighted” (625–27). The poem portrays Satan’s creation of an ideology of war as a secondary and belated discourse, the unnatural outgrowth of a divine liturgy that is prior to it and which must return. Against the angels’ “sacred Song” (3.339) of piety and praise, rebellion defines itself as discord. Again and again the rebels ridicule the good angels’ musicality. The loyalists, they claim, shrink from battle for the “easier business” of making “songs to hymn [God’s] Throne, / And practis’d distances to cringe, not fight” (4.944–45). Mammon scorns their lip service of “warbl’d Hymns” and “forc’t Halleluiahs” (2.242–43). Satan jokes that the angels sent wheeling by cannon fire are dancing for joy (6.615–17). “[T]rain’d up in Feast and Song,” he sneers elsewhere, they are “the Minstrelsy of Heav’n” (167–68). These taunts have their ultimate source in Homer’s Iliad, where the Trojans repeatedly mock Paris by associating him with music and the dance.27 Their use by the rebel angels already feels oddly derivative; it is the familiar rhetoric of a masculinist warrior culture that can cohere only through division and exclusion, an impoverishment of the good angels’ more capacious forms of community. While the rebels’ “odious din” evokes the “universal hubbub wild” of primordial Chaos (2.951), the loyalists bracket the din of war with songs of praise: when Abdiel’s blow against Satan begins the war, “the faithful Armies rung / Hosanna to the Highest” (204–5); as the war ends with the Son’s expulsion of the rebels, the heavenly host “Sung Triumph, and him sung Victorious King” (886). Rupture and fragmentation are answered by continuity and restoration. Milton’s backward-looking vision of cosmic harmony sets Paradise Lost apart from the chivalric war epics that were by now the normative model for European epic poetry on religious subjects. By Christianizing Virgilian martial piety, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata had set a pattern for most of the seventeenth century’s epic theory and a good deal of its practice. By mid-century, the 152

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neoclassical epic’s dominant subject, especially in France, was sacred warfare.28 In poems like Pierre Le Moyne’s Saint Louis (1653, 1658) or Jean Chapelain’s La Pucelle (1656), God’s angels ranged themselves under the banners of Christian holy warriors while Satan oversaw the hopeless resistance of their hard-hearted pagan enemies. Related patterns also extended to heroic poems treating the war in heaven, such as Erasmo di Valvasone’s Angeleida (1590), where the loyalists’ victory over the rebel angels translates easily into the idiom of the warrior epic: Quivi si sta celestïal Sirena, Che con santa armonìa di dolci note Lodando il suo fattor in giro mena Di quel primo orbe l’argentate rote: Onde stilla virtù, che alla terrena Arida mole dar l’umido puote: Questa al passar delle vittrici genti Il lor volo seguì con tali accenti. Salve, o del sommo Dio prole sincera, Indefesso valor, milizia invitta: Salve, e poggiando alla sublime sfera, Che hai di tua mano a’ rei frati interditta, Godi il trionfo, e la mercede intera, Che al tuo sublime merto è stata ascritta: E quivi di sua man d’eterni allori Il tuo gran padre le tue tempie onori.29 [There stands the celestial Siren, praising her maker with the holy harmony of her sweet notes as she guides the circling silvery wheels of the first orb, whence virtue trickles down to moisten the parched matter of earth. As the triumphant crowd passed by she followed their flight with these words: Hail, true offspring of the highest God, tireless valor, undefeated soldiery! Taking your rest upon the sublime sphere from which your hand has barred your wicked brethren, rejoice in your victory and in the full reward that has been measured out for your exalted merit. There, with his own hand, your great Father shall honor your temples with an everlasting laurel crown.]

Such protocols were so widely shared that Milton’s scene of triumphal rejoicing among the victors (6.882–92) stands out for its brevity. Instead Milton frames the battle’s climax, the Son’s defeat of the rebels, with forms of restitution and renewal: his first act upon ascending the chariot of paternal deity is to return the uprooted hills to their places and thus to renew heaven’s “wonted face” (783). Upon his victorious return, “Disburdened heaven rejoiced, and soon m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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repaired / Her mural breach, returning whence it rolled” (878–9). The key words are “rejoiced,” “repaired,” and “returning,” their shared prefix signaling an act of going backward or undoing. Celestial warfare in Milton’s poem is secondary to the work of restorative creation that launches the hexameral praise poem of its seventh book. As a literary artifact, Paradise Lost presents itself, too, as both a compensation and a return, calling epic poetry back to the sacred liturgy of creation. There is no explicit reference in Milton’s epic to the “disproportioned sin” of “At a Solemn Music,” ascribing to the fall of man an irrevocable untuning of the musica humana. In its place is the narrator’s exchange of his sightless eyes for the lost gift of divine song. Each act of new creation is a form of restitution for prior losses—a pattern appropriate for a poem that chronicles the ultimate loss and lays out the terms for recovery.

voices of the dead We have seen that Milton’s Paradise Lost draws on a cluster of traditions and motifs that are closely intertwined in his early writings. The Pythagorean music of the spheres, associated for Milton with both bodily purity and poetic inspiration, was recast to fit a model of Christian salvation history that linked the poet’s access to divine song with the return of Eden, the restitution of loss and suffering, the evasion of human mortality, and the reintegration of the self into a choric community of the blessed. Such beliefs form a powerful frame for imagining the shape of history and for buttressing the authority of the poetprophet. But this is only one of the models set forth in Paradise Lost to frame the author’s voice and its sources of origin. Like the Renaissance hexameral poems that influenced its vision, Milton’s epic shows some signs of bad faith in its desire to complement God’s work of creation and join his creatures’ chorus of praise. For Milton never entertained a dream of total self-immersion in an eschatological community of the saints. While John Donne could imagine himself wholly transformed into a passive instrument of God—“I am comming to that Holy roome, / Where, with thy Choir of Saints for evermore, / I shall be made thy Musique”30—it is a gesture that Milton’s poetry resists. Absolute self-effacement before God, writes Stanley Fish, “is a truth Milton was continually proclaiming, yet one he could never fully accept.”31 Milton’s favorite authorial personae were solitary voices of charismatic authority: the Athenian orator before the Areopagus; the Hebraic prophet crying out against a sinful generation; the poetsinger flanked by rapt listeners. His literary visions of heaven, both early and late, set glorified individuals in sharp relief against an undifferentiated backdrop of choric festivity. These luminous central figures—the Christ-child hymned by ranks of angels, Edward King or Charles Diodati crowned with bliss, Abdiel or 154

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the Son of God received in triumph by the heavenly host—ray out from the autobiographical vision that concludes Of Reformation, Milton’s apocalyptic prayer that “amidst the Hymns, and Halleluiahs of Saints some one may perhaps bee heard offering at high strains in new and lofty Measures to sing and celebrate thy divine Mercies, and marvelous Judgements in this Land throughout all Ages.”32 In these visionary tableaux, a residual “I” jostles against a totalizing angelic “we,” asserts its rhetorical independence, resists assimilation. Milton came very early to the rhetorical pose of the singing bard in ways that reveal a deeply proprietary attitude toward his art. His impulse was to treat written texts not as autonomous artifacts but as oral utterances, organic extensions of their creator’s bodily presence and a function or epiphenomenon of his total personality—to insist that, in Milton’s terms, the poet himself is the “true Poem.” Throughout his career, Milton returned hypnotically to the conceit of the poet as an oral performer, ritually decked with “his garland and singing robes about him.”33 Such postures drew heavily on both native British and Greco-Roman traditions. In Ad Patrem, Milton describes his gathering vocation in terms of the old custom “that the bard should sit at the festal banquet, wearing a garland of oak leaves on his unshorn locks, and should sing of the deeds and emulable achievements of heroes, and of chaos and of the broad foundations on which the earth rests” (44–49). The Attendant Spirit in A Maske promises a tale that “never yet was heard in Tale or Song, / From old or modern Bard, in Hall or Bow’r” (44–45). Il Penseroso seems to refer to Spenser when it speaks of those “great bards” who “In sage and solemn tunes have sung, / Of tourneys and of trophies hung; / Of forests, and enchantments drear, / Where more is meant than meets the ear” (116–20). Both Lycidas (53) and Mansus (42–43) describe the Druids as bardic singers. Areopagitica jokingly describes English popular ballads as an equivalent of literary romance, “the Countrymans Arcadia’s and his Monte Mayors.”34 Further examples abound. Leah Marcus has noted that “it is in part the profoundly oral quality of his literary production during a period of increasing emphasis on the visual potential of printed books that makes Milton appear a glorious throwback to the earlier days of European humanism.”35 Even as Milton repeatedly wrote of rejoining the heavenly chorus, then, he tended to portray his own art as that of a charismatic voice singing alone. Yet in Paradise Lost Milton’s signature trope finds a home among the damned. The devils’ recitations of “Thir own heroic deeds,” he writes, “Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment / The thronging audience” (2.549, 554–55). Elements of this scene, with its imagery of suspension and enthrallment, can be traced back to Milton’s earliest account of his own poetic ambitions in “At a Vacation Exercise”; there he had hoped someday to emulate Homer’s “wise m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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Demodocus,” whose story of the Trojan War held “sad Ulysses’ soul and all the rest / . . . with his melodious harmony / In willing chains and sweet captivity” (50–52).Milton’s recurring symbol for poetic authority,the singing voice,was often attended by imagery of constriction and bondage. In his religious epic, it takes on a thoroughly negative moral coloring, as a symbol for the sinful desire to claim as one’s own the creative agency that derives from God. The devils’ insistence on their radical autonomy reveals the impulse to claim ownership over one’s art as a solipsistic delusion. The voice that breaks free from the chorus of God’s creatures to declare its separate agency—its special “vocation”—also exposes its lonely vulnerability. Its songs are laments over the lost experience of belonging that has been forfeited in the scramble for independence from God. The devils sing of their heroic deeds, but the narrator punningly observes that “Thir Song was partial” (2.552); a caricature of the angels’ part-songs, their music reflects a splintered community. They have already divided themselves into wandering blocs, pursuing separate vocations as they bide their time in hell, and their partial song captures the loss of unity that marks their alienation from God. In Paradise Lost, the voices of the fallen are a cautionary counterpoint to the narrator’s divine song. They serve as a reminder of what befalls the artist who strays from God to chase after fictions of his own making. If the poem’s solo voices cling to claims of self-determination, they are frequently also voices in mourning. Like Milton’s writings on the music of the spheres, his voices of the damned are bound up with the fate of the human body. I suggested earlier that the figure of Pythagoras reflects a dream of rising above the limitations of the body, a kind of inversion of Christ’s descent into the flesh.Yet such patterns are shadowed in Milton’s poetry by their dark anti-type, the voice that sings for its own glory and is associated not with liberation but with bodily impairment and entrapment. In the young Milton’s unfinished poem on Christ’s passion, for example, he casts a backward glance at his recently completed ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”: Erewhile of music, and ethereal mirth, Wherewith the stage of air and earth did ring, And joyous news of heavenly infant’s birth, My muse with angels did divide to sing: But headlong joy is ever on the wing, ... For now to sorrow must I tune my song, And set my harp to notes of saddest woe[.] (1–9) 156

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Distancing itself from the angelic chorus of the Nativity Ode—“divide to sing” activates puns both on choral part-singing and on a more technical sense of “divisions” as rapid, ornamented melodic passages—the poetic “I” finds its voice only in the transition from shared joy to private grief. The hymnal harp and epic trumpet are set aside for the “softer strings / Of lute, or viol still, more apt for mournful things” (27–28). Some scholars have attributed the failure of “The Passion” to the poem’s intense artistic self-consciousness; W. R. Parker wryly observes that “Milton was writing a poem about himself writing a poem.”36 Others have blamed its weaknesses on Milton’s lifelong discomfort over the scene of Christ’s crucifixion. The two problems are related. The poet’s restless preoccupation with his own voice in “The Passion” is an oblique, symptomatic response to the sacrificial death at the poem’s center. Milton opens the poem proper with a vivid account of Christ’s pitiably mortal body. Yet he suddenly recoils from his glimpse of that “Poor fleshly tabernacle” (17) and spends the rest of the poem indulging in fantasies of spiritual flight: five stanzas of roving verse, whirling chariots, flying cherubs, and viewless wings. He becomes obsessed, too, with forms of poetic creation, most of them couched in bodily metaphors: he could write with his tears on black pages, or on the rocks of the Holy Sepulcher, or he could cry out his woes to the echoing groves. Milton thrashes about inside the narrow limits of this crucifixion poem as if straining to free himself from the vision of human helplessness at its core.The intensity of his response to Christ’s wounded body is heightened by the embarrassment of the poem’s obvious striving for artistic renown—the overwrought conceits, the fourth stanza’s awkward homage to Vida’s Christiad—in the presence of the self-sacrificing God. Milton’s frenetic creative activity suggests a need to assert control in the face of physical frailty and victimization. The poem’s anxiously shifting rhetorical set pieces barely shield the voice of the poet, solitary and vulnerable, from the consciousness that it, too, belongs to a body that must die. Lamenting the death of the incarnate son of God, Milton implicitly mourns the fate of all mortal bodies. The pall of mortality continues to hang over Milton’s later writings on music as the ominous double of his Pythagorean exceptionalism. Images of bodily infirmity and mourning in the early verse develop into a more abstract set of associations that bind the pride of human artistry to the transience of all mortal things. Singing of exile and abandonment, lonely voices in the poems express a doomed love for the fleeting goods of a world that must pass away. By the 1640s, such attitudes can be felt especially strongly in Milton’s responses to the Italianate declamatory solo song that had come to be known as monody. This musical idiom was by definition the art of a voice singing alone, and the term “monody” connected the form to a tradition of lyric obloquy traceable to the funeral m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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dirges of the ancient Greeks.37 Among its pioneers in England was the composer Henry Lawes, whom Milton praised in his thirteenth sonnet for having “First taught our English music how to span / Words with just note and accent” (2–3), subordinating music to text in the manner of the Italian humanists. The poem ends with a strange compliment: “Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher / Than his Casella, whom he woo’d to sing, / Met in the milder shades of Purgatory” (12–14). Milton refers to a brief episode in canto 2 of the Purgatorio. Dante’s Pilgrim, upon reaching the shores of Purgatory, encounters the singercomposer Casella, a dear friend, among the souls recently arrived there. At his request for a song, Casella sings a ravishing setting of a canzone from Dante’s Convivio, “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona”; the company of spirits is transfixed with delight. But their overseer, the Stoic philosopher Cato, sternly interrupts the song, reproves their delay, and ushers them up the mountain.38 The Casella episode seems out of place in this praise poem. But as part of a meditation on an artist’s worldly fame, it weaves together the anxieties that burden Milton’s writing on music. The scene measures the temptations and the limits of human achievement. The text that Casella sings, as Dante’s Convivio explains, is a eulogy to philosophy in the guise of an erotic lyric. Placed in the mouth of a singer who has struggled to free himself from the bonds of the flesh—in Dante’s telling, Casella has died several months before this meeting, but has reached Purgatory only after a Jubilee Year indulgence issued by Pope Boniface VIII—the song embodies the downward pull of mortal artistry, the errant human delight in things of its own making. Dante portrays the song as a moment of blissful lyric suspension, its melody giving such contentment that the listening souls stand fixed in silent admiration (“fissi e attenti / a le sue note”). And yet, like the songs of Milton’s devils that “suspended Hell” with their beauty, Casella’s music of ravishing stillness represents a failure of transcendence, a hiatus from the Commedia’s ascending journey toward the divine.The boatful of souls who reached Purgatory moments earlier had been singing in unison Psalm 114, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto” (the same biblical text that Cowley would later adopt as an inset lyric in the Davideis).39 Their text makes explicit the theme of exodus that dominates Dante’s Purgatorio, a pattern of liberation from the things of this world. That journey entails stripping away all individuation and all love for created things, and reorienting desire toward their divine creator. Cato’s rebuke insists on the nomadic restlessness of the heart, always impelled toward closer union with God; the Pilgrim watches the company of souls leave Casella’s song behind (“lasciar lo canto”) and scramble toward the mountain slope. But the moment of hesitation has been revealing.The Pilgrim had requested the song as a form of solace (“consolare alquanto l’anima mia”) and rest from weariness. The 158

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creature, overwhelmed by its coming immersion in God, cleaves for comfort to the things that it has made, as if unwilling to relinquish its own former standing as a maker. Casella’s song is a farewell to the ideal of the human artifex, even as Dante’s wider narrative frame marks that loss as the cost of spiritual ascent. The rise of Italianate monody helped to condition Milton to link all of these concerns—the mortality of the body, the false pride of creaturely artistry, and the painful renunciation of worldly things—to the motif of the human voice singing alone. Moreover, the origins and repertoire of monodic song invited him to connect those anxieties in more specific ways to the cultural heritage of Greece and Rome. Early Italian opera had sprung from the efforts of musical humanists to reconstruct the vocal music of the ancients, renowned for its ability to move the passions and to exert control over the natural world. The genre embodied the humanists’ dream of making contact with forms of prehistoric human power that had been lost to later times. Drawing heavily on pagan mythology, operatic plots showed a special affinity for myths associated with loss and abandonment. Those themes allowed the composers to make the most of the compositional techniques at their disposal, to color their texts with pathos and move their audiences to tears. Such figures as Orpheus, Ariadne, and Proserpina followed the monody repertoire into England. Milton’s sonnet describes Lawes as “the priest of Phoebus’ choir / That tun’st their happiest lines in hymn, or story” (10–11); when the poem first appeared in print, in Lawes’s Choice Psalmes of 1648, a marginal note glossed “story” as “The story of Ariadne set by him in Music.”40 In the early 1640s Lawes had composed a “Complaint of Ariadne” based on verses by William Cartwright. Its origins lay in Mantua, where Claudio Monteverdi’s hugely successful opera Arianna (1608) had set off a wave of operas and secular songs with plangent Ovidian heroines. Based on the story of Ariadne and Theseus as told in Catullus’s great epithalamium, Poem 64, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroides, the opera culminates in a monodic lament by the abandoned Arianna, “Lasciatemi morire”—the only fragment of this lost work that has come down to us—which instantly took on a life independent of the opera and inspired imitations throughout Europe.The opera’s first performance became famous for its eyewitness descriptions of the audience in tears.41 Giovanni Battista Doni called the lament “perhaps the most beautiful composition of our time in this field.”42 Half a century later, Severo Bonini remarked that “there was not a house which, having harpsichords or theorbos on the premises, did not have the lament [of Arianna].”43 Monodic songbooks such as the Lamenti d’Ariana abandonata da Teseo, printed in Bologna in 1640, proliferated.44 These were among the musical scores that fell into the hands of foreign travelers such as Milton, who was exposed to at least one opera during his m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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Italian journey in 1638–39.45 The Englishman Richard Flecknoe, who encountered Italian opera during his travels in the 1640s, observed that the genre strove for “a pathetickness in lieu of all other Rhetorick,” in the same way that “your Italian orators, with an Oh or a Misericordia, do more move their auditors to tears and compunction, than with all their curious Rhetorick besides.” Flecknoe’s Ariadne Deserted by Theseus (1654), the first printed English opera libretto, praised Monteverdi in its preface.46 Samuel Pepys was still singing Lawes’s Ariadne lament to himself in 1665, while the first foreign opera known to have been performed in Restoration England was the French Ariane by Pierre Perrin and Robert Cambert, staged at court in 1673 and printed in an English translation as Ariadne, or the Marriage of Bacchus.47 This cultural environment helped to sustain the cluster of ideas already developing in Milton’s poetry, a relationship that linked the singing voice to themes of loss, renunciation, and mourning. It also encouraged Milton to identify the doomed dream of human creative autonomy with the cultural heritage of pagan antiquity. Accordingly, Milton’s writings on song began to turn his unsettled views about human artistry into a troubled relationship with the literary past. Over the course of his career, his struggle to reconcile poetic achievement with human limitation and the transience of mortal things migrated from the symbol of the suffering Christ to proxy figures from Greco-Roman story, such as the poet-singer Orpheus. Milton’s early portrayals of Orpheus treat him as an ancient archetype of humanity’s semidivine power over its environment. But the young Milton already tends to place him in the underworld (spellbinding the gods of Tartarus in Ad Patrem) and in contexts of mourning (drawing “Iron tears down Pluto’s cheek” in Il Penseroso). Closely associated with the poet’s desire for worldly fame, the figure of Orpheus increasingly comes to stand for all pagan literature, which, in turn, becomes saturated with the consciousness of mortality and the failure of human art to forestall or mitigate it. European humanism embraced the Orpheus myth as a symbol of human potential and of the cultural legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity. In Milton’s portrayal of Orpheus, the poet’s voice, the source and symbol of the artist’s godlike authority over creation, is also the frail organ of a living body, subject to the depredations of time and constantly threatened with its own destruction. The divine singer becomes the torn and bloodied child of Calliope, the pagan muse who cannot save her son. In Paradise Lost, Milton vacillates between identifying himself with Orpheus and projecting the figure as a negative example, a cautionary type of the pagan artist whose voice fails him because he has placed his confidence in “an empty dream” (7.39) of creative self-sufficiency: 160

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But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his Revellers, the Race Of that wild Rout that tore the Thracian Bard In Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had Eares To rapture, till the savage clamor drowned Both Harp and Voice; nor could the Muse defend Her Son. (7.32–38) The Bacchantes are not just the poet’s enemy but also, in a sense, his double: they evoke the poet’s worry over his own sources of inspiration, the madness of seeking after strange gods of his own making and giving himself up to unsanctioned forms of poetic furor. His centrifugal urge to forsake the divine origins of his creativity, to break free from the sacred chorus and lay claim to his own voice, tears the poet apart. At the same time, however, this familiar passage tells a different story. Stanley Fish has suggested that the frenzied Bacchantes project Milton’s latent fear of losing his own voice in the angelic chorus.48 We have seen that Milton was drawn to fictions of creative autonomy, even as he knew that this meant being drawn toward that part of himself which must die. So often portrayed in postures of grief, his singers do not just mourn their separation from God, the loss of the primal unity that is the origin and cause of their being. Their song can also be understood as the lament of a created being that is in love with its own works but knows that they belong to another and must be abandoned.This is the burden of Dante’s Casella, whose erotic lyric is an elegy for a form of creative achievement that has its center in the human rather than in God. It is also the burden of Orpheus, whose backward glance at his beloved Eurydice had long been regarded by Christian allegorists as a symbol for humanity’s stubborn love of mortal things. For Milton the singer’s grief is fueled by his felt alienation from God, but also by the pending loss of those same alienated parts of the self, those elements which constitute the creature’s unique being and which must someday be stripped away in the act of total reunion with the divine. We will find hints of this mourning in Paradise Lost, where it clings to the poem’s allusions to pagan mythology. Shadowing Milton’s Pythagorean history of the fall—in which God’s creatures lose their place in the divine chorus and long for a future return to their communal home—there is a rival story of loss. In that counter-narrative, the poem’s fallen voices lament the need to abandon creaturely claims of ownership over their own works, to renounce their creative agency and leave its delusions behind. Among the losses recorded in Paradise Lost is the rending of m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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an ancient fabric of myths that tell of human self-sufficiency, a dream of art that must be renounced along with the pagan world that dreamed it. This pattern of renunciation is perhaps most clearly evoked in the poem’s chain of allusions to the ancient myth of Proserpina.

the rape of proserpina The first reference to Eve in Paradise Lost is nested inside a description of Paradise. Satan enters a garden more beautiful than that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world[.] (4.268–72) Louis Martz has called the allusion “the most significant mythological reference in the entire fourth book, perhaps in the entire poem.”49 A network of analogies braids together the story of Eve’s fall with the abduction of the pastoral goddess Proserpina by the king of the underworld.50 Like Proserpina, Eve is a pastoral heroine, set into a landscape of golden age bliss and perpetuum ver. Each figure casts an aura of frail innocence over her garden world, and ties its fragility and transience to her own sexual vulnerability. Death’s ravishment of Proserpina shapes Satan’s seduction of Eve into a myth about the brutal encroachment of time and mortality onto human consciousness, as both Eve and her Paradise are “defac’t, deflow’r’d, and now to Death devote” (9.901). In Milton’s epic, the figure of Proserpina, rooted in the epic fictions of Ovid and Claudian, and popular in early Italian opera and song, comes to embody Milton’s troubled relationship with the classical past, to stand, metonymically, for the literary inheritance of Greco-Roman antiquity. In this pattern of allusion, the poet’s fascination with Proserpina’s ravished body widens to encompass not only the trauma of sexual violation and death but also the loss of a pagan mythological past that was bound up with Milton’s Pythagorean dream: a joint fantasy of wielding an art that might be proof against bodily corruption and historical change, and that might be his own. Milton’s attraction to the Proserpina myth began early and stretched across his career.51 For Renaissance mythographers, the goddess’s ravishment invited tropological readings as an allegory of sin and redemption. Gathering flowers in Henna suggested taking delight in earthly vanities and falling prey to death, until salvation should come through the ministry of a patient Ceres, or Christ. 162

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Furthermore, Proserpina’s fatal choice to eat the seeds of the pomegranate offered her by Dis invited a traditional analogy with the sin of Adam and Eve.52 When Milton came to write an epic on the fall of man, this knot of allegorical associations made the Proserpina myth one of the poem’s natural substructures: Satan is cast as the predatory king of the underworld, seducing Eden’s garden nymph. Drawing on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti and Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae, Milton’s epic sows echoes of the myth with economy and lightness of touch. They are scattered across a broader tonal background drawn from Proserpina’s ancient literary association with flowers, a topos that reaches back to the Homeric Hymns.53 Flowers are Eve’s special purview, forming her first memory of Paradise (4.450–51) and one of her last (11.273–81). In her love affair with the land, they are her figurative children—the brood of her pastoral “Nursery” (8.46) that she must forgo to become the mother of humanity. And in the poem’s symbolic universe, Eve’s flowers counterpoint her own role as Eden’s “fairest unsupported Flow’r” (9.432); she shares Proserpina’s naïve fragility and her fate of defloration. At a handful of moments, features from this palette of associations coalesce into more tangible allusions. In Claudian’s poem, Pluto softens at the sight of Proserpina’s weeping and consoles her with the promise of an accommodating new world in Hell: “all living things shall yield alike to your sovereignty, all that lies beneath the sphere of the moon,” he promises. “To your feet will come purple-clad kings. . . . Receive the Fates as your slaves, together with the flood of Lethe; let whatever you wish be fulfilled” (2.297–306). His lovely wooing speech is evoked by Milton when Satan first glimpses Adam and Eve in Paradise. Satan’s initial jealousy gives way to a chilling gesture of amity. Inviting them to join him in his spacious kingdom, as John Leonard has suggested, Satan echoes Claudian’s Pluto: “my dwelling haply may not please / Like this fair Paradise, your sense,” he grants, yet “Hell shall unfold, / To entertain you two, her widest Gates, / And send forth all her Kings” (4.378–83).54 The surface context makes Satan’s overture a hollow joke. But the passage’s affective impact rises up from the lower strata of the poem, as Death enters Milton’s Paradise and folds his pastoral heroine in its arms. The uneasy impression throughout the poem of Satan’s sexual desire for Eve draws much of its force from this subtext. The poem has already begun to mourn the brutal ravishment of its harvest queen, “despoil’d of Innocence, of Faith, of Bliss” (9.411). One moment in the classical Proserpina narratives held special imaginative force for Milton. Perhaps the most poignant detail in Ovid’s version of the story is Proserpina’s loss of her flowers when Pluto seizes her. In George Sandys’s rendering, “as shee tore th’ adornment of her haire, / Downe fell the flowr’s m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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which in her lap she bare. / And such was her sweet Youth’s simplicity, / That their losse also made the Virgin crie.”55 Milton stretches this climactic scene into a chain of allusions across the final books of Paradise Lost. When the fallen Eve returns to Adam, Ovid’s sequence combines with a passage from Claudian, in which Proserpina weaves a garland of flowers before her abduction: “now she linked a chain of flowers and crowned herself unknowingly, a fateful presentiment of the marriage-bed.”56 Together these form a vivid metonymy for Eve’s fall. Awaiting her return, Adam “had wove / Of choicest Flow’rs a Garland to adorn / Her Tresses, and her rural labors crown”; when he realizes that she is lost, “From his slack hand the Garland wreath’d for Eve / Down dropp’d, and all the faded Roses shed” (9.839–41, 892–93).57 Ovid’s passage had reached into the affective heart of the myth with a few powerful gestures. In a last display of Proserpina’s innocence, she grieves as much over her lost flowers as over a fate at Pluto’s hands that she is still too much a child to understand: the sexual violation symbolized by the scattering of the plucked flowers in her lap. Claudian, with his usual affinity for long rhetorical set pieces, widens the motif into a twenty-two-line lyric lament as his Proserpina struggles in Pluto’s chariot. She cries out to her father, Jupiter: Sic me crudelibus umbris tradere, sic toto placuit depellere mundo? ... Sed mihi virginitas pariter caelumque negatur; eripitur cum luce pudor terrisque relictis servitum Stygio ducor captiva tyranno. O male dilecti flores despectaque matris consilia! o Veneris deprensae serius artes! [Has it pleased you to deliver me thus to the cruel shades, thus to drive me from all the world? . . . to me is denied both my virginity and the heavens, my chastity is stolen along with the light, and, leaving the earth behind me, I am led as a captive to serve the tyrant of Styx. O flowers loved to my cost, and scorned advice of my mother! O the arts of Venus which I detected too late!] (2.251–52, 262–66)

This lament, linking exile, mortality, and loss of innocence, made a deep impression on Renaissance culture. Proserpina was among the classical heroines whose lamentations most exercised seventeenth-century songwriters; the scene of her abduction attracted monodic settings and was dramatized in intermedii and operas produced at Rome, Venice, Bologna, and elsewhere during the first half of the seventeenth century, including a lost Proserpina rapita by 164

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Monteverdi.58 In England, too, Proserpina was shortly to become a recurring figure in music drama, initially in Restoration masques and operas such as Elkanah Settle’s Empress of Morocco (1673) and Matthew Locke’s Psyche (1675).59 Milton himself nearly became one of the first English writers in this tradition; in the Trinity and Bridgewater manuscripts of A Masque, the Younger Brother worries that the Lady—herself a singer—“in wild amazement and affright, / soe fares as did forsaken Proserpine / when the bigg rowling flakes of pitchie clouds / and darkness wound her in[.]”60 Its overtones of sexual violence perhaps too strong for the Egerton family, the passage was crossed out in the Trinity manuscript and did not appear in print. In the operas, Proserpina, shrinking from her new role as the bride of Death, typically looks back to her homeland and contrasts it with the dismal landscape of hell. In Benedetto Ferrari’s 1644 intermedio, Proserpina rapita, the goddess surveys hell for the first time: Ahi che veggio, oue sono, e chi mi guida, Da fiorito Teatro A Regno oscuro, ed atro? Fors’Amor è la guida? Ah ch’Amor tra le Furie non annida; Verginella tradita, Verginella rapita Cielo soccorri con pietoso zelo Ah ch’i Tartarei non ascolta il Cielo; Inhorridite al caso O Genitori amati, Vn innocente cor scende ai Dannati; Infelice Donzella! La Region del pianto Funestissima, e fella Reggia mi fia delitiosa, e bella. Fian gli arredi regali Le fuligini eterne, E fian l’Ancelle mie furie fatali. Per abbellirmi, e per lavarmi il fronte Fia mia linfa, e mio speglio Flegetonte. La pura neue, che nel sen hà loco Non mai sorgero intatta; Nero è lo sposo, e il thalamo, di foco. m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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O sciagure inaudite! Infra i regni pietosi Ha’l Destino locati i miei riposi. Merauiglie abhorrite; Mí m[a]ndano le stelle auuerse, e dure Nell’Abisso a cercar le mie venture.61 [What do I see? Where am I? Who guides me from my flowery theater to this dark and dreadful kingdom? Perhaps it is Love who leads me? Ah, but Love has no home among the Furies. A betrayed, abducted virgin, Heaven, help me in your zealous pity! Ah, but Heaven hears no one in Tartarus. Tremble at the event, oh my beloved parents; an innocent heart goes down to join the damned. Unhappy maiden! This fell and dismal place of weeping must be a lovely palace to me. My royal furnishings shall be made of ashes, and my handmaidens shall be Furies. For washing my face and dressing, the Phlegethon shall be my basin and mirror. The pure snow in my heart will never emerge from here unspoiled, for my husband and my marriage bed are blackened by fire. Oh unimaginable calamity! In this piteous kingdom Destiny has decreed that I shall remain. What ghastly wonders! The cruel stars have sent me to seek my fate in the Abyss.]

The formal features of Ferrari’s text squarely fit the rhetoric of early seventeenth-century Italian operatic laments, with its short, mostly paratactic phrases, its affective Ohs and Misericordias of the kind praised by Richard Flecknoe, and the heroine’s impulse to record her losses (and, here, their ghastly infernal substitutes) in anaphoric catalogues. Ferrari’s rendering of the scene has a gently ironic tone, but its symbolic logic remains that of Ovid and Claudian: a deflorated goddess singing of loss and exile. Again we can discern a pattern of ideas that brings together Greco-Roman mythology, monodic song, and tropes of mourning and victimization. Such treatments of the Proserpina myth help to illuminate another valedictory lament, as Milton’s Eve learns of her exile from Paradise: O unexpected stroke, worse than of Death! Must I thus leave thee Paradise? thus leave Thee Native Soil, these happy Walks and Shades, Fit haunt of Gods? where I had hope to spend, Quiet though sad, the respite of that day That must be mortal to us both. O flow’rs, That never will in other Climate grow, My early visitation, and my last At Ev’n, which I bred up with tender hand From the first op’ning bud, and gave ye Names, 166

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Who now shall rear ye to the Sun, or rank Your Tribes, and water from th’ ambrosial Fount? Thee lastly nuptial Bower, by mee adorn’d With what to sight or smell was sweet; from thee How shall I part, and whither wander down Into a lower World, to this obscure And wild, how shall we breathe in other Air Less pure, accustom’d to immortal Fruits? (11.268–85) Eve’s exile lament evidently found its place in Paradise Lost at an early stage.62 The speech moved Milton’s early readers and editors, while early opera librettists sensed that it had the feel of a theatrical set piece.63 Its stylistic features draw attention to Eve’s vocality. She speaks in short, mostly paratactic phrases. In a string of delicate anaphoric questions, she apostrophizes favorite aspects of her home. Her moaning “O”s, her forlorn monosyllabic diction, and her schemes of assonance and alliteration give the lament an intensely oral quality. This female voice crying alone is the closest that Milton’s poem comes to acknowledging fallen humanity’s loss of harmonia: once part of the universal chorus of praise, mortal voices now sing in solitary lamentation. The pressure of the Proserpina myth in Paradise Lost transforms the scene of Eve’s lament into a symbolic death. Eve is of course already mortal by book 11. But the threat of death hangs over this speech in strangely pressing ways. Eve worries that her flowers may not survive without her care; she imagines suffocating in “Air / Less pure” (284–85); and as she looks ahead to her departure, the journey suddenly becomes, like Proserpina’s, a descent to the underworld: “How shall I part, and whither wander down / Into a lower World, to this obscure / And wild . . . ?” (282–84).64 To stay in Paradise might at least preserve the illusion of being sheltered from mortality; Eve’s “hope to spend / . . . the respite of that day” in Paradise hints at such an illusion, her ambiguous use of “respite” holding out a faint hope that the garden can somehow forestall or cancel her “long day’s dying” (10.964).65 In the epic’s theological scheme, Adam and Eve will accept their punishment and forgo their terrestrial Paradise for “paradise within” (12.587). Eve embraces her role as the bearer of the “Promis’d Seed” (623), an internal, providential basis for the recovery of a lost relationship with God that she now accepts the blame for having forfeited.Yet Eve has always had a strong connection to the landscape of Paradise, and has been at a loss to understand why that connection cannot be closer. Milton compulsively associates her with pagan nature goddesses, and her body with the topography of the m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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garden (e.g., 4.306–7, 5.215–17). He portrays her gazing at her reflection in the waters, seeking to tend the garden alone, restlessly chasing the primal dream of a closed, loving circuit connecting her to the land. She is for Milton a sort of animistic genius loci, the Ovidian creature of a landscape lush with reference to pagan story. In the poem’s mythological structure, this creature never leaves the garden, for her lament marks her figurative death. The fact of exile “must be mortal” to Eve (11.273), for it tears away her imaginative existence in the poem as an Ovidian creature of the land. Eve’s mortality is therefore involved not just with her descent from a timeless enchanted garden but with the coming destruction of Milton’s literary Eden itself, the epicenter of his work of imaginative creation. The false dream of “respite” notwithstanding, Eve recognizes that the day of her descent from Paradise “must be mortal to us both” (273)—both to her and to the land. Proserpina’s abduction wrenches her out of a golden age world, but Eve’s fall ends that world. Her language of exile is poignantly draped over the poem’s deeper tragedy, the fact that her literary homeland has already been violated by time and mortality. Her flowers, like her, are already dying. In Eve’s symbolic rape, the poem mourns the violation of Paradise itself. One of the earliest elements in Milton’s manuscript sketches for Paradise Lost is the image of “Death . . . enterd into ye world.”66 Milton found the idea so haunting that Sin and Death remain as the one piece of extended allegorical architecture in Paradise Lost. Death’s harrowing rape of Sin—a beautiful female “thrust . . . down,” Proserpinalike, “Into this gloom of Tartarus profound” (2.857–58), to face, in effect, the horror of an infernal bridegroom—defines Satan’s seduction of Eve in advance as a symbolic ravishment. When Eve eats the fruit, the garden reacts as if to an act of sexual violence: “Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe” (9.782–83). The imagery of bodily pain suggests both sexual penetration and birth pangs; upon Adam’s fall, similarly, “Earth trembl’d from her entrails, as again / In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan” (1000–1001). The imagery here reenacts the allegorical birth of Death in book 2, when Sin’s own rapist clambers out of her womb: Death “Tore through my entrails,” she recalls, while Hell “sigh’d / From all her Caves, and back resounded Death” (783–89). With the eating of the fruit, the wounded Paradise has come to resemble the body of Sin, sexually violated and disfigured. And as Death follows Satan into the world, the wound widens in the poem’s final books to extend across time as well as space. The visions of Michael, dilating on the “many shapes / Of Death, and many . . . ways that lead / To his grim Cave” (11.467–69), trace the encroachment of death into human history. 168

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But history does not just measure the widening wound of human mortality, for history itself is the wound that the fall inflicts on Milton’s garden. The Proserpina myth binds Satan’s sexual threat together with the pressures of time that bear down on the poet’s golden age literary world. Satan’s stalking of Eve, like Pluto’s of Proserpina, is a raid by civilization on nature, an urban invasion of the countryside. Throughout the poem, Milton associates Satan and the devils with urban culture. Pandaemonium, the “City and proud seat / Of Lucifer” (10.424–25), is linked typologically with Nimrod’s Babylon (11.24–62), the rise of the city symbolizing apostasy and political tyranny. Commentators had traditionally contrasted the earthly city of Babylon with the heavenly city of God, but Paradise Lost makes little of that opposition. Milton turns instead to the pastoral tradition, and sets the forces of civilization against the unspoiled innocence of the natural world.67 By bringing about the fall, Satan initiates the historical process that will in time transform Milton’s rural Eden into the urban landscape of Hell. This central motif of the poem, Paradise destroyed by history, measures the distance between Milton’s epic locus amoenus and those of his predecessors. In his invasion of the garden, Satan has rightly been compared to Spenser’s Guyon, whose holocaust of Acrasia’s bower suggests a similar triumph of epic rage: “All those pleasant bowres . . . / Guyon broke downe. . . . / Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save / Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, / But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse.”68 In a rush of martial ferocity, heroes such as Guyon, Ariosto’s Ruggiero, Tasso’s Rinaldo, and the like had either broken out of their poems’ pleasure gardens or destroyed them in the name of epic. The earlier romance gardens, for all their lavish fecundity, stood for spiritual corruption: death draws the epic hero toward it by masquerading as life. The story of Milton’s garden is the reverse: personified in Satan, the epic knight himself is death, brutally colonizing a universe of life.69 For the mythographers, the allegorical arc of the Proserpina story tells of redemption: Proserpina loses her innocence but wins a partial restoration, to spend half of each year on the fertile earth with her mother. Like Eve, she comes of age; she leaves the golden world of childhood for the darker regions of maturity. Her exile is, in a sense, no exile at all, only a coming to consciousness: a recognition that death already preys on her pastoral world. But Milton registers the pain of that discovery. As Eve mourns the loss of her homeland, the poem mourns the one romance garden that did, for a moment, stand outside the reach of mortality. Eve’s exile to a lower world and Death’s rape of Paradise meet in the same conclusion: with this garden’s destruction, the dream of an escape from history is over. Romance is finally impossible when we know that we must die. m i lton ’s l a m e n t

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Eve’s lament therefore does not only mark a confrontation with human mortality. It is also a valediction for a pagan past, one that dreamed of the artist’s demiurgic power to create out of himself.Throughout the poem’s middle books, Eve has been steeped in the fabular language of humanist mythography. Milton had always felt the attraction of pagan fictions, even as he asserted their derivative, partial, and mediated relation to Christian truth. In his late poetry, he increasingly associated classical-humanist poetics with regression and falling, and the cultural heritage of pagan antiquity with the pull of the grave. It is a feeling that comes into view as early as Ad Patrem, which Milton ends with the hope that his poem will outlive him and preserve his father’s name, “if dark oblivion does not after all plunge you down beneath the dense crowds of the underworld” (118–19). The verb translated here as “plunge down”—rapere—recalls the Proserpina myth in its nightmare of descent. In the final books of Paradise Lost, the residue of pagan literary art that clings to Milton’s Eve and her Paradise is likewise tainted everywhere with the pall of death.When the fallen Eve begins to worship the Tree of Knowledge as a cultic object, it becomes clear that her exile must strip away an attachment to the sensuous materiality of her garden world, which, in turn, calls up the threat of idolatry in all pagan art, a love for dead things of human manufacture that share their creators’ doom of mortality. Eve’s exile from the garden records the collapse of the humanists’ golden world in the face of history. Milton’s imagined Paradise holds out a fleeting fantasy of somehow bypassing the death of the body and the eschatological surrender of the self to God; the fantasy is sustained as late as book 11, when the Father exiles Adam and Eve from the garden lest they “live for ever, dream at least to live / For ever” (95–96). But there is no going backward to a lost golden age prior to sin and corruption, for Milton’s Paradise is itself a dream of art, a classicizing locus amoenus now irrevocably stained by mortality. The garden, uprooted in the Flood, is cast out to sea and robbed of its impermeable sanctity. To go backward now is only to retreat into ancient pagan fable. After Eve’s lament is over, Milton’s Proserpina subtext falls away. In Milton’s youthful Nativity Ode, the fantasy of hearing the music of the spheres—and, with it, the wish to make “Time . . . run back, and fetch the age of gold”—had given way to a vision of the pagan gods in disarray: “The parting genius is with sighing sent, / With flower-inwoven tresses torn / The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn” (186–88). In Paradise Lost, too, the Ovidian genius loci fades silently into the landscape, and when Eve reappears, she is no longer a pastoral goddess but the first Mary and the mother of humankind. Even before Michael begins his narrative of salvation history, the nymphs have departed. The classicizing animism of Eve’s lament, and of the whole Edenic 170

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landscape, ebbs away in two final books increasingly bare of pagan mythology. Milton’s turn to biblical history dismantles the entente between Christian theology and pagan mythography that had animated his Paradise and joined it to the humanist literary tradition. This decoupling of the Christian and pagan worlds became a central task of his next great work, Paradise Regained. Paradise Lost is the last great issue of a syncretic humanist era; Milton acknowledges that its pagan world must end, but, through Eve, he marks its passing. Among the flowers that she leaves behind are the collecti flores of humanist culture.70 The Proserpina myth in Paradise Lost therefore charts Milton’s painful acknowledgment of the limits of his own art, its false consolations against the reality of death and temporality. Eve’s exile lament set out a truth that Milton was repeatedly rediscovering. The lost classical past, embodied for the young Milton by the figure of Pythagoras, was not an escape from death and bereavement but the essence of these. History must be waited out, and transcendence must come at the price of self-renunciation and acknowledgment of sin. The only music available to the fallen is that made by their own mortal voices, whose songs are by definition laments over losses past and to come. Insofar as this realization, performed over and over again, was the work of Milton’s literary career, the story of his poetry is also the story of his century, marking a transition from the celestial music of the spheres to the human music of the passions.

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5)FIVE)% Epic Opera

ancients and moderns It is tempting to declare Paradise Lost the last of the neoclassical epics and the end of an era. Yet would-be Homers and Virgils still toiled across Europe, and the last decades of the seventeenth century reaped a steady harvest of epic poetry. These writings shared much in common. Most were didactic in spirit, organized themselves around a central, idealized hero, strove for a tone of ritual elevation and wonder, and found their material at the intersection of history and myth. Most were also stilted, formulaic, and dull. They have largely been forgotten by literary history. When scholars refer to them at all, they tend to use terms like “exhausted,” “wooden,” “tyranny,” and “nausea.” Their flaws were not unrecognized in their own time; John Dryden accused at least one of the English Virgils of having “robb’d and murder’d Maro’s Muse.”1 How did this happen? Perhaps the simplest explanation is that epic poets in these decades were outnumbered by epic theorists. In the January 26, 1695, issue of the Athenian Mercury, a reader posed the question, “What is the Nature of a true Epic Poem?” The journal’s reply—“a Fable, in imitation of an important Action, and related in Verse after a wonderful, but probable manner”—came directly from René Le Bossu’s Traité du poème épique (1675), which was printed in its first English translation later in 1695.2 French neoclassicism by now reigned 172 3)))))#

over European letters. Formulae for the imitation of the ancient epics were set down with legislative rigor, and waves of rule-bound heroic poems rose up to ratify the critics’ authority over their art. In the period’s great debate over the achievement and legacy of classical antiquity, the dispute that soon came to be known as the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, neo-Aristotelian critics like Le Bossu stood in the front ranks of the ancients.3 They held the line against cultural innovation. Human nature, they insisted, is permanent and unchanging, and the Greeks and Romans were its best interpreters. Against the moderns, who argued that human civilization evolved over time—making it pointless for poets to copy the primitive artifacts of a bygone era—the ancients were loath to concede the obsolescence of the past. They held up their Greco-Roman sources as the abiding standard of excellence in all areas of culture. The period’s epic poets naturally took their side. They had little choice. Few genres depended so heavily on ancient models for their cultural authority; if these poems were to cling less tightly to their classical ancestors, there seemed nowhere else for them to go. Many critics urged epic poets to concede little to changing tastes. They must portray their heroes as Homer and Virgil did, wrote André Dacier, “as they used to be, more or less, and not give them the customs of our own century.”4 Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips, scorned the thought that poets should dilute their epic style for the tastes of modern readers, as if “the Poet should check his fancy for such, either Men or Ladys, whose capacities will not ascend above Argalus and Parthenia.”5 If heroic poetry struggled in the modern age, argued the English translator of Le Bossu, the blame lay with the poets’ “notorious neglect of following the Rules which Aristotle and Horace have prescrib’d.”6 The denial of cultural difference was not always projected with such confidence. One clear sign of strain is the period’s tendency to draw distinctions between Virgil and Homer, with Homer shouldering the weight of historical change. The moderns portrayed him as a remote heathen because this strengthened their case for progress in the arts and sciences over time. The ancients’ motives were more complicated. Although they acknowledged Homer’s value as a source and model, some also contrasted his primitive art with Virgil’s Augustan civility. The Aeneid was said to embody the piety, patriotism, and politesse of imperial Rome, traits inherited by the Romans’ enlightened successors. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for their part, slipped deeper into remote antiquity. Critics found their artistry crude and their social codes archaic. Their style was repetitious and long-winded. Their supernatural marvels strained credulity.Their gods acted like children, “wretched, restless, and quarrelsome.”7 Their heroes were brutal thugs. Even Homer’s defenders—including Jean epic opera

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Racine, Pierre Huet, William Temple, William Wotton, and the Daciers— blamed his vices on the primitive “age he liv’d in, which was not capable of any greater politeness.”8 Influential voices in the ancients’ camp were prepared to push Homer to the margins of Greek civilization in order to preserve the rest of the canon that they valued so deeply. For such readers, what was left of Homer’s authority derived from his role as a figure of historical origin: he was the ancient source of a literary tradition that had left him behind. “The Poems of homer will always be a master-piece,” wrote Charles de Saint-Evremond, “but they are not a model always to be followed.”9 Indeed, some critics went further, and began to push Homer outside the realm of civilized letters altogether. Comparisons to wandering minstrels and balladeers become common, influenced by the belief that Homer’s epics, in the form of fragmentary “rhapsodies,” had been assembled under Peisistratus at Athens in the sixth century BCE. For Alessandro Tassoni, Homer was a “povero vagabondo” of uncertain parentage and an inflated posthumous reputation.10 The abbé d’Aubignac daringly proposed that the poet Homer had never existed at all, anonymous rhapsodies merely having been attributed to this legendary figure.11 His friend Gabriel Guéret published a volume in 1671 labeling the so-called Prince of Poets a “miserable rapsodiste” who performed scraps of songs on street corners.12 René Rapin recoiled from d’Aubignac’s theory, which he worried would “deprive Homer of his greatest glory, the disposition of his poems,” and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux insisted on the artistic unity of Homer’s epics as proof that they had been composed by a single man—a view shared in England by John Dryden and William Temple.13 So began a debate that would divide later Homeric scholars into Analysts and Unitarians, struggling to account for the origins of the poetry that bears his name. It should be remembered, though, that these seventeenth-century writers did not describe Homer in any clear sense as an artist working in a wholly preliterate environment. Analogies to oral performers were less a thoughtful sifting of the historical evidence than a witty slur. By distancing Homer from elite literature, however, his critics show us that a growing historical consciousness—one bound up in many minds with a divide between oral and written art—had seriously shaken the traditional authority of epic poetry by the late seventeenth century. Relegating Homer to a primitive prehistory left Virgil, too, in an unstable position. Even if Virgil could be championed as the anti-Homer, a strong sense of historical distance migrated into criticism of the Aeneid as well. The darling of the neoclassicists, Virgil had long stood as their symbol of the ancients’ cultural preeminence. To imitate the Aeneid was still, in theory, to embrace its myth of universal civilization and the idea of a master text for human culture that rose 174

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above disparities of place or time. For many early modern readers, this dream of transcending history was also a political one. From the Venetian republic to the restored Stuart monarchy in England, a return to the rhetoric and iconography of imperial Rome allowed seventeenth-century elites to cultivate the fantasy of a renewed pax Augustana, screening the messy discontinuities of local history. The Augustan myth revived and reworked older models of translatio imperii, the westward migration of imperial power exemplified by Aeneas’s journey out of the smoldering ruins of Troy. The Aeneid’s vision of providential empire offered a model for imagining a new golden age, a refinement of manners and taste, a renewed ideal of shared civic purpose, and a regime of enlightened cultural patronage sponsored by the state’s ruling powers. Translations and adaptations of Virgil’s epic celebrated the long reach of European cultural tradition and espoused the role of the artist as a panegyrist to political power. These ideological fictions, like the critics’ rules for epic poetry, were wielded like a talisman against historical change. Yet change was of course taking place all around them. The epic tradition was widely interrogated, attacked, defended, lampooned, and reassessed over these decades. “Virgil is attack’d by many Enemies: He has a whole Confederacy against him,” wrote John Dryden in 1697.14 The early modern veneration of the Aeneid had long competed with less deferential strains of Virgil criticism, a counterculture of interpretation, adaptation, and mock translation that reread the poem at the expense of its imperial ambitions. Instead of timeless myth, its critics found an aging historical relic. They frowned upon the poem’s pagan gods and its credulous taste for miracles and portents; they questioned its portrayal of heroic violence and found fault with the manners of its hero. In other words, they treated the poem in the same prejudicial terms that others reserved for Homer’s Iliad. In a key sign of this historicization of the Greco-Roman epic tradition, they also reactivated ancient grievances against Virgil’s politics. His universal story of empire was exposed as a partisan fantasy; his artistic choices were tied to the local propaganda efforts of an unscrupulous Roman principate. In the Aeneid’s mythologized history—strategically concealing “the proscriptions and ‘justified’ illegalities of Octavianus, the Triumvir” under “the beneficent and constitutional paternalism of Augustus, the Princeps”—Virgil gave the lie to all such political fictions.15 At issue for his Restoration critics were not just changing historical perspectives on the ancient world but also some of the period’s most urgent questions about the relationship between art and ideology, and about the boundaries that marked off history from political mythology. Special interest gathered around the figure of Dido, Virgil’s tragic antiheroine. Many seventeenth-century critics found Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido epic opera

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unsettling. Why, some asked, should Virgil have degraded his hero, so tender of feeling elsewhere in the poem, by portraying him as a casual seducer? Others recognized that larger issues were at stake. The last decades of the century saw the widespread return of an ancient “chaste Dido” tradition: readers strove to recover the putative historical Dido, the founder of Carthage who had never met the legendary Aeneas and who, when pursued by foreign suitors, had chosen suicide for the sake of her country. Alert to the gap between this figure and the fabled queen of the Aeneid, critics accused Virgil of tampering with history in the name of a prejudicial fiction; the chaste Dido of history had been libeled in order to justify Rome’s enmity toward its Mediterranean rival, Carthage. These efforts to peel back Virgil’s imperial myth suggest a growing competition between Europe’s ancient literary heritage, with its claims of permanence and universality, and other ways of knowing the past. Some of those competing voices found a home in European opera. In several respects, it was in early opera that the epic tradition returned at last to an oral idiom, but one transformed by centuries of literate cultural history. Early Italian operas, at first attracted to pastoral and Ovidian fictions, soon began to take their plots from epic source texts: Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Milton, and others offered a shared body of story that lent itself to opera’s stylized, flamboyant grandeur, and bestowed on the fledgling genre some of the cultural prestige long held by Europe’s great epics.Yet the operas’ adoption of epic sources gave way to sweeping acts of adaptation and revision. Episodes were cut or added; emphases were changed; current critical debates were alluded to; forms of heroism were tested and embraced or discarded. In the process, opera could become a tool for oppositional readings of the epic canon. This chapter shows how one early European opera, the Tate-Purcell Dido and Aeneas, reflects the period’s growing discomfort over epic mythmaking. Taking up the chaste Dido tradition, Dido and Aeneas explores the Virgilian epic’s lost voices. It exposes the mechanics of political myths, the process by which both artists and their political masters recast history in their own ideological image. It finds charismatic authority not in the figure of the ancient bard but in a heroine whose good name has been suppressed by Virgil’s imperial fiction. But in transferring the ancient mystique of the epic poet’s voice to that of his slandered queen, Dido struggles to come to grips with the meaning of this shadowy figure from the past and her enigmatic vocality. This and other seventeenth-century operas show the symptoms of an evolving literary culture, still compulsively returning to its ancient source texts but seeking out new voices within them to express its uneasy skepticism over their founding myths. 176

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the confederacy against virgil While neoclassical hardliners still enthroned Virgil as a timeless model for literary art, others sought out his epic’s political origins in first-century Rome. Early modern panegyrists thought themselves to be following the example of Virgil, who, after years of civil war, had set out “to reconcile all the World, and more particularly the Romans, to the New Establishment, and the Person of Augustus Caesar.”16 But unease over the emperor’s controversial rise to power had long been an undercurrent in Virgil criticism.Was Augustus an enlightened bringer of stability or an unscrupulous tyrant? The emperor’s patronage of Virgil, in turn, came under close scrutiny.The Aeneid’s pious hero, generally thought to be modeled on Augustus himself, raised questions about the poet’s posture toward his patron and his imperial project. Some viewed Virgil as a principled reformer whose epic answered the need for social cohesion in the wake of intractable factional conflict. Others saw a servile propagandist who had betrayed Rome’s republican past. Again and again, these and other voices returned to the question posed by a leading French modern, Charles Perrault: “What had that Piety of Father Aeneas to do in the Cave with Dido Queen of Carthage?”17 At stake in the question was not just the hero’s ungentlemanly conduct toward Dido but also the poet’s mistreatment of her historical namesake. Ancient legend told of a chaste Dido, the devoted widow of Sychaeus who chose to die rather than contemplate a new dynastic marriage. Early readers of the Aeneid seem to have known the story, and influential ancient commentators criticized Virgil for overwriting it with his own.18 Servius and Macrobius accused Virgil of libeling Dido. Tertullian praised the historical Dido as a model of chastity and conjugal affection. Augustine famously wept over Dido’s abandonment in the Aeneid, but he barely finished telling the story in his Confessions before noting that Aeneas’s journey to Carthage was agreed by the learned to be an impossible fiction. Early Renaissance scholars recovered the historical Dido in their classical research; she appears, for example, in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and in Petrarch’s Trionfi. As part of the claris mulieribus tradition, she came to seventeenth-century France, where she was championed in François Le Métel de Boisrobert’s tragedy, La vraye Didon, ou la Didon chaste (1643).19 Writers who portrayed the figure of Dido show an acute sensitivity to the demands of a readership unwilling or unable to approachVirgil on his own terms. Boisrobert’s preface, for example, insists that he will restore the historical Dido, long eclipsed by “that fabled Dido whom Virgil treated so poorly.” “In all the histories,” he explains, “I find her to have been as innocent as she was beautiful,” a queen who embraced death rather than violate the pledge that she made epic opera

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to her husband’s ashes. Boisrobert repeatedly compares his chaste Dido to his dedicatee, the comtesse de Harcourt; in overthrowing “the error and calumny of several centuries,” he reaches out to an audience of influential, high-born women ready to look favorably on a revisionist Roman history that has been tailored to their own social perspective.20 La vraye Didon was probably a direct response to Georges de Scudéry’s more traditional adaptation of Virgil’s fourth book, Didon, performed in 1636 and printed the following year. For his part, Scudéry wrote of Virgil’s Aeneid in highly conventional terms that stressed its universality and permanence. The poem was an “illustrious monument,” more durable than marble or bronze, “still the most lovely and intact relic of the Roman Empire.” Even Scudéry, though, acknowledges that history had left many such relics behind, including the Latin language. A favorite of the précieuses, he, too, is obliged to address his female readers: “Since the Latin nation is too far from France for the ladies to travel there, it is here that they shall see at least some idea of the many excellent things that are hidden from them by a language which can now be found only in books.”21 In works like these, the two Didos shadowed each other throughout the period, as writers struggled to extend Virgil’s legacy while distancing themselves in different ways from the foreign historical conditions in which his poetry was born. Indeed, both Didos could coexist in a single work, where they embodied the conflict between permanence and discontinuity that shaped the Aeneid’s early modern reception. Such is the case of the first European opera based on the Dido story, La Didone, a collaboration between Giovanni Francesco Busenello and Pier Francesco Cavalli that debuted in 1641 at the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice. A successful lawyer and member of the influential Accademia degli Incogniti, Busenello shared the group’s investment in a patriotic Venetian mythology, dedicated to celebrating the city’s commercial power, lauding its republican oligarchy, and holding up its arts and sciences as rightful heirs to the great cultural heritage of Augustan Rome. But Busenello also had an unusually strong, complex grasp of Roman historiography—his later libretto for Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea drew heavily on the writings of Tacitus—and his approach to the story of Dido and Aeneas was openly ambivalent. In the Didone’s printed “Argomento,” he sought to excuse the opera’s most startling departure from Virgil’s epic: its happy ending, whereby Dido, abandoned by Aeneas, is saved from suicide by her rival wooer, the Gaetulian king Iarbas, and accepts his offer of marriage. Busenello explains: “If it was a famous anachronism in Virgil that Dido lost her life not for her husband Sychaeus but for Aeneas, great minds should be able to accept that here a marriage takes place that differs from both fictions and histories. It is hardly necessary here to remind men of 178

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understanding that the best poets have portrayed things in their own fashion; the books are open, and learning is not foreign to this world.”22 This backhanded defense, tweaking Virgil for distorting the historical record but drawing on his authoritative precedent to defend Busenello’s own poetic license, is typical of the librettist’s uncertain stance toward his ancient source. In the opera itself, several minor characters seem to exist only to offer competing perspectives on the meaning of Virgil’s fiction. Aeneas, Dido, and their retinues all return obsessively to the themes of memory, fame, and slander. Although the libretto’s main plot hews closely to the Aeneid— Aeneas flees the burning Troy in act 1, is shipwrecked near the Libyan coast and meets the Carthaginian queen in act 2, and deserts her at Jove’s command in act 3—the pressure of the historical chaste Dido is felt with growing force throughout. Comic figures such as the wily Greek warrior Sinon and the gentlewomen of Dido’s court high-spiritedly mock ideals of faithful love and embrace both male and female libertinage; “alla fine / son donne come l’altre le regine” (in the end, queens are women like any others), they observe (46). From another flank, the ghost of Dido’s dead husband Sychaeus confronts her in a swoon, demanding, like Hamlet, that she hold up a mirror to examine her sinful heart (64). At the same time, a subplot unfolds the fortunes of Aeneas’s rival, the rejected suitor Iarbas, whose sufferings come across as a parody of Virgil’s distraught and abandoned Dido.23 His pleas denied, he is driven to madness, whereupon he skulks at the edges of the drama raving at the perfidy of womankind; as if to lampoon the voyeuristic melodrama of Dido’s heartbreak in the Aeneid, Iarbas laments in terms that repeatedly prefigure Dido’s defiant words to the parting Aeneas. But Busenello’s tone and perspective remain unstable. In an irony-laden addition to Virgil’s text, his Dido yearns for posterity to blacken Aeneas’s name: Ti sprezzi ogni memoria, l’oblio ti vilipenda; per spavento de’ tempi, per terrore de’ secoli venturi resti il tuo nome; e per racchiuder tutte l’empie brutture in una voce rea sol si pronunci, Enea. [Let every memory scorn you, let forgetfulness despise you; let your name linger to be the fear of later times, the terror of centuries to come; and to contain all impious filthy things in one guilty voice, let “Aeneas” alone be uttered.] (63) epic opera

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Yet in an abrupt swivel, as Dido later raises a sword to pierce her heart, she hopes to preserve only “il bel nome d’Enea” (the lovely name of Aeneas) from future harm (68). This awkward reversal, like the patently artificial lieto fine that saves Dido from her tragic fate, reflects Busenello’s self-conscious, often irresolute approach to the problems of fame and slander that had troubled Virgil’s readers since ancient times. Over the last half of the seventeenth century, debate over the conduct of Virgil’s hero found a center of gravity in France and England. The period’s commentary stands out for its animus not just against Aeneas but against Virgil’s false presentation of history. Mid-century French critics made much of the gulf between Virgil’s injured queen and the chaste historical Dido. Jean Regnault de Segrais, whose 1668 translation of the Aeneid informed Dryden’s, objected to Virgil’s flagrant anachronism: Aeneas could never have encountered Dido, for Carthage was thought to have been founded in the ninth century BCE, three hundred years after the supposed fall of Troy.24 Lodging the same objection, the influential neoclassicist René Rapin summed up Virgil’s fourth book as a cunning political artifice: a “filthy slur” on the historical Dido by a cagey propagandist, “imagining he might, without any disparagement to himself, sacrifice her, the better to flatter his own Country, which no doubt, would have boggled at the reputation History gave that Princess.”25 Nourished by the growing influence of Continental criticism in England, the chaste Dido tradition flowered there in the 1680s and 1690s. Dryden tried to defend the “famous anachronism” of Virgil’s fourth book: “Chronology,” he argued, “at best, is but a Cobweb-Law, and [Virgil] broke through it with his weight.”26 This was an unusual exception to the prevailing view; criticism of Virgil’s tampering with the historical record became so widespread that by 1698, when a history primer by Thomas Hearne set out to define the term “anachronism,” it needed only to cite the Dido episode: “an Error or Mistake in the Computation of Time. Thus Virgil is guilty of an Anachronism in his Aeneis, by making Aeneas and Dido Co[n]temporaries, whereas they lived 300Years distant one from another.”27 As the English critics’ hostility migrated from Aeneas’s bad manners to Virgil’s bad history, their complaints came into sharper focus as an assault on the politics of imperial praise. In 1692, the poet William Walsh complained that the reputations of heroic women like Dido and Penelope lay at the mercy of the poets, who “as they please, give Infamy or Fame.” “In vain the Tyrian Queen resigns her Life,” he wrote, “For the bright Glory of a spotless Wife, / If lying Bards may false Amours rehearse, / And blast her Name with arbitrary Verse.”28 Walsh subtly links Virgil’s “arbitrary Verse” with the political despotism of Augustus: he has just finished comparing poets to “Monarchs, on an Eastern 180

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Throne, / Restrain’d by nothing but their Will alone.” In 1697, the year when Dryden published his Aeneis, the anonymous Verdicts of the Learned Concerning Virgil and Homer’s Heroic Poems was able to announce a critical consensus linking Virgil’s alleged libel of Dido, his manipulation of history, and his role as a mouthpiece for absolutism: “All Authors have observed two considerable Faults of Anachronism and Slander in that Episod[e] of Dido in the fourth Book. By the first of false Chronology, he makes that Princess Elder by 300Years than in reality she was. By the other of Scandal, he has disgrac’d the most Discreet and Vertuous Princess of her Age. . . . And thus has utterly ruined her Reputation in the Mind of all Posterity. This is both a base and unpardonable Fault in Virgil, to raise the Glory of the Romans, by ruining the good Name of a Woman, the Ornament of her Sex; because forsooth she was the Foundress of an hostile City.”29 If an earlier era had conflated the literary hero Aeneas, the emperor Augustus, and the contemporary ruling powers of Europe that had inherited their imperium, a new axis had now emerged: the grouping of Augustus as a tyrant, Virgil as a fawning propagandist, and Aeneas as an unscrupulous cad, all ranged against a wronged woman who stood between them and their shared political ambitions. At stake in this criticism, then, was the vexed relationship between history and fiction. Epic was losing its authority as history even as its canonical texts came to be more rigorously historicized by scholars of the ancient world. The implications of these changes—the weakening of the epic’s political claims and a growing insistence on reading the genre as purely imaginative literature— were explored most acutely in a widespread vogue for Virgilian mock-heroic parody and burlesque. The tradition began with Giovanni Battista Lalli’s Eneide travestita (1633) and reached its pinnacle in Paul Scarron’s buoyant, ribald Virgile travesti (1648–53), which included a dedicatory poem by Boisrobert. Although literary historians have noted the close overlap between the mid-century explosion of French travesties and the social turmoil of the Fronde, Scarron’s English imitators also used the genre to explore the workings of political ideology and representation. A Tory poem by one “W. B.” chided Virgil’s Aeneas for using the gods’ marching orders to justify his betrayal of Dido: a divine mandate, he complains, is just an excuse for Aeneas to establish his own political authority—so convenient an excuse, indeed, that the English Commonwealth regime had used it too.30 The writer links that false authority with Virgil’s libel of the historical Dido, “Chast Queen to be abus’d by story, / Virgil’s infamy, as Virgil’s glory” (27–28). This was a dedicatory poem introducing Charles Cotton’s mock translation of the Aeneid’s fourth book, a satire frequently reprinted after its initial publication in 1665. Cotton’s pastiche, W. B. explains, will happily embrace Virgil’s spirit of libelous fiction making: “But let’s proceed (though all epic opera

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must know it / A story false) along with Poet” (29–30).Taking Virgil’s lies as their precedent, burlesques like Cotton’s reveled in exposing Dido’s inner life to vulgar public scrutiny. Written in a childlike register of scatology and bawdry, Cotton’s Scarronides strips the Dido story of its mythical weight and stresses the biological facts on the ground. Of the infamous tryst of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, we are told, “The Cave so darksome was, that I do / Think Joan had been as good as Dido: / But so it was, in that hole they / Grew intimate as one may say” (437–40). The glib euphemism of the last line, teasingly following a prurient sexual pun, renders absurd any effort to dignify this act of anonymous copulation. Cotton’s poem enthusiastically replaces the chaste Dido of history with her polar opposite, a sexually voracious antiheroine whose passion for Aeneas is frankly centered on his “weapon, / For which she did so scald and burn / That none but he could serve her turn” (6–8). The narrator’s tasteless exposure of her body, forcing its most private aspects into open view, suggests a parody of Virgil’s own exploitative treatment of Dido. Refusing to collude with the poet in mourning his tragic heroine, Cotton pointedly trains a cold public gaze on her emotional life and vulgarizes it beyond recognition. There is some evidence connecting Cotton with Nahum Tate, who would later collaborate with Henry Purcell on the English opera Dido and Aeneas. Cotton owned a copy of Tate’s first volume of poetry, and their mutual friends included Dryden and the poet Thomas Flatman.31 Some points of contact can be found, too, between Cotton’s bawdily skeptical treatment of the Dido story and the act 3 sailors’ scene in Tate’s opera, a scene that has puzzled critics with its jocular, cynical tone. The Trojans offer a coldly comic foil to Aeneas’s mournful leave-taking: Come away, fellow sailors, your anchors be weighing, Time and tide will admit no delaying. Take a bouze short leave of your nymphs on the shore, And silence their mourning With vows of returning, But never intending to visit them more. (3.1–6)32 As in Cotton’s parody, the intimate circle of Aeneas’s relationship with Dido is thrown open, its contours rendered rough and crude by its new public frame. Dido and Aeneas become, like Cotton’s hero and heroine, mere Jacks and Joans, playing out an immemorial romantic endgame that makes the story’s high epic ambitions lurch into parody.33 Like Cotton’s poem, although in a more complex 182

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register, Dido and Aeneas wrestles with the costs of empire, the political functions of art, and the poet’s troubled compact between fiction and history. In his handling of Virgil’s Dido episode,Tate is fascinated by the ways in which heroic story suppresses other historical voices. Dido and Aeneas will take a sustained interest in how the Augustan imperial myth has been constructed and in the violence that the myth inflicts on its victims. The reception of the Aeneid had for some time acted as a frame for contemporary English political controversy. Widely read as a celebration of Augustus Caesar’s empire in the making, Virgil’s poem set the tone for a period of royalist entrenchment that was soon being described as a new “Augustan age.”34 Robert Howard began his 1660 Poems with verses celebrating Charles II’s Virgilian journey across the sea to launch a new imperial era. Dryden’s Astraea Redux (1660) closes by proclaiming the return of Augustan peace and plenty; a series of triumphal arches prepared for Charles II’s coronation entry in 1661 bore inscriptions celebrating the “Adventus Augusti.”35 When John Boys published his 1661 translation of book 3 of the Aeneid, he appended a set of “Reflections” comparing the new king to Aeneas in piety, wisdom, and valor.36 Charles’s death in 1685 brought Augustan-themed elegies such as Dryden’s “Threnodia Augustalis” and the anonymous Augustus Anglicanus (1686). King James II, inheriting the motif, commissioned Grinling Gibbons to sculpt him in bronze decked out as Augustus.37 As late as 1697, Dryden’s refusal to dedicate his translation of the Aeneid to William III generated enough controversy that his publisher, Jacob Tonson, stepped in to alter the volume’s illustrations—Aeneas’s nose being duly hooked to bring out a resemblance to the Prince of Orange.38 In this cultural environment, the slippery loyalties of Nahum Tate offer us little purchase on the politics of Dido and Aeneas.39 The first recorded performance of Dido and Aeneas took place in 1689 at Josias Priest’s boarding school for young women in Chelsea; some scholars conjecture an earlier court performance.40 Tate came from a family of Irish Puritan ministers, but he soon slipped into London Tory circles, and his early plays took up the cause of the Stuart kings. His notorious adaptations of Shakespeare—Richard II,The History of King Lear, and Coriolanus (retitled The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth)—draw sympathetic portraits of embattled rulers, victimized by scheming usurpers and Whiggish mobs. Tate soon won the patronage of the powerful Earl of Dorset, who also gave financial support to Shadwell and Dryden. With Dryden’s help, Tate published a Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel in 1682, after the initial arrest of the Duke of Monmouth. He was invited to write the Saint Cecilia’s Day Ode for 1685, and was among the first poets to elegize Charles II after the epic opera

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king’s death later that year.Tate’s early writings show equally strong partisanship for the king’s heir, the Duke of York. But Tate became uncharacteristically quiet after the accession of York as King James II in 1685. By the end of 1689, Tate had already begun a series of poems in praise of King William III, and in 1692 the new king awarded him the poet laureateship. Whether Tate was a sly temporizer, or a naïve courtier-poet with an “unpolitical mind,”41 or just one of the many Tory partisans who were disappointed in James II, his changing allegiances make Dido and Aeneas’s political sympathies hard to measure. In 1678 Tate had already adapted the fourth book of the Aeneid in a tragedy called Brutus of Alba, or,The Enchanted Lovers. Like Tate’s other early plays, Brutus of Alba was a blunt propaganda vehicle for the Stuart monarchy; its changes to Virgil’s text combine the vitiated shock tactics of the late heroic play— ghosts, witches’ rites, a poisoned bracelet, swoonings, suicides, ravings and hysterics—with the standard political talking points of royalist tragedy during the Exclusion Crisis. Tate lifted enough material directly from Brutus to make it clear that he used the play as the main source for Dido and Aeneas.42 Yet where Brutus of Alba swells with bombast and spectacle, Dido and Aeneas offers brevity and compression. Brutus is showy and extroverted: all motives are made clear, all plot mechanisms made visible. In place of the uncanny divine forces that drive the plot of the Aeneid,Tate substitutes a local political conspiracy. He exposes the inner lives of the principal characters to plain view; both exhaustively analyze their conflicted feelings in long set speeches.When they feel guilty over breaking their past marriage vows, we watch their dead spouses rise as ghosts to haunt them. By contrast, Dido and Aeneas is oddly reticent. In Brutus of Alba, the nameless Queen confides her passion to her nurse and feels relief in the telling: “I kn[e]w thou wouldst be shockt with the relation, / But now I’ve told my grief I am at ease” (9). In Dido and Aeneas’s version of the same scene, Dido refuses to divulge her secret (1.12–15). In the first two acts of the opera, Dido addresses just one line of dialogue to Aeneas. Tate’s villains, too, lose their clarity of motive. In Brutus, the sorceress announces that “I hate all humane kind, / But envy most the prosperous and great” (19). The passage survives in Tate’s opera, where the witches rail against Dido—“whom we hate, / As we do all in prosperous state” (2.9–10)—but the revealing word “envy” has dropped out. Tate’s opera also vastly compresses Virgil’s historical frame. Aeneas’s famous tale to Dido of his misfortunes, adapted for Brutus of Alba as a long set of expository speeches in act 1, disappears in Dido.The gods have no part in the action and no clear investment in Aeneas’s future. Aeneas’s son Ascanius no longer appears as a living emblem of dynastic duty unfulfilled, and no one ever refers to him. The military invasion that ends Brutus of Alba has been stripped away. In Aeneas’s 184

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wooing speeches, the pains of empire shrink into metaphors for disprized love, the flames of Troy becoming the flames of passion: “Ah!” he pleads, “make not in a hopeless fire, / A hero fall, and Troy once more expire” (1.54–55). Elsewhere, Tate transmutes Virgil’s scenes of epic warfare into Ovidian themes of hunting and pursuit. “Pursue thy conquest, Love,” urges Belinda (a version of the Aeneid’s Anna), and the opera’s second act stresses the erotic symbolism of Virgil’s book 4 hunting expedition. Tate’s courtiers dance around a fountain where “Actaeon met his fate, / pursued by his own hounds” (2.37–38); Aeneas shows off a “monster’s head” borne on his spear, and compares it to the famous boar that mauled “Venus’ huntsm[a]n,” Adonis (44). The Aeneid’s vision of the divine is replaced here by a mosaic of chance erotic encounters that suggest the helplessness of both mortals and gods to control the natural madness of the libido. Ovid’s doomed hunters implicitly offer themselves as analogues for Aeneas, who has earlier scorned “the feeble stroke of Destiny” in favor of the “dart” of Cupid (1.48–49). Virgil’s epic struggle of civilization against chaos yields to a private human struggle of reason against passion. In Tate’s hands, then, political history becomes domestic tragedy. The main effect of this tight focus on the domestic is to weaken Aeneas. In Virgil’s poem, Aeneas’s break with Dido forces him to tear out the private man and fully become the instrument of a public destiny. His sojourn in Carthage disastrously elides the domestic with the political: erotic love presents itself to him as a basis for empire, a source of authority in itself, rather than as a private madness that wars against the established authority of history and nation. Dido and Aeneas glances at this temptation—Carthage offers a false synthesis of “Empire growing, / pleasures flowing” (1.3–4)—but the opera quickly lets Aeneas’s public world fade before the mounting intensity of Dido’s tragedy. With no feeling of historical pressure, no overriding geopolitical stakes to counter Dido’s claims upon him, Tate’s Aeneas becomes ineffectual and irresolute. He has been widely dismissed by modern critics as “a meandering oaf,” “a complete booby.”43 As Dido’s intimate suffering swells to fill the opera’s narrow circle of action, Aeneas’s thinly realized psychology fades into invisibility.44 Why should Tate have so annihilated Virgil’s hero? In doing so he was reflecting wider English cultural trends, skeptical of the literature of war and empire. Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and Macflecknoe (1682) had transmuted heroic poetry into an instrument of topical satire; the vogue for mock-epic writing was further nourished in England by John Crowne’s 1692 translation of Boileau’s Le Lutrin and by local imitations such as Samuel Garth’s Dispensary (1699). In these poems, martial conflict was wittily burlesqued or left out entirely, as a widening bourgeois reading public sought out stories that more epic opera

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closely resembled its own domestic life. Growth in popular piety and moral activism near the end of the century coincided with a philosophical reassessment of the nature of the hero.45 John Locke’s 1693 treatise on education scorned “the Honour and Renown, that is bestowed on Conquerours (who for the most part are but the great Butchers of Mankind),” and discouraged the reading of martial histories, which would only persuade young people “to think Slaughter the laudable Business of Mankind, and the most Heroick Vertue.”46 William Temple’s essay “Of Heroick Virtue” (1690) defined the nature of heroism as “the deserving well of Mankind,” an approach that raised Confucius and Mohammed above Almanzor and Aureng-Zebe, the heroes of Dryden’s early heroic plays.47 Dryden himself had harsh words for Homer’s “ungodly Mankillers, whom we Poets, when we flatter them, call Heroes.”48 This revisionist critique of ancient cultural norms was to culminate in Richard Steele’s The Christian Hero (1701), which scrutinized three great classical figures, Cato, Caesar, and Brutus, and found that they all failed to measure up to the heroic examples of Christ and Saint Paul. New champions were needed for an age that alternately lamented and took pride in its own antiheroism. When Tate took on Virgil’s Aeneas, however, he involved himself in a narrower political argument. Dryden’s talk of a “Confederacy” against Virgil marks a backlash against the Aeneid’s cultural dominance in the 1680s and 1690s: a movement, led by but not limited to the Whigs, that took Dido’s side against Aeneas and ranged itself against both Virgil’s epic and the Stuarts’ Augustan politics.49 In England, as in Continental Europe, views of the historical Augustus were mixed. According to Dryden, Virgil recognized “that this Conquerour, though of a bad kind, was the very best of it,” that is, a harsh autocrat who nonetheless brought stability to Rome after its civil war.50 Special attention fell on Virgil’s flattering reference to Cato in the Aeneid, 8.670, which was widely thought to refer to the republican hero Cato of Utica, rather than to his greatgrandfather, Cato the Censor, who is mentioned in book 6. The reference seems to have been enough to convince Dryden, along with earlier French critics, that Virgil “was still of Republican principles in his Heart” when he wrote his epic, and that he secretly opposed his emperor’s rise to tyranny.51 Hostile reassessments of Augustus took their toll on Virgil’s epic and its hero. Although some were ready to imagine a crypto-republican Virgil, most Restoration critics assumed that the poet had designed his Aeneas as an idealized portrait of Augustus, and they read the Aeneid as an effort to reconcile the Roman people to his principate. As the Stuart regime lurched through the crises of the 1680s, darker legends of Aeneas surfaced in opposition to Virgil’s account. One ancient tradition held that Aeneas had betrayed Troy to the Greeks, perhaps motivated 186

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by a political grudge against the house of Priam.52 At least one late Stuart pamphlet updated the legend to serve the Whigs. The anonymous 1682 poem The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor Against the State of Troy tells how Aeneas (that is, the Duke of York), jealous of Priam’s “brave eldest son” Hector (Monmouth), is bribed by the Greeks (the French) to help them conquer Troy.The Greeks’ arguments show how easily Aeneas’s translatio imperii could be recast as political and religious tyranny: Apollo speaks Stupendious things to come, An absolute Empire, and a Spiritual Rome; Which shall extend her Sway to that Degree, That Phrigia shall a petty Province be[.] ... Let Troy then fall that does your Fate Controul, And with the Name of Country Checks your Soul: Let Priam dye, and let Palladium go; To other Gods your Empire you must owe[.]53 Aeneas’s Roman destiny figures as an abandonment of his nation rather than as its extension and fulfillment. The quest for empire does not test and confirm the hero’s pietas, it exposes it as a fraud, in an act of betrayal that the poem goes on to link with Aeneas’s desertion of Dido. This was the environment in which Tate and Purcell adapted Virgil’s fourth book for the operatic stage. Although the opera cannot be reduced to a clear topical allegory, we shall see that it takes a sustained interest in the nature and consequences of political mythmaking.

dido’s lament “Remember me, but ah! forget my fate” (3.62): Dido’s famous dying words pull in two directions. Her “remember me,” echoing the mantra of Hamlet’s father, appears to be a call for pity, for the preservation of her story, and perhaps, glancing along with Virgil at the future hostilities between Rome and Carthage, for revenge.Yet in her next breath Dido asks us to forget her story of abandonment and untimely death. This climactic, puzzling cry suggests that Tate is especially concerned with the problem of Dido’s literary “fate.” The word appears ten times in Dido and Aeneas.54 The ambiguous use of the term in Dido’s final line opens up a distinction that the opera explores at some length: a conflict between Dido’s public destiny in the Aeneid, that is, the poem’s “official” record of her tragic actions, and a largely hidden inner life, a mysterious “me” that stands apart from Virgil’s fateful story of doomed love. Against her reclusive selfhood that “admits of no revealing,” Tate’s Aeneas champions a “fate” that would fuse the private epic opera

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with the public. Even as he insists that “Aeneas has no fate but you,” he asks Dido to accept him “If not for mine, for empire’s sake” (1.46, 52). The Carthaginian courtiers paint a royal marriage as “The greatest blessing Fate can give, / Our Carthage to secure, and Troy revive” (18–19). Already Aeneas’s public “fate” appears to serve as a screen or pretext for human desire. Again and again, the opera portrays destiny as a thing of human making—in effect, a work of art—rather than an inscrutable force of nature. Where Virgil’s Dido had fatally confused the private with the public good, Tate’s Dido stubbornly resists Aeneas’s bland conflation of the personal and the political. The public world around Tate’s Dido also contains troubling dark spots. Almost at once, the opera’s Virgilian backdrop begins to suffer tears and fissures, exposing ominous forms of local faction and conspiracy underneath the surface drama of fated empire. Tate’s earlier plays repeatedly register anxiety over political dissent. His Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth adds to its Shakespearean source an attack on the Roman tribunes as “Faction-Mongers” and “Canting Caballers.” And we have already noted the emphasis on civil conflict in Brutus of Alba. In Dido, as in Brutus, Tate makes the agents behind Dido’s downfall a local coven of witches rather than the Olympian gods. The witches’ topical political resonance is real, albeit unfocused. One of Tate’s probable sources, William Davenant’s 1674 musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, had furnished parallels between Malcolm and Charles II, both persecuted exiles who triumphed over their demonic oppressors. And Shadwell’s Lancashire Witches (1681), a harsh anti-Catholic satire, had recently cemented a growing link in Restoration drama between stage witches and Catholics.55 Whether or not Tate’s cabal of witches has a specific topical referent—from the Popish Plot crisis to rumors that the unexpected birth of a son to James II in 1688 was a hoax engineered by the Vatican—they absorb, as if in the symbolic language of a dream, the period’s popular unease over the threat of a political enemy operating invisibly inside the state. In their uncanny, fictive quality, the witches become Tate’s focal point for a meditation on epic mythmaking. The witches’ scenes in acts 2 and 3 unearth a dark substratum underneath the public pageant of the Aeneid: Tate’s Dido owes her death not to the grand imperatives of Virgil’s fatum but to the scheming of an internal enemy that remains invisible to epic history.The witches expose the private and irrational forces that shape the chronicle of empire.They are concerned not with the metaphysical ordering of history but with Dido’s good name. The Sorceress announces that her goal is to deprive Dido at a single stroke “of fame, of life and love” (12).The epic plot, the imperial teleology that means everything to Aeneas, works merely as a means to an end, the real goal of staining Dido’s 188

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reputation. Tate’s story of Dido and Aeneas reshapes Virgil’s vision of world empire into the personal tragedy of a good name lost to history. The opera’s signal plot event, the witches’ fabrication of a false Mercury to order Aeneas to leave for Rome, is a daring twist on a notorious turning point in Virgil’s poem. Virgil had pressed the god Mercury into service to resolve a delicate plot problem. Aeneas must be extricated from Carthage, but without accruing a heavy burden of ethical blame for breaking Dido’s trust. Mercury’s intervention resolves the problem but also renders it visible. The god’s marching orders for Aeneas form a transparent plot mechanism, a narrative lever or hinge that momentarily exposes the structural mechanics behind Virgil’s translatio imperii. The gods have this meta-narrative function throughout the Aeneid, as their manipulation of Aeneas’s destiny mirrors the poet’s own task of shaping the epic’s ideology and form. The preface to Dryden’s Aeneid struggles at length with the gods’ role in book 4. As Richard F. Thomas has shown, Dryden’s translation tweaks its source text to weaken Dido’s claims on Aeneas.56 At the same time, Dryden magnifies his hero’s religious obligations. He stresses that the domestic commitments of Aeneas as a husband cease to apply after Mercury’s arrival, since “an immediate Revelation dispenses with all Duties of Morality.”57 Dryden does not hide the fact that he needs this expedient to redeem a hero who would otherwise come across as an ethical failure: “Humanely speaking,” he concedes, “I doubt there was a fault somewhere; and Jupiter is better able to bear the blame, than either Virgil or Aeneas.”58 But his recourse to the gods brings Dryden directly to the hostile view of Virgil put forward by the French critics. Dryden explains that Virgil had overriding political reasons to stage Aeneas’s break with Dido, since he needed a fiction that would account for the long historical enmity between Rome and Carthage. The task obliged Virgil to sacrifice not just the manners of Aeneas but also the reputation of the historical Dido: “He knew he cou’d not please the Romans better, or oblige them more to Patronize his Poem, than by disgracing the Foundress of that City. . . . [H]e knew the Romans were to be his Readers; and them he brib’d, perhaps at the expence of his Heroe’s honesty, but he gain’d his Cause however; as Pleading before Corrupt Judges.”59 In Dryden’s reading, the gods’ intervention in book 4 relieves Aeneas of personal blame for his treachery, but at the expense of both confirming that treachery as a moral problem and damaging the integrity of Virgil’s gods, who are exposed as a mystification, a cover for a coolly pragmatic political myth. Tate, for his part, also makes the Aeneid’s ideological scaffolding visible, but he does so by exposing yet another layer of causality behind the Virgilian gods. Rather than simply erase the gods from his drama, as he had done in Brutus of epic opera

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Alba,Tate reintroduces them as a flimsy human construct: a “trusty elf, / In form of Mercury himself ” (2.20–21) manufactured by the witches to dupe Aeneas into leaving Carthage. Tate seems eager not just to collapse the divine infrastructure behind Aeneas’s quest for empire but to expose the process whereby such an epic ideology has been constructed. Tate both flaunts the fictionality of Virgil’s Mercury and shows how Aeneas turns that baseless fiction into the foundation for an imperial myth. Tate’s Dido, meanwhile, begins to recognize the partisan history that is beginning to form around her, and struggles with growing helplessness against it. When the “trusty elf ” appears to him, Aeneas assents without hesitation. As in Virgil, his thoughts then turn to Dido: what words can he find to “pacify” his “injured Queen”? Tate’s Aeneas has told Dido in act 1 that he would “defy / The feeble stroke of Destiny,” and would answer to “no fate but you” (1.46–48). That strong claim to authority now abruptly melts away. Aeneas now portrays “fate” as an agency so external and impersonal that, as the hero’s guilty “I” disappears, even the grammatical relation of subject and object breaks down: “from her arms I’m forced to part. / How can so hard a fate be took, / One night enjoyed, the next forsook?” (2.64–66). By the end of the speech (and in a further addition to Virgil), Aeneas has embraced his new role as the helpless instrument of a divine plot teleology, imposed on him from above, which recasts Dido as a necessary sacrifice to his manifest destiny: “Yours be the blame, ye gods, for I / Obey your will—but with more ease could die” (67–68). Tate has staged an epic myth in the making. The witches, the true agents behind Dido’s downfall, recede into the background, their motives left obscure. Over the opera’s core plot engine of conspiracy and rebellion they have succeeded in stretching a layer of fiction. Aeneas wholly accepts their mystification: history has shaped itself into a providential public destiny to which his personal will must be forfeited. As Tate’s hero begins his final interview with Dido, an opening rhetorical question advertises his powerlessness: “What shall lost Aeneas do? / How, royal fair, shall I impart / The gods’ decree and tell you we must part?” (3.29–31). With his self-exculpating swivel to the third-person voice, he startlingly echoes Virgil’s omniscient narrator—“Heu quid agat? Quo nunc reginam ambire furentem / audeat adfatu?” (Ah, what should he do? With what speech now dare he approach the frenzied queen?)—as if surrendering himself to the fate that the epic poet, through his instruments, the Roman gods, has decreed for him.60 Dido is not convinced. Virgil’s Dido had already raised doubts about Aeneas’s claim of a divine visitation; in Dryden’s translation, she rages, “A God’s Command he pleads, / And make’s Heav’n accessary to his Deeds / . . . as if 190

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the peaceful State / Of Heav’nly Pow’rs were touch’d with Humane Fate!”61 In Virgil’s account, Dido is tragically mistaken to doubt the gods’ investment in Aeneas’s future. In Tate’s new context, however, her argument gains force and point.The bulk of his Dido’s recriminations target Aeneas’s shift of responsibility from himself to the gods. In Dido’s view, overlaying the gods onto what is really a matter of human choice amounts to willful fraud and hypocrisy: “Thus on the fatal banks of Nile, / Weeps the deceitful crocodile” (3.32–33). More than one critic has raised an eyebrow at the incongruous metaphor of the crocodile, but it is not a trivial one. Virgil had linked Dido thematically with the archetypal eastern queen of the Nile, Cleopatra.62 Both women embodied the irrational, wily, and prevaricating social world of the southern Mediterranean: the uncontrollable forces that pressed in on the Roman Empire from its frontiers, symbolic of the volatile passions that threatened each Roman from within. Tate’s Brutus of Alba had alluded repeatedly to Dryden’s All for Love (1677), in which Cleopatra is labeled a “False Crocodyle” for her seductive cunning, and he deployed the trope in his Brutus.63 In Dido and Aeneas, the crocodile metaphor has migrated to Aeneas, who inherits Cleopatra’s association with hypocrisy and prevarication. We find in retrospect that he has wrapped himself in selfserving fictions throughout the drama.When Aeneas attached his domestic affair with Dido to the fate of a revived Troy—“If not for mine, for empire’s sake”—he had cast a screen of imperial destiny across what was finally a transient erotic passion. The witches’ false Mercury persuades Aeneas that he is the victim of a divine destiny rather than its prime mover, but it strengthens his impulse to rewrite his life as myth, and history as fate. Read in these terms, the end of the opera seems to show Aeneas’s Virgilian myth absorbing Dido into itself. No longer held at a moody distance from us, the reticent, shrinking figure of the first two acts now becomes the familiar doomed queen of the Aeneid. Aeneas’s language and ideology begin to imprint themselves on Dido’s suddenly voluble speech. She pleads with fate, “The only refuge for the wretched left” (3.25), even as she rejects Aeneas’s appeal to the supernatural agency of “heaven and gods” (35). She scorns Aeneas’s offer to stay with her, yet she adopts his tragic terminology, calling herself “The injured Dido” (46) as he had earlier called her his “injured Queen” (2.62). With Aeneas’s departure, Dido embraces death as “a welcome guest” (3.59), a new paramour to replace the “Trojan guest” (1.16) who has left the scene, but her conclusion that “Death must come when he is gone” (3.53) comes across as strangely impersonal. The apparatus of tragedy seems to act upon her like an external force—“More I would but death invades me” (58)—rather than as an impulse emerging from within. epic opera

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With her dying lament, Dido’s secretive emotional autonomy gives way to conventional feminine self-display: More I would but death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest. When I am laid in earth may my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast; Remember me, but ah! forget my fate. (58–62) What to make of this sudden self-exposure? Just as Tate’s witches had disappeared under the false screen of Aeneas’s imperial myth, Tate seems to show his Dido being supplanted or overwritten by the figure of Virgil’s antiheroine; the opera’s “historical” Dido, so to speak, is absorbed into Aeneas’s widening fiction and compelled to play the role it has cast for her. Her efforts to protest this “fated” role only make her conform more tightly to it: any form of passionate self-expression simply consolidates her resemblance to the irrational, unstable women of the Aeneid. Purcell’s scoring of Dido’s lament, heavy with abstract inexorability, strengthens this dramatic argument. Its famous chromatic ground bass, descending relentlessly in a repeating five-measure phrase, overlaps with and pulls against Dido’s languid melody to produce ripples of suspensions and discords.64 The resulting push and pull of the fixed bass against her chromatically ascending vocal line suggests Dido’s struggle to break free from the myth that the other characters have wrapped claustrophobically around her—a struggle, however, in which her every gesture is itself a conventional reflex of feminine lamentation, a stylized confession of anguish that seems to arise more from the tragic protocol of the moment than from Dido’s prior emotional life.The gloomy, sinuous eroticism of her dying melody is no less a prison than the unyielding fixed bass. By thrashing about inside the trap of her Virgilian “fate,” she binds herself more tightly in its toils. Tate’s chorus, with its habit of projecting Dido’s private life onto a wider public canvas, is ready to write Dido into history as the victim of a fatal inner conflict: “Great minds against themselves conspire, / And shun the cure they most desire” (54–55). Dido’s last word in the opera is “fate,” an unwilling concession to Aeneas’s rhetoric of destiny. And the afterlife of Dido in the Aeneid—the underworld meeting where, reunited with her first husband, she turns away from the pleading Aeneas—is suppressed, to be replaced by a fixed memorial in the world of the living. Cupids are called down to strew Dido’s tomb with roses: “Soft and gentle as her heart, / Keep here your watch and never part” (65–66). Virgil’s epic myth has extracted its required sacrifice, and Aeneas sails toward his imagined Roman destiny. 192

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In other respects, though, Dido’s dying lament seems to resist the form’s conventional expectations. Her words carry a strong aura of ceremonial detachment and reserve, as if they were only another solemn gesture of turning away from public view. Both the text and its musical setting create an effect of such distilled purity, such patient, formal elegance, as to convey an emotional experience serenely remote from any human context, deeply intimate but also elusive and mysterious in its terms. From this perspective, Dido’s divided sentiment— remember, but forget—continues to separate an inner “me” from the imperial “fate” that binds her to Aeneas. Apparently trying to have it both ways, Tate both exposes and conceals Dido’s torment, both embraces and attacks Virgil’s account of her tragic victimhood. This confusion probably stems from Tate’s ambivalence toward his source material. Like Busenello in La Didone, he seems to have been torn between the two Didos, each carrying her own complex ideological burden. Sympathetic toward the chaste Dido tradition, and inclined to take Dido’s side against Virgil’s partisan mythology, he was likely unsure whether to commit himself to portraying Dido’s lament as a posture forced upon her by Virgil’s fiction—and, as in Cotton’s Scarronides, a violent and prejudicial exposure of his heroine’s emotional life—or to treat her song instead as a poignant, fleeting remnant of a historical voice that has been lost to posterity. The result is a jumble of competing imperatives. On one hand, Tate takes polemical aim at Virgil’s Augustan fiction, where the impassioned suicide of Dido confirms the danger that she poses to Aeneas and his Roman future. Her violent unreason is made to justify the antifeminist gender politics of the Aeneid, its hero constantly forced to protect his patrilineal inheritance against the assaults of wrathful females both mortal and divine. In these terms, the lament of Tate’s Dido becomes the sign of her submersion into Virgil’s masculinist, absolutist, and imperial myth. On the other hand, exploiting ancient tropes of female victimization and mourning, Tate seems to want his heroine’s last utterance to call forth pity and sympathetic identification, to stand as the mournful testimony of the chaste historical Dido rather than the false tears of her Virgilian double. From this perspective, his opera assails the imperial politics of the Aeneid but shares a kind of complicity with its gender politics, placing the spectacle of a grieving woman at the heart of its ideological program. Neither Busenello nor Tate could finally master the dense matrix of cultural forces that gave shape to “epic” opera’s argument and form: their efforts to reimagine Virgil’s antiheroine entangled them in critical debate over the meaning and legacy of the classical past, shifting models of heroism and of gender relations, the changing makeup of theatre audiences and the evolution of their tastes, and the protocols of genre that organized early epic opera

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opera’s relationship with the European epic tradition. Like other readers of the classical literary canon, they continued to be haunted by the mysterious vocality of the ancients but could no longer confidently assert its place and meaning in the present. It was now not enough for the artist simply to take up the old rhetorical stance of the poet-singer. Dido’s lament speaks for a desire to reach back to realms of experience that were still more ancient, more elusive, and more resistant to authorial control. The classical epic, for all its universalizing grandeur, was not commensurate with this period’s widening view of antiquity—a gaze that ranged across an ever more cluttered, fragmented historical landscape in search of the old sense of wonder. Early opera’s unstable responses to Virgil’s Aeneid aptly measure the late seventeenth century’s uncertainty over a literary tradition whose time-honored authority had splintered into an array of voices, each of them claiming primacy, yet all of them still bound to one another by a shared past.

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5)CODA)% The Singer Withdraws

The case of Dido and Aeneas is not an isolated one. The same ambivalence toward the inherited epic canon can be traced in other late seventeenth-century operas, from the Armide of Quinault and Lully (1686) to the Dryden-Purcell King Arthur (1691). All of these point to the breakup of the traditional epic into an array of cultural forms that both preserved and challenged its legacy. Ancient codes of martial heroism jostled against newer models of human inwardness; in many genres, attention shifted from sovereigns to their subjects, from male to female protagonists, from feudal violence to domestic family conflicts. Characters often found themselves in murky political environments where the tidy evaluative hierarchies of an older era had crumbled away. Dido and Aeneas shows how the epic genre’s founding voices still shared a common fate with Renaissance musical humanism, the project to recover the magical vocality of the ancients that had led to the creation of opera. But by the late seventeenth century the quest to recover the lost music of antiquity had already begun to shift toward other methods and traditions. These largely left Homer behind as earlier beliefs about the ancient poets’ mystical charisma were displaced by mechanical, acoustic, and psychophysiological theories about the effects of music on the body. Such arguments tended to steer vocal music away from the humanist arts of rhetoric and oratory and back toward the sciences. Marin Mersenne’s 195 3)))))#

influential Harmonie universelle (1636) drew on the work of sixteenthcentury music theorists such as Gioseffo Zarlino, Giulio Caccini, and members of Jean-Antoine de Baïf’s Académie de Poésie et de Musique, but also on René Descartes, who influenced Mersenne’s view that music acts on human emotions through the impact of vibrating air upon the activity of the body’s vital spirits.1 These claims later found their way into the work of the Dutch humanist Isaac Vossius, whose De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi (Oxford, 1673) argues that poetry can raise the passions only if it is patterned in rhythmic units that mimic their biological motions. The musical verse of the ancients, Vossius claims, distilled these rhythmic “images” of the passions into the various classical meters, each one modeling a single human emotion. To stir human feeling at its organic roots the moderns must therefore return to the musical poetry of their Greco-Roman ancestors. Epic poets figured only peripherally in such arguments. Vossius adduces a handful of verses by Homer and Virgil to assess their handling of poetic rhythm. John Dryden, admiring Vossius’s tract, considered writing his own treatise on prosody “out of some Observations which I have made from Homer and Virgil, who amongst all the Poets, only understood the Art of Numbers, and of that which was properly call’d Rhythmus by the Ancients.”2 Eighteenth-century adherents of the doctrine of rhythmus occasionally drew on epic sources from Homer to Milton. Samuel Say insisted that the greatest poems combine “the Music . . . and the Power of Numbers together,” and extolled the “Propriety and Force of the Sounds in almost Every Line” of the Iliad, which, he suggested, led Milton to choose Homer as his chief model for the prosody of Paradise Lost.3 Daniel Webb’s Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (1769) similarly found that Milton had achieved a poetics of the passions, “not balanced by rule, but measured by sentiment, and flowing in ever new yet musical proportions,” its placement of accent deftly capturing the organic motions of the animal spirits.4 In its longer trajectory, however, this pattern of thought traces the decline of the traditional epic, for it marks a shift toward other loci of cultural authority. Although it could dovetail in its early phase with humanist thought, and in its later stages with cultures of sensibility or primitivism, its core premises were those of scientific rationalism, encroaching on the old territory of shamanic magic and cultic myth that had been the preserve of the epic’s ancient voices. Other narratives had by now replaced epic history as the master texts of civilization. Another sign of this transfer of authority is the epic poem’s enslavement to the formal “rules” of the neoclassicists, with their stylistic formulae and taxonomies of narrative form. The parasitic critical apparatus that had gathered around the epic canon by now vastly outweighed the bulk and scope of the 196

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poems themselves, so that, as Thomas Maresca has observed, “Epic, at the close of the Renaissance, had to bear the burden of its own hermeneutics.”5 Those who sought cultural prestige in this era were as likely to compose analytical treatises about the epic plot as they were to invoke the muse. Voltaire later complained that “there are more Commentators than Poets, . . . and ’tis no wonder if such Lawgivers, unequal to the Burthen which they took upon themselves, have embroil’d the States which they intended to regulate.”6 The epic, which had once offered itself as a total explanatory system, reigning over other ways of knowing the self and the cosmos, was now consigned to a place inside other discourses that picked apart its form and policed its codes of value. It is hardly a coincidence that seventeenth-century epics returned so often to themes of art and artistry. As literary writing was pushed outside the public life of the community, epic poets came to focus less on narrating heroic action than on exploring the narrower confines of literary fiction. Voltaire’s remarks were doubtless meant to clear a path for his own recently finished Henriade, which met with some critical favor. Yet the vast, all-inclusive worldview of the epic had already come to be seen as an anachronism in an increasingly atomized social environment, where no voice commanded universal assent and no single literary form was felt to capture the totality of social life in time. Such a unified field of vision was instead projected back onto the archaic past. The earliest epics were soon to be read as the expression of a lost communal mentality, a totalizing view of civilization that was no longer possible. In this imagined era before individuation, the artist, too, began to fade into the collective identity of a people. Scholars from Thomas Blackwell to Giambattista Vico understood the Homeric epics less as the work of a single authorial intelligence than as the slow, impersonal outgrowth of a larger social organism. Their ideas enabled F. A. Wolf’s epochal Prolegomena ad Homerum—itself a triumph of imagination not so much in conceiving of an oral Homer as in its painstaking effort to reconstruct the intricate story of his poems’ textual transmission over time. A cluster of related insights about the organic emergence of the Western cultural tradition, gathered by late eighteenth-century primitivists into new models of nature, ethnic nationalism, and literary creativity, prepared European Romanticism for its own relationship with the ancient world. The modern “discovery” of orality therefore has a prehistory that reaches back to the origins of the Renaissance. Generations of literary artists framed their ideas about authorship and tradition by grounding their work within, or measuring it against, an imagined oral past. Models of an ancient cultural life structured by speech and song gave shape to arguments about the role of the artist in the polity, the dynamics of literary imitation, and the structure of t h e s i ng e r w i t h dr aw s

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history itself. The sites of historical origin that the poets constructed for their writings were often inchoate.They could be viewed with nostalgia or alarm. But they share a supporting role in the emergence of the modern author, as poets worked through key questions about their art by finding ancient precursors and lines of genealogical inheritance to sanction their voices. Such visions of the past did not wholly fade away as authorship took on its modern lineaments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Robert Wood praised James Macpherson as a new Lycurgus or Peisistratus for his recovery of the poems of Ossian; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pondering whether Homer could have been illiterate, compared the Greek rhapsodes to the Venetian gondoliers who sang scraps of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata while they plied their trade.7 Yet such patterns of thought could not long survive the archaeological and philological rigor of modern historiography. Epic fictions had always depended on a belief in the continuity of the past and the present, a common register of human experience over time. As the gulf widened between the contemporary world and its ancient origins, traditional heroic poetry faded from the West’s cultural imagination. It was rather in the Renaissance era—when the early stirrings of historical consciousness had not yet shaken off an older residue of myth and magic, when the poets’ voices had not wholly lost their ancient charisma—that the European epic could still aspire to an all-embracing song of human civilization.

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3)NOTES)#

All quoted verse passages in this book are supplied in the original language with English translation in parentheses. Foreign-language prose passages are quoted in English translation only. All translations are my own unless otherwise specified. I N TRODUCTION

1. See Virgil, Aeneid, 1.723–56, and Homer, Odyssey, 8.62–92. Petrarch refers here to the Aeneid’s misrepresentation of the chaste historical Dido; for further details and later responses to the problem, see chapter 5. Line references in this paragraph, and subsequent Latin quotations from Petrarch’s poem, are drawn from L’Africa, ed. Festa. English translations are from Petrarch’s “Africa,” trans. Bergin and Wilson, except where specified below. 2. The book 1 sequence derives from a famous dream vision in the sixth book of Cicero’s De re publica, in which the Roman general Scipio Africanus visits his adopted grandson, Scipio Aemilianus, and reveals to him the nature of the cosmos; the highly influential fourthcentury commentary on this episode by Macrobius become a key source of information about classical philosophy and cosmology throughout the Middle Ages. 3. Translations of the Africa in this paragraph are my own. 4. For examples see Saenger, “Silent Reading,” 388–93. 5. Letter 18.2, 10 Jan. 1354, in Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Bernardo, 3:45–46. 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essai sur l’origine des langues,” ed. Jean Starobinski, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 5:390. 7. The term derives from Thomas M. Greene’s classic account of humanist imitatio,The Light in Troy, 4–27; for Petrarch, see 81–103. 8. Marx, Critique of Political Economy, trans. Stone, 311. 9. On this process see Hudson’s essay “Constructing Oral Tradition,” noting that “orality is a fundamentally literate concept” (251). See also Hudson, “Evolution of an EighteenthCentury Concept,” and Korshin, “Reconfiguring the Past.” Longer-term surveys of the growth of the concept of orality can be found in Ong, Orality and Literacy, 16–30, and in the further sources listed below, note 10; on the reception of Homer in particular, see note 40. 10. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 77. For a seminal version of this argument, see Goody and Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” 27–68. A broader view of the Western transition from orality to literacy is laid out in Havelock, Preface to Plato, and summarized in Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write. Goody distances himself from the seeming determinism of these claims for literacy and cognitive change in Domestication of the Savage Mind, 1–18. A thoughtful modification of the theory is proposed in Olson, “Cognitive Consequences of Literacy,” and developed in Olson’s The World on Paper. 11. For a fuller review of the criticism of the Goody/Ong thesis outlined below, see Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice; Finnegan, Literacy and Orality; and Graff, The Legacies of Literacy. 199 3)))))#

12. A thorough analysis of this practice can be found in Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, esp. 83–134. On the contest for authority among the dialectal forms within a single vernacular language, see e.g. Blank, Broken English; further theoretical considerations are explored in Balibar, “National Language, Education, Literature.” 13. Coleman, Public Reading, 1–33, argues that the much-discussed “transition” from orality to literacy describes not a temporary and end-stopped historical evolution but a permanent feature of modern societies. Among the important recent efforts to map the interactions between oral and literate domains are Stock, Listening for the Text; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture; and the comparative studies of Roger Chartier, including “Orality Lost” and “Leisure and Sociability.” 14. See Graff, “On Literacy in the Renaissance: Review and Reflections,” in The Labyrinths of Literacy, 146–65, for this estimate, and see Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 42–61, for some of the methodological problems involved in such calculations of literacy rates. 15. “Scripturus ego quantam exercitibus Graiis cladem excitaverit Achillis furens indignatio.” Valla, Homeri Poetarum Principis, sig. A2r. Valla composed his edition in 1440–44. 16. On these interactions see Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, and “Oral Residue.” 17. Elsky, Authorizing Words, 35–69. Elsky and others take serious issue with Michel Foucault’s claim, in The Order of Things, for a later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century episteme that gave writing ontological and epistemological priority over speech. 18. Goody and Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” 63–67. Compare Eisenstein, Printing Press, 1:129–36, on the “atomization” of the early modern reading public. 19. “You know the vulgar and banal breed that makes a living on words not its own; they have spread among us to the point of nausea.They are men of no great talent, but great memory and great drive and even greater effrontery, who frequent the palaces of rulers and powerful men, devoid of anything of their own, yet dressed in others’ verses.” Petrarch, Rerum Senilium Libri, 5.2, trans. in Letters of Old Age, ed. Bernardo, Levin, and Bernardo, 1:157. 20. Bracciolini, Facetiae 82 (“Comparatio Antonii Lusci”), in Les Facéties de Pogge, 1:130–31. See additional examples in Levi, “I cantari leggendari,” 2–4. 21. Quoted in Rossi, Il Quattrocento, 395. For additional contexts, see Tommaso, “Oral Tradition,” 202–3. This humanist disdain for popular canterini was not universal; Angelo Poliziano compared the same improviser, Antonio di Guido, to Orpheus: “Antonius Orpheo / Hoc differt: hominess hic trahit, ille feras” (Antonio differs from Orpheus in this respect, that Antonio draws human beings to him, while Orpheus attracted wild animals). Poliziano, Epigrammata latina 23, in Prose volgari, ed. Del Lungo, 121. 22. See e.g. Cinthio, On Romances, trans. Snuggs, 7–8, 36–37, 83–84. Further examples are cited in my chapter 1. 23. See Anthony Grafton, What Was History? 112–17, expanding on the observations of Carlo Ginzburg, No Island Is an Island, 30–33. 24. Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Hadfield and Maley, 77, 62–63. See my chapter 2. 25. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, lays out the classic distinction between “primary” (oral, Homeric) and “secondary” (literary, Virgilian) epic. The efforts of early modern literate high culture to mimic the oralist trappings of the ancients can be seen to support rather than weaken Bowra’s thesis, although his approach has been challenged more seriously on other fronts for being too reliant on primitivist assumptions about Homer’s artless oral simplicity—assumptions that these early modern epicists helped to bring into being. See e.g. Kirk, Homer and the Oral Tradition, esp. 85–98. 26. Marcellinus, Rerum gestarum libri XXXI, 15.9.8, in Ammianus Marcellinus, ed. Rolfe, 1: 178–81. 200

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27. For example, Minturno, De poeta, 9, remarks on the “bards who sang in verse with musical instruments the virtues of good men and the vices of wicked ones” to show that there is no human society, however barbaric, that lacks poetry. Joachim du Bellay, drawing on Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Illustrations de Gaule, describes the “grand’ estime” accorded to the ancient Gallic bards, whom he claims to be the source of rhymed poetry in French and in “the other vernacular languages [that] derived it from us.” La deffence, et illustration, ed. Monferran, 154. 28. Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, 66; Sir Philip Sidney, A Defense of Poesy, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, 1:153. 29. William Harrison, “An Historicall Description of the Iland of Britaine,” in Holinshed, Chronicles, ed. Ellis, 1:37. 30. Henry Peacham, Of Poetry, from The Compleat Gentleman (1622), in Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays, 1:119. 31. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2: 10–11. 32. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme (1603?), in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:360; compare Cinthio, On Romances, 6, linking the romance genre to Turpin, archbishop of Rheims, a figure whom the romancers often cited as the source of their “histories.” Daniel seems to refer here to earlier Gallic practices of the kind described by Du Bellay above, note 27. 33. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:43. 34. See “To My Noble Friend, Sir Henry Goodere,” and “To The Reader,” in Drayton’s 1619 Odes, reprinted in Drayton, Works, ed. Hebel et al., 2:344–46. Drayton’s prefatory poem, “To Himselfe, and the Harpe,” imagines a British bardic tradition that competes in its antiquity with the Greeks: “And diversely though Strung, / So anciently We sung / To [the harp], that Now scarce knowne, / If first it did belong / To Greece, or if our Owne” (2:348). 35. References to Poly-Olbion are to Drayton’s Works, vol. 4, and are cited parenthetically by line number in the text. On Drayton and the bards, see Hiller, “‘Sacred Bards’ and ‘Wise Druides,”’ 1–15, and Curran, “The History Never Written,” 498–525. 36. “To My Friends, the Cambro-Britans,” in Drayton, Works, 4:vii*. 37. Of modern Greece, he lamented elsewhere that “Th’ unletter’d Turke, and rude Barbarian trades, / Where homer sang his lofty Iliads.” “To Master George Sandys,” 71–72, in Drayton, Works, 3:207–8. On Drayton’s pervasive nostalgia and alienation from the Stuart court, see Hardin, Michael Drayton, and Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets, 115–27. 38. John Selden, “From the Author of the Illustrations,” in Drayton, Works, 4:viii*–ix*. 39. On Christian ethics and Renaissance revisions of epic heroism, see Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero; on the epic’s relationship to a weakened aristocracy, see Burrow, Epic Romance, 233–43, and Quint, Epic and Empire, 308–24. The impact of gunpowder and the changing conduct of warfare is explored in Murrin, History and Warfare. Two older studies link the epic’s apparent decline with the dense body of critical interpretation that accreted around its classical epic models: Hägin, The Epic Hero, and Maresca, Epic to Novel. For the debilitating impact of rationalist philosophy on epic fictions, see e.g.Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background, 206–62, and Greene, The Descent from Heaven, 363–418. 40. Fuller accounts of the early modern reception of Homer include Myres, Homer and His Critics; Costil, “La question homérique”; Hepp, “Homère en France au XVIe siècle” and Homère en France au XVIIe siècle; Allen, Mysteriously Meant; Clarke, Homer’s Readers, 106–55; Ford, De Troie à Ithaque; Ferreri, La Questione Omerica; and Whitney, “English Primitivistic notes to pages 11–14

201

41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 202

Theories.” The rise of modern Homeric scholarship, especially in relation to the Homeric Question, is succinctly traced by Adam M. Parry, “The Making of Homeric Verse,” in The Language of Achilles, 195–264. The story originates in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 170, whose author describes himself as “a blind man” who “lives in rocky Chios.” Homer, Homeric Hymns, ed. and trans. West, 84–85. From the time of Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War, 3.104) this was taken as an autobiographical claim by Homer; see Graziosi, Inventing Homer, 62–66. On the early transmission of these Homeric lives and for further bibliography, see “Plutarch” [PseudoPlutarch], Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer, ed. Keaney and Lamberton, 1–38. Elyot, Governour, ed. Rhys, 1:64. Chapman, Iliads of Homer (1611), 9.188, in Chapman’s Homer, ed. Nicoll, 186; Chapman adds a marginal gloss: “Achilles’ love of Musicke. Himselfe sings the deeds of Heroes.” Elyot, Governour, 1:39–40, proposes that Achilles calmed his rage against Agamemnon by taking up his harp and singing “the gestes and actis martial of the auncient princis of Grece, as Hercules, Perseus, Perithous, Theseus, and his cosin Jason, and of diuers other of semblable value and prowess[.]” Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Cavalchini and Samuel, 199. Tasso may have derived this claim from Pseudo-Plutarch’s remarks in On Music, 1145e–f, trans. in Barker, ed., Greek Musical Writings, 1:246–47.Also relevant is the anecdote in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, 15, that when the great warlord visited the site of Troy and was asked if he wished to see the harp of Paris, he replied with some disdain that he would rather see that of Achilles, with which he had sung the deeds of brave men. Pierre de Ronsard, “Elegie à Cassandre,” 1–8, 45–76, in Oeuvres, ed. Laumonier, Silver, and Lebègue, 6:57–60. Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 4.3–4, records that Lycurgus in Asia “made his first acquaintance with the poems of Homer, which were preserved among the posterity of Creophylus; and when he saw that the political and disciplinary lessons contained in them were worthy of no less serious attention than the incentives to pleasure and license which they supplied, he eagerly copied and compiled them in order to take them home with him. For these epics already had a certain faint reputation among the Greeks, and a few were in possession of certain portions of them, as the poems were carried here and there by chance; but Lycurgus was the very first to make them really known.” Plutarch, Lives, ed. and trans. Perrin, 1:214–15. Compare Strabo, Geography, 10.482, and Aelian, Historical Miscellany, 13.14. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 1.57, ed. and trans. Hicks, 1:56–59. See Cicero, De oratore, 3.137; compare Pausanias, Graeciae descriptio, 7.26.13. Further sources relating to the Peisistratean Recension are reproduced in Allen, Homer, 225–38. See also Davison, “Pisistratus and Homer,” and Graziosi, Inventing Homer, 201–34. Aelian, Historical Miscellany, 8.2, 13.14, ed. and trans. Wilson, 260–63, 426–27. This role for Cadmus was promulgated as early as Herodotus, and was sponsored in Erasmus’s De recta latini grecique sermonis pronuntiatione, ed. M. Cytowska, in Opera omnia, ed. Waszink et al., 1.4:38. See further Hudson, Writing and European Thought, 51–52, 58. See “(Pseudo-)Herodotus on Homer’s Origins, Date, and Life,” 4–5, 26, in Homer, Homeric Hymns, ed. West, 356–59, 384–85; compare 404–5, 410–11. Vives on Education, ed. and trans. Watson, 146–47. Vives’s discussion cites both Cicero and Aelian. Cinthio, On Romances, 7–8, 36–37, 83–84. notes to pages 14–16

54. Casaubon’s claim, made in a note on Diogenes’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 9.113, in Notae ad Diogenis Laertii libros (1583), was based in part on the view of the ancient historian Josephus, Contra Apionem, 1.12, that Homer was an illiterate singer whose poems had long been transmitted by memory before they were set down in writing. See Casaubon, Notae . . . in Diogenem Laertium, ed. Huebner, 1:132, later noted in Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, ed. and trans. Grafton, Most, and Zetzel, 161 n. 42. Further contexts are discussed in Ferreri, La Questione Omerica, 103–4, and Myres, Homer and His Critics, 46–47. 55. Beni, Comparazione, ed. Rosini, 21:192–93. 56. Rapin, Observations, trans. Davies, 114–15. 57. See d’Aubignac, Conjectures académiques, esp. 61–64; Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 1:23–25. On d’Aubignac and his influence, see Lorimer, “Homer and the Art of Writing”; Parry, “The Making of Homeric Verse,” in The Language of Achilles, 200–201; and my chapter 5, note 11. 58. The term “musical humanism” appears to have been coined by Paul-Marie Masson in a pair of articles for the journal Mercure musical in 1906 and 1907, before being expanded in scope by the work of D. P. Walker, Claude Palisca, and others; see Ryding, In Harmony Framed, 2. Ryding cautions us that the term “suggests a unified musico-philosophical movement that never existed” (x). For further studies, see my chapter 1, note 4. 59. Claude V. Palisca, “The Alterati of Florence,” 14–15. The claim that vocal music should heighten the emotional impact of poetry, relying on expressive text-setting rather than on the formal structures of counterpoint, was also the defining principle of the socalled seconda prattica madrigalists, led by Claudio Monteverdi. See Giulio Monteverdi’s well-known “Explanation of the Letter Printed in the Fifth Book of Madrigals,” in Claudio Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali (1607), trans. in Treitler, ed., Strunk’s Source Readings, 536–44, and Fortune, “Monteverdi and the Seconda Prattica.” On the categories of “constructive” and “expressive” composition, see Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence, 122–93, to which I also owe the term “rhetorical Renaissance” below. 60. Marsilius Ficinus, Opera Omnia (Basel, 1576), 651, 673, quoted in Kristeller, “Music and Learning,” in Renaissance Thought II, 161. On Pico, see Walker, “Le chant orphique de Marsile Ficin,” in Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1954), 20 n. 10, rpt. in Walker, Music, Spirit, and Language. 61. Some of these settings are surveyed in Lowinsky, “Humanism in the Music of the Renaissance,” in Music in the Culture of the Renaissance, 1:154–218. For example, Franciscus Niger’s Grammatica brevis (Venice, 1480) includes anonymous examples of Latin verse with melodic notation (on these settings, see also Ryding, In Harmony Framed, 41–42), and Sebastian Forster’s Melodiae Prudentianae et in Virgilium (Leipzig, 1533) sets passages from the Aeneid. Settings for the Aeneid’s fourth book became especially popular, on which see Skei, “ ‘Dulces exuviae.’ ” 62. Vettori set an eight-hour limit, while Castelvetro proposed a division into sections of twelve hours each. See Williams, Epic Unity, 12, and Charlton, Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetry, 87–88. 63. Ronsard, “Epitre à Ambroise de la Porte,” 37–50, in Oeuvres, 6:11–12. 64. Davenant, “The Author’s Preface,” in “Gondibert,” ed. Gladish, 17. 65. Compare Giamatti, Play of Double Senses, 17–18: “In revealing this [epic tradition’s] civilizing impulse through the father, these large, public, historically oriented poems unfold their massive subject: man’s effort to impose civilization within and without himself, his desire and need to earn citizenship in a city of man or of God. So the father tells the son in the underworld, that deep, dark place in the self where the roots of the self begin, and n ot e s to pag e s 1 6 –2 0

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so the son learns to be a father, to his people, to his city, to himself.” See also Fichter, Poets Historical, for the epic genre’s portrayal of historical origins. C HAP TER ON E . TAS S O ’ S S I LEN T LYR E 1. Tasso, Rime, 312.3, ed. Solerti, 3:361. All references to Tasso’s lyric poems are to this edition. On Achilles’ lyre, his spoils from a raid on Thebe, see Homer, Iliad 1.366–67, 9.185–95. For Bernardo Tasso’s acquisition of the inkwell, see Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, 1:4, 127. 2. For a thorough account of the neo-Aristotelian movement in Italian letters, see Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, and, for its French impact, Bray, Formation de la doctrine classique. In “The Epic Ideal,” 120–23, Durling links the Cinquecento’s concern with Aristotelian unity to the centralizing political impulses of the emerging nation-state and the Counter-Reformation papacy. 3. On related issues in Cinquecento imitation theory, see Greene, The Light in Troy, 171–96. 4. Major accounts of the development of this work in Cinquecento Italy include D. P.Walker, “Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries,” in Music Review 2 (1941): 1–13, 111–21, 220–27, 288–308, and 3 (1943): 55–71, reprinted in Walker, Music, Spirit, and Language; Edward E. Lowinsky, “Humanism in the Music of the Renaissance,” in Lowinsky, Music in the Culture of the Renaissance, 1:154–218; and Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, 1–50. See also Palisca, “Humanism and Music.” 5. Greene, The Descent from Heaven, 16. 6. On Tasso’s troubled attraction to figures of paternal authority, see Zatti, The Quest for Epic, 167–71, and Ferguson, Trials of Desire, 54–136. 7. Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Caretti, 22. Subsequent references to Tasso’s epic are to this edition, cited parenthetically by canto and stanza number. English translations are from Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Nash, with some silent modifications. 8. See Greene, The Light in Troy, 4–27 and passim. 9. Zatti, The Quest for Epic, 137. 10. For in-depth treatment of the earliest negotiations between epic and romance in Italy, see Everson, The Italian Romance Epic. The most thoroughly documented account of the critical reception of Ariosto remains Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, 2:954–1073; see also Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, especially chapters 1–2, 5–6. 11. For further accounts of Homeric analogies drawn by G. B. Pigna and Simone Fornari, see Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, 2:955–56, 965, and Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 28–31. Some additional suggestive observations on Tasso’s Homer are found in Stephens, “Reading Tasso.” 12. Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Cavalchini and Samuel, 40.Tasso proposes a distinction between changing customs in language and society, such as the obsolescence of certain words or forms of clothing, and unchanging, transhistorical absolutes, such as humanity’s moral antipathy toward cannibalism or its aesthetic demand for unity in an epic plot. 13. Tasso, Lettere, ed. Guasti, 1:238. The distinction between Homer’s “nature” and Virgil’s “art” goes back at least as far as Quintilian; see my chapter 2, note 16. 14. De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, trans. Redfern, 2:637. 15. Tasso’s early preface to Rinaldo (1562) describes the Furioso’s proems as an “affectation” better avoided; see “Torquato Tasso to His Readers,” ed. and trans. in Rhu, The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory, 97–98. Compare his discussions of verisimilitude in the Discorsi dell’arte poetica, book 1, and the Discorsi del poema eroico, book 2. 16. Lodovico Castelvetro, “Poetica” d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, trans. in Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, ed. Bongiorno, 249. The critical controversy over Ariosto’s intrusive narrator is reviewed at length in Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 86–105.

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17. See e.g. Gerusalemme liberata 4.87, 5.4, 8.63, 10.41, 13.15.The poem teems with metaphorical and material prisons that become hard to tell apart. Physical bondage broadly reflects the internal tyranny of the passions, as failures of Christian self-bridling result in forms of imprisonment by the pagan forces; compare e.g. 4.83.7 and 6.58. 18. See the detailed account in Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic. The Furioso’s early publication history is more briefly sketched in Casadei, “The History of the Furioso.” 19. For discussion and examples, see Bronzini, Tradizione di stile aedico, 123–27. 20. Pigna, Scontri de’ luoghi mutati dall’ autore doppo la sua prima impressione, Osservazione LII, in Ariosto, Orlando furioso (Venice, 1558), 544–45. Pigna claims that the common people had modified the first line of Ariosto’s twenty-fifth canto, “E gran contrasto in giouenil pensiero,” by substituting “O” for “E,” thereby showing that “the ignorant sometimes make discoveries which the learned with all their studies fail to make.” Relevant literary and musicological contexts for the popular cantari cavallereschi can be found in Pirrotta, Music and Culture, 80–112; Levi, “I cantari leggendari”; Prizer, “Frottola”; McGee, “Cantare all’improvviso”; and Cabani, Le forme del cantare. 21. “Are not his stanzas a refreshment for the tired traveler on a lengthy journey, who, singing them, eases the hardships of heat and the long road ahead? Do you not hear them being sung every day in the streets and the fields? In the space of time that has passed since that most learned gentleman conveyed his poem into the people’s hands, I don’t believe that so many Homers and Virgils have been printed or sold as have Furiosi.” Letter to Benedetto Varchi, 6 March 1559, in Lettere di M. Bernardo Tasso, ed. Seghezzi, 2:425. 22. See Ruscelli, Del modo di comporre in versi nella lingua italiana, cv–cvi; Ricci, Operum Bartholomaei Riccii Lugiensis . . . (Batavia, 1747–48), 434, quoted and translated in Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 11; Trattato di M. Francesco Caburacci da Immola . . . Con un breve discorso in difesa dell’Orlando Furioso (Bologna, 1580), 80, quoted in Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 14; Montaigne, Journal de voyage, ed. Lautrey, 391; Malatesta, Della nuova poesia, 147. For more on the tradition, including later reports and responses by Rousseau, Goldoni, Goethe, Rossini, and Liszt, see Bronzini, Tradizione di stile aedico, 127–30; Haar, “Arie per cantar stanze ariostesche,” 31–46, and “Improvvisatori and Their Relationship to Sixteenth-Century Music,” in Essays on Italian Poetry and Music, 76–99; Haraszti, “La technique des improvisateurs”; and Brand, “Ariosto and the Oral Tradition.” 23. Cinthio, On Romances, trans. Snuggs, 7–8, 36–37, 83–84. 24. Letter to Cinzio, 1556, in Lettere, 2:193. Parts of this paragraph are indebted to Looney, Compromising the Classics, 46–54, on constructions of Ariosto as a rhapsode. 25. On their decline, see Cavallini, “Sugli improvvisatori del Cinque-Seicento.” Reports of performances by improvisers at the Italian courts do, however, continue into the midsixteenth century. See e.g. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, 374–75, citing a 1570 letter in which Benedetto Varchi recalls his delight at hearing the performer Silvio Antoniano improvise to the lyre during a visit to Florence; see also Lazzari, “Un improvvisatore alla corte,” 333–37. 26. Gioseffo Zarlino, Le Istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558), 75, trans. in Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, 371–72. 27. Bardi argues that “those verses will be the best which will have the best rhythm and the best sound, and consequently will be the most musical, hence the most singable.” Excerpt and translation from Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, 2:985; the lecture is summarized in more detail on pp. 985–87. 28. Sung recitative, he claims, “is above all suited to ottava rima, and to heroic poems; whether long ones such as Tasso’s Gerusalemme, or short ones such as Preti’s L’Oronta.” Doni, Compendio del trattato de’ generi, 118. notes to pages 30–33

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

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Tasso, La Cavaletta ovvero della poesia toscana, in Dialoghi, ed. Tortoreto, 219–20. Ibid., 221. Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Cavalchini and Samuel, 199. Ibid., 203; see Aristotle, Poetics 26 (1462). Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Cavalchini and Samuel, 204. Tasso seems to be objecting specifically to staged performance of epic poems by actors, accompanied by dramatic movement and gesticulation. But his approach to the question spreads into a blanket condemnation of oral performance that leaves him at odds with the ancient authorities he engages here. See e.g. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, 14.620d, trans. Gulick, 6:340–41, and Greek Musical Writings, ed. Barker, 1:279. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, 14.632c, trans. Gulick, 6:413. Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, 199–200; see Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music, 1141c–f, in Greek Musical Writings, ed. Barker, 1:235–37. For a survey of ancient accounts of Timotheus’s musical innovations—which became entangled with similar stories about the Greek composer Phrynis (referred to below)—see Maas, “Timotheus at Sparta.” Ibid. Tasso’s source is again the Pseudo-Plutarchan treatise On Music, 1133c; for its references to the musician Phrynis, see Greek Musical Writings, ed. Barker, 1:93–95, 211. On Phrynis see also Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, 14.638c. Aminta, act 1 Chorus, 25–26, in Tasso, Opere minori, ed. Solerti, 3:40. Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Cavalchini and Samuel, 197. A differently framed but complementary view of Tasso and Odysseus can be found in Stephens, “Tasso as Ulysses,” which focuses primarily on Dante’s Ulysses to argue that this figure conveys Tasso’s anxiety over the “unbridgeable chasm between humanity and the divinity” (228), his longing for an intellectual apprehension of God that he knows to be forbidden. One of Ariosto’s defenders, Simone Fornari, drew on the same Homeric analogy in a midcentury treatise addressed to Cosimo de’ Medici: many nowadays who read the Furioso “through defect of doctrine are content to remain only at the sweet harmony of the words and at the delightful inventions of the story, almost as if at the rocks of the Sirens,” at the expense of moral instruction. La Spositione di M. Simone Fornari . . . sopra l’Orlando Furioso, 2 vols. (Florence, 1549–50), 1:3, cited and trans. in Gough, “Tasso’s Enchantress, Tasso’s Captive Woman,” 526. “se mi mostra la mia carta al vero, / non è lontano a discoprirsi il porto; / . . . mi par di veder, ma veggo certo, / veggo la terra, e veggo il lito aperto” (if my map shows me the truth, the port is not far from coming into view; I seem to see—but now I do indeed see it, I see the land, I see the hospitable shore). Ariosto, Orlando furioso, 46.1, ed. Caretti, 1209. On this allusion see Zatti, The Quest for Epic, 95–113. For Tasso and the Renaissance epic’s appropriation of this romance trope, see Quint, Epic and Empire, 248–67. For extensive treatment of the Orlando innamorato and Mambriano and their influence on the Italian romance epic tradition, see Cavallo, Romance Epics; additional material is gathered in Everson, “Epic Tradition of Charlemagne.” Marilyn Migiel explores some patterns of maternal and paternal origin in Gender and Genealogy. Brief remarks on the etymology with additional references can be found in Pucci, Song of the Sirens, 6–9. For further remarks and contexts, see Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” For a related view of Tassian romance and its temptation of rest from physical and spiritual toil, see Giamatti, Earthly Paradise, 179–210. notes to pages 33–39

46. On this problem of “epistemological uncertainty” in the garden, see Enterline, Tears of Narcissus, 111–15. 47. Cavallo, Romance Epics, 192, referring to Trissino’s Italia liberata da’ Goti (1547–48). The rebellion of Trissino’s Corsamonte is more directly based on that of Homer’s Achilles, angered at the loss of Briseis; for Tasso the Homeric model is more tightly wedded to the Carolingian tradition of the hero’s revolt, drawing as the poem does on the story of the rebel Rinaldo of Montalbano, earlier adopted as the subject of Tasso’s youthful romance Rinaldo (1562). 48. See Gerusalemme liberata 5.45–51: Rinaldo storms and rages against Goffredo’s authority but is persuaded by Tancredi to leave the camp rather than precipitate a direct confrontation; the ultimate model, again, is Homer’s Achilles, warned by Athena not to raise his sword against Agamemnon (Iliad 1.188–222). 49. St. Justin Martyr, Hortatory Address to the Greeks, trans. Marcus Dods, in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1:288. 50. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 6.2.89.1, in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 2:500; see Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mysteries, 328–71, for a fuller survey of early Christian responses to Odysseus’s journey. 51. Homer, Odyssey, 12.189–90, trans. Lattimore, 190. 52. Tasso, Rime, ed. Solerti, 3:105. The poem is suggestively discussed in Ferguson, Trials of Desire, 74–77; Enterline, Tears of Narcissus, 84–91, 115–23; and Schiesari, “The Victim’s Discourse.” 53. This point draws on Enterline’s reading in Tears of Narcissus, esp. 123–30, of Rinaldo’s break with Armida as an Oedipal drama of separation from the mother; Tasso, Enterline argues, is haunted by the memory of a prior state of union that can be portrayed only in oblique and negative forms: “Recollection of a putatively original, prelibidinal separation of ‘him’ from ‘her’ can be represented only in the oedipal terms of renunciation and loss by which culture institutes its hierarchical definition of female sexual difference” (133). 54. The stanza appears in almost identical form in the miniature Gierusalemme written during Tasso’s adolescence; see Brand, Torquato Tasso, 56. 55. Cinthio, On Romances, trans. Snuggs, 36–37, describes the practice in his discussion of the rhapsodes, who, he argues, established the conventions of the modern cantastorie: “They do this as would a good performer on the lyre or lute or any other similar instrument, who, before he starts to play, takes his instrument in hand and seeks with a few sweeps over the strings to catch the ears of those before whom he is to play. So our poets, seeking from canto to canto renewed attention with some pleasing beginning, arouse the minds of the hearers.” 56. For the concerto and its contexts see Newcomb, Madrigal at Ferrara. On such female performances and the gender transgression that they threatened, see Nicholson, “Romance as Role Model.” Earlier backgrounds on professional women musicians in Italy are supplied in Brown, “Women Singers and Women’s Songs.” 57. Two of the Ariostan stanze set most often by Cinquecento composers—“La verginella è simile a la rosa” (a virgin is like a rose) (1.42) and “Era il bel viso suo, qual esser suole” (her beautiful face was as the spring sky) (11.65)—are singled out in Tasso’s early Discorsi dell’arte poetica to show how epic poetry can give itself over to the lyric style. “I have not yet decided,”Tasso concludes, “whether or not the epic should do so.” See Tasso’s Discourses on the Art of Poetry, in Rhu, Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory, 152; the sentence was dropped from Tasso’s later Discorsi del poema eroico. Lists of Ariostan stanze set to music by Italian Cinquecento composers appear in Einstein, “Orlando Furioso and La Gerusalemme Liberata,” notes to pages 40–45

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58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

and Balsano and Haar, “L’Ariosto in musica,” 47–81. For detailed analysis see the essays in Balsano’s collection Ariosto, la musica, i musicisti, as well as Norman, “Cyclic Musical Settings of Laments.” Certeau, Writing of History, 183. Tylus, “Tasso’s Trees,” 117. See Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, esp. 15–18, 83–134. The poem’s “Platonizing epistemology,” an impulse to withhold its divine “source of intelligibility from the sensible confines of its fictive universe, beyond the language of the poem itself,” is explored in Quint, Origin and Originality, 81–132 (quotations from 107, 116). See also Ascoli, “Liberating the Tomb.” See Residori, L’Idea del poema, 163–252, for Tasso’s rewriting of the Liberata to conform to the model of Homer’s Iliad, a labor of imitation so thoroughgoing that it amounted to a “ritual repetition, a liturgical echo” (173). Le Sette giornate del mondo creato, 3.18–57, in Tasso, Opere minori, 2:70–71.

CHAP TER TWO . THE OLDES T S ONG 1. For the impact on the epic genre—the English epic in particular—of the consolidation of state power and shrinking royal patronage, see Quint, Epic and Empire, 308–24; Burrow, Epic Romance, 200–243; Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, esp. 195–214; and Helgerson, “Tasso on Spenser.” 2. Partial efforts before Ronsard to recount French national history in epic verse, both in Latin, are Pierre de Blarru’s Nanceid (1518), narrating the battle of Nancy, and Laurent Pillard’s Rusticiad (completed 1541), celebrating the suppression by Antoine, Duke of Lorraine of a regional flare-up of the 1525 Peasant Revolt; both poems are discussed in Maskell, Historical Epic. Spanish efforts to celebrate the exploits of Charles V include Sempere’s La Carolea (1560) and Zapata’s El Carlos famoso (1566). In England, William Warner had attempted national history on an epic scale in Albion’s England (1586–1606), and Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Again, lines 400–415, praises William Alabaster’s unfinished Latin epic Elisaeis, about the career of Queen Elizabeth. 3. For analysis of Ronsard’s (probably slight) direct influence on Spenser, see Prescott, “The Laurel and the Myrtle”; Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay; and, more generally, Prescott, French Poets, 76–131. 4. Ronsard, Oeuvres, ed. Laumonier, Silver, and Lebègue, 1:163–64. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent citations of Ronsard’s writings refer to this edition, which, preserving the state of each text in its first printing, reflects the developing shape of his aesthetic commitments and problems over time. I have silently modernized “i,” “u,” and “v” as “j,” “v,” and “u.” 5. “Au lecteur,” 1550, in Oeuvres, 1:48. The poem’s main classical sources are Pindar, Pythian Odes, 1.1–14, and Horace, Odes, 1.32.13–15, 3.11.3–6. Other members of the Pléiade, including Pontus de Tyard and Joachim du Bellay, evoked this ideal and its symbol in their writings, but none no fervently and abidingly as Ronsard; see Lebègue, “Ronsard et la musique.” 6. A Michel de l’Hospital, 545–68, in Oeuvres, 3:149–50. See also Quint, Origin and Originality, 24–30, on the poem’s shifting models of literary origin and authority. 7. “Au lecteur,” 1550, in Oeuvres, 1:48. 8. His biographer adds that for Ronsard, “without music, poetry is almost graceless, as is music without the melody of poetic verses, inanimate and lifeless.” Binet, La Vie de P. de Ronsard, ed. Laumonier, 45. Compare Ronsard’s Abbregé de l’Art poëtique (1565), in Oeuvres, 14:9: “Poetry unaccompanied by musical instruments, or by the grace of one or several

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voices, is not at all pleasant, any more than are instruments when they are not animated by the melody of a pleasing voice.” 9. See especially Jeffery, “The Idea of Music.” Some useful information can still be drawn from Tiersot, Ronsard et la musique; Photiadès, Ronsard et son luth; Lesure, Musicians and Poets, 53–79, Lebègue, “Ronsard et la musique”; and related materials in Silver, Ronsard and the Hellenic Renaissance, vol. 2. 10. Ronsard enlisted four prominent French composers to prepare a printed musical supplement to his 1552 Amours. The nine scores that they provided, set in four-part harmony and availing themselves of traditional counterpoint, scarcely resemble the later, more radical French musique mesurée, with its homophonic texture and its efforts to reproduce the short and long vowel quantities of Greek and Latin poetry. An editorial Advertissement invites the reader to substitute several additional poems from Ronsard’s volume for the text provided with each score; in one case, a single musical setting is made to serve more than ninety sonnets of the Amours. This approach neglects the core rationale of the musical humanists, their call for an intimate, reciprocal partnership between the text and its music; the result is predictably inept, as musical effects meant to illustrate an action or mood in one poem are mechanically redeployed to other poems where they no longer signify. For details see Jeffery, “The Idea of Music,” 212–15. 11. A Charles de Pisseleu, 34, in Oeuvres, 2:50. 12. “Au lecteur,” in Oeuvres, 16:12. Jamyn’s reading of Ronsard’s Franciade at Blois is recorded in Girard du Haillan, Promesse et desseing de l’histoire de France (1571); see Espiner, “Charles IX et la Franciade,” 179–80. 13. On elocutio, see for example Du Bellay’s Deffence, et illustration, book 2, chapter 10, “De bien prononcer les vers,” which argues that the reciter should match his voice to the affections of the poem being declaimed. Wide-ranging discussions of oral reading in the late Middle Ages and early modern era include Saenger, “Silent Reading”; Nelson, “‘Listen, Lordings”’; Crosby, “Oral Delivery”; and Chartier, “Leisure and Sociability.” 14. References to the poem refer to its original 1572 version in Oeuvres, vol. 16, and are cited by book and line number. 15. For contexts see Ménager, Ronsard, 284–87, 293–305; Huppert, Idea of Perfect History, esp. 72–87; and Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship. 16. Ronsard, Oeuvres, 16:5. Writes Quintilian, “Though we must yield to Homer’s divine and immortal genius [hercule. .. illi naturae caelesti], there is more care and craftsmanship [curae et diligentiae] in Vergil, if only because he had to work harder at it.” The Orator’s Education, 10.1.86, ed. and trans. Russell, 4:296–97. Extended analysis of Ronsard’s remarks here can be found in Rigolot, “Homer’s Virgilian Authority.” Much the same distinction stands behind C. M. Bowra’s contrast between oral and literary epic in From Virgil to Milton, 4–5. 17. See for example Levi, “The Role of Neoplatonism”; Castor, Pléiade Poetics, 24–50; and Antonioli, “Aspects du monde occulte.” 18. Hymne de la Mort, 1–6, in Oeuvres, 8:161–62. 19. “Au lecteur apprentif,” in Oeuvres, 16:338. 20. Ronsard’s borrowings from the Argonautica are surveyed in Silver, Ronsard and the Hellenic Renaissance, vol. 1, 390–412. 21. See in particular Hutchinson, Hellenistic Poetry, 1–25; Bing, The Well-Read Muse; and Hunter, Theocritus, on the Alexandrian poets’ relations to their literary predecessors. 22. My remarks on this passage draw loosely on some acute observations about the episode in Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice, 297–300. 23. Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, 4.904–9, ed. and trans. Rice, 401. notes to pages 54–60

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24. Elements of this paragraph are influenced by the excellent account in Ménager, Ronsard, 306–16, of initiation rites in the Franciade. 25. See Kushner, “Le personage d’Orphée”; Joukovsky-Micha, Orphée et ses disciples, 62–103; and D. P.Walker, “Le chant orphique de Marsile Ficin,” in Music, Spirit and Language, 17–28. 26. This English translation is drawn from Athanassakis, The Orphic Hymns, 11: Upon two-natured, great and ether-tossed Protogonos I call; born of the egg, delighting in his golden wings, he bellows like a bull, this begetter of blessed gods and mortal men. Erikepaios, seed unforgettable, attended by many rites, ineffable, hidden, brilliant scion, whose motion is whirring, you scattered the dark mist that lay before your eyes and, flapping your wings, you whirled about, and throughout this world you brought pure light. For this I call you Phanes and Lord Priapos and bright-eyed Antauges. But O blessed one of the many counsels and seeds, come gladly to the celebrants of this holy and elaborate rite.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 210

Details below about the Hymns’ European reception are indebted to this volume’s introduction; see in particular xiii–xiv. On Marullus and the Orphic texts, see Ford, “The Hymni Naturales,” 475–82, and on Marullus’s sources more generally, Ciceri, “Michele Marullo.” See also Ford, Ronsard’s “Hymnes,” esp. 111–20, for a discussion of Marullus and the Orphic Hymns among Ronsard’s sources. Hymne de l’Éternité, 1–4, in Oeuvres, 8:246. “Au lecteur” (1572), in Oeuvres, 16:5. See Silver, Ronsard and the Hellenic Renaissance, vol. 1, 152, with notes, and, for Ronsard’s literary relations with Jamyn, see Ferguson, “Reviving Epic.” Guillory, Poetic Authority, 23–45. Guillory argues that Spenser tries to preserve the fiction of his poem’s sacred origin despite the secular tendency of the poem’s own narrative logic; my own view below also finds Spenser’s poem to be uncertain in its portrayal of sacred sites of literary origin, but this uncertainty works itself out in competing models of history rather than in an abstract internalized conflict between putative divine inspiration and the shaping human imagination. With regard to Spenser, the classic account is Greene, The Light in Troy, 270; compare Greene’s similar view that “the status of the text as a diachronic object does not seem to have been very meaningful to Ronsard” (198). Harry Berger Jr. has variously argued for other models of historical or evolutionary consciousness in Spenser’s poetry, for example in the essays “Archaism, Immortality, and the Muse in Spenser’s Poetry” and “The Mutability Cantos: Archaism and Evolution in Retrospect,” both collected in Revisionary Play. The extent of musical humanism in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England is helpfully surveyed in Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, esp. 162–244, and Ryding, In Harmony Framed. Sidney, A Defense of Poesy, in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:178. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:10–11. William Harrison, “An Historicall Description of the Iland of Britaine,” in Holinshed, Chronicles, ed. Ellis, 1:37. Sidney, A Defense of Poesy, in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:153. notes to pages 61–68

38. The oldest extant British writer on these matters, the sixth-century historian Gildas, claims that no records of pre-Roman Britain survive except those written by its conquerors. See Ferguson, Utter Antiquity, 84–105; Curran, “The History Never Written”; and Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, 45–57. 39. Camden, Britannia, trans. Holland, 4. Compare Speed, History of Great Britaine, 157: “The first Inhabitants [of Britain] being meerely barbarous, never troubled themselves with care to transmit their Originals to posteritie: neither if they would, could have done, being without Letters, which only doe preserve and transferre knowledge unto others”; it was in any case “not lawfull for them to commit their affaires to writing, as Cesar doth testifie of the Druides.” 40. Holinshed, Chronicles, 1:540, complains that medieval historians “needed not to have given eare unto the fabulous reports forged by their Bards, of Arthur and other their princes,” whose stories are no less fantastic than “the tales of Robin Hood, or the gests written by Ariost the Italian in his booke intituled ‘Orlando furioso.”’ John Selden’s preface to Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, in Drayton, Works, ed. Hebel et al., 4:viii*–ix*, compares the “Bardish impostures” of the Galfridian tradition to “Ariosto’s Narrations of Persons and Places in his Rowlands, Spensers Elfin Story, or Rablais his strange discoveries.” 41. For contexts see Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, 51–57. 42. Harrison, “An Historicall Description,” in Holinshed, Chronicles, ed. Ellis, 1:36–37. 43. See e.g. Price, Historiae Brytannicae defensio, 7–16, and Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 4.171–80, in Works, 4:73–74. 44. Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 10.272–79, in Works, 4:208. 45. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, 258. Subsequent references to the poem are to this edition. 46. Thus Spenser can fill Eumnestes’ library with records that are “all worme-eaten, and full of canker-holes,” while insisting that no memory of past ages was “suffred. .. to perish through long eld” (2.9.57, 56). On the contrast between the perishable material archive and the transcendent soul of memory that it preserves, see Anderson, “‘Myn auctour.”’ 47. See Rose, Spenser’s Art, 64–65. 48. Compare Harry Berger Jr., “The Discarding of Malbecco: Conspicuous Allusion and Cultural Exhaustion in The Faerie Queene III.ix–x,” in Revisionary Play, 156–57: “Paridell is effectually tyrannized by his ancestor: he can only reenact” the fate of Paris and Helen, whose “images reproduced and preserved in shrunken stereotypes have reached a cultural dead end.” On the episode as a parody of dynastic continuity, see also King, “Lines of Authority,” and Dubrow, “Arraignment of Paridell.” See also Elizabeth J. Bellamy’s compelling account of the poem, and of Arthur’s dynastic predicament in particular, in relation to problems of memory and origin in the epic tradition, in Translations of Power, 211–33. 49. Berger, “Discarding of Malbecco,” in Revisionary Play, 160. 50. Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Hadfield and Maley, 47. Subsequent references are to this edition, based on the 1633 printed text overseen by Sir James Ware, and appear parenthetically in the text. Spenser’s Irenius does argue briefly that the Irish anciently used “letters,” a skill taught them by ancient settlers from Spain; they in turn learned their script from the Gauls, who used it for “their trades and privat business” (47–48). The Scythians, from whom Spenser derives the main lines of Irish descent (see below), “never, as I can reade, of old had letters amongst them” (47). 51. Neither classical author makes this claim. Strabo, Geography, 4.3–4, explicitly distinguishes Ireland from Britain. It is unclear whether this and other such false claims are misrememberings or are based on mistaken citations in other Elizabethan source texts, most likely notes to pages 68–75

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56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

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from Camden’s Britannia; see Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, 101–3. But the repeated effort to attach his claims to Roman authorities suggests a careful strategy that may have led Spenser to finesse the evidence. On the View’s debt to antiquarian writings on Ireland, see van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History, 78–111. On the passage, see Spenser, Works, ed. Greenlaw et al., 10:82, 309–10; Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, 99–101; and Brink, “Constructing the View.” McCabe, “Poet of Exile,” 78. A related view of Spenser’s emulative relationship with the bards can be found in Highley, “Spenser and the Bards,” and McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 28–56 (esp. p. 40). Gross, Spenserian Poetics, 79. Gross writes more particularly of Spenser’s troubled status as a poet of exile, in whose colonial environment “nature, mind, and culture fought unresolvable battles.” For Quintilian, see above, note 16. Scaliger’s criticism of Homer appears in Poetices libri septem (Lyons, 1561), 5.3, and is surveyed in Ford, De Troie à Ithaque, 275–86. For general discussion of these and other period criticisms of Homer, see Sowerby, “Early Humanist Failure with Homer (I)” and “Early Humanist Failure with Homer (II)”; Clarke, Homer’s Readers, 106–18; and the additional sources listed in my Introduction above, note 40. Paolo Beni’s Comparazione di Omero, Virgilio e Torquato (1607), in Opere di Torquato Tasso, ed. Rosini, 21:153–55, describes Achilles as “avaro, crudele e fiero,” deplores his desecration of Hector’s corpse, and finds Tasso’s account of the Egyptian ambassador Argante an apt portrait of Achilles: “impaziente, inessorabil, fero, / ne l’arme infaticabile ed invitto, / d’ogni dio sprezzatore, e che ripone / ne la spada sua legge e sua ragione” (impatient, unrelenting, fierce, in arms unwearying and invincible, a despiser of every God, and one who bases on the sword his reason and his law). Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, 2.59, ed. Caretti, 60; English translation from Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Nash, 39. Andrew Hadfield explores the function of Spenser’s comparative ethnography more fully in “Briton and Scythian.” See also McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 142–64. The source of this anecdote, the longer Pseudo-Herodotean Life, 37, is reproduced in Homer, Homeric Hymns, ed. West, 398–401. Anon., “The Lamentation of Troy, for the death of Hector” (1594), sig. B2, in Edmund Spenser:The Critical Heritage, ed. Cummings, 77; see also e.g. 117, 123, 147. I have restored the rendering of this passage in the Ellesmere manuscript of A View, which was recast more neutrally by Ware as “it is the maner of many Nations.” For side-by-side comparison of the texts, see the Spenser Variorum, 10:519–23, reproduced in A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Hadfield and Maley, 170–76. Humphrey Tonkin argues that the poem’s last books contain a pattern of allusion to the Orpheus myth in Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral, 213–19. Compare Cain, “Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus,” which stresses Orpheus’s role as a humanist “culture-hero” and a symbol of rhetorical eloquentia. The popular Renaissance trope of the poem as microcosm, and, in turn, of the poet as godlike creator, is surveyed at length in Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, 364–97. On the trope’s origins in Renaissance Italy, see Tigerstedt, “The Poet as Creator,” and for later developments of the trope, see Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 272–84. Hadfield, “Spenser, Drayton, and the Question of Britain,” 582–99. Hadfield’s view finds support in Baker, “Spenser and the Uses of History,” which argues that “Britishness, for Spenser, was not so much a coherent identity as an ongoing predicament” (196). For related discussion of primitivism in The Faerie Queene, see Giamatti, “Primitivism and the Process of Civility”; Pearce, “Primitivistic Ideas in the Faerie Queene”; Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral, 192–205; and Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age, esp. 99–107. notes to pages 75–82

65. For a survey of early opinion on the dating of the Cantos, see Spenser, Works, ed. Greenlaw et al., 6:433–51. More recent bibliography can be found in Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, 185–86, and Meyer, “ ‘Fixt in heauens hight.’ ” 66. These two contrasting structures of time contribute to the sense of historical dislocation in the poem, which, Joanne Field Holland observes, leaves the reader in some confusion over whether “the antique world of The Faerie Queene [is] a Golden Age that knows about iron or an Iron Age that remembers gold”; see Holland, “Cantos of Mutabilitie,” 26. 67. For allusions to Hesiod in Spenser’s poem, see Stella P. Revard, “Hesiod,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton, 369–70; Bennett, “Spenser’s Hesiod”; and Nohrnberg, Analogy of “The Faerie Queene,” 268, 694. 68. On the influence of the Theogony’s long invocatory proem, see Revard, “Hesiod,” 370. 69. The intrusion of temporality and political change into Jove’s absolutist myth is suggestively explored by Gordon Teskey, “Spenser’s Mutabilitie and the Authority of Forms,” in Allegory and Violence, 168–88, and Guillory, Poetic Authority, 46–67. I NT E R C H A PTER . THE LU TAN I S T AN D THE N IGH T I NGA L E 1. On “soft” primitivism and its premises, see Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, 1–22, and Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age, 139–67. For an influential account of literary tensions between nature and technology in some ways analogous to those discussed in this interchapter (and from which this section’s title is derived), but in the later context of nineteenth-century industrialism, see Marx, The Machine in the Garden. 2. Wine, Forgotten Virgo, 49. 3. On the passage’s debts to Ripa, see Columbo, Cultura e tradizione, 29–30. 4. Quotations of the poem refer to Marino, L’Adone, ed. Pozzi, vol. 1, and are cited by line number. English translations are from the selected edition by Priest, Adonis, with some slight changes of syntax and with line breaks removed. 5. For a survey of the laus musicae tradition see Hutton, “Some English Poems.” Elsewhere Marino’s poem pays homage to Monteverdi’s opera Arianna (7.88) and adapts the legend of Pythagoras’s discovery of the musical intervals (57–60). 6. Compare Giannantonio, “Natura e arte nelle ‘Delizie,’ ” 108–9, arguing that the episode shows “the absolute superiority of man over all creatures,” in contrast with the bird’s unreasoning and therefore meaningless imitation of human art. 7. Marino, La Murtoleide, Fischiata 30, in Marino e i marinisti, ed. Ferrero, 627. See Pozzi, ed., L’Adone, 2:364–65, for a reading of the episode as a defense of Marino’s poetics, and Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous, 113–208, for a detailed account of the poet’s stylistic innovations. 8. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 131. 9. Strada’s poem is reproduced in Marino, L’Adone, ed. Pozzi, 2:366–67; an English translation can be found in Coelho, “Marino’s ‘Toccata,’ ” 412–13. Strada’s work was also the primary source for Richard Crashaw’s familiar poem “Musicks Duell.” For an account of other seventeenth-century English adaptations, see Parrish, “ ‘Musicks Duell.’ ” 10. Pozzi, ed., L’Adone, 2:364–65. See also 2:91–94 for the influence of Claudian and Nonnus on Marino’s epic. 11. For a related argument that assesses the poem’s form in relation to the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, see Guardiani, “Giovanni Battista Marino’s L’Adone.” 12. Augustine, De musica, 1.4.6, in Writings, ed. Schopp, 2:178–79. 13. Marino, La Sampogna, “Orfeo” 913–15, in Ferrero, ed., Marino e i marinisti, 444. 14. Pozzi, ed., L’Adone, 2:364–65.

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15. Milton’s praise of the poem (which he may not have read) is in Mansus, 9–12; for Marino’s reception across Western Europe, see the thorough survey and further references in Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous, 211–68. 16. Chapelain, Preface to Marino’s Adone (1623), trans. in The Continental Model, ed. Elledge and Schier, 15, 11, 10. 17. Quotations are from Segrais, Poésies diverses, and are cited by page number. Other sources and analogues for the poem, including the pastoral dramas of Tasso and Guarini, are briefly surveyed in Chauveau, “Les Tentations de Segrais.” 18. Saint-Amant, Oeuvres, ed. Bailbé and Lagny, 1:20. 19. Compare the suggestive discussion of motherhood in the poem in Calin, A Muse for Heroes, 224–25. 20. This and subsequent quotations refer to Saint-Amant, Moyse sauvé, in Oeuvres, ed. Bailbé and Lagny, 5:1–242. The poem is cited by line number and the preface by page number. 21. See Greene, The Descent from Heaven, 348–49, on the swarm of wasps episode (7.453–68) and on mock-heroic elements in Saint-Amant’s poem. Compare Virgil, Aeneid, 3.209–77, and a related source, Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, 9.58–66, in which God dispatches the angel Michael to disperse the evil spirits who have joined the pagans in their night battle against the crusader army. 22. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1.Proem.1, ed. Hamilton, 27. The incorporation of the proem in editions of the Aeneid extended well into the seventeenth century, including the 1668 translation by Segrais. 23. Rosenberg, Oaten Reeds and Trumpets, 19. 24. Citations of Paradise Lost are to Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, by line number. 25. Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae, 2.140–41, ed. and trans. Gruzelier, 35; for further discussion of this allusion, see my chapter 4. C HAP TER THREE . HARP S I N B ABYL ON 1. The locus classicus for this view of royalists taking refuge in “the good life” at the periphery of public affairs is Miner’s Cavalier Mode, 43–99. On the royalist epic’s “oblique” engagement with postwar politics, see Salzman, “Royalist Epic and Romance,” 215. Similarly, Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 268, finds “poetic wishful thinking” in Cowley’s Davideis, while Parfitt, English Poetry, 177, remarks on the failure of Davenant’s Gondibert “to convey any sense of real involvement with anything real.” 2. Lawes, Select Psalmes, 2. On this collection see Spink, Henry Lawes, 126–29. For other translations of Psalm 137 in seventeenth-century England, see Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 218–52. 3. Herrick, “To his Friend, on the untuneable Times,” in Poems, ed. Martin, 84. 4. Walton, Compleat Angler, ed. Bevan, 70. See also the commendatory poem “To the Readers of my most ingenuous Friends Book, The Compleat Angler,” in ibid., 431. 5. Davenant, “Gondibert,” 3.7.31, ed. Gladish, 256. 6. Butler, Hudibras, 1.3.157–68, ed.Wilders, 66. Subsequent references to Hudibras are to this edition and are cited parenthetically by line number. 7. Craig, “Hudibras, Part I,” 149, 151. 8. Listing some of these poems, Richard Helgerson makes a similar claim in Self-Crowned Laureates, 236. For a fuller list of early English translations of Virgil, see Dryden, Works, gen. ed. Swedenberg, 6:1191–92. France also witnessed a surge of epic activity in the 1650s; a detailed list can be found in Toinet, Quelques recherches.

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9. Thomas Ross’s dedication of his Punick War to Charles II notes that the king’s “acceptance of this Poëm, when it wanted all Ornament, both of the Press, and Pencil” was “both to It, and Me, the onely Refuge from the Tyranny of the Times” (sig. B1r). Debate continues over when Butler composed the first part of Hudibras; conjectured dates range from the late 1640s to the period 1659–62. For a summary and references, see Wasserman, Samuel “Hudibras” Butler, 51–52; for a contrasting emphasis on topical contexts of the 1660s, see Marshall, “Aims of Butler’s Satire.” 10. Davenant, “Postscript” to Gondibert, and Waller, “to sr will. d’avenant, Upon his Two first Books of gondibert,” in “Gondibert,” ed. Gladish, 251, 269. 11. See above, note 1. Contrast e.g. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 233. Forms of topical polemic in these poems are widespread. On Virgilian translations that took aim at the king’s opponents, see Hartle, “ ‘Lawrels for the Conquered,’ ” and Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 163–92. 12. On the efforts of various partisan groupings to claim ownership of English literary culture (or to define the literary canon in terms that favored their own ideology), see e.g. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 1–19 and passim, and Hirst, “Politics of Literature.” See also McKeon, “Politics of Discourses.” 13. Sheppard, The Faerie King, 4.5.2, ed. Klemp, 166. 14. Abraham Cowley, The Civil War, 1.143–48, in Collected Works, ed. Calhoun, Heyworth, and Pritchard, 1:117. Subsequent references to the Civil War are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 15. Cowley, Preface to Poems (1656), in Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 2:80; the italics are Cowley’s. 16. See Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 183–92, for a subtly argued case that “Cowley set out not with a grand design to celebrate the ultimate triumph of royalist arms, but with a more modest and immediately polemical project which only later began to assume the ambitious proportions of an epic” (185). On the poem’s debts to the newspaper Mercurius Aulicus and other royalist pamphlets and polemical literature, see Allan Pritchard’s discussion in Cowley, Collected Works, 1:361–73. 17. On this point compare Trotter, Poetry of Abraham Cowley, 18, and, on Cowley’s elegy for Falkland, see Rosenberg, “Epic Warfare,” 76–78. 18. In Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 2:83. 19. Ibid., 2:79, 84. For Cowley’s political circumstances during this period, see Nethercot, Abraham Cowley, 142–57, and Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 252–59. 20. Cowley’s early biographer, Thomas Sprat, reports that he began work on his Davideis as early as the 1630s, well before the country erupted in revolution. Some critics prefer the view of Kermode, “The Date of Cowley’s Davideis,” 154–58, that the poem was wholly composed in the 1650s but backdated by Sprat to avoid political controversy. 21. See Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 265–68, for a view of the Davideis as a “royalist fantasy, the rehearsal of royalist values in action, and . . . its abandonment as a further token of Cowley’s political despair” in the mid-1650s (266). Radzinowicz, “Forced Allusions,” 53–56, seems to concur with Trotter, Poetry of Abraham Cowley, 85–108, in finding the poet trying to identify David with the Stuart monarchy but troubled by parallels between the biblical rebel-king and Oliver Cromwell. 22. Milton, Complete Prose Works, gen. ed. Wolfe, 3:434–35. Milton’s Trinity MS sketches for a biblical drama are transcribed in Complete Prose Works, 8:554–57. 23. Cowley, “Davideis,” 1.483–93, ed. Shadduck, 119. Subsequent references to the Davideis are from this edition, cited parenthetically by book and line number. Cowley’s supplementary notes to the poem are cited by page number. notes to pages 110–114

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24. In his satirical poem The Puritan and the Papist (c. 1642–43) Cowley warns, “do not to your selves (alas) appeare / The most Religious Traitors that ere were, / Because your Troopes singing of Psalmes do goe; / Ther’s many a Traytor has marcht Holbourne so” (161–64, in Collected Works, 1:108). Donagan, War in England, 1642–49, 121, notes that royalist troops sometimes took up the practice of singing psalms as well. 25. For Thomas Hobbes, Samuel’s long diatribe against the evils of kingship simply lays out the founding contract of absolute monarchy: “when the people heard what power their King was to have, yet they consented thereto.” Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, 258. The King’s enemies, conversely, read Samuel’s harangue as an expression of God’s anger toward the Israelites for casting away their political liberty; Saul’s tyranny was proof, wrote James Harrington, that God had “abandon[ed] this sottish and ungrateful people to the most inextricable yoke of deserved slavery.” Harrington, The Prerogative of a Popular Government, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, 525. Cowley’s Davideis lingers over Samuel’s warning—“You’re sure the first (said he) / Of freeborn men that begg’d for Slaverie” (4.232–33)—and the poem’s lengthy explanatory notes argue that Samuel in no way established an absolute “right of Kings” over their subjects (472). Cowley’s David seems to agree with this view (150–61). But contrast Cowley’s claim that “all the Wickednesses and Disorders that we read of during the time of the Judges, are attributed in Scripture to the want of a King” (112, n. 9). 26. Cowley, The Puritans Lecture (c. 1642), 209–12, in Collected Works, 1:100; see 1:320–24 on the attribution of the poem to Cowley. 27. Sayce, French Biblical Epic, describes the use of such inset stanzas as “a common phenomenon” in the late sixteenth-century French epic; his examples include Didier Oriet’s Susanne (1581). 28. On the poem’s conflicting Christian and pagan elements, see Greene, The Descent from Heaven, 368–73. On its tension between secular rationalism and Christian piety, see Dykstal, “Epic Reticence.” Cowley’s early readers do not seem to have been bothered by this tension; Thomas Sprat praises Cowley’s “admirable mixture of humane Virtues and Passions with religious Raptures.” An Account of the Life and Writings of Abraham Cowley (1668), in Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 2:133. 29. English critics tended to be less dogmatic about the perfection of the epic hero than the French. For a survey of neoclassical opinion on the subject, see Swedenberg, The Theory of the Epic, 23–24, 306–7; Steadman, Milton and the Paradoxes, 3–19; and Hägin, The Epic Hero. 30. “Préface” to La Pucelle, ou la France délivrée, books 1–12 (1656), in Chapelain, Opuscules critiques, ed. Hunter, 263. Cowley’s similar emphasis on pathos is clear from his epic’s subtitle, “A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David.” 31. Scudéry, Preface to Ibrahim, trans. Cogan, sig. A3r–v.The preface is traditionally thought to have been composed by Scudéry’s brother Georges, but we can assume that she shared its sentiments. On character and self-analysis in the French romances, see further Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 177–201. 32. For a related perspective, see Fish, “Things and Actions Indifferent.” Milton’s Jesus compares himself to passive sufferers like Socrates and Regulus (2.446–49, 3.96–99), figures invoked above by Jean Chapelain as heroes of passion rather than action. On passive heroism in the baroque epic, see also Warnke, Versions of Baroque, 158–86. 33. Here Cowley both intensifies and feminizes Tasso’s characterization of Rinaldo in Gerusalemme liberata as a young “fanciullo . . . dolcemente feroce” (1.58.1–3). 34. Thomas Rymer, Preface to Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesy (1674), in Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 2:171–72. 216

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35. Rymer, Preface, 2:172–73. 36. Aylett, David’s Troubles, B1r; compare Phineas Fletcher, The Locusts, or Apollyonists (1623), 5.18, in Poetical Works, ed. Boas, 2 vols., 1:180. 37. Thomas Hobbes, “The Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sir Will. D’Avenant’s Preface before Gondibert,” in “Gondibert,” ed. Gladish, 49. 38. On the politics of enthusiasm and Restoration neoclassical poetics, see Williamson, “Restoration Revolt”; Heyd, “Reaction to Enthusiasm”; and Achinstein, “Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration,” 1–29. 39. Watson, A Sermon Touching Schisme, 8. 40. Hammond, To the Right Honourable, the Lord Fairfax, 2. Compare Nigel Smith’s discussion of this passage in Literature and Revolution, 42. Many other seventeenth-century epics and epyllia adopted the Allecto episode to demonize wicked rulers, including Milton’s In Quintum Novembris. Milton’s adaptation of the topos in Paradise Lost is explored in Gregory, From Many Gods to One, 192–95. 41. In a note to book 1, Cowley claims that the poem “was designed no farther then to bring [David] to his Inauguration at Hebron” (147)—that is, to 2 Samuel 2.1–4, the moment of his transformation from singer to statesman. In his 1656 preface, however, Cowley claims that he “had no mind to carry [David] quite on to his Anointing at Hebron,” but planned instead “to close all with that most Poetical and excellent Elegie of Davids upon the death of Saul and Jonathan” (86); to have ended the epic with David’s famous lament (2 Samuel 1.19–27) would have obscured his Virgilian destiny in favor of a scene of grieving retrospection, the singer mourning the losses of war. 42. Quint, Epic and Empire, 314. See also Burrow, Epic Romance, 233–243, on the weakening political influence of seventeenth-century English courtier-poets and “the fundamental changes forced on the epic when the public realm of counsel and virtuous aspiration to rule was closed by the erratic patronage of the Stuarts” (235). 43. Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1644–1645, 430, quoted in Davenant, Shorter Poems, ed. Gibbs, xxviii. 44. Davenant’s preface was published in Paris in early 1650, almost a year before his unfinished Gondibert, leading one early reader to observe, “A Preface to no Book, a Porch to no house, / Here is the Mountain, but where is the Mouse?” in Certain Verses Written by Severall of the Authors Friends (1653), reprinted in Davenant, “Gondibert,” ed. Gladish, 273. For a closer analysis of early responses to the poem, see Nevitt, “The Insults of Defeat.” 45. Abraham Cowley, “to Sir william d’avenant, Upon his Two first Books of GONDIBERT, Finish’d before his Voyage to America,” in Davenant, “Gondibert,” ed. Gladish, 270. 46. Davenant, “The Author’s Preface,” in “Gondibert,” ed. Gladish, 18. Subsequent quotations from Davenant’s preface and poem refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text; references to the poem are by line number and those to the preface are by page number. 47. Schiffer, “Loyal Scout Lost at Sea,” 559–60, argues that Davenant senses “the degree to which his claims of originality resemble the kind of self-authorization that led to the beheading of Charles I little more than a year earlier”; his “fear that the poet may be no less dangerously self-authorized than the divines he blames for social division at home” creates “a very real, if unacknowledged, problem for a preface that argues desperately for the social utility of poetry.” 48. Hobbes, “The Answer of Mr. Hobbes,” in Davenant, “Gondibert,” ed. Gladish, 47. 49. The apologia of Astragon’s lodger, Ulfin, recounting his retreat from the cares of court and city (1.6.35–39), clearly belongs to this tradition of pastoral escape, as does Gondibert’s notes to pages 119–126

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68.

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long speech to Astragon (2.8.26–46) affirming his choice of Birtha and “Nature’s quiet wonders” over the pleasures of the court. On the House of Astragon as a locus amoenus, see also Quint, Epic and Empire, 314–16. See e.g. [John Denham et al.?] The Incomparable Poem Gondibert, 10–11: “Thou art the publique Icon morum, / The Ladies lay the Book before um / . . . And if they lose the Virgin-name, / They onely say in joyfull shame, / Sweet Gondibert thou wert to blame.” The poem’s most direct broadside against nonconformist religion and its populist tendencies comes when Gondibert visits the Monument of Vanished Minds in Astragon’s temple, where the Bible is described as “Our Map tow’rds Heav’n; to common Crowds deny’d; / Who proudly aim to teach, ere they can read; / And all must stray, where each will be a Guide” (2.5.47.2–4). Davenant, “To the Queen; Entertain’d at Night. In the Year 1644,” in Shorter Poems, ed. Gibbs, 138. The story of the urn appears in Henry Peacham’s Valley of Varietie (1638), 53, as well as in other contemporary accounts listed in Gladish, 301, n. 87. Compare Lois Potter’s analysis of this passage in Secret Rites and Secret Writing, 99–100. Cotton, Scarronides, 1.1387–92, in Charles Cotton’s Works, ed. Dust, 160. Scudamore, Homer A La Mode, 120, 3. For details see Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 253–55. Clare, “Production and Reception,” 840. On royalist subtexts in Davenant’s Interregnum operas, see also Frohock, “Davenant’s American Operas.” Pordage, Heroick Stanzas, 11. Harbage, Sir William Davenant, 103, 108; Nethercot, Abraham Cowley, 94–95. Hobbes, “The Answer of Mr. Hobbes,” in “Gondibert,” ed. Gladish, 51. See Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 85, and Butler, Hudibras, 1.1.515–18, 1.2.394–402. For more parallels see Hudibras, ed. Wilder, xxvi–xxviii. See Rollins, “Broadside Ballad,” 321 and notes. On Parliament’s order against bearbaiting, see Hudibras, ed. Wilder, 337, n. 706. Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, ed. Waller, 411–12. Similarly, Sir William Temple compared the poetry of the ancient Scythians to modern practices in “Hungary and Ireland, where, at their Feasts it was usual, to have these kind of Poets entertain the Company with their rude Songs, or Panegyricks of their Ancestors bold Exploits, among which, the Number of Men that any of them had slain with their own hands, was the chief ingredient in their praises.” “Of Heroick Virtue,” in Miscellanea, 240. See Seidel, Satiric Inheritance, 115–17, on the possible allusion to Lucan and on the relationship between satire and civil discord in Butler’s poem: “Satire,” Seidel suggests, “like faction, is a record of collapsed meaning” (117). Letter to Sir George Oxenden (19 March 1662/3), transcribed in Quintana, “The ButlerOxenden Correspondence,” 4. Sir Roger L’Estrange, A Key to “Hudibrass” [sic], in Butler, Posthumous Works, sig. O1r. Details can be found in Robert Plot, The Natural History of Stafford-shire (London, 1686), 435–40, cited in Zachary Grey’s 1715 edition of Butler’s Posthumous Works: if the minstrels can grapple with the bull “and hold him so long, as to cutt off but some small matter of his hair,” the animal is “brought to the Bull-ring in the high-street, and there baited with doggs: the first course being allotted for the King; the second for the Honor of the Towne; and the third for the King of the Minstrells” (440). Neo-Pythagoreanism and other arcane lore are satirized at length in Ralpho’s “mystick Learning” (1.1.523), in the astrologer and experimentalist Sidrophel (2.3), and in notes to pages 127–137

69. 70. 71. 72.

Butler’s character of “An Hermetic Philosopher” (Characters and Passages from Note-Books, 97–108). Butler, “A Romance Writer,” in Characters and Passages from Note-Books, 118. Miner, Restoration Mode, 179. Detailed accounts of the poem’s Babel of competing discourses can be found in Horne, “Hard Words in Hudibras,” and Snider, Origin and Authority, 201–13. Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.860, 1.547–49, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 322, 245.

C HAP TER FOU R . M I LTON ’ S LAME N T 1. Milton, Prolusion 2, “On the music of the spheres,” trans. in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 603–4. Subsequent references to Milton’s poetry are cited parenthetically by line number and refer to this edition. 2. Hollander, Untuning of the Sky. Milton’s musical background has been extensively treated. See in particular Spaeth, Milton’s Knowledge of Music, and Brennecke, John Milton the Elder. On ideas of music in Milton’s poetry, see also McColley, Poetry and Music, 175–217, and Berley, After the Heavenly Tune, 141–205. 3. This widely explored transition has been suggestively applied to Milton by Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton; Guillory, Poetic Authority; and Teskey, Delirious Milton. 4. See Adelman, “Creation and the Place of the Poet,” 55–57. 5. On the music of the spheres, see e.g. Plato, Republic, 10.617; Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, 6.17–18; Plutarch, De musica, 44; and Boethius, De musica, 1.2; Hollander, Untuning of the Sky; and Spitzer, World Harmony, esp. 102. 6. Dante, Purgatorio, 30.92–93, in Divine Comedy, ed. and trans. Musa, 296–97. 7. Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Georges Edelen, in Works, gen. ed. Hill, 2:114. 8. Du Bartas, Divine Weeks, trans. Sylvester, Second Week, “The Columns,” 710–16, ed. Snyder, 1:486–87. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited by section and line number. 9. Kurt Reichenberger, Themen und Quellen der Sepmaine (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1963), 12, cited in Divine Weeks, ed. Snyder, 1:2. 10. Francis Bacon, for one, coolly asserted that the heavens were silent, “though in some dreams they have been said to make an excellent music”; see Sylva Sylvarum, 39. From another flank, a hard-line Protestant like Thomas Cartwright could scoff at the belief that polyphony “came from heaven and that the Angels were h[e]arde to singe after this sorte. Which as it is a meere fable, so is it confuted by historiografers.” Hooker, Works, gen. ed. Hill, 2:154. 11. Cowley, “Davideis,” ed. Shadduck, 177. Compare Plato, Phaedo, 86b–d, and Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 2.9, in Major Works, ed. Patrides, 149–50. 12. See e.g. Du Bartas, Divine Weeks, trans. Sylvester, First Day, 30–34, and, for Milton’s treatment of Lucretius within this tradition, Quint, “Fear of Falling.” 13. Acevedo, La Creación del mundo, “Dia Segundo,” in Poemas épicos, ed. Rosell, 2:253. Compare Du Bartas, Divine Weeks, trans. Sylvester, First Day, 134–38: “My heedful Muse, trayned in true Religion, / Devinely-humane keeps the middle Region: / Least, if she should toohigh a pitch presume, / Heav’ns glowing flame should melt her waxen plume[.]” 14. Le Sette giornate del mondo creato, 1.63–69, in Tasso, Opere minori, ed. Solerti, 2:8. 15. Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, 1.21–24, 34–37, ed. Norbrook, 7. 16. Order and Disorder, ed. Norbrook, 5. On her earlier translation of De rerum natura into English, Hutchinson writes, “the vain curiosity of youth had drawn me to consider and translate the account some old poets and philosophers give of the original of things: which

notes to pages 138–147

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17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 220

. . . filled my brain with such foolish fancies, that I found it necessary to have recourse to the fountain of Truth” (3). A thorough list of parallels between the two epics—not necessarily reflecting the unmediated influence of the Semaines in every case—is compiled in Taylor, Milton’s Use of Du Bartas, 64–124. For the earlier English reception of Du Bartas, see Prescott, French Poets, 167–234. On patterns of repetition and restorative ritual in Paradise Lost, see the complementary arguments of Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating, esp. 60–90: “Milton has clearly devised an extensive liturgy of praise to form the backdrop to the action of Paradise Lost, one designed to make his praise a ritual ‘doing’ rather than a ‘stating’ ” (74). Du Bartas, Divine Weeks, trans. Sylvester, First Day, 173–74. Prolusion 2, trans. in Hughes, 603. See Shakespeare, The Tempest, 3.135–38, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Greenblatt et al., 3087; Milton had already triggered the same reflex some forty years earlier, in Elegia 3: the poet dreams of a heavenly reunion with the dead bishop of Winchester, an ecstatic vision cut short when the angels take up their songs of joy; “my golden repose was dispelled with the night,” Milton concludes, “and I wept for the sleep which Cephalus’ mistress had disturbed” (trans. in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, 67). De Doctrina Christiana, 1.12, trans. Charles R. Sumner, in Milton, Works, gen. ed. Patterson, 15:209. See Tillyard, Milton, 318–26; such assumptions about Milton’s sexuality have been challenged by John Leonard, “Milton’s Vow of Celibacy,” 187–201. Kerrigan, “The Heretical Milton,” 147. See also Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex, 22–72. See Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, ix–xiii, 21–44, and passim. The angels’ hymn in book 3 (372–415) owes debts to the “new song” of Revelation 5.9–14, and to the general context of Revelation 4–5, with its sequence of musical ceremonies. The angelic hymn on the seventh day of creation (7.601–32) alludes to the song in Revelation 15.3–4, which celebrates victory over the beast. See Lewalski, Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 160–72. See also Parardise Lost 6.730–45 for a glimpse of the end point in history when all created things will sing around God’s throne. See Iliad 3.54–55, 3.393–94, and 24.261. The rebels’ masculine community contrasts with the protean gender identity of the good angels (1.423–24), and Satan laments that their fall has frustrated the rebels’ sexuality: “fierce desire, / Among our other torments not the least, / Still unfulfill’d with pain of longing pines” (4.509–11). Of the small flood of epics printed in the 1650s—including those by Le Moyne, Georges de Scudéry, Chapelain, and, in his own way, Cowley—most sang the deeds of religious martial heroes. For summaries of this and other aspects of Tasso’s influence on the seventeenth-century French epic, see Maskell, Historical Epic, 17–33, and Beall, La Fortune du Tasse, 80–104. Valvasone, L’Angeleida, 102. Additional translated excerpts of the poem appear in Kirkconnell, ed., The Celestial Cycle. John Donne, “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness,” 1–3, in Complete Poetry, ed. Coffin, 271. Fish, “With Mortal Voice,” 523. Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Wolfe, 1:616. Milton, The Reason of Church Government, in Complete Prose Works, ed. Wolfe, 1:808. Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, ed. Wolfe, 2:525. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, 208. Parker, Milton, 1:72. notes to pages 147–157

37. See e.g. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesy, 1:39. Blount’s Glossographia defines “Monodie” as “a lamentable or funeral song, where one sings alone” [n.p.]. 38. Carpenter, “Milton and Music,” suggests that the allusion to Dante was appropriate for a poem about Italianate music. Recent readings have taken the sonnet as a measure of Milton’s relations with the royalist party with which Lawes was associated. See e.g. McDowell, “Dante and the Distraction of Lyric,” 232–54. 39. Dante’s letter to Can Grande reads Psalm 114 anagogically as a description of the soul’s passing from the bondage of the world to the “liberty of everlasting glory.” Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, trans. Toynbee, 199. My account of this episode in the Purgatorio draws on Freccero, “Casella’s Song,” and Hollander, “Purgatorio II.” Milton composed an English translation of Psalm 114 in 1634; for further analysis of its political valences see Revard, Tangles of Naeara’s Hair, 84–86. 40. Lawes, Choice Psalmes, sig. A2v. Milton evidently knew the piece years before its first printing in 1653. In the Trinity MS, the Lawes sonnet is dated 9 February 1646. 41. A well-known account by Federico Follino notes that “all the performers, well-dressed, played their roles very well, but best of all [was] Ariadne . . . who in her musical lament accompanied by violas and violins made many cry for her misfortune; there was one musician, Raso, who sang divinely; but next to Ariadne, the eunuchs and all the others seemed like nothing.” Follino, Compendio delle sontuose feste . . . (1608), trans. in Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord,” 350. 42. Giovanni Battista Doni, Trattato della musica scenica, ch. 9, trans. in Fortune, “Monteverdi and the Seconda Prattica,” 204. 43. Bonini, Discorsi e regole, 110. 44. See Fortune, “Monteverdi and the Seconda Prattica,” 204, and Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 218–19. 45. While in Rome on 27 February 1639, Milton attended what he later described as a “public Musical entertainment with truly Roman magnificence” at the Palazzo Barberini, a performance that has been identified as the comic opera Chi soffre speri by Rospigliosi and Mazzocchi. See Milton’s letter to Lucas Holstein, in Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Wolfe, 1:334. His nephew Edward Phillips informs us that Milton later sent home a chest of music books including works by “the best Masters flourishing about that time in Italy, namely, Luca Marenz[i]o, Monte Verde, Horatio Vecchi, Cif[r]a, the Prince of Venosa and several others.” Darbishire, ed., Early Lives of Milton, 59. 46. Flecknoe, Ariadne Deserted by Theseus, sig. A7v, A5r. 47. Willetts, The Henry Lawes MS, 9, and see Pepys, Diary, ed. Lathamer and Matthews, 6:303; on Ariane, see Dent, Foundations of English Opera, 106. 48. Fish, “With Mortal Voice,” 519–21. 49. Martz, Poet of Exile, 227. John E. Parish, in “Rape of Proserpina,” 332–35, claims to be the first to trace the poem’s Eve-Proserpina motif, but he was anticipated by Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 173. See also Forsyth, “Of Man’s First Dis”; DuRocher, Milton and Ovid, 79–85; and Milton, Paradise Lost, 9.393–96, 838–42. 50. The story is told in Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 5.341–571, and Fasti, 4.417–620. Proserpina’s mother Ceres obtains the gods’ consent to her release from the realm of Dis so long as she has eaten nothing during her sojourn. It is discovered that Proserpina has eaten the seeds of a pomegranate offered to her by Pluto; in a compromise, she is allowed to spend half the year with her mother, but must spend the rest in the underworld as the queen of Death.

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51. Milton’s first allusion to Proserpina appears in his early Latin poem “In Obitum Procancellarii Medici,” 37–40. Knott, Milton’s Pastoral Vision, 120, finds a hint of Proserpina in “On the Death of a Fair Infant,” with Anne Philips as its “fairest flower no sooner blown but blasted” (1), a doomed innocent ravished by death. 52. “Let us take heed, that whilst we are gathering flowers with Proserpina, that is, delighting our selves in these earthy vanities, Pluto the Devil do not take away our souls.” Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus, 68. The pomegranate seeds signify “a fatall liquorishnesse, which retaines [Proserpina] in Hell; as the Apple thrust Evah out of Paradice, whereunto it is held to have a relation.” Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, trans. Sandys, 195. 53. The description of Proserpina as a flower among flowers is ancient, already appearing in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 9–10. Compare Catullus, poem LXII, 39–47, and Claudian, De nuptiis honorii Augusti, 243–50. See also Giamatti, Earthly Paradise, 37, 47–48. 54. See Milton, Complete Poems, ed. Leonard, xvi–xvii. As Leonard notes, the passage is usually viewed as an allusion to Isaiah 14.9–11. 55. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Sandys, 5.483–86. 56. Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae, 2.140–41, ed. and trans. Gruzelier, 35. Subsequent references to Claudian are to this edition; parenthetical citations refer to line numbers in the Latin text. 57. Compare Parish, “Rape of Proserpina,” 334, and Giamatti, Earthly Paradise, 344. 58. Such settings, most surviving only in manuscript, include an anonymous 1636 lament mentioned by Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 211. A list of early Italian full-length dramatic Proserpina settings before 1650, with the year and location of their first performance, includes three intermedii—Girolamo Giacobbi, Proserpina rapita (Bologna, 1613), Pier Francesco Valentini, Il ratto di Proserpina (Rome, 1623), and Benedetto Ferrari, Proserpina rapita (Bologna, 1645)—and four operas: L’Ingannata Proserpina (1611, no surviving score, libretto by Francesco Andreini), Giulio Monteverdi, Il rapimento di Proserpina (Casale Monferrato, 1611), Claudio Monteverdi, Proserpina rapita (Venice, 1630), and Il ratto di Proserpina (Rome, 1645, composer unknown, librettist Pompeo Colonna). 59. Still earlier is Proserpina’s part in Daniel’s masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604). Later English versions include Thomas Durfey’s Cynthia and Endymion (1697); a oneact farce by Theobald and Galliard, The Rape of Proserpine (London, 1726); and a Rape of Proserpine performed in London in 1804, written by the German composer Peter Winter to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. 60. Milton, A Masque, ed. Sprott, 92–93. I have quoted from the Bridgewater MS version; the lines in the Trinity MS are crossed out, with “rowling” placed above the rejected earlier adjective “wallowing.” 61. Benedetto Ferrari, Proserpina rapita, in Ferrari, Poesie drammatiche, 302. 62. Milton’s prose argument for book 11 singles out “Eve’s lamentation” as one of its plot events. The narrator introduces it as an “audible lament” (11.264–66), and the lyric ends with the angel Michael’s mild rebuke, “Lament not Eve, but patiently resign / What justly thou hast lost” (287–88). 63. Joseph Addison declared that “the Sentiments are not only proper to the Subject, but have something in them particularly soft and Womanish.” Notes upon . . . Paradise Lost, 133–34. Addison’s remark is quoted approvingly in Newton, ed., Paradise Lost, 2:325–26. Henry Todd’s 1801 variorum admired the “pathos and variety” of Eve’s lament, which he compared to tragic laments in Sophocles and Euripides; see Todd, ed., Poetical Works of John Milton, 3:356–57. John Dryden’s The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man (1677) makes 222

notes to pages 162–167

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Eve’s lyric the emotional climax of the fall. The two eighteenth-century English oratorios based on Milton’s epic—Paradise Lost:An Oratorio (1760), by Benjamin Stillingfleet and John Christopher Smith, and Richard Jago’s Adam, Or The Fatal Disobedience (1784)—both set Eve’s lament as a plaintive aria. Later, as Stella Revard has noted, the lament became “the ‘hit’ of the 1817 season in London, when Matthew King included it as a central piece in his oratorio The Intercession.” See Revard’s “From the State of Innocence to the Fall of Man,” 103, and Stevenson and Seares, Paradise Lost in Short. Compare Adam’s own question about leaving the garden and losing direct access to God: “In yonder nether World where shall I seek / His bright appearances, or footstep trace?” (11.328–29). See OED, “respite,” I.1.a, c; compare I.5. Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Wolfe, 8:559. See Knott, Milton’s Pastoral Vision, 150–75. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 2.12.83, 297. An analogy between Satan and Guyon is drawn by, among others, Knott, Milton’s Pastoral Vision, 133–35. Compare Webber, Milton and His Epic Tradition, 103–63, on Paradise Lost as a struggle between the affirmation of life (God) and the consciousness of mortality (Satan). Ovid, Metamorphoses, 5.399. Milton’s ambivalence over classicism and pagan poetics is often discussed in relation to his early poetry, especially as expressed through the flight of the pagan gods in the Nativity Ode. See e.g. Kingsley, “Mythic Dialectic,” and Fry, The Poet’s Calling, 37–48. See also Greene, The Descent from Heaven, 363–418, on similar tensions in Paradise Lost.

CHAP TER FI VE . EP IC OP ERA 1. Dryden, “To My Honour’d Kinsman, John Driden,” in Dryden, Works, gen. ed. Swedenberg, 7:198. Subsequent quotations from Dryden’s poetry and prose refer to this edition. 2. Athenian Mercury 15 (26 January 1695), reprinted in The Athenian Oracle, 4:280. 3. For details, see especially Joseph M. Levine’s two studies, The Battle of the Books and Between the Ancients and the Moderns. On Homer’s role in the quarrel and its aftermath, see also Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius, 19–56; Foerster, Homer in English Criticism, 1–25; and Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, 193–236. 4. Dacier, La Poëtique d’Aristote, 293. 5. Phillips, Preface to Theatrum Poetarum (1675), in Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 2:269. 6. W. J., Preface to Le Bossu, Monsieur Bossu’s Treatise, b2v (italics reversed). 7. Anon., Verdicts of the Learned, 10. 8. Rapin, Observations, 63. 9. Saint-Evremond, “Of the Poems of the Antients,” in Works, 2:351. 10. Tassoni, Opere minori, 1:93. For further discussion of Tassoni and his peers, see Arcudi, “Seicento Doubts.” 11. D’Aubignac’s claims did not appear in print until 1715, but they were widely disseminated after he set them down in the late 1660s. Charles Perrault obliquely cited d’Aubignac in his attack on Homer in 1692, when he noted that “many excellent critics hold that there was never anyone named Homer in this world, and that the Iliad and Odyssey were nothing but a pile or collection of many little poems by various authors which were joined together.” Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 1:23–24. See Myres, Homer and His Critics, 47–48, and Clarke, Homer’s Readers, 143–44, 150–55. 12. Guéret, La Guerre des auteurs, 41.

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13. Boileau’s remarks appear in his Treatise of the Sublime (1693), where he insists that “there never were two Poems so regularly pursu’d and so happily connected, as the Ilias and the Odysses, nor where the same Genius Shines more every where.” See Boileau-Despréaux, Works, 2:93.William Temple discusses the claim that Lycurgus gathered the “loose and scattered Pieces of Homer” in Of Poetry (1690), in Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3:107. 14. Dryden, “Dedication of the Aeneis,” in Works, 2:277. 15. Harrison, “English Virgil,” 3. 16. Dennis, Remarks on . . . Prince Arthur, 6. 17. Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, 1:92–93, paraphrased in Anon., Verdicts of the Learned, 11. 18. A summary of ancient commentary on the question can be found in Pease, ed., Aeneidos Liber Quartus, 64–67. Classical and medieval discussions are canvassed in Lord, “Dido as an Example of Chastity,” and Desmond, Reading Dido. For a survey of the early modern reception, see also Allen, “Marlowe’s Dido.” Some further details appear in Schmalfeldt, “In Search of Dido.” 19. Servius, notes to Aeneid 4.36, 459, in Servianorum . . . commentariorum, ed. Rand et al., 3:263–64, 400; Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.17.4–6, in Macrobius, ed. Eyssenhardt, 320–21; Tertullian, De exhortatione castitatis, 13, in Treatises on Marriage, trans. Le Saint, 63; Augustine, Confessions, 1.13.21–2, in Writings, ed. Schopp, 5:21–23; Boccaccio, Famous Women, trans. Brown, 166–81; Petrarch, “Triumphus Pudicitie,” 9–12, 154–59, in Rime, trionfi, e poesie latine, ed. Neri, 509, 516. 20. Boisrobert, La vraye Didon, ou la Didon chaste (Paris, 1643), in Delmas, ed., Didon à la scène, 81–82. 21. Georges, de Scudéry, Didon (Paris, 1637), in ibid., 5–6. 22. On Busenello’s reading of Tacitus and Roman history, see Ketterer, Ancient Rome in Early Opera, 22–40, and Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 136–77 and passim. Heller (82–135) also reads La Didone in terms of the ‘chaste Dido’ tradition, in an illuminating discussion that focuses on the opera’s gender politics. 23. Compare Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 110. 24. See Fabre, “Les Figures amoureuses,” 107–8. 25. Rapin, Observations, 100. 26. Dryden, “Dedication of the Aeneis,” in Works, 5:300. 27. Hearne, Ductor Historicus, 8. 28. William Walsh, “To His Mistress,” in Letters and Poems, 75–77. Walsh probably alludes to Ariosto’s famous remark, in Orlando furioso 35.27–28, that the poets have misrepresented the true character of the unfaithful Penelope and the chaste Dido. 29. Anon., Verdicts of the Learned, 8–9. 30. Of the arrival of Mercury in book 4 to order Aeneas to Rome, he notes: “By Revelating Spirits thus we see / Obtained was the Fourth Monarchy: / Harrison and Vane ventured a lift / By the same Spirit for a Fift.” Charles Cotton’s Works, ed. Dust, 165. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by line number.This example should make clear that attacks on Virgilian historiography were not limited to the Whigs; Cotton himself was a lifelong supporter of the Stuarts. 31. Spencer, Nahum Tate, 23. 32. Quotations from Dido and Aeneas refer to the libretto reproduced in Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, ed. Price, 63–79, and are cited parenthetically in the text.

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33. This odd tonal mixture has made it possible for Andrew Pinnock to read the opera as a Cottonesque comic burlesque in its own right; see Pinnock, “Book IV in Plain Brown Wrappers,” an essay to which I am indebted for my reading of act 3. 34. Francis Atterbury may have been the first to use “Augustan age” to designate the English Restoration era and its classicizing literary culture; see the preface to The Second Part of Waller’s Poems, A4r, and Erskine-Hill, Augustan Idea, 223. On the royalist politics of Aeneid translations during the Interregnum, see Venuti, “The Destruction of Troy.” 35. On the 1661 Royal Entry, see Erskine-Hill, Augustan Idea, 216–19. Erskine-Hill argues, however, that the political use of iconography from Augustan Rome was neither wholly new nor particularly widespread in Restoration England. 36. See Boys, Aeneas His Errours, 52–61. 37. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England, 61. 38. The edition’s illustrations were inherited from John Ogilby’s lavish 1649 translation of Virgil’s works. See the discussion of the format and presentation of Dryden’s volume in Zwicker, Politics and Language, 188–96. 39. For a range of perspectives on political allegory in Dido, see Margaret Laurie, “Allegory, Sources, and Early Performance History,” in Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, ed. Price, 42–46; Walkling, “Political Allegory”; Price, “Questions of Style and Evidence”; and Hume, “The Politics of Opera.” 40. The earliest printed libretto states that the opera was staged at a performance that was long thought to have taken place in the spring of 1689, but circumstantial evidence has led many scholars to suspect a court performance earlier in the decade. See Luckett, “A New Source”; Wood and Pinnock, “ ‘Unscarr’d By Turning Times’?”; and the responses by Walkling and Price above, note 39, as well as White, “Letter from Aleppo.” 41. Spencer, Nahum Tate, 84. 42. For a list of Dido’s borrowings from Brutus, see Craven, “Nahum Tate’s Third Dido and Aeneas,” 73–76. On the rhetorical tactics of royalist drama during the 1680s, see Canfield, “Royalism’s Last Dramatic Stand,” but see also the qualifications offered by Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, 200–238. 43. Kushner, “Henry Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas,’ ” 28; Kerman, Opera as Drama, 43. 44. For a related reading, stressing the opera’s valorization of private feeling at the expense of Aeneas’s public world, see Wilfrid Mellers, “The Tragic Heroine and the Un-Hero,” in Harmonious Meeting, 203–14. 45. For more on this reassessment, including a more substantial discussion of Locke and Temple, see Johnson, “An Age without a Hero?” 46. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 132. 47. Sir William Temple, “Of Heroick Virtue,” in Miscellanea, 146. 48. Dryden, Examen Poeticum (1693), in Works, gen. ed. Swedenberg, 4:374. 49. On the Restoration reaction against Virgil, see especially Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England, and Hartle, “ ‘Lawrels for the Conquered.’ ” 50. Dryden, “Dedication of the Aeneis,” in Works, 5.281. 51. Ibid., 5.280: citing the Cato passage, Dryden argues that Virgil’s “Conscience could not but whisper to the Arbitrary Monarch, that the Kings of Rome were at first Elective, and Governed not without a Senate.” Compare Rapin, Observations, 58, and see Aeneid, 6.841, for the earlier reference to Cato the Elder. On continuing eighteenth-century claims for a secretly republican Virgil, see also Harrison, “English Virgil,” 4–7. 52. The earliest surviving reference to the story of Aeneas’s treason against Troy is that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities, 1.48). Aeneas and Antenor are linked in Aeneid notes to pages 182–187

225

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

1.242–53, and a connection between Aeneas and the treason of Antenor appears in the fourth-century journals attributed to Dares the Phrygian and Dictys of Crete. Anon., The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor, 12. For further discussion of this poem see Walkling, “Political Allegory,” 553–54. Roger Savage, “Producing Dido and Aeneas,” in Price, ed., Dido and Aeneas, 261. See Plank, “ ‘And Now About the Cauldron Sing,’ ” and Curtis Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” in Price, ed., Dido and Aeneas, 9–11. On topical politics in Davenant’s play, see Davenant’s “Macbeth,” ed. Spencer, 2–3. Richard Kroll, in “Emblem and Empiricism,” 858, suggests additional points of contact between Davenant’s Malcolm and the civil war general Prince Rupert. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception, 186–89. Dryden, “Dedication of the Aeneis,” in Works, 5:296. Ibid. Works, 5.298. Compare Rapin, Observations, 100: “And whereas this artifice was advanc’d only to humour the Romans . . . yet he thought himself concern’d to use all precautions, to prepossess their minds, upon that disguising of the truth. To that purpose he cunningly brings the Gods into the plot, to put a better gloss upon the sacrificing of her.” Virgil, Aeneid, 4.283–84, trans. Fairclough, translation slightly modified. Dryden, Aeneis, 4.542–43, 546–47, in Works, 5:469. A brief, well-documented discussion of Dido and Cleopatra is found in Pease, ed., Aeneidos Liber Quartus, 24–28; see also Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, 51–54. See All for Love, 2.1.161, in Dryden, Works, 13:44. Compare Brutus of Alba: “’Twere Woman’s Fraud t’ have ruin’d with your Smiles, / But to betray with Tears, the Crocodile’s” (31). On this figure as a musical topos, see Ellen Rosand’s influential essay “The Descending Tetrachord.” It has become traditional to read the Dido ground bass as a mark of the inevitable pressure of the heroine’s tragic destiny; compare Schmalfeldt, “In Search of Dido,” 611: “She lingers to plead with us, even though the ongoing ground-bass repetitions would seem relentlessly to urge her toward her end.”

C ODA . THE S I NGER WI THDRAW S 1. On Mersenne’s tract and its approach to music and the passions, see Mace, “Marin Mersenne”; Augst, “Descartes’s Compendium”; and Duncan, “Persuading the Affections.” On Vossius below, see also Mace, “Musical Humanism.” For eighteenth-century thought in the era of Condillac and Rousseau, see Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language. 2. Dryden, “Preface” to Albion and Albanius, in Works, 15:9–10. 3. Say, Poems, 154, 157–58. 4. Webb, Observations, 113. 5. Maresca, Epic to Novel, 49. 6. Voltaire, An Essay upon . . . Epick Poetry, 37. 7. See Wood, Original Genius, lxv, and Rousseau, “Essai sur l’origine des langues,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 5:389–90; compare the entry for “barcarolles” in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (1768),in Oeuvres complètes, 5:650–51.

226

notes to pages 187–198

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3)INDEX)#

Absalom and Achitophel (Dryden), 185 Académie de Poésie et de Musique, 17, 56, 196 Acevedo, Alonso de, La Creación del mundo, 146 Addison, Joseph, 222n63 L’Adone (Marino): allegorical symbolism of, 92–93, 99; blend of speech and textuality, 96–97; and contest between lutanist and nightingale, 94–99; erotic anti-heroism of, 118; and interaction of epic and pastoral tradition, 92–99, 100; and literary imitation, 92, 94, 95–96, 98, 99, 213n6; Milton’s praise of, 99, 214n15; models of, 96; and myth of Icarus, 96–97; as parable of literary history, 95; and rivalry of music and poetry, 94–95, 97, 99; and union of music and poetry, 92–93, 94 Ad Patrem (Milton), 155, 160, 170 Aelian, 15 Aeneid (Virgil): and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 31; bardic figure in, 63; and Cowley’s Davideis, 121; criticism of, 174–75, 177–81, 186–87, 189, 224n30; and Dido, 1, 19, 175–76, 177, 178, 180, 181–82, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190–91, 192, 193, 194, 199n1, 226n59; Dryden’s translation of, 180, 181, 183, 189, 190–91; and heroism, 25–26, 175, 180, 193; and imperial Rome, 173, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 193; and neoclassicism, 23, 174–75, 177; and opera, 19, 178–79, 194; proem included in, 103, 214n22; as Renaissance epic model, 23, 24, 25, 27, 50; and Ronsard’s Franciade, 24, 58–59, 61; and royalists, 109, 183; and Saint-Amant’s Moyse sauvé, 103, 214n21;

Segrais’s translation of, 100, 180, 214n22; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 24, 103; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 24, 37, 40, 44; Tate’s adaptations of, 184; vernacular translations of, 123 Africa (Petrarch), 1–3, 4, 10, 20, 199n1, 199n2 Alabaster, William, Elisaeis, 208n2 Alighieri, Dante, 144, 158–59, 161, 206n39, 221n38, 221n39 All for Love (Dryden), 191 Ambrose, 123, 143–44, 145 A Michel de l’Hospital (Ronsard), 53, 57, 63 Aminta (Tasso), 35, 42 Ammianus Marcellinus, 11 Amours (Ronsard), 14, 209n10 Antenor, 187, 225–26n52 Antonio di Guido, 8, 200n21 Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica, 58–60, 61, 62, 63, 80, 123; and literary imitation, 19, 123; translations of, 123 Arcades (Milton), 149 Arcadia (Sannazaro), 91 Arcadia (Sidney), 90 Areopagitica (Milton), 155 Argonautica (Apollonius Rhodius), 58–60, 61, 62, 63, 80, 123 Arianna (Claudio Monteverdi), 159, 160, 213n5, 221n41 Ariosto, Ludovico: Celtic bards compared to, 68, 211n40; Cowley on, 134; and Davenant, 124; and opera, 176; Tasso’s rivalry with, 25, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36, 45–47; translations of, 123. See also Orlando furioso (Ariosto) Ariosto, Orazio, 29

247 3)))))#

Aristotle: on poetic form, 35; Poetics, 23, 27, 28, 56–57; on vocal music, 33 Armide (Quinault and Lully), 195 A sa lire (Ronsard), 53 Astraea Redux (Dryden), 183 Astrée (d’Urfé), 100 “At a Vacation Exercise” (Milton), 155–56 Athenaeus, 34 Athys (Segrais), 100–102 Atterbury, Francis, 225n34 Aubrey, John, 134 Augustine: Confessions, 177; De musica, 97 Augustus (Roman emperor), 177, 178, 180, 181, 183, 186 Augustus Anglicanus, 183 authorship: and Butler’s Hudibras, 135–36, 138; and Cowley’s Davideis, 111–12, 115–16, 120, 121, 122, 132, 135, 139; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 124–25, 132, 135, 139, 217n47; and Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, 13; influence of oral past on theories of, 10; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 139, 142, 154, 155, 156, 160–61, 162, 170; modern experience of, 3, 20, 116 Aylett, Robert, David’s Troubles, 120 Bacon, Francis: experimentalism of, 124; on music of the spheres, 219n10; New Atlantis, 115 Baïf, Jean-Antoine de, 56, 196 Baker, David J., 212n63 Bardi, Giovanni de’, 32, 205n27 bards: Ariosto compared to, 68, 211n40; and British prehistory, 10–11, 12, 67–69, 75, 201n27, 211n39, 211n40; and Daniel, 11, 201n32; Drayton on, 12, 69, 201n34; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 155; and Renaissance epic, 10, 19; Spenser on Irish bards, 9, 11, 18, 52, 74–75, 78, 82; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 72; and Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, 74–77, 78, 79 Bardus (king of Celts), 69 Basil, 123, 145 Baudouin, François, 8 Beaumont, Joseph, Psyche, 109, 118 Bellamy, Elizabeth J., 211n48 Bembo, Pietro, 96 248

Bendidio, Lucrezia, 45 Beni, Paolo, 16, 77, 212n56 Benlowes, Edward, Theophilia, 109 Berger, Harry, Jr., 73, 210n32 Bianconi, Lorenzo, 222n58 Blackwell, Thomas, 131, 197 Blarru, Pierre de, Nanceid, 208n2 Bloom, Harold, 95 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 177 Boethius, 17, 143 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, Orlando innamorato, 37 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas: on Homer, 174, 224n13; Le Lutrin, 185 Boisrobert, François Le Métel de: and Scarron, 181; La vraye Didon, ou la Didon chaste, 177–78 Bonini, Severo, 159 Bowra, C. M., 200n25, 209n16 Boys, John, 183 Bracciolini, Poggio, 8 Brehon law, 78–79 British prehistory: and bards, 10–11, 12, 67–69, 75, 201n27, 211n39, 211n40; and du Bellay, 201n27, 201n32; and national identity, 10, 11, 12, 13, 67–68; Strabo on, 11, 68, 211–12n51; views of, 10–11, 12, 18, 66–67 British royalists: and Butler’s Hudibras, 136, 137, 138, 139; and civil wars, 112–13, 215n21; and Cowley’s Davideis, 113–15, 121–22, 132, 133, 215n21, 216n25, 217n41; and cultural authority, 110–11; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 126, 128–29, 131, 132, 133; and Restoration, 134; and rhetoric of poetic inspiration, 120 Brut, 68, 69 Brutus (Cowley), 122 Brutus of Alba (Tate), 184, 188, 189–90, 191, 226n63 Burrow, Colin, 217n42 Busenello, Giovanni Francesco, La Didone, 178–80, 193, 224n22 Butler, Samuel: and Davenant, 134; Milton compared to, 139; mock epic poetry of, 18, 108–9, 110, 111; and myth of artisthero, 111. See also Hudibras (Butler)

index

Caburacci, Francesco, 31 Caccini, Giulio, 196 Cadmus, 15, 202n50 Caesar, Julius: on British prehistory, 11, 13, 68; Gallic Wars, 75 Cambert, Robert, Ariane, 160 Camden, William, Britannia, 68, 212n51 Camões, Luís de, Os Lusíadas, 91, 109 cantari cavallereschi, 30, 31, 40 cantastorie, 8, 25, 29, 31, 32, 34, 45, 207n55 Canzone al Metauro (Tasso), 43 Carew, Thomas, Select Psalmes, 108 Carpenter, Nan C., 221n38 Cartwright, Thomas, 219n10 Cartwright, William, 159 Cary, Lucius, viscount Falkland, 113 Casaubon, Isaac, 16, 203n54 Cassiodorus, 144 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 30, 203n62 Castiglione, Baldassare, 96 Catholic Church: and expansionist papacy, 23, 26, 28; Tridentine reform of, 26, 27, 28 Catullus, 159 La Cavaletta, ovvero de la poesia toscana (Tasso), 33, 35, 44 Cavalli, Pier Francesco, La Didone, 178–80, 193, 224n22 Cavallo, Jo Ann, 40 Ceba, Ansaldo, La reina Esther, 141 Certeau, Michel de, 45 Chamberlayne, William, Pharonnida, 109 Chapelain, Jean: on Marino’s L’Adone, 99–100; La Pucelle, 117, 153, 216n32, 220n28 Chapman, George, 14, 202n43 Charles I (king of England), 109, 112, 113 Charles II (king of England), 110, 124, 134, 183–84, 188, 215n9 Charles IX (king of France), 55, 64 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 72, 79 Christiad (Vida), 23, 116, 141, 157 Christian hexameral epic: and artistic authority, 147; and cultural change, 145–47; and du Bartas’s Semaines, 145, 147; and martial heroism, 152–53, 220n28; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 18–19, 139, 142, 143, 147, 151; and Tasso’s Le Sette giornate del mondo creato, 47–49, 146; and world harmony, 144, 145

Christianity: and Cowley’s Davideis, 116; and martial heroism, 13; and pastoral tradition, 105; and Saint-Amant’s Moyse sauvé, 104. See also Catholic Church; Protestant Church Cicero: and Cowley’s Davideis, 145; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 129–30; De oratore, 15; De re publica, 199n2; on Peisistratus, 125; on rhapsodes, 32 Cieco da Ferrara, Francesco, Mambriano, 37 Cinzio, Giraldi, 16, 31–32, 201n32, 207n55 civil war: and British royalists, 112–13, 215n21; and Butler’s Hudibras, 138, 139; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 126; and epic tradition, 18, 106, 107–11, 132; and literary canon, 110, 215n12; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 139 The Civil War (Cowley), 112–15, 121, 122, 134, 215n16 Claudian: De raptu Proserpinae, 96, 106, 162, 163, 164, 166, 221n50; and Marino’s L’Adone, 99; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 142, 162, 163, 164; as Renaissance epic model, 19; translations of, 123 Clement of Alexandria, 41 Colin Clouts Come Home Again (Spenser), 208n2 The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor Against the State of Troy, 187 Cotton, Charles, Scarronides, 133, 134, 181–82, 193 Council of Trent, 26 Cowley, Abraham: Brutus, 122; and civil war, 111–12, 113; The Civil War, 112–15, 121, 122, 134, 215n16; and Davenant, 134; epic poetry of, 18, 109, 111, 220n28; Essays, 122; and ideals of cosmic order, 111–12; and Lucan, 136; and music of the spheres, 115, 145, 148; and Orpheus, 111, 122; and patronage relations, 110, 124, 134; Poems, 113; Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, 115; The Puritan and the Papist, 216n24; and Saint-Amant, 118. See also Davideis (Cowley) Crashaw, Richard, 99, 213n9 Cromwell, Oliver, 113, 133, 215n21 Crowne, John, 185

index

249

Dacier, André, 173, 174 Dacier, Anne, 131, 174 Daniel, Samuel: and bards, 11, 201n32; The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, 222n59 d’Aubignac, Abbé François-Hédelin, 16, 174, 223n11 d’Aubigné, Théodore-Agrippa, Les Tragiques, 123 Davenant, William: and Cowley, 134; epic poetry of, 111; Jeffereidos, 134; Macbeth, 188; and patronage relations, 110, 124, 134; and Protectorate, 133–34; and singing of poetry, 17, 125. See also Gondibert (Davenant) Davideis (Cowley): and artistic authority, 111–12, 115–16, 120, 121, 122, 132, 135, 139; and celestial harmony, 119, 145; and civilization, 115, 136; and cosmic order, 111, 113, 115–16; date of writing, 113, 215n20; as epic narrative, 109, 113; and erotic anti-heroism, 118–19, 120; invocation of, 120; and music, 114–16, 119–20, 122; and Psalm 114, 158; as religious epic, 117; and royalist political typology, 113–15, 121–22, 132, 133, 215n21, 216n25, 217n41; and seclusion from public life, 122; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 120, 216n33 de Belges, Jean Lemaire: and British prehistory, 201n27; Illustrations de Gaule, 56 De bello civili (Lucan), 107, 112, 123, 136, 218n64 De Doctrina Christiana (Milton), 149 Defense of Poesy (Sidney), 67, 124 Denham, John: Cooper’s Hill, 128; translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, 109 De partu virginis (Sannazaro), 89, 103–4, 141 de’ Pazzi, Alessandro, 27 De rerum natura (Lucretius), 63, 146, 147, 219–20n16 De Sanctis, Francesco, 30 Descartes, René, 196 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean, Esther, 123 “De sphaerorum concentu” (Milton), 148 d’Este, Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, 26, 36 Dido and Aeneas (Tate and Purcell): and chaste Dido tradition, 19, 176, 183, 189, 250

193; and Dido’s lament, 187–94, 226n64; and epic tradition, 176, 195; and fate, 187–88, 190, 191, 192; historical frame of, 184–85; performances of, 183, 225n40; and political myths, 176, 182–83, 184, 185, 187, 188, 190; sailors’ scene in, 182; score of, 192, 193, 226n64 La Didone (Busenello and Cavalli), 178–80, 193, 224n22 Diodorus Siculus: on British prehistory, 11, 68; Spenser on, 75 Diogenes Laertius, 15 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 225n52 Discorsi del poema eroico (Tasso), 27, 34–35, 36, 44, 49, 56, 98, 207n57 Doni, Giovanni Battista, 33, 159 Donne, John, 154 Dorat, Jean, 53 d’Orléans, Anne Marie Louise, La Grande Mademoiselle, 100 Drayton, Michael: and British bardic tradition, 12, 69, 201n34; and construction of British past, 12, 13; and models of history, 10–11, 70. See also Poly-Olbion (Drayton) Druids: and British prehistory, 11, 12, 67, 68; Milton on, 155 Dryden, John: Absalom and Achitophel, 185; All for Love, 191; Astraea Redux, 183; and Cotton, 182; on epic poetry, 172; on Homer, 174, 186; King Arthur, 195; Macflecknoe, 185; and patronage relations, 183; and poetic rhythm, 196; and Segrais, 100; The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man, 222–23n63; “Threnodia Augustalis,” 183; translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, 180, 181, 183, 189, 190–91; on Virgil, 175, 186, 225n51 du Bartas, Guillaume: and Acevedo, 146; Judith, 116, 141; and Milton, 18–19, 147, 148; Semaines, 89, 144–45, 147, 220n17; translations of, 123 du Bellay, Joachim: Antiquités de Rome, 66; and British prehistory, 201n27, 201n32; and oral performance, 55, 209n13; and Pléiade, 208n5; and Ronsard, 55 d’Urfé, Honoré, 90, 99, 100 Durfey, Thomas, Cynthia and Endymion, 222n59

index

Eclogues (Virgil), 91, 100 Elegia 3 (Milton), 220n21 Elegia 6 (Milton), 141 Elsky, Martin, 200n17 Elyot, Thomas, 14, 202n43 Empson, William, 221n49 Enterline, Lynn, 207n53 epic tradition: and British royalist poets, 109, 110, 111; and civil war, 18, 106, 107–11, 132; and Greco-Roman antiquity, 27, 30, 105, 194; and history, 1, 2, 181; and neoAristotelian literary theory, 118–19, 134; and neoclassicism, 78, 88, 171, 172–73, 196–97; and opera, 176, 193–94, 195; oral and literary epics, 200n25; Tasso on, 34–35, 206n33; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 27; and technologies, 91–92; and Trojan dynastic legend, 61. See also Homer; Renaissance epic; Virgil Erasmus, Desiderius, 202n50 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 225n35 Exclusion Crisis, 184 Faerie Queene (Spenser): and authorial stance, 52, 79–81, 88; and bards, 72; and British chronicle history, 52, 66–67; and British oral tradition, 69; and cosmic dance motif, 65; and cosmogonic myth, 65, 66, 79–81, 83, 84–85, 88; and ethnic and geographic difference, 82, 83; and global exploration, 65; and Greco-Roman antiquity, 66, 79; and memory, 70–71, 211n46, 211n48; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 169; and models of history, 66, 69–72, 82–83, 84, 85–86, 87, 213n66; as national origin myth, 18, 51–52, 79, 80–81; and Paridell episode, 71, 72–74, 82, 211n48; and pastoral retreat, 126; and prophecy of Merlin, 71, 72; and reading, 70–71; and rite at Acidale, 65–66, 81, 210n31; Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, 82, 83–87; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 24, 103 Fairfax, Edward, 42 Fallon, Stephen, 151 Fanshawe, Richard, 109 Fasti (Ovid), 163, 221n50 Fauchet, Claude, Antiquitez gauloises et françoises, 56

Ferrari, Benedetto, Proserpina rapita, 165–66, 222n58 Ficino, Marsilio, 17, 57 Fish, Stanley, 154, 161 Flatman, Thomas, 182 Flavius Josephus, 16, 203n54 Flecknoe, Richard, Ariadne Deserted by Theseus, 160 Fletcher, Giles, Christ’s Victory and Triumph, 117 Fletcher, Phineas, Purple Island, 118 Fludd, Robert, 145 Follino, Federico, 221n41 Forster, Sebastian, 203n61 Foucault, Michel, on writing, 200n17 France: Hellenic studies in, 53; humanism in, 53–54, 57–58; and pastoral tradition, 100; and Renaissance epic, 54–56, 214n8 Franciade (Ronsard): and Apollonius’s Argonautica, 58, 59, 61; bardic figures of, 61–63, 64; and Greco-Roman antiquity, 55, 57, 58, 64, 65; and literary ancestors, 57, 58–59; as national origin myth, 18, 51–52, 54–57; and obsession with past, 61; oral performance of, 55, 209n12; and Orphic Hymns, 18, 52, 64, 65, 80, 88; plot of, 58–59; and poet’s voice, 52; revisions of, 55, 58; and silence, 55–56; Spenser’s Faerie Queene compared to, 73; and Terpin’s song, 61–62, 64, 65; themes of repetition and regression, 52, 58, 59; and Valois monarchs, 55, 56; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 24, 58–59, 61 French Wars of Religion, 107 Frénicle, Nicolas, Jésus crucifié, 117 Fronde, 107, 181 Furetière, Antoine, L’Énéide travestie, 123 Galilei, Vincenzo, 24 Galliard, John Ernest, The Rape of Proserpine, 222n59 Garth, Samuel, Dispensary, 185 gender: and Chapelain’s La Pucelle, 117; and Cowley’s Davideis, 118; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 126, 127, 130, 131; and female protagonists, 195; and hierarchy of language, 46; and oral performance, 29; and pastoral tradition, 99; and romance epics, 37; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 193

index

251

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, 66–69, 75 Gerusalemme conquistata (Tasso), 47 Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso): authorial presence in, 30, 36; Beni on, 212n56; bridling and binding in, 30, 38, 205n17; as Christian epic, 35, 152; and Cowley’s Davideis, 120, 216n33; exile motifs of, 29–30, 37–38, 47; First Crusade as subject of, 26–27; and Greco-Roman antiquity, 25, 27, 28, 29, 35, 42, 49; homecoming motifs of, 27–30, 36, 37–38, 40, 44, 47; and Homer’s Iliad, 47, 208n62; and Italian Counter-Reformation, 26, 41, 46; and literary authority, 18, 27, 29; and martial heroism, 169; oral performance of, 33, 198, 205n28; and pastoral retreat, 126; proem of, 36; and religious authority, 27, 46; romance episodes in, 36, 37, 38, 39–44, 46, 48; and Saint-Amant’s Moyse sauvé, 214n21; sea voyage as trope in, 36, 37, 44, 47; Siren motif of, 25, 29, 36, 37, 38, 41–43, 44, 45, 47, 48; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 24, 37, 40, 44 Giacobbi, Girolamo, Proserpina rapita, 222n58 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 203–4n65 Giannantonio, Valeria, 213n6 Gibbons, Grinling, 183 Gildas, 211n38 Godeau, Antoine, Saint Paul, 141 Godolphin, Sidney, 109 Gomberville, Marin le Roy de, 99 Gondibert (Davenant): and artistic authority, 124–25, 132, 135, 139, 217n47; concealment motifs in, 129–30; as epic narrative, 109; and grief, 108, 125, 127–28, 130; and ideology of heroic warfare, 126, 127–28, 129; incubation theme in, 131; and music, 115, 125, 132; and oral past, 125–26, 131; and pastoral retreat, 126, 217–18n49; preface of, 124–25, 130, 134; and prose romance, 124; and Psalm 137, 108; rejection of epic invocation, 120; resistance of new political establishment, 110, 130; and royalist politics, 126, 128–29, 131, 132, 133; singing of, 17, 110, 125, 127–28, 131–32 Gonzaga, Ferrante, count of Guastalla, 21, 22 252

Goodere, Henry, 12 Goody, Jack, 199n10 Grantham, Thomas, 109 great divide theory, 5, 7, 13 Greco-Roman antiquity: and British prehistory, 12; cosmological models of, 143; and epic tradition, 27, 30, 105, 194; and French humanism, 53–54; and humanism, 3, 4, 10, 28, 159, 170, 196; literacy in, 15; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 105–6, 142, 143, 148, 160, 161, 162, 168, 170–71; musical humanists on, 16–17, 23–24, 32–33, 49, 195; music theory of, 23–24, 54; and neo-Aristotelian literary theory, 27; and neoclassicists, 23; Renaissance epic’s relationship with, 4, 9, 10, 13, 17–18, 19, 23, 24, 90, 108, 123, 172–73; revisionist critiques of, 186; and Ronsard’s Franciade, 55, 57, 58, 64, 65; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 66, 79; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 25, 27, 28, 29, 35, 42, 49; and vernacular oral culture, 9; written texts of, 3–4 Greene, Thomas, 4, 25, 199n7, 210n32 Gross, Kenneth, 76, 212n54 Guarini, Battista: and pastoral tradition, 90; Pastor Fido, 42 Guéret, Gabriel, 174 Guillory, John, 65–66, 210n31 Hadfield, Andrew, 81 Hammond, Henry, 121 Harrington, James, 216n25 Harrison, William, 11, 67, 69 Hearne, Thomas, 180 Helgerson, Richard, 214n8 Heliodorus, Aethiopica, 37 Heller, Wendy Beth, 224n22 Henrietta Maria (queen of Charles I of England), 124, 128–29 Henry VIII (king of England), 78 Herodotus: on Cadmus, 202n50; on Homer, 14; oral performance of Histories, 34 Heroides (Ovid), 159 heroism: and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 169; and Butler’s Hudibras, 139; and Christian hexameral epic, 152–53, 220n28; and Cowley’s Davideis, 116, 118, 120; and

index

Davenant’s Gondibert, 126, 128; hero’s task, 25, 30, 50, 91; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 126, 139, 152, 220n27; myth of artist-hero, 111; and neo-Aristotelian literary theory, 116–17; and opera, 176; and Renaissance epic, 25, 30, 50, 91, 111, 172, 173; and singing, 14, 34; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 25–26, 175, 180, 193 Herrick, Robert, 108 Hesiod: as Renaissance epic model, 19; and Ronsard, 54, 63; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 18, 66, 80, 82–83; Theogony, 63, 82–83, 85, 88 Hewes, John, 12 Hipparchus, 15 history: Aristotle on relationship with poetry, 56–57; and changing historical consciousness, 52, 67, 174; and Cowley’s The Civil War, 112–13; and epic tradition, 1, 2, 181; and fiction, 181, 183; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 142, 148, 149, 151, 154, 161, 168, 169, 170–71, 220n26; Milton’s vision of, 140, 149, 150; models of, 10, 54, 66, 84; oral and written history, 67, 68–70, 74–75, 78–79, 84, 90; and oral past, 10–11, 197–98; and religious epics, 141; sixteenth-century historiography, 51; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 192, 194, 199n1. See also British prehistory Hobbes, Thomas, 114, 120, 124, 125, 134, 216n25 Hojeda, Diego de, La Christiada, 117, 141 Holinshed, Raphael, 68, 211n40 Holland, Joanne Field, 213n66 Hollander, John, 141 Homer: Analysts and Unitarians on, 174; and Apollonius Rhodius, 60; Ariosto compared to, 18, 28, 29, 32; Athenaeus on, 34; composition of epics, 15–16, 197, 202n46, 203n54; contemporary oral cultures compared to, 8; and Cowley’s Davideis, 115; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 130, 131–32; Dryden on, 174, 186; and epic tradition, 19, 52, 57, 76, 89, 90, 125, 173–74; Hymn to Apollo, 202n41; life of, 14, 202n41; and Lycurgus, 15, 202n46; and Milton, 148, 155–56; narrators of,

30; poetic rhythm of, 196; Quintilian on, 9, 57, 76, 204n13, 209n16; as Renaissance epic model, 10, 17, 57; and rhapsodes, 15, 16, 31, 32, 34; and Ronsard, 54, 55, 57, 59, 64, 65, 76; self-portraits of, 14, 202n41; and Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, 77–78, 79; as symbol of antiquity, 7; Tasso on, 14, 34–35, 51, 202n44; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 207n47, 207n48; Virgil compared to, 28, 29, 173, 174, 204n13. See also Iliad (Homer); Odyssey (Homer) Homeric Hymns, 63, 163, 222n53 Hooker, Richard, 144 Horace, 27, 53 Hotman, François, Franco-Gallia, 56 Howard, Robert, 183 Hudibras (Butler): and artistic authority, 135–36, 138; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 134; and escapist nostalgia, 108–9; and minstrelsy, 135, 136, 137, 218n67; as mock epic, 133, 135–36, 139; mock invocation in, 120; and music, 135, 136–38; and neo-Pythagoreanism, 137, 218–19n68; and royalist politics, 136, 137, 138, 139; writing of, 110 Huet, Pierre, 174 humanism: and ancient music, 54, 94, 141–42; and British historiography, 67, 68; disdain for popular canterini, 8, 200n21; in France, 53–54, 57–58; and Greco-Roman antiquity, 3, 4, 10, 28, 159, 170, 196; and historical solitude, 27, 67; and historiography, 51; and Milton, 155, 171; and Orpheus myth, 160; and promotion of literacy, 7; and relationship between orality and literacy, 6, 7–8; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 28. See also musical humanism Hutchinson, Lucy: Order and Disorder, 146–47; translation of Lucretius, 147, 219–20n16 L’Hymne de Calaïs et de Zetes (Ronsard), 63 Hymn to Apollo (Homer), 202n41 Iliad (Homer): and Achilles as self-portrait of Homer, 14, 202n43; and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 28; assembling of, 15, 16; criticism of, 175; Jamyn’s translation of,

index

253

Iliad (Homer): (cont.) 65; Latin translation of, 6–7; manuscript copies of, 3; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 152; oral transmission of, 4, 5; and poetic rhythm, 196; royalist translations of, 109; Scudamore on, 133; and singing deeds of heroes, 34; and social code, 173; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme conquistata, 47, 208n62 Il Penseroso (Milton), 155, 160 Il ratto di Proserpina (opera), 222n58 L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Claudio Monteverdi), 178 L’Ingannata Proserpina (opera), 222n58 Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth (Tate), 188 “In Obitum Procancellarii Medici” (Milton), 222n51 Institutio oratoria (Quintilian), 57, 76, 209n16 Ireland: oral poetry of, 67, 69. See also View of the Present State of Ireland (Spenser) Isidore of Seville, 144 Jago, Richard, Adam, Or the Fatal Disobedience, 223n63 James II (king of England), 183, 184, 188 Jamyn, Amadis, 55, 65, 209n12 Jeffereidos (Davenant), 134 Jermyn, Henry, 124, 134 Judith (du Bartas), 116, 141 Kepler, Johannes, 145 Kermode, Frank, 215n20 Kerrigan, William, 150 King, Matthew, The Intercession, 223n63 King Arthur (Dryden and Purcell), 195 Kircher, Athanasius, 145 Klockus, Johannes, Christiados priscae et novae, 141 Lalli, Giovanni Battista, Eneide travestita, 181 Laparelli, Marcantonio, La Cristiade, 117 Lawes, Henry, 158, 159, 160, 221n38, 221n40 Le Bossu, René, 172, 173 Le Moyne, Pierre, Saint Louis, 153, 220n28 Leonard, John, 163, 222n54 Linus, 54 literacy: and cognitive change, 5, 6, 199n10; and great divide theory, 5, 7; in GrecoRoman antiquity, 15; hierarchy of, 46; 254

interaction with orality, 6, 7–8; and Renaissance epic, 90; technology of, 91; transition from orality, 5, 6, 45, 200n15. See also reading; writing literary imitation: of Greco-Roman poets, 19, 23, 173, 200n25; literary art defined by, 9, 23; and Marino’s L’Adone, 92, 94, 95–96, 98, 99, 213n6; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 95; and neoclassicism, 25, 52, 57, 173; and partisan allegiances, 110; and Petrarch’s Africa, 1, 14; and Renaissance epic, 1, 9, 25; and Ronsard, 18, 54, 58, 64, 65; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 80, 81, 103; and Tasso, 18, 208n62; and Virgil, 57, 174–75 Locke, John, 186 Locke, Matthew, Psyche, 165 locus amoenus tradition, 91, 126, 169, 170 Lorrain, Claude, 90 Louis XIII (king of France), 99 Lucan: De bello civili, 107, 112, 123, 136, 218n64; and monophonic settings, 17; narrators of, 30; and technologies, 91 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 63, 146, 147, 219–20n16 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, Armide, 195 Lycidas (Milton), 155 Lycurgus, 15, 202n46 Macflecknoe (Dryden), 185 Macpherson, James, 198 Macrobius, 17, 143, 145, 177, 199n2 madrigalists, 25, 32, 33, 45, 203n59 Malatesta, Giuseppe, 31 Mansus (Milton), 155 Marcus, Leah, 155 Maresca, Thomas, 197 Marino, Giambattista: epic poetry of, 18; and interaction of epic and pastoral traditions, 18, 92–93, 106; and Saint-Amant, 102, 103; La Sampogna, 99, 102; La Strage degli innocenti, 99. See also L’Adone (Marino) martial epic: alternatives to, 18, 99, 100, 105, 123, 131, 134, 185–86; and civil war, 107–8; and Cowley’s Davideis, 117, 118, 119; and Homer, 52, 89, 90; and Milton, 139; and Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, 77; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme

index

liberata, 152–53, 169; and Virgil, 52, 89, 90, 131, 152 Martz, Louis, 162 Marullus, Michael, 63 Marx, Karl, 4–5 A Maske (Milton), 150, 155, 165 Masson, Paul-Marie, 203n58 McCabe, Richard, 75–76 Medici, Maria de’, 99 Mei, Girolamo, 24 Mersenne, Marin, 144, 195–96 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 82, 159, 162, 163, 163–64, 166, 221n50, 222n52 Milton, John: Ad Patrem, 155, 160, 170; Arcades, 149; Areopagitica, 155; “At a Vacation Exercise,” 155–56; Butler compared to, 139; and civil wars, 113; De Doctrina Christiana, 149; “De sphaerorum concentu,” 148; and doctrine of rhythmus, 196; and du Bartas, 18–19, 147, 148; Elegia 3, 220n21; Elegia 6, 141; English translation of Psalm 114, 221n39; epic poetry of, 18; and epic tradition, 60; Il Penseroso, 155, 160; “In Obitum Procancellarii Medici,” 222n51; Lycidas, 155; Mansus, 155; A Maske, 150, 155, 165; and models of the past, 9, 18, 20; Of Reformation, 155; “On the Death of a Fair Infant,” 222n51; “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” 144, 149, 156–57, 170, 223n70; and opera, 19, 159–60, 176, 221n45; Paradise Regained, 118, 216n32; “The Passion,” 156–57; and Pythagoras, 19, 140–43, 148–51, 154, 156, 157–58, 161, 162, 171; voice of, 19, 150, 154, 155, 161. See also Paradise Lost (Milton) Miner, Earl, 138 minstrelsy: and Butler’s Hudibras, 135, 136, 137, 218n67; relationship to Greco-Roman antiquity, 4 Minturno, Antonio, 201n27 mock epic tradition, 18, 108–9, 110, 111, 133, 134, 135–36, 181, 185 monody, 32, 34, 93, 157, 159, 164, 166 Montaigne, Michel de, 31 Monteverdi, Claudio: Arianna, 159, 160, 213n5, 221n41; L’Incoronazione di Poppea, 178; and madrigalists, 203n59; Proserpina rapita, 164–65, 222n58

Monteverdi, Giulio, Il rapimento di Proserpina, 222n58 Moyse sauvé (Saint-Amant): anti-heroism of, 118; and domestic affairs, 102, 104, 123; and feminine antitype to Virgil, 102–3; and interplay of epic and pastoral traditions, 102–3; lute imagery in, 103–5; as religious epic, 123; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 214n21; and technologies, 104–5 Musaeus, 16, 24, 53, 99 music: ancient music and modern writing, 22, 93, 97, 106, 196; and British royalists, 114–15; and Cowley’s Davideis, 114–16, 119–20, 122; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 115, 125, 132; and Marino’s L’Adone, 92, 93; and Neoplatonism, 143; occult power of, 65, 80, 159; and poet-singer, 13, 14, 18, 24, 67, 69, 194; Pythagorean doctrine of music of the spheres, 19, 140–46, 148; rivalry of music and poetry, 94–95, 97, 99; and Ronsard, 54, 209n10; sources associated with, 10; Tasso on, 33, 34–36, 44, 48; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 38–39, 44, 48; union of music and poetry, 17, 53, 54, 55–56, 67, 203n59, 208–9n8, 209n10. See also opera; song musical humanism: and Ariosto, 25, 29, 32; in Britain, 67; in France, 54; on GrecoRoman antiquity, 16–17, 23–24, 32–33, 49, 195; and Marino’s L’Adone, 93; and neoclassicism, 47; as term, 203n58; and union of music and poetry, 17, 54, 56, 93, 94, 203n59, 209n10 national identity: and British prehistory, 10, 11, 12, 13, 67–68; and dynastic epics, 50–52, 208n2; and literary canon, 110; and Trojan origins of France, 56 neoclassicism: and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 28, 30, 32; and epic tradition, 78, 88, 171, 172–73, 196–97; and literary imitation, 25, 52, 57, 173; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 172; and musical humanism, 47; and Ronsard’s Franciade, 57, 64; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 47; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 23, 174–75, 177 Neoplatonism, 52, 57, 63, 143

index

255

Niger, Franciscus, 203n61 Nonnus, 19, 96 Odes (Ronsard), 54 Odyssey (Homer): and Apollonius Rhodius, 60; and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 28, 29; Demodocus as self-portrait of Homer, 14; and epic tradition, 123; and feast of Alcinous, 1, 14; manuscript copies of, 3; oral transmission of, 5; portrait of Phemius in, 15; preface on Homer’s life, 14; Sirens of, 25, 29, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 60; and social code, 173; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 25, 36, 37, 40, 206n39; and technologies, 91; writing of, 15, 16 Of Reformation (Milton), 155 Ogilby, John, 109, 225n38 Ong, Walter J., 5 On Music (Pseudo-Plutarch), 17, 34, 202n44, 206n37 “On the Death of a Fair Infant” (Milton), 222n51 “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (Milton), 144, 149, 156–57, 170, 223n70 opera: and Davenant, 133–34; and epic tradition, 176, 193–94, 195; and GrecoRoman antiquity, 176; and heroism, 176; and musical humanists, 17, 19; and Ovid, 159, 176, 185; and pagan mythology, 159; and pastoral tradition, 90, 176; and Proserpina myth, 164, 165–66, 167; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 19, 178–79, 194; and vocal music of ancients, 159 orality: adaptation to literacy, 6; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 126; and great divide theory, 5, 7; interaction with literacy, 6, 7; modern “discovery” of, 197; as pure music, 46; sources on ancient orality, 14; as symbol of prehistoric past, 5, 7; transition to literacy, 5, 6, 45, 200n15; and writing, 45, 49, 155 oral performance: of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 8, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 45, 205n21; duration of, 17, 203n62; hierarchical and gendered terms of, 29; and models of the past, 4, 9, 24; and musical humanism, 32; and Petrarch’s 256

Africa, 2–3; and rhapsodes, 14–16; of Ronsard’s Franciade, 55, 209n12; shared, social experience of, 8; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 52; and writing, 2–5, 30–31, 45 Orlando furioso (Ariosto): and chaste Dido, 224n28; critics of, 31, 32; and martial heroism, 169; modifications to, 31, 205n20; and oral modernity, 46–47; oral performances of, 8, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 45, 205n21; and revival of Homer, 18, 28, 29, 30–33, 35–36, 45; romance episodes in, 39, 40; and Tasso, 28, 29, 30, 36, 46, 204n15; and vernacular language, 46; and Virgil, 28 L’Orphée (Ronsard), 63 Orpheus: Aldine edition of, 63; and Apollonius Rhodius, 60; and Butler’s Hudibras, 135; and Cowley, 111, 122; and Marino’s L’Adone, 97; and Milton’s early portrayals of Orpheus, 160; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 111, 142, 160–61; and musical humanists, 24; Orphic Hymns, 18, 19, 52, 64, 65, 80, 88, 210n26; and Renaissance epic, 10, 17, 19; and Ronsard, 18, 52, 54, 63–64, 65, 80, 88, 210n26; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 80, 88, 212n61; and vocality, 12, 16, 97 Ossian, 198 Ovid: and Cowley, 113; Fasti, 163, 221n50; Heroides, 159; and Marino’s L’Adone, 96; Metamorphoses, 82, 159, 162, 163, 163–64, 166, 221n50, 222n52; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 19, 142, 168, 170; and monophonic settings, 17; and opera, 159, 176, 185; and Segrais’s Athys, 100, 101; and Tate, 185 Palisca, Claude, 203n58 Paradise Lost (Milton): and artistic authority, 139, 142, 154, 155, 156, 160–61, 162, 170; and Christian hexameral epic, 18–19, 151, 152, 153–54; competing forms of speech and song in, 142–43; and Death, 168, 169, 170; and Greco-Roman antiquity, 105–6, 142, 143, 148, 160, 161, 162, 168, 170–71; and history, 142, 148, 149, 151, 154, 161, 168, 169, 170–71, 220n26; and ideology of heroic warfare, 126, 139, 152, 220n27;

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and literary imitation, 95; and mourning, 143, 156, 160, 161–62, 166–70, 171, 222–23n63; oppositional politics of, 123; and origins, 139, 142, 148, 154; and poetic rhythm, 196; Proserpina myth and Eve in, 162–71, 221n49, 222n62, 222–23n63; and Pythagorean musica speculativa, 147, 148–50, 154; as religious epic, 117, 152; and renunciation, 159, 160, 162, 171; and restitution and return, 142, 147, 151, 154, 220n18; and song, 142, 148, 150, 151–52, 154, 156, 160, 220n26; and technologies, 105–6; and world harmony, 148–49 Paradise Regained (Milton), 118, 216n32 Parish, John E., 221n49 Parker, W. R., 157 Parry, Milman, 5 “The Passion” (Milton), 156–57 pastoral tradition: and cultural memory, 100, 101; and interest in private feeling, 117; interplay of nature and technologies, 18, 91–92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 104–6; and Marino’s L’Adone, 92–99, 100; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 169; and primitivism, 90–91; and Renaissance epic, 18, 19, 90–93, 99, 100; and writing, 150 Peacham, Henry, 11, 218n53 Peisistratus, 15, 16, 125, 132, 174 Peperara, Laura, 45 Pepys, Samuel, 160 Perrault, Charles: on Homer, 16, 223n11; on Virgil’s Aeneid, 177 Perrin, Pierre, Ariane, 160 Petrarch, Francesco: Africa, 1–3, 4, 10, 20, 199n1, 199n2; contempt for itinerant reciters, 8, 200n19; and Cowley’s Davideis, 119; and Davenant’s Gondibert, 127; and estrangement from ancient world, 4, 10; imitation of Homer, 14; speech and song as preserve of ancients, 6; Trionfi, 177 Pherecrates, 35 Phillips, Edward, 173, 221n45 Phineas, 148 Phrynis, 35 Pico della Mirandola, 17 Pigna, G. B., 31, 205n20 Pillard, Laurent, Rusticiad, 208n2 Pindar, 53, 116

Pinnock, Andrew, 225n33 Plato: and Cowley’s Davideis, 145; and imitation theory, 95; Republic, 143; Timaeus, 115, 144 Pléiade, 53–54, 208n5 Pliny the Elder, 11 Plutarch: on Homer, 14; Life of Alexander, 202n44; on Lycurgus, 15, 202n46 Poetics (Aristotle), 23, 27, 28, 56–57 Poliziano, Angelo, 200n21 Poly-Olbion (Drayton): author’s selfrepresentation in, 13; and bardic tradition, 12, 69; and construction of British past, 12, 13; Selden on, 211n40 polyphony, 17, 144, 219n10 Popish Plot, 188 Poussin, Nicolas, 90 Pozzi, Giovanni, 96, 98 Priest, Josias, 183 primitivism, 90–91, 196, 197, 200n25 print culture: and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 30–31, 205n21; and authorship, 20; and Milton, 155; and oral forms, 10; and Renaissance epic, 90; and vernacular oral cultures, 9 Prolegomena ad Homerum (Wolf), 5, 16, 197 Prolusiones academicae (Strada), 96, 97, 98–99, 213n9 Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (Cowley), 115 Proserpina rapita (Claudio Monteverdi), 164–65, 222n58 Protestant Church: and Milton, 141; and Puritan populism, 128, 218n51; and Puritan repression, 135, 136, 137–38; and religious enthusiasm, 120, 121 Psalms of David: and Cowley’s Davideis, 113–15; Psalm 114, 113–14, 158, 221n39; Psalm 137, 108, 109; as Renaissance epic model, 10, 17, 19, 90; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 80 Pseudo-Herodotus, on Homer, 15, 77–78 Pseudo-Plutarch: on Homer, 15; On Music, 17, 34, 202n44, 206n37 Purcell, Henry: King Arthur, 195. See also Dido and Aeneas (Tate and Purcell) The Puritan and the Papist (Cowley), 216n24 Puritan Revolution, 107

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257

Puttenham, George, 11, 67 Pythagoras: and Butler’s Hudibras, 137, 218–19n68; and Cowley’s Davideis, 119, 145; doctrine on music of the spheres, 19, 140–46, 148; and Marino’s L’Adone, 213n5; and Milton, 19, 140–43, 148–51, 154, 156, 157–58, 161, 162, 171; as model for epic poetry, 19, 90; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 80; and vocality, 12 quantitative verse movement, 17 Quinault, Philippe, Armide, 195 Quint, David, 123 Quintilian: on Homer, 9, 57, 76, 204n13, 209n16; Institutio oratoria, 57, 76, 209n16; on Virgil, 57, 76, 209n16 Rabelais, François, 13, 68 Racine, Jean, 173–74 Rapin, René, 16, 174, 180, 226n59 reading: oral reading, 55, 209n13; as private experience, 8; proficiency in, 6; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 70–71; transition from aristocratic to bourgeois reading public, 13; visual experience of, 3, 5 Renaissance epic: and attitudes toward oral performance, 4; decline of, 196–97; diversity in, 19, 89–90, 134; and duration of oral performance of, 17, 203n62; and dynastic epics, 18, 50–52, 64, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, 88, 89, 90, 208n2; and heroism, 25, 30, 50, 91, 111, 172, 173; and historical consciousness, 20; and idealized past, 66; and literary imitation, 1, 9, 25; and mock epic tradition, 18, 108–9, 110, 111, 133, 134, 135–36, 181, 185; and models of poet-singer, 13, 18, 24, 67, 69, 92; and opera, 19; oral roots of, 96; and origins, 20, 50, 52, 88, 89–90, 100; and pastoral tradition, 18, 19, 90–93, 99, 100; relationship with antiquity, 4, 9, 10, 13, 17–18, 19, 23, 24, 90, 108, 123, 172–73; and religious epic, 117, 123, 141, 142; self-consciousness of, 1; theory of, 172. See also Christian hexameral epic; martial epic Republic (Plato), 143 Restoration, 134, 165, 175, 183, 186, 188, 258

225n34, 225n35 Revard, Stella, 223n63 rhapsodes: and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 31–32; Cinthio on, 207n55; Doni on, 33; Greek accounts of, 14–15; and Homeric poems, 15, 16, 31, 32, 34; Rousseau on, 198 Ricci, Bartolomeo, 31 Rinaldo (Tasso), 204n15, 207n47 Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia, 92–93 Roman sources, on British prehistory, 10–11, 12, 13 Ronsard, Pierre de: A Michel de l’Hospital, 53, 57, 63; Amours, 14, 209n10; A sa lire, 53; epic poetry of, 18, 49, 51; and French humanism, 57–58; Greene on, 210n32; on Homer, 14; L’Hymne de Calaïs et de Zetes, 63; hymns and odes of, 54, 63, 64; models of Neoplatonic inspiration, 52, 57, 63; and musical humanism, 67; Odes, 54; L’Orphée, 63; and Pléiade, 53–54; and Spenser, 51; and Virgil, 17, 54, 57, 58, 59, 64–65, 76. See also Franciade (Ronsard) Ross, Alexander, 222n52 Ross, Thomas, 110, 215n9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 7, 198 Ruscelli, Girolamo, 31 Ryding, Erik S., 203n58, 203n61 Rymer, Thomas, 118–19 Saint-Amant, Marc-Antoine Girard de: and Cowley, 118; epic poetry of, 18; and interaction of epic and pastoral traditions, 18, 102–5. See also Moyse sauvé (SaintAmant) Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 55 Sainte-Maure, Benoît de, Roman de Troie, 56 Saint-Evremond, Charles de, 174 La Sampogna (Marino), 99, 102 Sandys, George: Select Psalmes, 108; translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 163–64 Sannazaro, Jacopo: Arcadia, 91; De partu virginis, 89, 103–4, 141 Say, Samuel, 196 Sayce, R. A., 216n27 Scaliger, J. C., 76, 77 Scarron, Paul, Virgile travesti, 123, 181

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Schiffer, Edward, 217n47 Scudamore, James, Homer A La Mode, 133 Scudéry, Georges de, Didon, 178, 220n28 Scudéry, Madeleine de, Ibrahim, 117, 216n31 Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel (Tate), 183 Segrais, Jean Regnault de: Athys, 100–102; translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, 100, 180, 214n22 Seidel, Michael, 218n64 Selden, John, 13, 68, 211n40 Semaines (du Bartas), 89, 144–45, 147, 220n17 Sempere, Jerónimo, La Carolea, 208n2 Servius, 177 Le Sette giornate del mondo creato (Tasso), 47–49, 146 Settle, Elkanah, Empress of Morocco, 165 Shadwell, Thomas: Lancashire Witches, 188; patronage relations, 183 Shakespeare, William, 124, 149, 183, 188 Sheppard, Samuel, Faerie King, 109, 110 Sidney, Philip: Arcadia, 90; on British prehistory, 11, 67–68; Defense of Poesy, 67, 124 Sigeros, Nicholas, 3 Silius Italicus, Punica, 110 Smith, John Christopher, Paradise Lost: An Oratorio, 223n63 Smith, Nigel, 217n40 Solon, 15 song: Greek myths of power of ancient song, 53, 64; lyric poetry originating in popular song, 6; and Milton’s Paradise Lost, 142, 148, 150, 151–52, 154, 156, 160, 220n26; and models of the past, 9, 94; and pastoral tradition, 90, 98; relationship of popular song to Greco-Roman antiquity, 4; and Ronsard’s Franciade, 61–62, 64, 65; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 80 Speed, John, 211n39 Spenser, Edmund: Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 208n2; Cowley on, 134; and Davenant, 124; epic poetry of, 18, 49, 51, 107; on Irish bards, 9, 11, 18, 52, 74–75, 78, 82; lyric poetry of, 69; and Milton, 155; and Ronsard, 51; View of the Present State of Ireland, 52, 74–79, 82, 85, 87,

211n50, 211–12n51. See also Faerie Queene (Spenser) Sprat, Thomas, 215n20, 216n28 The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man (Dryden), 222–23n63 Statius, 19, 107, 123 Steele, Richard, The Christian Hero, 186 Stillingfleet, Benjamin, Paradise Lost: An Oratorio, 223n63 Strabo: on British prehistory, 11, 68, 211–12n51; on Homer, 15; Spenser on, 75 Strada, Famiano, Prolusiones academicae, 96, 97, 98–99, 213n9 Strafford, Earl of (Thomas Wentworth), 111 La Strage degli innocenti (Marino), 99 Strozzi, Ercole, 96 Sylvester, Josuah, 144 Tacitus, 178 Tasso, Bernardo, 31, 32, 205n21 Tasso, Torquato: Aminta, 35, 42; and authority figures, 26, 27, 28; Canzone al Metauro, 43; La Cavaletta, ovvero de la poesia toscana, 33, 35, 44; and Christian hexameral epics, 19, 152–53, 220n28; Discorsi del poema eroico, 27, 34–35, 36, 44, 49, 56, 98, 207n57; epic poetry of, 18; Gerusalemme conquistata, 47; on Homer, 14, 34–35, 51, 202n44; and literary imitation, 18, 208n62; and literary tradition, 21–22; models of the past, 9, 20, 21–25; and musical humanism, 67; and opera, 176, 195; and pastoral tradition, 90; poetry of holy war, 116; Rinaldo, 204n15, 207n47; Le Sette giornate del mondo creato, 47–49, 146; and technologies, 91; theoretical writings of, 27, 28, 33–35, 36, 44, 49, 204n12, 206n33; translations of, 123. See also Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso) Tassoni, Alessandro, 174 Tate, Nahum: Brutus of Alba, 184, 188, 189–90, 191, 226n63; and Cotton, 182; early plays of, 183, 184, 188; Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth, 188; as poet laureate, 184; Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel, 183. See also Dido and Aeneas (Tate and Purcell) Temple, William, 174, 186, 218n63, 224n13 Tertullian, 177

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Thamyris, 148 Theobald, Lewis, The Rape of Proserpine, 222n59 Theocritus, 91–92, 100 Theogony (Hesiod), 63, 82–83, 85, 88 Thirty Years’ War, 107 Thomas, Richard F., 189 “Threnodia Augustalis” (Dryden), 183 Thucydides, 202n41 Tillyard, E. M. W., 150 Timaeus (Plato), 115, 144 Tiresias, 148 Todd, Henry, 222n63 Tonkin, Humphrey, 212n61 Tonson, Jacob, 183 Les Tragiques (d’Aubigné), 123 Trionfi (Petrarch), 177 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, Italia liberata da’ Goti, 23, 40, 207n47 Trojan dynastic legend: and national origin myths, 68; and Renaissance epic, 141; and Ronsard’s Franciade, 51, 52, 56, 61; and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 51, 52, 71, 72–74; and Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, 75 Tyard, Pontus de, 208n5 Valentini, Pier Francesco, Il ratto di Proserpina, 222n58 Valla, Lorenzo, 6 Valvasone, Erasmo di, Angeleida, 153 van den Vondel, Joost, Joannes de Boetgezant, 118 Verdicts of the Learned Concerning Virgil and Homer’s Heroic Poems, 181 Vergil, Polydore, Anglica Historia, 68 Verino, Michele, 8 Vettori, Piero, 203n62 Vico, Giambattista, 7, 197 Vida, Girolamo: Christiad, 23, 116, 141, 157; on Homer, 76; translations of, 123 View of the Present State of Ireland (Spenser), 52, 74–79, 82, 85, 87, 211n50, 211–12n51 Virgil: and Cowley’s Davideis, 115; cultural

260

prestige of, 123; Eclogues, 91, 100; and epic tradition, 19, 52, 57, 89, 90, 102, 103, 107, 112; Homer compared to, 28, 29, 173, 174, 204n13; and monophonic settings, 17; narrators of, 30; and opera, 176; and pastoral tradition, 91; poetic rhythm of, 196; and Ronsard, 17, 54, 57, 58, 59, 64–65, 76; singing of, 33. See also Aeneid (Virgil) Vives, Juan Luis, 15–16 Voltaire, 197 Vossius, Isaac, 196 Wales, 11, 67–68, 69 Walker, D. P., 203n58 Waller, Edmund, 109, 110 Walsh, William, 180–81, 224n28 Walton, Isaak, Compleat Angler, 108 Ware, James, 211n50 Warner, William, Albion’s England, 208n2 Watson, Richard, A Sermon Touching Schisme, 121 Webb, Daniel, 196 Wentworth, Thomas, earl of Strafford, 111 William III (king of England), 183, 184 Wine, Kathleen, 91 Winter, Peter, Rape of Proserpine, 222n59 Wolf, F. A.: and oral past, 7; Prolegomena ad Homerum, 5, 16, 197 Wood, Robert, 198 Wotton, William, 174 writing: and abstract reasoning, 5; ancient music and modern writing, 22, 93, 97, 106, 196; Foucault on, 200n17; and Marino’s L’Adone, 92, 93; oral and written history, 67, 174; and orality, 45, 49, 155; and oral performance, 2–5, 30–31, 45; and pastoral tradition, 150; and perception of the past, 8; proficiency in, 6; in silence, 3; transition to, 5, 66 Zapata, Luis, El Carlos famoso, 208n2 Zarlino, Gioseffo, 32, 144, 196 Zatti, Sergio, 28

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