History of English Literature, Volume 1: Medieval and Renaissance Literature to 1625 3034322283, 9783034322287

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olume 1 Book 1

History of English Literature

Histor y of English Literature Franco Marucci

Medieval and Renaissance Literature to 1625

Franco Marucci

Peter Lang

Volume 1

History of English Literature

History of English Literature Volume 1

Medieval and Renaissance Literature to 1625 Franco Marucci Translated from the Italian by Julia Bolton Holloway, Rosalynd Pio, Maria Cristina Cignatta and Valentina Poggi

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marucci, Franco, 1949- author. Title: Medieval and Renaissance literature to 1625 / Franco Marucci. Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2018] | Series: History of English literature ; Volume 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017047860 | ISBN 9783034322287 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English literature--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR83 .M37 2017 | DDC 820.9--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047860 Originally published in Italian as Storia della letteratura inglese – Dalle origini al 1625 by Casa Editrice Le Lettere (2015). Cover image: N.C. Wyeth, illustration from The Boy’s King Arthur, edited by Sidney Lanier ed. (1880). Cover design by Brian Melville. ISBN 978-3-0343-2228-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-194-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-195-8 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-196-5 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2018 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Franco Marucci has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents List of abbreviations § 1. The initial and terminal dates of this volume

xv 1

Part I

The Formation of a National Literature

3

  2. Placing Old English literature in the canon

5

  3. English history to 1066

14

  4. Bede

19

  5. Old English poetry

21

 6.  Beowulf

28

Part II

The Middle English Period

35

  7. English history from 1066 to 1485

37

  8. Genres and ‘matters’

45

  9. The Arthurian romances: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon

59

10. Ricardian literature

64

 11. The influence of the Roman de la Rose

67

vi

§ 12. Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

73

  13. Gower

85

  14. Langland

92

  15–20. Chaucer

105

§ 15. Stereotypes of courtly love and symptoms of modernity, p. 105. § 16. Biography, p. 119. § 17. Dream-vision poems, p. 123. § 18. Troilus and Criseyde, p. 131. §§ 19–20. The Canterbury Tales (§ 19. The poem as a field of contrary vectors, p. 136. § 20. The internal texture, p. 147).

  21. The English Chaucerians: Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes 160   22. Barclay

173

  23. Skelton

178

  24. Fifteenth-century Scottish literature

191

  25. The Scottish Chaucerians: Douglas, Henryson, Dunbar197   26. Lyndsay

210

  27. Popular ballads and lyrics

215

  28. Medieval drama

219

  29. Fifteenth-century prose

225

  30. The Paston Letters

228

  31. Caxton

232



§§ 32–33. Malory

vii

236

§§ 32–33. Le Morte d’Arthur (§ 32. Authorship, publication and popularity, p. 236. § 33. The stark kaleidoscope, p. 245).

Part III

The Sixteenth Century

251

  34. England under the Tudors

253

  35. The English Reformation

263

  36–38. English humanism and the Renaissance

267

§ 36. The continental trail, p. 267. § 37. Forms, reception and genetic and historical theories, p. 275. § 38. The arts, p. 281.

  39. More

284

  40. Conduct books

294

  41. The Miscellanies

304

  42. Wyatt

307

  43. Surrey

318

  44. The Mirror for Magistrates

326

  45. Gascoigne

330

  46. Other minor poets

333

  47. Elizabethan Catholic poets

334

viii

§§ 48–54. Sidney

338

§ 48. The diagnostician and healer of infected man, p. 338. § 49. The Lady of May and other youthful lyrics, p. 345. § 50. Astrophel and Stella, p. 347. §§ 51–52. The Old Arcadia (§ 51. The neoclassical polish and the oblivion of reality, p. 354. § 52. Malice, humour and political allegory in the pastoral canvas, p. 360). § 53. The New Arcadia: The toning down of the pastoral and the emphasis on the heroic, p. 364. § 54. The Defence of Poesy, p. 367.

  55. Greville

372

  56–65.  Spenser

375

§ 56. The most poetic of English poets, p. 375. § 57. The Shepheardes Calender. 1579: The fateful year, p. 381. § 58. Aesopian and pastoral fables and elegies, p. 386. §§ 59–62. The Faerie Queene (§ 59. The poem’s ‘dark conceit’, p. 389. § 60. Upright knights against felons, monsters and enchantresses, p. 398. § 61. Man vs beast, p. 404. § 62. The Mutability Cantos, p. 414). § 63. Amoretti, p. 416. § 64. ‘Epithalamion’ and ‘Prothalamion’, p. 419. § 65. The four hymns to heavenly love, p. 423.

  66. Ralegh, Wotton

427

  67. Thomas Campion

434

  68. Drayton

437

  69. Daniel

442

  70. Other sonneteers and pastoral poets

448

  71. Davies and Davies of Hereford

451

ix



§ 72. Hall

454

   73–83. Donne

457

§ 73. The holy sinner and the querelle on concettism, p. 457. § 74. Biography, p. 467. §§ 75–76. Songs and Sonnets (§ 75. The obsolescence of Petrarchism, p. 470. § 76. Love, rescued from, and a slave to, time, p. 476). § 77. Elegies and epithalamia, p. 484. § 78. The satires, p. 488. § 79. The Verse Letters, p. 490. § 80. The Anniversaries, p. 493. §§ 81–82. Divine poems (§ 81. La Corona and Holy Sonnets, p. 497. § 82. The hymns, p. 505). § 83. Treatises, libels and sermons, p. 506.

  84. Puttenham

510

Part IV

The Elizabethan Theatre

515

  85. Tudor masques and interludes

517

  86. Elizabethan drama: An overview

520

  87. The incunabula

525

  88. Udall

531

  89. Bale

533

  90. Gorboduc

536

  91. Cambyses

540

  92. Arden of Feversham

542

x

§§ 93. Kyd

545

  94. Peele

550

  95–102. Marlowe

554

§ 95. The apotheosis and its nemesis, p. 554 . § 96. Dido, Queen of Carthage, p. 561. § 97. Tamburlaine the Great, p. 563. § 98. The Jew of Malta, p. 566. § 99. History plays, p. 569. §§ 100–101. Doctor Faustus (§ 100. A short history of Faustism, p. 572. § 101. The drama of irresolution, p. 578). § 102. Hero and Leander, p. 582.

  103–109. Marston

584

§ 103. The satires, p. 584. § 104. His theatrical career and his early retirement, p. 587. § 105. Plays of disguise and revenge, p. 591. § 106. The Malcontent, p. 595. § 107. The two city comedies, p. 598. § 108. Sophonisba, p. 601. § 109. The Insatiate Countess, p. 602.

  110–114. Chapman

604

§ 110. Homeri metaphrastes, p. 604. § 111. Orphic and mythological poems, p. 611. § 112. The comedies on the trial of chastity, p. 616. § 113. Bussy D’Ambois and the surrendering hero, p. 620. § 114. The stoic hero, p. 625.

  115–122. Jonson § 115. Construction and deconstruction of Jonson’s classicism, p. 627. § 116. The comedies of ‘humours’, p. 637. § 117. The Roman tragedies, p. 645. §§ 118–119. The tetralogy of tricksters (§ 118. Volpone and The Alchemist, p. 648. § 119. Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair, p. 654). § 120. Last Jacobean and Caroline plays, p. 659. § 121. The masques, p. 664. § 122. The poems, p. 665.

627

xi



§§ 123. Tourneur

668

   124–127. Webster

674

§ 124. Nihilism and possibilism in the Italian trilogy, p. 674. § 125. The White Devil, p. 682. § 126. The Duchess of Malfi. The blood taboo, p. 687. § 127. The Devil’s Law Case, p. 692.

  128–129. Dekker

696

§ 128. The brothel syndrome, p. 696. § 129. The prose, p. 705.

  130–136. Middleton

706

§ 130. A journeyman in Olympus, p. 706. § 131. Comedies set in the London gutter, p. 710. § 132. The romantic comedies, p. 714. § 133. Women Beware Women. Conjugal fidelity checkmated, p. 716. § 134. The Changeling. Woman is voluble, and so is man, p. 720. § 135. Other tragedies and tragicomedies, p. 723. § 136. A Game at Chess, p. 725.

   137–140. Beaumont and Fletcher

727

§ 137. The pliable centaur, p. 727. § 138. Independent plays, p. 730. § 139. Co-authored plays, p. 734. § 140. Plays by Fletcher alone, p. 739.

  141–143. Massinger

742

§ 141. Necessity and apology of self-sacrifice, p. 742. § 142. Satires of pretentiousness, p. 751. § 143. Caroline compromises, p. 753.

  144–146. Ford § 144. The focus on incest, p. 757. § 145. Heroines of firmness, p. 764. § 146. ‘Unity is no sin’, p. 770.

757

xii

§ 147–148. Thomas Heywood

773

§ 147. A Woman Killed with Kindness, p. 773. § 148. Other plays, p. 779.

  149–150. Shirley

781

§ 149. Elegant causeries, p. 781. § 150. The demise of Elizabethan tragedy, p. 790.

Part V

The Beginnings of Narrative Prose

795

  151. The first eclectic writers

797

  152–153. Lyly

798

§ 152. The Euphues romances, p. 798. § 153. The comedies, p. 804.

  154. Lodge

808

  155–156. Greene

811

§ 155. From the Arcadian euphuist to the Defoe-like realist, p. 811. § 156. The dramatist, p. 818.

  157. Nashe

821

  158. Deloney

827

  159. The Marprelate Tracts

831

xiii



§ 160.

Hooker

833

  161.

Travel literature and historical compilations

835

Index of names

839

Thematic index

861

Abbreviations G. Baldini, Storia della letteratura inglese. La tradizione letteraria dell’Inghilterra medioevale, Torino 1958. BAUGH A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh, 4 vols, London 1967. BEL B. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600–1660, vol. V of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and B. Dobrée, Oxford 1973 (1st edn 1945). BRP J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the ‘Gawain’ Poet, Harmondsworth 1992 (1st edn London 1971). CEL E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Eng. trans., New York 1953 (1st German edn 1948). CHI The Cambridge History of English Literature, 14 vols, Cambridge 1934 (1st edn 1907–1916). CLA M. Praz, Cronache letterarie anglosassoni, 4 vols, Roma 1951, 1966. CRHE The Critical Heritage of individual authors, London, with editors and publication years indicated in the Bibliographies. EETS Early English Text Society, with editors, volume numbers and dates as specified. ELS C.  S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, vol. III of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F.  P. Wilson and B. Dobrée, Oxford 1965 (1st edn 1954). ESE T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, London 1963 (1st edn 1932). GSM H. J. C. Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry, London 1956. HWP B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1964 (1st edn 1946). LEW C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, Oxford 1938 (1st edn 1936). MAR Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, ed. F. Marenco, 4 vols, Torino 1996. MIT L. Mittner, Storia della letteratura tedesca, 3 vols in 4 tomes, Torino 1964–1977. BAL

xvi Abbreviations 

TLS

George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols, Harmondsworth 1970. The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, 7 vols, Harmondsworth 1966 (1st edn 1954). M. Pagnini, Letteratura e ermeneutica, Firenze 2002. M. Praz, Machiavelli in Inghilterra e altri saggi sui rapporti letterari anglo-italiani, Firenze 1962. M. Praz, The Romantic Agony, Eng. trans., London 1956 (1st Italian edn La carne la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, Firenze 1930). M. Praz, Storia della letteratura inglese, Firenze 1968. Il Rinascimento, ed. C. Corti, Bologna 1994. G. Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature, London 1948 (1st edn 1898). A. C. Swinburne, The Age of Shakespeare, London 1908. J.  L. Styan, The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance, Cambridge 1996. M. Praz, Studi e svaghi inglesi, 2 vols, Milano 1983 (1st edn 1937). H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, Eng. trans., 4 vols, London 1920 (1st French edn 1864). V. Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series, Harmondsworth 1938 (1st edn London 1925), and Second Series, London 1935 (1st edn London 1932). The Times Literary Supplement.

Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Volume 8

F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 2, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 3, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 4, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 5, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 6, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 7, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 8, Oxford 2018.

OCE PGU PLE PMI PRA PSL RIN SAI SAS SES SSI TAI TCR

Note. Except for the above abbreviations, full publication information of cited works will be found in the bibliography for each author.

§ 1. The initial and terminal dates of this volume The ‘year zero’ of English literature, as I shall argue below, cannot be pinpointed with any degree of certainty, and indeed various theories exist as to when it all began. I believe that, rather than identify this elusive beginning, it is important to concentrate on subsequent fractures and demarcations, which should not be arbitrary, but as objective as possible. The terminus ad quem of this volume is a subject of controversy: in general I shall consider as Elizabethan not only those authors who, by 1603, had already written and published at least one of their major works, and who therefore were over the age of twenty. The reason this volume breaks off in 1625 lies in the fact that many playwrights straddle the dividing line of 1603, and are both Elizabethan and Jacobean. I have preferred not to split their careers and deal with them in two separate volumes, as will be done with the first- and second-generation Victorians, or Victorians and Edwardians. Indeed, there is a continuity that lasts for half a century, and more, if we include those playwrights who lived long enough to be Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline. The socio-political history of the reigns of James I and Charles I will be presented together, as will the literature and culture of the age, at the beginning of the third volume. For the use of ‘Elizabethan’ as conventionally inclusive of ‘Jacobean’ and a period considered as a whole, irrespective of historical watersheds, one can cite (at least Italians can) a panoramic essay surveying drama by Mario Praz.1 Another loophole was proposed and used by George Saintsbury, who determined the properness of the label ‘Elizabethan’ on the basis of the date of birth of the writer under question. The second caveat concerns the titles of works from the origins up to the period of linguistic stability: these have usually been given following inconsistent and erratic norms, even by British and American authors. So too with quotations, which will appear either in the old spelling or in a modernized form. The justification often given, that some texts must be read and cited in old spelling while others may be presented in modern form, is far from convincing. I have in general chosen to respect general consensus and the criterion of frequency. Sidney’s two Arcadias, 1

‘La fortuna del dramma elisabettiano’, in SSI, vol. I, 133–52, in particular the opening remarks.

2

§ 1. The initial and terminal dates of this volume

for example, are usually read and quoted from in modern English, which is absolutely not the case for Spenser, his contemporary. Shakespeare too is presented in modern spelling. In this regard it must never be forgotten that the normalization of spelling took a very long time, and can be said to have been completed towards the end of the seventeenth century, saving here and there residual archaic forms. In any case, normalization was gradual and not evenly spread, bearing in mind regional and local usage, so that a text which is later than another will not necessarily have a more ‘modern’ spelling. This remark of C. S. Lewis on methodology is worth repeating and remembering:  ‘A poetic translation is always to some extent a new work of art’.2 In other words, I will not make a priority of looking for sources at any cost. Lastly, the reader will be aware of a glaring omission in this volume: Shakespeare, who will, however, be the subject of my second volume. In studying the dramatists I also warn that the two dates, separated by a dash, given to the individual works, indicate the first performance and the first publication; where neither one or the other is certain, I only note in passing its composition date. It is superfluous to mention, concerning the dating, that the English legal calendar until 1750 began the year on 25 March; to avoid confusion between O.S. and N.S. (‘Old Style’ and ‘New Style’) the dates are not given in the dual form but only refer to the modern calendar.

2

ELS, 492.

Part I 

The Formation of a National Literature

§ 2. Placing Old English literature in the canon The literature written in England in Latin, in Old English or AngloSaxon and then Middle English, dazzlingly proves the validity of E. R. Curtius’ theory expounded in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, as to the particular and different meaning of the word auctor in the Middle Ages as compared to today’s. The author was not expected to be original; on the contrary he was and was supposed to remain hidden; he did not experience the drama and the anxiety of literary authorship. This is the reason why a great deal of the documentation relative to this long period, is either anonymous or attributed to an undefined or doubtful author, and why we have to wait until Gower, Langland and Chaucer before we get anywhere near our modern concept of authorship.1 As a further proof, the editors of the works in this canon do not classify them by author, even when they are fairly certain, but by genres,2 so that each individual work is almost exclusively identified by its title. The absence of the principle of auctoritas tallies with another fact, that is, that literature, from its beginnings to a watershed which I shall identify later on, is mainly a form of historiography. We therefore rely on these written documents to reconstruct history, and the word ‘document’ is by no means a haphazard choice. One section of this canon consists of archival material, title deeds, the census;3 another repertory is that of religious material, chants, hymns, and graces; a third comprises early romances. The historical calendar consists

1

One must note that several anonymous poems were re-written by monks and that they are the fruit of controlled empathy, and celebrations of what stemmed from earlier sources but from a far later viewpoint, say around the ninth or tenth century: a primitivism that is thus coloured by Christian spirituality rather than found in its pure state. 2 Or even usefully by manuscript, the four chief manuscripts of which I will speak below. 3 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, originally commissioned by Alfred the Great, is the most significant amongst Old English prose works, and one of the first modern, continuous narrative in the vernacular, consisting mostly of a list of historical facts, though interspersed by fine poetic compositions. After Alfred, this Chronicle benefitted from his ideas and organizational gifts. It was developed in various cultural centres, corresponding to abbeys, until 1154. It comes to us in seven manuscripts.

6

part i  the formation of a national literature

of a list of important dates and begins with the invasion of the island by Julius Caesar and early Roman colonization, and closes with the Romans abandoning this distant, unmanageable, fairly unprofitable and, for them, unappetising fringe. The Empire was disintegrating, attacked as it was by barbarians. Some of the mainland tribes then invaded the island which the Romans had left. One is irresistibly reminded of the paradox with which Marlow’s narration opens on the deck of the Nellie lying at anchor in the Thames in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: this island, which would move the epicentre of Europe to the North, and from being a periphery, would become central, was, 2,000 years earlier, a conquered, looted, and substantially undefended land. Relationships would be gradually reversed, and from being colonized it would become the colonizer. 2. In the Old English canon, Widsith is normally held to be the most ancient literary document, The Battle of Maldon the latest. This canon, covering four centuries, may be contained in a book of scarcely 400 pages, and it seems thus to possess a relaxed productive rhythm, or even to move on slowly and sparely, but only because it has come down to us greatly incomplete. The Danish raids brought about the destruction of the monasteries, where many of the manuscripts were kept. Initially, the sagas from the far north, which dealt with happenings in Denmark, Sweden, Frisia and other territories of that latitude, were rewritten in England. At the same time hagiography and sermon literature acted as links to Anglo-Norman literature. The celebration of the heroic age develops according to concepts similar to all heroic canons, and the behavioural customs of the Germanic court foreshadow those of Arthur’s Camelot, where the king is at the centre of the ‘Table’ of his faithful band, and rewards them after a victorious battle with song, music and libations – even if a traitorous Judas may be amongst them. Blood feuds were intrinsic to the Germanic world, and filled with wonder the people who listened to the minstrels singing about them. The accepted chronology is as follows: literature in Old English4 up to 1150, in Middle English up to 1500, in Early Modern English afterwards. In macro4

‘Old English’ is synonymous with ‘Anglo-Saxon’, but is the more extensive term, including all the various dialects spoken on the island until the advent of Middle English.

§ 2. Placing Old English literature in the canon

7

historical terms the watershed between the second and the third phase is represented by the Reformation and the Renaissance (though the conventional date usually chosen is 1485, i.e. that of Henry VII’s accession to the throne); but the Reformation is a northern event that most closely affects England, while the absorption of the Renaissance is not synchronic but later, with the medieval period being prolonged, one could say, until the Romantic period.5 After all, one may easily find or posit an opposition (and a very clear-cut one, as does Yuri Lotman’s typology of culture) between the two cultural types, medieval and Renaissance, as well as some form of continuity. We owe the notion of a Renaissance flowering in the Middle Ages, before its official inception and definition in France and in Italy, to the English, or at least to some of them, like Pater and Ruskin. The pertinence of Old English literature to the English literary canon is, in effect, anything but taken for granted, and even today two theories confront each other, one of which can be defined as atomistic, the second as organic. According to the first, Old English literature must be kept separate from the study of both English language and literature; for the second, it is a part of an integral whole, inasmuch as it is a moment of its development – not unlike texts in poetry and prose, historical and religious, written in Latin or in Anglo-Norman before the advent of Chaucer. The one differentiation, the sine qua non condition of belonging to English literature, is, according to those who uphold the second theory, that texts should have been written by English authors and on English soil. As regards Old English literature, there are histories of English literature, like the earliest editions of the Pelican Guide, which exclude it, while others include it but only as

5

Curtius (CEL, ‘Appendix’, 585–96) reduces his manual by fifty to one in these ten pages, summing up his theses and salient points. He emphasizes the compactness of the European cultural system of the early Middle Ages, noting above all the cultural, national and political unity of northern France with England. Exchanges in both directions took place: poets emigrated to the English courts and men of the Church became bishops in France. Curtius insists that the boundaries of the Middle Ages must be shifted forward to a much later date, that of the Industrial Revolution, around 1750.

8

part i  the formation of a national literature

a well-circumscribed prologue.6 In B. Ifor Evans’s brief History the author discovers and analyses a mysterious symmetry between what came after Chaucer and what was written before.7 Whoever establishes the beginning of English literature in Chaucer’s writings, Evans says, assigns only six centuries of life to it, but it had had just as many before Chaucer. England was conquered and colonized repeatedly, as Evans rightly reminds us using a German word that evokes the same kind of shudder that the recurring thought of invasion was to arouse 1,500 years later, when England actually had to defend itself against the German bombs.8 Those very Angles, Saxons and Jutes were already trying to find Lebensraum in England in the fifth century. It is thus legitimate to consider the Anglo-Saxon invasion, and the successive conversion of those peoples from paganism (AD 597), as much as the Norman Conquest, as a series of milestones. The discovery of pre-Conquest manuscripts took place after the Reformation, when the idea of a true and proper national literature dating back far earlier than the fifteenth century started to emerge. The historic reason for the celebration of this heritage was the English rivalry with the Germans and the French. The study of the roots of this literature was carried out by Coleridge, De Quincey and Carlyle in the Romantic period. The transition was from a separatist vision to one of an organic, uninterrupted development triggered by historical developments: Latin, succeeded by Germanic dialects, by Old English, then by Middle English, and finally by English. The Romantics were later aided by the philologists. But Legouis and Cazamian were against the total merging of literatures, which dangerously obscured distinctions: ‘There is no other literature which has lived and developed in as much ignorance of its indigenous past as English literature’,9 they said, above all because Old English literature had been for centuries largely unknown, and, when known, could not be understood. 6 7 8 9

Also BAL, 31–3, removes this canon because it is ‘autonomous’, and too much separated for various reasons from Middle English, this last being more recognizably the progenitor of English. But he does study it summarily. B. Ifor Evans, A Short History of English Literature, Harmondsworth 1940, 9. On the threat of imminent war and on anti-German sentiment in the late nineteenth century, see Volume 7, § 59. E. Legouis and E. Cazamian, A History of English Literature, London 1967, 5–6.

§ 2. Placing Old English literature in the canon

9

3. No ready scientific criteria exist to separate Old English literature from English literature, and those who include it, do so, admitting perplexities and stretching a point or two. Undoubtedly, the arguments against are neither few nor slight: one can invoke the case of Latin and Italian literature, which, it is true, are themselves kept unanimously apart, although written in languages that present fewer differences, and where Latin is the undeniable forebear of Italian, while Old English is further apart from English, though ‘English’ was what the Anglo-Saxon language spoken by the peoples settled on the island was called. The criteria of place and people also fail us, that is, those of an ‘English’ literature originating in a unified land, the land that gave birth to English literature ‘proper’, written by one people, rather than by that ethnic mixture that in fact authored it. Yet the fact remains, that what little remains of Old English literature would be stateless, and one would not know which linguistic-literary category one should attribute it to: it could, perhaps, be classed among the writings included in Germanic Philology studies, but its subject matter has been found extraneous to the content and spirit that informs Icelandic and Old German sagas. Everything however changes radically if we substitute for ‘History of English Literature’ ‘History of Literature in England’, even if Old English literature was not written synchronically in different languages – like the literature of linguistic minorities today in Italy, Spain or America – but diachronically. Similarly no Scot or Irishman would dream of excluding Gaelic literature from the history of his national literary heritage, but would today discover and draw on it for elements of most intrinsic continuity. Nineteenthcentury historians posed the problem and found a somewhat more scientific criterion: that of the foundational character of Old English literature. On the one hand they had to reply to another substantial objection: that this literature could not be foundational because it had been discovered too late, and was therefore unknown, wherefore it could not interact with the writers of the successive centuries, until the 1800s10 (and yet we find that Milton’s Satan echoes various Old English poems on Genesis and was perhaps inspired by them). On the other hand Taine and his followers

10

The Old English canon became part of the academic syllabus with Henry Sweet’s primer (1st edn 1876).

10

part i  the formation of a national literature

began to point out genes and traits that would have remained as identifiable marks for later generations of writers. Mario Praz follows the same kind of guidelines, stating that ‘throughout the whole course of literature’ one witnesses a ‘curious clash’ between paganism and Christianity. Other enduring traits, alluded to by Praz, are the sense of Ossianic melancholy, of the ‘tempestuous’ sea (which we will find in Swinburne), of the heath, of the gloomy forest and of the menacing mountains. One can prove this continuity in early, Ossianic Romanticism, in Coleridge’s ballads and in Matthew Arnold’s essays on the Celtic element. Later a fanatical fascination with this poetic repertoire and world view was to be shared by the twentieth-century English Catholics headed by Tolkien, addicted to fantasy and apologetics. On a purely formal level, the accented syllabic alliterative measure was inherited by Hopkins with his own rhythm, ‘sprung’ exactly like that in the Old English epics (and Hopkins, seldom mentioned in these discussions, esteemed the role of the poet as the scop, and for him poetry was supposed, above all, to be declaimed).11 Many surviving Old English lyrics are embryonic dramatic monologues and constitute a precedent most dear to Browning, and through Browning to Pound, and, perhaps, even to T. S. Eliot. This foundational nature, or mere continuity, is also proved by the far from extravagant and impressionistic quantity of echoes and foreshadowings disseminated in the works of many poets of later generations, the sea evoking for instance Kipling and Byron, the wind Shelley, the bestiaries Ted Hughes. 4. What Old English literature has come down to us, we owe to monks of the seventh to the eleventh centuries. Only edifying and morally sound literature was accepted and transmitted through their filter, and sagas and myths were in many cases manipulated and Christianized. On the other hand the invading peoples were already civilized and socially organized, thanks to their contacts with the Celts. So this literature cannot be compared to the primitive German literature of the same time, such as the Nibelungenlied and the Edda. The Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England took place in 597, the year in which the monk Augustine came 11

Seamus Heaney, in the preface to his translation of Beowulf (see § 6 Bibl.) claims Hopkins as the heir of the Old English tradition.

§ 2. Placing Old English literature in the canon

11

from Rome to convert the Jutes and founded the Abbey of Canterbury. At the same time Ireland, already Christianized, was sending missionaries to the Angles and also the Saxons came under their influence. The Roman alphabet was imported along with Christianity, replacing the Germanic runes and the Celtic Ogham script. All Old English literature was therefore strongly influenced by Latin literature. At the same time, however, the monk scribes were the sons of Viking warriors, so that Old English poetry also presents hybrid pagan traits. Together with early literary forms in Old English one finds inscriptions in runes and others in the Roman alphabet. It is an exemplary form of crossing over from paganism to Christianity, or from magic to Christian ritual. The alphabet of the first Old English writings is substantially the Latin one of the Irish monks, but joined to it are some phonetic runes that represent Old English sounds. Here two consequences are discernible: the scribes copied, even two centuries after their composition, poems that had previously circulated in oral form; and alongside the popular Anglo-Saxon heroic literature, scholarly writings in Latin also survived. The scribes also translated homiletic and spiritual works into the vernacular. 5. Runes were the ancient alphabet of the Germanic languages held to be of obscure origin (for Sweet they were a Nordic modification of a Greek alphabet; according to Carlyle, in the first lecture of Heroes and Hero Worship, the Scandinavian alphabet was invented by Odin; according to recent scholars, runes are the Phoenician Etruscan alphabet that reached Iceland and Greenland as a by-product of trade and plunder). They were employed for inscriptions and epigraphy, and therefore their use was not for writing on parchment or paper, but for incisions on stone, metal or even wood bark, the so-called ‘bóc’, the ancestor of the word ‘book’. Runes, therefore, had a phonetic, as well as an iconic and even an ideogrammatic value, and represented not only a sound, but also were associated with objects, with an animal or a plant, while some runes survived to represent sounds which were not in the Roman alphabet. The word itself had a shamanic or mysterious value, and the word ‘rún’ recurs in subsequent English expressions. Runes were mystic signs that held magic power, and hid treasures of wisdom, incised often on swords. The advent of the Latin alphabet was also used for exorcising purposes, as runes were thought of as devilish.

12

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6. By common consensus Old English was a transformation and reelaboration of the language spoken by the first invaders of 450. It was therefore akin to German and Dutch with injections of runic symbols, such as those which stood for the ‘th’ sound. In linguistic terms around 80 per cent of Old English is Germanic, the rest neo-Latin. North and South had remarkable dialectal differences but these merged with a progressive reduction on stress, which gradually led to the creation of Middle English. This is confirmed by Edward the Confessor’s removal of his court and of his capital to London, thus putting an end to the predominance of the Wessex dialect. Baugh12 vigorously stresses the formation and acquisition of a common language as the ‘King’s English’ unifying the other dialects, as a result of the transition from a tribal and fragmentary, to a centralized, statutory and organized nation. In the year 1000 there was, in fact, no single kingdom having such consciousness of its own unity as the English realm. Of the four dialects mostly spoken – northern in Northumbria, central in Mercia, the Kentish and the western Saxon – the latter became hegemonic, while, in the course of time, it underwent flexional and even grammatical simplification and the loss of final unstressed vowels. Baugh13 also adds that Old English was linguistically more refined than the rough language introduced by the Normans, who supplanted and suppressed it, both as a spoken and a literary language, and that the Conquest was a linguistic impoverishment and a violent break in an ongoing process. The characteristics of Old English and particularly of its poetic language are the predominance of consonants, the stress given to the root syllable, the division of the line into two hemistichs, with two accents in the first part and two in the second; alliteration; the ‘Latin’ spirit of synthesis, with conjugations and declinations; the non-logical but poetic order of the phrase. Other features include the compounds, which look ahead to the imitations and parodies by Carlyle and Joyce; the accumulation of circumlocutions, almost an end to themselves; the chains of synonyms, and the syntagmatic and paradigmatic links; the metaphoric designations and finally the wellknown artifice of the ‘kenning’ (a euphemism or expression serving to 12 13

BAUGH, vol. I, 5. BAUGH, vol. I, 10.

§ 2. Placing Old English literature in the canon

13

identify a person or a thing, consisting of a word and a genitive), which leads to the riddle. Old English poetry belongs to the period between the eighth and the tenth centuries, and was edited by transcribers who, as I have said, were already Christian and conversant with Greek and Latin models. The greater part of Old English poetry comes to us in four manuscripts from the eleventh century: the Junius, which contains Cædmon’s poems; the Codex Exoniensis, a curious medley of different poems; a manuscript in the British Library which unites Beowulf and Judith; and the Vercelli manuscript, discovered in the Vercelli Chapter Library in 1822,14 which contains lives of the saints and religious poetry. Other brief fragments complete the canon. 7. As to the purely literary value of Old English literature, the general consensus is, to repeat, lukewarm if not unfavourable. And after all, the whole of this canon is the domain of philologists and textual, and only rarely literary, critics; and the issues that hold the stage are those of dating, ordering and attributing the texts. The highest praise, on the other hand, is attributed to Old English as an expressive instrument: it is a flowing, refined and flexible language, able to express a spectrum of registers and spheres of intellectual activity. It is often claimed that the Normans had an inferior literary culture and artistic taste compared with the English, and that they brought to a halt, rather than promoting, England’s literary progress. It is true that before the Danish invasions, England was a cultural beacon, from which shone the light of Christianity and of the religious life. Her monasteries, abbeys, bishops and numerous episodes of devotion were legendary and sensational, so that Europe, having first evangelized pagan England, and now in need of re-sanctification, came to be re-Christianized by the nation it had Christianized. A similar symbolism can be perceived in Charlemagne’s appointment of Alcuin, Bishop of York, to organize his schola.15 Such a distorted perspective has enjoyed uncommon favour with Protestants 14 15

See PSL, 11, for some curious conjectures regarding the circumstances whereby this manuscript ended up in this Italian city. Alcuin came from Northumbria and spent much time among the Franks, but only after he was sixty. He wrote personal and elegiac poetry in Latin and also manuals and pedagogic works.

14

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and Puritans, as the coming of the Normans seemed to them as an earlier instance of Catholicization, Romanization or even ‘Vaticanization’ of the island. According to this version, the Normans were seen to have devastated, if not degraded and paralysed a land that promised to become in a short while the highest European pinnacle of poetry and prose.16 § 3. English history to 1066 English history in the first millennium is a still wide open field of study, on which the ongoing archaeological excavations – one of these in 2009, in ancient Mercia – can shed essential light and furnish valuable updates. The fact from which to begin, in the years preceding 1000, is that the Saxon emigrants of northern Europe, who were periodically invading England, became Christian, unlike other peoples and clans of the surrounding areas. These immigrants rapidly acquired a national consciousness, feeling themselves a different people compared with the race into which they had been born. The next odd aspect is that they were soon spoken of as English, though formerly Danes or Vikings, and that they had, as such, to fight against members of their own race, during the numerous invasions of the Vikings proper. One can therefore speak of internal feuds and intestine wars amongst the Nordic races. A precocious nationalistic feeling and consciousness, which distinguished these settlers, even on a linguistic level, from their inherited origins, thus ensued. 2. To the Celts, organized in tribes, who had come from Gaul in the fifth century BC, the Romans had transmitted their civilization, commerce and law and, when Rome became the seat of Christianity, their religion. They traded with the clan chiefs, acquiring luxury items which served to maintain a high standard of living in Rome, in exchange for basically necessary merchandise: according to Strabo the island was fertile with grain and animals, gold, silver and iron, exported to Rome, while the Celts discovered wine. Caesar had invaded the island, Claudius conquered it. The Emperor proceeded with a pervasive colonization, Romanizing the land as far as urbanization, uses and customs were concerned, and with fortifications (the two walls, or ditches, of Hadrian and Antoninus); and

16

On Ralph Waldo Emerson’s theory about the Normans as ‘twenty thousand thieves’, see BAUGH, vol. I, 105 n. 45.

§ 3. English history to 1066

15

he imposed the educational model of Roman citizenship. Four centuries of Roman rule provoked occasional mutinies, repressed with bloodshed, when the luminous example of heroes, like Caractacus or Queen Boadicea shone forth, to be sung much later by Tennyson and, in music, by Elgar. In practice, the Romans instituted and favoured the role of client rulers, as an instrument for subjugating families and hostile peoples. London became the capital of the colony, operating centre and headquarters, replacing Colchester. In the first years of the fifth century (AD 410) the Roman legions started to withdraw, in order to protect Rome from the barbaric invasions, and the island was gradually abandoned. Roman Britain had by then fallen into neglect and decay, and the Britons, a weaker civilization, became absorbed and almost obliterated (‘Briton’ meant ‘slave’ for the Saxons). But not altogether. One can surmise that, though there is a lack of written records, the British or Celtic language became mixed with that of the incoming Anglo-Saxons. The Celtic element, gentle, elegiac and lyrical, would have been a counterweight to that of the more masculine Anglo-Saxon. 3. In 449, the first invasion or migration of the Angles,1 Saxons and Jutes drove the Britons, or Celts, to the west, to the north and to the south. Many centuries later the abandonment of the island on the part of the Romans would be forgiven and thought to be less grave: the Romans left the country to confront and block the ‘German threat’, which was to be recurring for the English over the centuries. In reality the Romans were thinking of their own, German threat, and the first example of this occurred when the barbarians were left free, the Romans gone, to invade the defenceless island. But it was soon rumoured that a reckless British king, Vortigern, had himself invited the Germans to protect him from the Picts of Caledonia and from the Scots from Ireland.2 Bede speaks of four areas peacefully 1

2

First mentioned in Tacitus, Germania, chapter 40, as ‘Anglii’. For reasons that are not very clear the term that was applied to the mixed population which came to be on English soil was ‘Saxon’; but the term ‘Angli’ prevailed amongst writers from the time when Gregory the Great (who died in 604) used it for the entire population of Germanic immigrants mixed with the indigenous Celts. Later a compromise was reached with the label ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Bede I.14 and 15; but the episode is also narrated by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, the latter spinning an intriguing account of Vortigern’s trickery in pitting the Germanic Hengist and Horsa against the Picts.

16

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divided between the Picts, the Britons, the English, and the Scots, and of seven distinct kingdoms at the end of the sixth century. In 597 Pope Gregory I had sent the monk Augustine with forty followers to Christianize the island, and Ethelbert was the first English king to convert. In Ireland, the Irish had been previously Christianized by St Patrick3 and others. The heart of England was thus clenched in a pincer grip: from the north-west, the evangelization by the Irish Christians who came from Iona, and, from Rome, Augustine with his monks. Pope Gregory adopted the wise policy of not wiping out the pagan traditions at a single stroke, but promoted a gradual transition to Christianity, proved by the surviving repertoire of magical formulae and exorcisms, of spells and charms derived from the ancient rites used for propitiating fertility.4 Another major date is 664, that of the Synod of Whitby, when the two English churches (the Irish of travelling missionaries, and the Roman, more systematically organized) were unified under Rome. In reality, paganism continued to exist in a fluctuating state and was not wiped out (as proved, in Bede, with the episode of pagan Penda who killed Edwin, the Christian King of Northumbria, in 632). The Anglo-Saxons were described by Taine, following Tacitus with somewhat exaggerated emphasis, as drunkards and ‘butchers’, that is, ready to hunt, kill, and horribly dismember even human beings. But they also had a code of

3

4

Joyce would only have confirmed, or more exactly polemically and emphatically stated, that Ireland from its origins was heretical, or at least independent in its orthodoxy, thus almost heterodox. St Patrick was English – as Bertrand Russell (HWP, 396) noted, defining this as an ‘extremely painful fact’ (naturally for the Irish) – but what is more important is that, before his coming the island was already converted by none other than the Copts and Gauls, already pushed onto the island by the barbarian invasions. They were the custodians and importers of continental learning, and perhaps they knew Greek. Joyce was to celebrate this heritage. But Russell adds that Irish missionaries were monks, even bishops, but cut off from Roman contacts and sympathizing with the Pelagian heresy (according to Russell Pelagius was a Welshman whose real name, Morgan, signifies ‘man of the sea’ [HWP, 361], being in other words rather heretical). An Irish Neo-Platonist of the ninth century was Scotus Eriugena. Some of these spells, such as the ‘nine herbs charm’, remind one of the scene of the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth.

§ 3. English history to 1066

17

honour, and were determinedly monogamous, therefore precociously ‘sane’.5 Taine sought, and thought he had found the traces of, a Scandinavian gene which, according to Carlyle and others, would be fixed and embedded in the Englishman’s imagination of the following centuries. Nonetheless, the fundamental, basic seriousness, morality and inclination towards the sublime of the Anglo-Saxon could be absorbed without attrition by Christianity’s Gospel. Carlyle noted proudly that, above the Humber, there still were, in his time, Scandinavian linguistic residues, that Danish elements emerged in the language, and signs of Icelandic mythology survived. 4. England, towards 800 AD, was vaguely like Italy 1,000 years later. It was a racially homogenous area (except for the Britons), and this also applied to the practices, customs, history, provenance and, loosely, to the language as well; it was a self-sufficient civilization, even if broken up into monarchies that made war on – or, from time to time, made peace with – each other. Politically it was a federation, or even a precursor of the feudal system. There were indeed defined monarchies, each king swearing faith to an overlord from whom they were dependent; or it could be described as a system of connected provinces. In this context, if this analogy is correct, the Kingdom of Wessex functioned like that of the house of Savoy in Italy, and its representative sovereign in that century, Alfred the Great, placed himself at the head of a movement of unification from which a united kingdom emerged. But the analogy ends here, because, 200 years later, there was a new invasion. And yet England actually remained a united kingdom, only its reigning dynasty changed and the language changed as well in a revolutionary way. At the end of the eighth century, a second wave of Vikings and Danes invaded an England already taken over by the preceding invaders; in 871 this new population had already managed to conquer the whole island area north of the Thames, and the so-called Danelaw was consolidated, despite Alfred’s resistance. Having temporarily checked the Danes, Alfred dedicated himself to the moral, spiritual and cultural construction 5

Tacitus stresses the freezing cold of the polar climes and emphasizes the unfailing and inviolable sense of hospitality of its peoples. His chapter 21 helps one to understand the description of Heorot in Beowulf, while chapter 27 confirms the use of cremation on funerary pyres of the bodies of victorious warriors who died in combat.

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of the country and to the founding of schools. Following Charlemagne’s example, he was also the father of Old English prose with his two translations of Boethius’ Consolation and of Gregory the Great’s Cura pastoralis, in which he taught the clergy the duties and tasks for the care of souls.6 When he died in 8997 Wessex fell back into illiteracy and above all into religious apathy, until the bishops Dunstan and Æthelwold’s reform of the Benedictine monasteries. The vast mass of Old English prose lies outside the literary domain even more than its poetry, because of its prevalently practical, didactic, and pastoral nature. The huge corpus of sermons and lives of the saints by the Benedictine monk Ælfric (955–1010 or 1020, or 1025) was prompted by the need to seize the attention of the hearer with a plain, direct style and in a language stripped of obscurity, even though it used the rhythmic style it owes to Latin poetry, which became clear during the twentieth-century revival of his writings.8 Wulfstan of York (who died in 1023), though a bishop, was a fiery preacher in his Sermo Lupi ad Anglos which echoes the thunderous, apocalyptic tone of coeval religious poetry. The son of Alfred the Great defeated the Danes and reunited England under a single sceptre. In 980, however, the island was subjected to further incursions by Danish invaders, which were not entirely successful and were eventually re-absorbed. With the Normans it was very much the reverse. When, in 1066, William the Conqueror defeated the English led by Harold, successor to Edward the Confessor, England was a country with few large cities, but having many independent cultural centres.

6

7 8

In these translations he often consulted a team of scholars from the surrounding kingdoms. During his reign, Bede’s Historia was also translated from Latin. See CEL, 177, for King Alfred as an example of the changing of the role of the heroic king, and as a synthesis of fortitude and wisdom in the late Middle Ages. The modern fame of Alfred reached its highest point in 1901 at the death of Queen Victoria, when, to underscore the historic link, the date of Alfred’s death was held to be 901, as erroneously reported even now in various manuals. As a consequence of a new EETS edition, ed. W. W. Skeat, London 1881 and 1885.

§ 4. Bede

19

§ 4. Bede The idea of English history put to the test and to verification in the Venerable Bede’s (672–735) Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum1 is that even in the eighth century AD England was subdivided into many small regional monarchies, often even called provinces, and lacked the charismatic figure of a ruler who could unite them into one strong kingdom. Owing to historical vicissitudes, throughout more than seven centuries, the individual populations were of different races and had their own uses and customs. Above all, until well into the seventh century there were on the island, according to Bede, five main German languages that were not immediately understood – in some cases not understood at all – by the various local populations. The lingua franca was Latin, and the national binding force was the Christian religion, which was gaining ground but which might also lose it. Bede’s history is, above all, the history of a permanent evangelization, and it is so because, at its close, the historian has to admit that, although England had been Christianized even before Augustine, its paganism had not been definitely expunged, and its dying embers could always be rekindled. One must repeat that Bede’s is an ‘ecclesiastical’ history, which begins and proceeds against the background of Roman history and thus of the history of its emperors and, above all, of its popes. A pre-Dantesque similitude he uses is that the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons were the Elected People of God, who, like Israel, were punished with invasions when they went astray, and to whom prophets were sent in the guise of bishops and martyrs. As in the biblical Books of Kings, there had been a succession of kings who were either devout or pagan and idolatrous, and whom it was the duty of the bishops, abbots, and men of faith to convert and guide. In Bede’s view, the Christianization of the island had not taken place in a linear way, and a pious king could easily have a pagan, murderous, degenerate and desecrating son. The pace of Bede’s history is therefore not particularly diachronic; rather it is somewhat synchronic, because it often turns back from the facts of one reign to those of a previous one. 1

On the basis of a treatise by Bede on tropes, Curtius (CEL, 47) demonstrates how the Bible came to be taken by him as a poetic text and a repertory of rhetorical figures, like a classical work.

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The Roman popes were most careful not to permit any loosening of the fetters linking the English faith to the fulcrum of universal Christianity, lest it should deviate from orthodoxy. The missions sent by popes were supposed to evangelize regions and peoples that were still pagan, or had relapsed into paganism, as well as maintaining and assuring discipline and uniformity; and this entailed a battle against heresies born in England, such as Pelagianism. Bede’s text reproduces verbatim the various letters which the popes wrote incessantly to the English clergy to block deviations, dissidence and divergence, or to resolve diatribes, such as the dating of Easter or the correct form of tonsure.2 The second book opens by recalling Pope Gregory the Great and his famous pun of ‘Non Angli, sed Angeli’, as he was supposed to have defined some fair-haired Anglo-Saxon youths being sold as slaves in a market place in Rome. Bede confirms, citing two other calembours, that the great pope was also a player with words, able to find a providential key, and thus an omen, in nomina.3 Bede shows that the English were ‘angels’ – though they could also be occasionally tempted by the devil – by dedicating much space to documenting the precocious, early medieval saintliness of the English. The Historia becomes hagiography, or a listing of repetitive and somewhat boring acts of devotion, sacrifices and miracles derived from lives dedicated only to faith and to the denial of the world and its temptations. One might say that the foundation of an English medievalism can, to a certain degree, be found in Bede, resurfacing in some nineteenth-century poets like Hopkins, whose odes on the English martyrs (St Thecla, St Winifred) are foreshadowed in Bede’s work.4 Daily 2 3 4

The very long chapter 27 of the first book, which unfolds like a catechism, reminds one of episode 17 in Joyce’s Ulysses, written as if Joyce were parodying Bede. The native province of the Angles was Deira, which could be decoded as ‘De ira’ or ‘saved by the mercy of Christ’: and from their king, Aella, Pope Gregory deduced ‘Alleluia’. A typically Hopkinsian spirit (that of the ‘Echoes’) may be detected in the episode of the Abbess Etheldreda (IV.19), who believes that the tumour in her neck was caused by ‘the useless weight of the jewels’ she wore in her youth. Symptomatically, in the hymn in honour of Etheldreda (IV.20), St Thecla, on whom Hopkins wrote a poem, is mentioned. The collection of the biographies of the English saints contains those of the Abbess Hilda and of Bishop Cuthbert, the latter considerably lengthened by the accounts of his miracles. All these biographies follow the same pattern, and the Historia is modelled on the Acts of the Apostles.

§ 5. Old English poetry

21

miracles seem to have been freely in circulation in Bede’s time. In the fifth book, he recounts countless miracles performed by or attributed to various bishops and hermits; and the story of the man who returns from the realm of the dead to tell of his otherworld visions is not only a mini-Divine Comedy, but a connection to the anguished search for answers as regards the otherworld, so often observed in the Victorian world and alluded to in the frequent re-enactions of the resurrection of Lazarus which occurred in the nineteenth century. 2. Among the other Latin prose writers, Aldhelm (639–709) is distinguished by a style full of violent, shocking metaphors, somewhat protomannerist in his warnings to nuns as to the commandment of virginity. This oppressive and menacing weight of sin is a sort of foretaste of Protestant and Puritan attitudes. Curtius5 attributes to him the old theory of Isidore and of other Fathers of the Church, that the artes are needed to understand the Bible, but that the auctores should not be studied for themselves alone. For this reason Aldhelm checks and rejects the vagaries of the Irish Church and represents a vein of ecclesiastical rigour and a chapter in the process of conciliation between the pagan and the biblical cultures. The epistle of the monk and saint Gildas (494–570) on the English corruption is also rife with biblical and apocalyptic invectives.6 § 5. Old English poetry* Widsith1 catapults us directly into the heart of a pre-year 1000 tradition and custom of early medieval Europe, when wandering bards or jesters entertained courts with their ‘word hoard’. Their livelihood was assured by their acknowledged, appreciated and indispensable institutional function, 5 6

CEL, 46, reaffirmed at 457–8. On Gildas as a historian see § 9.1–2.

*

The whole poetic corpus is collected in Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie, ed. C. W. M. Grein and R. P. Wülcker, Kassel and Leipzig 1883–1898, and in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. G. P. Krapp and E. Van Kirk Dobbie, 4 vols, New York 1931–1942. Anthologies in modern English are Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. R. K. Gordon, London 1954, and, with parallel text (but in small print and scarcely legible), Old and Middle English: An Anthology, ed. E. Traherne, Oxford 2000.

1

This is either the name of the poet or a paraphrase for ‘the traveller in a distant land’.

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part i  the formation of a national literature

as an integral part of the court, charged with singing and entertaining. The voice speaking in this poem is not that of a, but of the bard, whose name therefore indicates his function rather than being that of an individual. Such a super-individualized and categorical identity allows the reader to follow the peregrinations of a figure who freely moves through space and time, and is just as comfortable in the age of Alexander the Macedon as in that of Alboin, among the Israelites or the English. He sings the principle and essence of the barbarian civilization: a solid, strong and established monarchy, and the self-evident reality of ethnic diversity and of the divisions into interrelated tribes, who are thus harmoniously connected, except in exceptional cases, such as when the sovereigns threaten order, by governing badly and foolishly. This civilization therefore hinges on warring and subjecting, regulated by the rhythm of wars and truces. All the rulers are ‘lords of the rings’ and distribute gifts in metal work, gold and iron, and utensils that are always serviceable weapons, designed for war. History means genealogy, the description of the movements and vicissitudes of races, tribes and peoples in the Northern and Scandinavian areas, led by either good or traitorous kings. Widsith’s song becomes a list of them. Culturally, Widsith pinpoints a period of transition, as is revealed by the final lines that speak of God as guarantor of the monarchic principle, of the figure of the king to whom the subjects delegate their power, although, immediately afterwards, ‘fate’, or rather fatalism, is named, seen as ever dragging glory, and ‘light and life’ down towards ‘ruin’. Deor’s lament in separate lays is not cast in a historical or illustrative mould, being rather lyrical, more personal and elegiac; it closes, unusually, with a refrain (one of the first such instances, which propels the development of prosody forwards).2 This refrain states that all sorrows are lessened by time and that the present sorrow of the poet will also be alleviated. The reason for the lament is revealed at the close: the lord or king has preferred another scop or jester, and Deor is in disgrace. The historic/ legendary heritage from which Deor draws its ‘objective correlatives’ is drastically sieved, and only four emblematic episodes are cited, recounted in a few lines – telling of punishment, worry, anguish, exile, subjugation, even 2

No Old English poem is in rhyme, except the Rhyming Poem, a warning to a king about how the splendour of his reign will end, inducing him therefore to think of death and life in the world to come.

§ 5. Old English poetry

23

of tyranny. At the end, the bard mourns over the few unfortunates contrasting their fate with that of the many rewarded by God. Tone and mood are remarkably divergent from Widsith. Deor and The Wanderer are far indeed from Widsith’s exuberance and its impassive heraldic poetry, and present, instead, the morbid sensitivity of a figure and profession which must have early depended on the extremely uncertain favour of the ruler. The wanderer in the poem of the same name is not really a bard, perhaps only a favourite or courtier who writes, or rather, soliloquizes, offering an early expressive instrument to the poets of future centuries. This rhapsody touches, with querulous repetitions, on his lonely, rootless, exiled condition, sorrowfully and pessimistically moralizing that the whole shifting cosmos moves towards its dissolution.3 A palpable and obsessive sense of the frozen seas of the north, of rough weather and lonely sea watches emanates from The Seafarer. This would be a profoundly pessimistic and nihilistic poem if the poetic voice did not also describe the electrifying quiver imparted by the sea and by the seaman’s life, mentioning how divine providence causes the seasons to follow each other, bringing the mildness of summer after the winter storms, and giving meaning to death and human actions. Unfortunately, however, the remarkable opening, full of imaginative symbolism, is followed by heavy sermonizing. The link is the ambiguity of a barbarian civilization based on migration and on displacement, which might lead to a career of honour and favour at court, yet more often hid the drama of becoming rootless, of the destruction of a family environment,4 of exile and of solitude. In The Lover’s Message we hear the voice of the wood on which the lover’s runes are carved, the message being an invitation to his beloved to come to him. 2. In the other categories of Old English poetry the first place ex aequo goes to the poems of legendary or even historically documented heroism, lengthy and variously fragmentary according to the state of the texts that have come down to us. The Battle of Maldon glorifies the resistance to 3 4

‘The Ruin’, a fragment, launches an archetype much loved by later Romantic poets, that of an apparently indestructible city fallen into ruins, together with its builders, in hammering cadences, such as those found in biblical prophecies. For example in ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’, a fragment of no more than twenty lines that are difficult to decipher. Wulf is an exile whose wife or beloved is kept prisoner by Eadwacer in an island cave.

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one of the last Danish invasions by the English who defiantly refuse to give in to the enemy, rejecting all compromise and even any price for their freedom; the English succumb, fighting with honour to the last man. The Battle of Brunanburh was translated into dry, rough, unrhymed lines by Tennyson. Beowulf deserves a separate discussion. The almost equally rich repertory of hagiographic poetry is shared, or rather, stubbornly disputed, between two shadowy and possibly legendary figures, the poets Cædmon and Cynewulf. How Cædmon became a scop or gleeman is told by Bede. Cædmon, an unforthcoming cowherd, used to fly from the refectory of Whitby Abbey whenever the harp was passed to sing songs of thanksgiving; one night, however, a vision in a dream ordered him to sing, and he sang of the marvels of Creation and became a monk. The so-called Cædmonian hymns in the Junius manuscript – even if some insist on attributing to him only the nine lines quoted by Bede in Latin, and known as ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ – are mostly biblical paraphrases. The intent of Judith was not to re-invent, but to popularize the knowledge of the Bible. Its distinguishing features are the ingenious imagination which superimposes the structures and forms of Anglo-Saxon social organization on the Bible, so that Judea is endowed with the appearance of the northern sea coasts. The Cædmonian poems on Lucifer’s rebellion lead one to think that Milton must have read them, because one immediately notices similar solutions and identically turgid expressions. Genesis is composed of two nuclei, neither of which is by Cædmon. The first is attributed to a monk, a rather slavish copyist and translator; that the second foreshadows Milton is an opinion motivated by the fact that Junius, the owner of the manuscript, was an acquaintance of the author of Paradise Lost.5 The sacred element is represented by heroic 5

In Manuscript B Satan leaves Hell with the help of a magic helmet that renders him invisible. Another variant is that in Eden there are two trees, one of life with fruit and leaves, the other of death, all black, dark, and gloomy. The responsibility of Adam and Eve is lessened, as in Milton, because Satan introduces himself as a true and authoritative messenger from God, while Eve does not know the fatal consequences of eating the fruit of the tree of death. When they are banished, the Old English adaptation underlines their fear of exposure to bad weather, freezing cold, hail and frost. Hell is not therefore the traditional place only of flames, but there is an alternation, as in the poem Christ and Satan, of flames and ice. In Cynewulf ’s Life of St Julian, Satan is, once again, disguised as a divine messenger to make Eve sin; but, unlike Eve, the

§ 5. Old English poetry

25

models or stereotypes, as in the sumptuous paraphrase of Exodus. That of the biblical episode of Daniel, for instance, focuses on the sensational miracle of God, who does not allow the three youths, shut in the fiery furnace, to burn. 3. Christ, parts of which were attributed to Cynewulf (a hypothesis, based on the runic characters that punctuate it, which, ingeniously agglutinated, provide the poet’s name),6 draws on liturgical and homiletic material as well as on the Advent antiphons, dramatizes the story of Mary and Joseph, and ends with a description of Doomsday. Of course, one has to put up with the text’s formulaic verbosity and insistent repetition, but is repaid by occasionally witty, eccentrically ‘metaphysical’ flashes that seem to foreshadow Crashaw, as in the description of Jesus’ career as a series of ‘leaps’ (six in all) downward and upward, such as his jump from Mary’s womb into life, the leap up to the Cross and his soaring rise at the Ascension. The apostles, as described by Cynewulf, are devout servants of God and sacrificial martyrs, who may or should be taken as brave mariners who defy the elements and challenge pagan and often savage monarchies, in which other apostles and believers are frequently imprisoned and threatened with death. The most vivid of these ornate, florid, embellished and romanced paraphrases is Andreas, which encloses the usual metaphor of the transition from the northern, pagan barbarism to the Christian civilization. In fact, the twelve apostles are presented as bringers of light to the human lands subject to the barbarian laws of wanton, unpunished massacre and murder. Andreas crosses the seas to their aid. It is obvious, even from this brief summary, that the poem retells, paraphrases and echoes Beowulf. Andreas is a type of northern hero who rushes to the defence of an innocent victim, and who must fight another hypostasis of the monstrous – the Mermedonians are in fact, like Grendel and his dam, devourers of human bodies or cannibals.7

6

7

martyr saint resists, calls on God and induces Satan to unmask in the course of an interminable debate. As we also find in the fifteenth and last section, of a personal and confessional character, of the Life of St Helen. Cynewulf, who lived in the middle of the eighth century, has been variously identified as the Abbot of Peterborough, the Bishop of Lindisfarne, a wandering gleeman, a warrior who was later converted by the vision of the Cross. Famine is at the root of the cannibalism of the starving Mermedonians, making one suspect that, in Beowulf, Grendel is an allegory of a contemporary reality.

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And, like Beowulf, Andreas organizes and heads a handful of men, readies the ship, ploughs the sea, and reaches the imperilled land. God launches this mission of liberation and, disguised in the figure of the pilot, guides the apostle and magically steers the ship to its destination.8 But heroic deeds are not finished, and Andreas has to fight a desperate battle with Satan himself. God, a very Old Testament God, dogs the weak man, who protests and argues, and, though he puts Andreas to the test, saves him and lets him survive unharmed. The parable is complete, and closes happily, with the expulsion of paganism from the coast and the flight and destruction of the idols. 4. Cynewulf might also be the author of the lives of St Julian, St Elene and of the hermit Guthlac, as well as of The Phoenix9 and The Dream of the Rood. In the life of St Elene, the poet, a barbarian descendant, exemplifies and celebrates in Constantine the historical concept of a Christianized Roman world that checks the barbarians. But the poem becomes verbose, and even involuntarily satirical regarding the reticence, the double-dealing and even the treachery of the Jews in revealing to the Empress the place where the True Cross is buried.10 The Dream of the Rood11 is a naïve dramatic

8 9

10

11

At the same time, the miraculous liberation of St Matthew typologically repeats the scene of the Resurrection, with Christ leaving the tomb empty. Lactantius, in particular, took the Phoenix as the symbol of Christ; and Hopkins in ‘Heaven-Haven’ may have summarized (in eight lines) this luxurious, ecstatic imaging of the religious life as a land where ‘flies no sharp and sided hail’. The Phoenix is, perhaps, the most modern poetic specimen of Old English poetry, because it avoids devotional and homiletic obligation more than others – at least in the first part – soaring up to a detailed, loving and often inspired description of the legendary life of the mythical bird. The religious and apocalyptic allegory re-emerges however, somewhat ponderously, towards the end. The poem is historical but greatly romanced, and therefore occasionally incorrect and anachronistic. At the end, it jubilantly celebrates the conversion to Christianity of a Jew, who becomes Bishop Cyriacus of Jerusalem; at the same time it is also remembered that the nails of the Cross were found and ‘fixed on the bridle as a bit for the steed of the noblest of the kings’, who is always described by the Old English kenning, as ‘giver of the rings’. The thematic links with Elene have induced many to attribute its authorship to Cynewulf rather than to Cædmon. Both poems celebrate the healing powers of the Cross.

§ 5. Old English poetry

27

monologue similar to that of the ‘Lover’s Message’, as in both cases it is the wood, this time of the Cross, that speaks. Guthlac, the Mercian saint who died at the beginning of the eighth century, opens with a paragraph which foreshadows the sense of the end of the world, of its deterioration and depravity and of the death of all beauty. The life of the saint is in fact the exemplum of the hermit whose psyche is the living theatre of the battle between the good and the evil angel, between diabolical temptations and the life of virtue. He is therefore comparable to Jesus himself in the desert, thrice tempted by Satan. Heroic, tenacious, unshakable is his resistance to the temptations conveyed by diabolical voices which assail him. It is a rather Milton-like work, based on a morbid fixation with the diabolical, which keeps on resurfacing and must therefore be repeatedly revanquished. On a figurative level, Guthlac is a pictorial subject, a kind of St Jerome in the desert with his lion, as depicted in so many fifteenth and sixteenth-century panels. In the second version, the saint lies dying, surrounded by sneering demons assaulting him. He lives through a morbid, delirious, Gethsemanelike experience; and after his death he rises, like Jesus, to heaven. It is a commonplace that Anglo-Saxon writers, and in particular these medieval poets, did not feel that they belonged to a ‘middle age’, but to a declining one. Their homiletic, didactic and persuasive poetry turns, with obsessive insistence, to the end of time, and is thus truly and profoundly apocalyptic, as if the authors sensed the imminent threat of the world ending in the year 1000. It shows the full success of the recent Christian preaching, and how deeply rooted it was, or, on the other hand, how slowly the Good News was gaining ground – so much so, that a poem entitled Doomsday is only to be expected. The counterpart to this somewhat heavy-going poetry, and the antithesis to its glumness, absence of happiness or humour, is the incidental, circumstantial, minor, entertaining yet anything but secular production. The ‘riddles’ provide a wide range of the cardinal points of Anglo-Saxon culture and a good sense of how to get one’s bearings, as they chiefly describe war implements, seascapes and nature, both animate and inanimate. This genre is deceptive: they are, in fact, snapshots of the landscape or of the weather, delicate and impressionistic, and modern enough, and some of them almost pre-imagistic.12 12

Like, for example, the very short riddle describing swallows.

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§ 6. ‘Beowulf ’* The implications of this anonymous poem of little more than 3,000 lines – one tenth, it is often noted, of the entire canon of Old English poetry that has come down to us – are innumerable. It is the first, in order of time, to be written in a European vernacular language and extant in its entirety, and has therefore incalculable importance as regards the history of the language and of Old English and English philology. In itself and because of its compositional code, it is a precious historic and anthropological relic of Baltic and North European culture, dating from before the late first millennium. Specifically, it offers an initial check, or an ex post idea, of the integration, then taking place, of the barbarian with the Christian civilizations, of their compatibility and potential conciliation.1 Behind an allegorical and marvel-filled veil, it celebrates the virtues of altruistic heroism, sacrificing itself for the public good and defeating the efforts of evil. It is the allegory of an exorcism, an exorcism that must time and again be renewed.2 The barbarian legacy survives, in fact, in the awareness of the Fall *

The title of the poem, anonymous according to contemporary manuscript tradition, was given to it by modern editors. Facsimile edited by N. Davis, Oxford 1966. Critical editions edited by F. Klaeber, Boston, MA 1950; by C. L. Wrenn, London 1958, and, revised, by W. F. Bolton, London 1973; by M. Swanton, Manchester 1978; by G. Jack, Oxford 1994; by G. Brunetti, Roma 2003. There are many translations into modern English in prose and verse, amongst which the most recent in verse is by S. Heaney, London 1999 (with preface). G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf, Berkeley, CA 1959; E. B. Irving, Jr, A Reading of Beowulf, New Haven, CT 1968, 1969, and Rereading Beowulf, Philadelphia, PA 1990; T. A. Shippey, Beowulf, London 1978; C. Clark, Beowulf, Boston, MA 1990; A Beowulf Handbook, ed. R. E. Bjork and J. D. Niles, Exeter 1997; A. Orcherd, A Critical Companion to Beowulf, Woodbridge 2003.

1

The Manichaean conflict between good and evil was found and energetically held as the allegorical basis of the poem by J. R. R. Tolkien (in his 1936 lecture, ‘Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics’), who challenged the historical value of the poem and insisted on its having a literary one. Tolkien could not but take up the epithet so often repeated in Beowulf, of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ (‘ðā hringa fengel’ in Beowulf, 2345). It is difficult to agree with Heaney, who in his preface (Heaney 1999, xi) defines this rather long-winded essay as noteworthy and ‘brilliant’. Hagiography was well known to the poem’s author, who was also conscious of the allegorical meaning of saints who, like St George, fought against a dragon.

2

§ 6. ‘Beowulf ’

29

of Man and the vanity of all human effort. The cyclical law, the root of all optimistic philosophies, upholding the return of the world to its primitive wholeness after catastrophe, yields to the barbarian and Germanic wyrd or Wurd, that is, Fate, against which not even God can intervene;3 a law that is also subjected to the recurring and pessimistic fear of the unknown and of the non-extirpation of evil. Beowulf thus fuses history and fictional myth; myth in other words stands out against a historical background. The immediate and superficial plot is that of the cruel monster Grendel – who sows terror and death in the kingdom of the wise King Hrothgar of the Danes – and of the rescue undertaken by Beowulf, a subject of Hygelac, King of the Geats. He has already killed giants and strangled sea serpents, and now promises to confront Grendel unarmed, with the force of his bare hands. Beowulf defeats Grendel, then confronts the beast’s ferociously vengeful mother and, in the terrible challenge, is only victorious thanks to a miraculous sword that Beowulf finds in his hands when he is just about to succumb, in the cave under the sea where the monster dwells. After these two heroic deeds, the hero returns to his own country where, now king, he has to take up a third challenge, fifty years later, against a firebreathing dragon guarding a treasure. Helped by his companion at arms he fells the dragon, but is mortally wounded. Dying before the treasure, which he bequeaths to his subjects, Beowulf is cremated on a funeral pyre. The hero’s deeds from youth to death are completed by a more synthetic and discontinuous survey of historical/legendary events and blood feuds of these Northerners, from the middle and end of the millennium, in the form of digressions, inserted by the narrator, or bards’ songs and chants sung by gleemen, during the celebrations after Beowulf ’s victories. These accounts are difficult to understand fully, as they are excessively detailed, yet they bear witness to a shared heritage of well-known dynastic events, testifying to the compactness of that well-defined northern world, and to its own homogenous culture. Which is why the poem has been frequently spoken of as a sort of bewilderingly muddled encyclopaedia of northern and Scandinavian folklore, providing some insight into the social or even 3

Finn, whose name is made in a digression, is a King of the Frisians, settled in today’s Holland, and therefore not in any way related to Joyce’s Finn.

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semiotic sphere that had no contact with the late Roman and continental culture. The northern world of Beowulf was, by and large, the environment described centuries earlier by Tacitus: consisting chiefly of ethnic or linguistic tribes and clans, whose social codes rested on opposing behavioural traits, such as laziness and cowardice, contrasted with bravery and an unswerving sense of honour and of duty, and on unfaltering loyalty to the ruler. This was already a partially civilized barbaric culture, that excelled in architecture and gold work and in the decoration of iron, as is visible in the gifts, always of this form and nature, such as rings and coats of mail,4 and in the epithets and titles they used. The poem opens on the progressive and generous Danish dynasty of the Scyldings, given to sharing and to public works, one of which is an ‘open palace’ or immense ‘mead hall’. The king’s comitatus or court is a kind of early King Arthur’s Round Table. But in this context, much less graced by female attendance, Beowulf is not rewarded by the love of a woman, and the only woman we see at work is Hrothgar’s wife, who only devotes herself to serving the men, and distributes mead at the feasts. The underlying allegory is basically the bonding process among the many races in the melting pot, which the Scandinavian basin was at the time. Beowulf strengthens the bonds of peace between Scyldings, Danes and Geats, but his death coincides with new violence and anarchy, almost foreshadowing Hamlet’s dictum that ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’. The paradigm is thus one of disorder giving way to order, which, in turn, is undone by renewed disorder. The gold fever of human greed, and the avaricious thirst for wealth irreparably contaminate Beowulf ’s descendants. Wagner and Morris were later to develop the character of Sigemund, the conqueror of the treasure, sung briefly in Beowulf by a scop. At an even deeper level is the allegory of the exorcism of evil. The author, who was of a later generation and Christianized, shows Grendel as an infernal instance

4

The quality of this exquisite and fully developed beauty in gold work was confirmed in 1939, when a seventh-century burial ship was discovered on the Suffolk coast, bringing to light many artefacts such as silver vases, shields, buckles, gloves and a small harp. These objects have become proverbially known among the scholars as the ‘Sutton Hoo ship burial’, from the place of their discovery. On ‘barbarian jewellery’ as a synonym for poetic technique, see PSL, 8.

§ 6. ‘Beowulf ’

31

of the race of Cain, strongly and basically satanic and Lucifer-like, who fights to the last, in an unconscious, imaginative anticipation of Milton.5 2. I said above ex post, because the oral composition and the written draft or drafts of the poem date from some centuries after (even if we cannot define exactly when) the historic time of the events in the epic, which are more or less datable to the fifth century.6 According to a fairly reliable version, amidst many others which are conjectural, the manuscript, written in the West Saxon dialect, belongs to around the year 1000, but it was already the result of one or more translations and retranslations. A first version, on the basis of some linguistic evidence and some internal historical allusions, was probably drafted two centuries earlier in Mercia7 or in Northumbria, at a moment in history between the era of the migrations and that of Bede, who died in 735. The poem is thus part of Old English literature because, although its material was brought to England by the Angles, and although the events it tells of are not part of the island’s history, it was composed and sung orally very soon afterwards on English soil. However, after a long period during which there had been ample certainty about all of the above, the debate on the dating and the place of its composition has been reopened, and the reasons for and against a very much earlier or less early or a later date have been weighed and found in substantial balance. The same applies to the courts and to the most likely settings where Beowulf could have been drafted. The study of the identity

5

6 7

The number 30 is repeated and recalled, when Beowulf is said to be able to strangle thirty men with his bare hands. Half of thirty, that is fifteen, is the total number of the Geats led by Beowulf, who come to Hrothgar’s court. These numerological occurrences are not casual, but ritual, like Grendel’s twelve raids, the three principal exploits, Beowulf ’s fifty-year reign, or the twelve loyal companions surrounding the hero’s pyre. Confirmation comes from an often quoted fact, jumbled with myth, which occurred between 512 and 520. This supposition, or rather this rather remote indication, is supported by the fact that the one link between the subject of the poem and England’s Anglo-Saxon history is the mention of Offa II (757–796), King of Mercia, whose multi-faceted and benevolent figure would be recalled and reinvented by the twentieth-century poet Geoffrey Hill (see Volume 8, § 94).

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of the ‘Beowulf poet’ can be said to be of philological and historical as much as of anthropological and cultural importance. The author is unanimously held to be an English Christian who had not forgotten his Germanic roots and who uncomplicatedly managed to attribute the events as much to Germanic Fate as to Christian providence. More precisely one can assign it to an author who was obviously well-educated and bi-cultural, in perfect control when handling material advanced with a precocious sense of estrangement: an invention that he reveals to his hearers right from the start, and one in which he shows the sound heroism of a world on its way to redemption and capable of being Christianized. Nothing he told was true, but it was an enchanting romance. The open questions are the following: is the author a single one, and is this a unitary text, or rather a combination of layers and episodes of different provenances? And, if the author is single, is he an author or more properly an editor? The prevailing opinion today is that a single Beowulf poet did not probably exist, and that the text is the work of at least two copyists/composers.8 Such a ghost author or essential editor must, however, have been an extremely learned and able manipulator of the classical, biblical9 and Germanic myths. As we have seen, he is able to superimpose the scheme of Cain and Abel on the simple narrative of heroic and marvellous adventures; and he suggests that the monsters, Grendel and the Dragon, are symbols of intrinsic as well as of extrinsic and cosmic evil. At the same time, Grendel, the giant, who can carry on his shoulders thirty courtiers or nobles of the court whom he has killed, and eat them, reminds us of Homer’s legendary Polyphemus.10 Thus Beowulf quotes Ulysses, and is, in fact, like him, an equally ‘astute’, 8

9 10

An indication of this barely concealed discontinuity can be seen in the genealogical prologue on the Danish dynasty of the Scyldings, whose first king tames anarchy and reinstates order amongst the clans, and is given a sea burial. An incoherence is represented by the introduction of a second, Danish, Beowulf, which led some scholars to think that this was the beginning of a poem, then abandoned, on this new character. Specifically of the Old Testament, as no references to the New have been found in the poem. Tolkien, however, in the above-mentioned lecture (see n. 1), compares the two works and their respective mythologies, defining them northern and southern.

§ 6. ‘Beowulf ’

33

‘prudent’ and valorous warrior, and leads a non lotus-eating band of men, ready for action. He is a hero who uses his strength as well as his cunning to win, aided by fortune who smiles on the daring.11 Or he comes, with other armed men, to Denmark in a small ship, bent, like Jason, on a heroic mission. The monster and the dragons are magical and metaphorical disguises, like the pestilence at the beginning of the Iliad, which is believed to be caused by the ire of Apollo. To define Beowulf as a new Iliad, with Hercules in the place of Achilles, or better still as Prometheus, is however wrong and incomplete, because Beowulf, unlike Achilles with his infantile and capricious heroism, is a useful hero who places himself at the service of internal harmony.12 He is a responsible hero, just as the Danish and Geatish kings are patriarchs and not despots. 3. Beowulf’s addition to the canon amounts to a little, somewhat incredible romance in itself. We owe the discovery of the manuscript to Sir Robert Cotton, a learned seventeenth-century collector of manuscripts. It also contained other, shorter poems or compositions on fantastic themes. The manuscript, known as MS Cotton Vitellius A.XV, got singed in a fire in 1731, was then acquired by the British Museum, and is now in the British Library.13 It was first copied by hand by a learned Icelandic scholar, and printed for the first time in 1815; since then, it has been re-edited and amended many times. As the text did not have any capital letters or punctuation, it was put into verse form by successive editors. It did not even have the title which it conventionally has today.14 It remains a mystery why no one bothered to print and publish a literary collection of such magnitude for two centuries following its discovery. Beowulf was therefore 11

Beowulf nevertheless prepares himself for the fight, conscious that it is a kind of divine judgement and that the fight between good and evil will result in God automatically rewarding the good. 12 Tacitus (Germania, 3) asserts that Hercules may have visited the Germans and that his deeds were sung by those peoples. 13 The general opinion is that the five different texts in prose and poetry, gathered together in the volume, belong to the monstrous and fantastic genre. 14 However, it was divided into numbered sections called ‘fitts’, a term Lewis Carroll used in The Hunting of the Snark, as did Chaucer in the Tale of Sir Thopas, in both cases with ironic effect.

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unavailable to all the most eminent English Romantics, whose imagination could have had valuable stimuli from it. Nonetheless, the exotic subject matter and, most of all, the myth of the sanity of royal courts, undivided by discord, as well as the epic of autochthonous, non-Homeric heroes, entranced the Victorians. Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship opens emblematically with a study of Scandinavian mythology and its god-like hero; Morris was the first eminent translator of Beowulf; whilst Tennyson, of ‘The Kraken’ and the Idylls, and Browning with the sinister wasteland of ‘Childe Roland’, were to be inspired by the magical atmosphere and by the seascapes in the poem. There is a double-edged resonance, to be encountered in the ironic, playful, burlesque parodies of Carroll and of Auden. In Tolkien and C. S. Lewis the forthrightness of the Teutonic hero, of whom Beowulf is the prototype, and the allegory of which the poem is the vehicle, were to constitute an ideal breakwater against the degenerations of modernity.

Part II 

The Middle English Period

§ 7. English history from 1066 to 1485 Four long and packed centuries of English history cannot be summarized, divided and distinguished from one another as, by definition, the literary ages of the monarchs reigning during these periods, unlike those in which the rulers were Henry VIII, Elizabeth I or Victoria, except in the case of Richard II. Some kings are identified by epithets, nicknames, metaphors; others emerge from anonymity for other reasons: William II (‘Rufus’, 1087–1100) because of his red hair and because he was killed in the New Forest, Richard I (‘Lion Heart’, 1189–1199) because of his mad and romantic egotism, John (‘Lackland’, 1199–1216) because he lost his French possessions; Henry III (1216–1272), because Dante called him ‘il re della semplice vita’ [‘the king of simple life’, Purg., VII, 130]. Edward I (1272–1307) is by definition the ‘English Justinian’. There are some decidedly strong personalities, such as Richard III, who in his brief two-year reign (1483–1485) was the anti-model of a good king. Henry V (1413–1422) is celebrated by Shakespeare, who described Henry VI (1422–1471), on the other hand, first as an exiled boy king, then as a ghost king. History rests above all on the social and political developments and their consequences rather than on the kings and the reigns during which they took place: the consolidation of a centralized state, the birth and development of the parliamentary system, with the limitations to the prerogatives of the Crown,1 the position of local clergy as regards political power, and its relationship with the Roman Curia. With hindsight, it was a teleological history right from the start. The corruption of the clergy was condemned everywhere, though ecclesiastics with integrity were exceptions proving the rule; and all over in Europe sovereigns could be defined as proto-Protestant, because they all dared, with lesser or greater arrogance, or simply unrealistically, to defy Papal authority as to the appointment of bishops and the administration of justice. The terminus a quo of 1066 raises no objection either in literature or in history and is a useful watershed, accepted by almost everyone; 1485 1

Parliament was soon to consist of two Chambers, and the freehold owners of property with an income of at least forty shillings a year were admitted to the Commons between 1430 and 1445 – a rule which continued to be applied until 1832 and the electoral Reform of that year.

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can be proposed among other ending dates because it marks the advent of the Tudor dynasty and of a monarchy more closely involved with English internal affairs, followed by the decided affirmation of England as a political and culturally mature power. It was around this time that one can descry if not ‘the’, at least ‘a’ division between medieval England and a Humanist and Renaissance nation. This was when a certain medieval period, though not the Middle Ages themselves, ended for England. More precisely, the dream of an English and at the same time Norman Crown collapsed, thus causing the English monarchs to give up eyeing and coveting French possessions. Thanks to Joan of Arc, this dream of a continental empire was adjourned, and after the Hundred Years’ War there was to be no more major fighting between England and France until the late eighteenth century. By 1485 the feudal system was dismantled and social prospects were no longer blocked on the hierarchical ladder with the king at the top, with his Privy Council, followed by the barons and other nobles and their knights, whereas the status of the peasants was that of serfs. The merchant class and that of university students had started emerging. The Inns of Court for legal training came into being in London, and Oxford and Cambridge had sprung up as the English alternatives to the University of Paris, attracting not the sons of nobles, but those of the less wealthy bourgeoisie, whose aim was to gain access to the lesser clerical and bureaucratic careers. Internal mobility was increased by the many wandering clerics, who were generally badly off and haunted the inns and taverns in which ribald songs resounded. From the time of Richard the Lion Heart, who died in grotesque circumstances after a romantic life, the whole of Europe had been penetrated and bedewed by Arabic influences thanks to the Crusades.2 It is said that the Chanson de 2

Aristotle was transmitted to the West through the filter of Arabic translators, and the new university teachings in mathematics and medicine are due to Arab teaching too. Poetry, philosophy and poetry received a new and conspicuous impulse from the religious re-awakening of the Dominicans and above all of the Franciscans, which in the first decades of the thirteenth century spread from Italy to England. Bishop Robert Grossetête (ca. 1175–1253) and Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1294), or Friar Bacon, magician, prolific writer, corrector of human errors, first natural philosopher and experimenter, later at the centre of a play by Greene (§ 154.1), grew up in this environment, like the greatest of medieval English philosophers, John Duns Scotus

§ 7. English history from 1066 to 1485

39

Roland may have been sung by the invading troops in 1066 by the minstrel Taillefer: and that Taillefer was the first of a succession of Anglo-Norman authors (uprooted and surrounded by a different language) of tedious, insignificant re-elaborations of material that, inasmuch as they did not belong to French literature proper, were encouraged for didactic and unification purposes. Hence the Normans were not, for the time being, creators of a local, English literature: they discouraged and even silenced the literature they found and imposed their own. In the long run, however, they contributed to the fertilization of culture. 2. Edward, called the Confessor, because of his chastity, faintheartedness and because he was the founder of Westminster Abbey, had studied and lived in Normandy for more than twenty years, and had surrounded himself with Norman counsellors and nominated a Norman Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward had illegally promised the crown to his cousin, William (called the Bastard, because he was the illegitimate son of the previous Duke of Normandy); but he had already offered it to Sweyn the Dane and to Harold, son of his father-in-law, Godwin. Harold, too, perhaps swore an oath that the English crown would be William’s. William, with the Italian bishop Lanfranc, who had the Pope’s blessing, landed on the English coast with 15,000 mounted lancers from ships constructed by cutting down forests, as illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry. It would be the

(ca. 1265–1308). After having been, with a wordplay upon his name, the ‘dunce’ or idiot for the sceptics of the sixteenth century, Scotus was to be rediscovered and re-evaluated in the late nineteenth by Hopkins as an intuitionist and voluntarist, thus becoming the principal philosophic adversary of St Thomas. Bertrand Russell affirmed that he caused English philosophy to become more Platonic, Augustinian and Franciscan, than Aristotelian and Thomistic, and this is particularly true if one thinks that Hopkins himself was black-balled within his own Jesuit Order, firmly entrenched in its allegiance to Thomism and Scholasticism; but not true for Joyce, whose aesthetics was notoriously shaped by Thomas Aquinas. William of Ockham (1288-ca. 1350), by ‘shaving away’ all abstract entities, which he had called mere definitions or names, could not but repeat that religion depends on pure faith and on the principle of authority. It is not the superiority of reason over faith, in the case of conflicts, but voluntarism that links Duns Scotus to the other Scot, John, or Scotus Eriugena (815–877).

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last historical invasion of England by any conqueror. Harold was defeated having the day before confronted and vanquished the King of Norway, who had also laid claim to the throne. He was caught therefore in a kind of vice, between the Scandinavian Viking and Roman European claims to possess England. Properly speaking, the Normans were, remotely, Germanic: themselves wanderers, as ‘North Men’ they had settled in northern France, adopting the religion and above all the language which came to be commonly designated as Norman, or Anglo-Norman, or Anglo-French, as it was a variation of ‘Parisian’ or central French.3 They however formed an independent or vassal state to the realm of France. Greedy for conquest, they had already colonized Sicily and southern Italy, without, however, suffocating their languages. In England they found moors, marshes, villages, but also compulsory conscription, the fyrd, and a taxation owed to the Crown, which derived from the Danegeld custom. A land census was undertaken in 1085, and the Domesday Book, compiled by special envoys sent by the king, reported an estimated population of 2 million.4 The many AngloSaxon federated kingdoms became a centralized kingdom which built up a bureaucracy and a chancery. The Anglo-Saxon kings thus transmitted to their conquerors a functioning and efficient state machinery, which administered justice, coordinated the economy and local government, managed the distribution of duties and rewards, and had already worked out a kind of blackmail enabling them to obtain and maintain power: it now only needed to be strengthened and the Normans themselves were already formidable bureaucrats. This feudal system, which coexisted with its opposite, a centralized state, was based, in fact, on the knight’s fee, an administrative unit that owed the king, in time of war, five knights (5000 during William’s reign).5 William quickly assigned properties extorted 3 4

5

Rollo, the Norwegian Viking chieftain also known as Hrolf, was baptized in 892, becoming the first Norman ruler in fief to the King of France. The Black Death, or bubonic plague epidemic of 1348, reduced to about two and a half a population that had been about 4 million. Its bacteria were propagated by the black rat (A. R. Myers, England in the Middle Ages, Harmondsworth 1982, 24). A somewhat later provision was ‘scutage’ or payment that certain knights had to provide, in order to obtain exemption from serving in war, which, except in times of emergency, was limited to forty days.

§ 7. English history from 1066 to 1485

41

from the Anglo-Saxon nobles to his vassals, later subdividing them in the form of rentals to subtenants in exchange for services. The term the Exchequer was coined when, chaired by the king, his Lord High Justice or viceroy or Chancellor, the most powerful men of the realm sat together around a table covered with checked cloth to discuss the accounts of the state.6 The accounts were kept so scrupulously that the kings could leave the country, and be certain that there would be sufficient funding for their ventures overseas. Richard I was thus able to visit his kingdom only twice in ten years. The delegating system and the institution of intermediaries assured secure links between central and local power; from outside, the king would every so often issue his writ, or brief letter to the sheriff of the shire,7 whereby he ensured that his voice was heard on specific matters. In the judicial system, the law courts overlapped in part, such as the ‘hundreds’ which complemented the shire courts. 3. During the reign of Henry II, whose queen was the celebrated Eleanor of Aquitaine (a patron of the arts, and tireless overseer, chiefly of her French territories), Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered (1170). At first, Becket had been a knight and the king’s trusted chancellor, but after becoming a prelate he unexpectedly changed into an ascetic and a strenuous defender of the Church’s rights. The murder concealed a conflict that was more juridical and economic, between the ecclesiastical and civil courts over the prerogatives of payment of land taxes. The murder was the result of a violation of formal codicils linked to practice (the sixteen Constitutions of Clarendon), and the presumed reduced rights of bishops, whom the king had assumed the right to nominate and remove, overruling the Pope. It was at this time that the long drawn out controversy exploded between the Crown and the Church, the latter having been up to that point a loyal supporter of the former. The 1215 Magna Carta included the granting of

6 7

Under Edward II the ‘Wardrobe’ of the king, or Privy Council, briefly acquired decisional powers equivalent to those of the Exchequer. The term ‘sheriff ’ is a transformation of the Old English ‘shire reeve’, and corresponds to the Norman role of the ‘vicomte’, ‘shire’ being used as ‘county’. The smallest administrative unit was, however, the Manor.

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freedoms, curbing the royal prerogative and hence absolute monarchism.8 But it was no precocious French Revolution and the Magna Carta was not translated from the Latin until the sixteenth century.9 The barons banded together again, led by Simon de Montfort, under Henry III (1216–1272) and England’s first Parliament was called in 1265, now including the new knightly and burgher classes. All decisive opposition to the Crown, however. vanished with the defeat and death of Montfort at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. Henry’s successor, Edward I (1272–1307), tamed and annexed Wales although he did not manage to conquer Scotland. The Scots, led by Robert the Bruce, defeated the corrupt and effeminate Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314,10 after which the king was dethroned and murdered, some say, by being impaled on a red hot poker.11 The Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) can rightly be defined a foolish and unnecessary expansionist war – which was concluded with the sole acquisition of the port city of the Pas de

8

9 10

11

Among the sixty-four articles were the writ of Habeas corpus, the restoration of feudal rights to the Church and to the common citizens, and the prohibition to impose any tribute not authorized by the King’s Council. After the text was approved, however, Pope Innocent III excommunicated the king and declared the document to be invalid, claiming that he was feudal lord of Ireland and England, which were granted to the king, as his feudal vassal, in exchange for the payment of 1,000 marks a year. The Magna Carta was confirmed and twice re-issued, in 1216 and in 1225, with the articles reduced from sixty-three to forty-seven. For a long time, historical judgement upon John Lackland remained controversial, and the pros and cons were ably discussed by writers and above all dramatists, beginning with John Bale (§ 89). The Celtic tribes were driven up into the Highlands of Scotland, where they remained unharmed until 1746. Formally, Wales was only annexed by Henry VIII’s Act of Union in 1536. The Welsh national hero is Owen Glendower, vanquished by Henry V. The Tudor dynasty came from Wales. Ireland was never directly ruled over by the English until William of Orange, and a timid nationalism was led unsuccessfully by one of the principal dynastic baronies, the Fitzgeralds. Recent historians (see TLS, 9 July 2010, 9) consider him more unlucky than fearful and cowardly, and tend to exclude that his relations with his two favourites, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser, were homosexual; the tales of the king’s ignominious death are legendary, as he probably ended his days in prison. On Marlowe’s version see § 97.1.

§ 7. English history from 1066 to 1485

43

Calais –12 because a relative peace had already been achieved in England and the national consciousness had been strengthened. The war was based on presumed dynastic clauses concerning the ownership by English kings of France, but it was above all sparked by Flanders, which had built up an important commercial axis with England, as the Flemish worked the raw English wool both in Flanders and, as immigrants, in England. The confrontation was between a recently de-feudalized state and a gathering of feudal baronies – as well as between the English longbow, well handled by mercenaries, and the not very well armoured French. The war, which became a paradigm in military and armaments history (the cannon was employed for the first time in the West during this war, yet only for its roar), in economy and in demography, went on being fought, even after the Black Death of 1348 had sparked off the Peasants’ Revolt (which called for the emancipation of the serfs) and the repeal of the Statute of Labourers. Soon afterwards, or almost simultaneously, and probably connected to it, the Lollards, or ‘Poor Priests’, led by John Wyclif (1328–1384), confronted the clerical Romanized hierarchy. In his treatises, De dominio divino, De civili dominio and De Ecclesia, Wyclif, professor at Oxford and already ambassador to the king, maintained that it was necessary to appeal directly to God, should his earthly representatives be fraudulent; that the Church of Rome was the direct descendant and heir of the Caesars and not of St Peter, and that the hierarchy was not really essential to the Church militant, which was constituted by all the ‘predestined’ and equals in grace. All these proto-Protestant assertions gained followers among the nobles and, above all, among the lower-ranking clergy, until Wyclif attacked the doctrine of Transubstantiation. His principal literary merit is the first translation of the Bible into Middle English. He however lived two more years, after the Blackfriars Synod condemned him as a heretic, and died of a natural death. 4. Edward III, come to the throne in 1330 after the dethroning and assassination of his father in 1327, had to confront his mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer. He fought against the Scots to defend the 12

By 1422 there had been four principal battles in this war, all won by the English: of Sluys in Flanders (1340), of Crécy (1346), of Poitiers (1356), and of Agincourt (1415).

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parts of the country that had suffered during the regime change, and to avenge a 1327 treaty that had been very punitive for the English. But he soon had to rush to another front, to protect the Plantagenet possessions in France.13 The French campaign culminated in various victories, among them that of Calais, chiefly thanks to the valour of his son Edward, known as the Black Prince.14 Edward III died leaving an unsettled country and a number of sons and grandsons to dispute the succession. The Wars of the Roses – an epithet derived from a story by Walter Scott – was brought about by the marriages of the various sons of Edward III with daughters of the nobles, who on the strength of these unions claimed the succession to the throne on Edward’s death for their lines of descent. The conflict lasted for thirty years, from 1455 to 1485, thus coinciding with the later years of the Hundred Years’ War as well as continuing afterwards. Opposition was raised against Richard II by the families excluded from government and also by anti-Lollard ecclesiastics; after quelling a revolt of the nobles, Richard chose political appeasement with France, which automatically implied doing without plentiful war booty and therefore brought on heavy internal taxation. The struggle commenced with Richard being deposed by an erstwhile exile, Henry Bolingbroke – a coup d’état that, ending the Plantagenet dynasty, as contemporaries opined, gave birth to that of the house of Lancaster. Henry V reopened hostilities with France, winning and imposing the Treaty of Troyes and marrying the daughter of the French king. After being away from the country for over three years, Henry returned in 1420, but, hearing of a sudden setback amidst his forces left in France, he rushed back and died there. The decline of English fortunes in the war, after Henry V’s death, was due to the immaturity of his successor, his son Henry VI, and to the ever diminishing resources granted to the

13 14

The English right to the Crown of France was based on the fact that Edward’s mother was French (and on the analogy with the reign of Judea, which came to Christ by way of his mother). Edward’s cruelty to the Burghers of Calais was softened by the intervention of Queen Philippa (six citizens offered themselves as hostages, with ropes around their necks, in exchange for the liberation of the city). The queen was so struck by this gesture, that she obtained their freedom. The episode was famously dramatized by G. B. Shaw.

§ 8. Genres and ‘matters’

45

conquering armies.15 The political axis had by then shifted, leading to a struggle for power between the Yorkists, headed by Richard Duke of York (the father of the future Richard III), and the eternally dithering sovereign Henry VI, crushed between two regents, subject to periodic attacks of dementia, and overpowered by the personality of his queen, Margaret of Anjou. After sudden volte-face, bloody confrontations and instances of high treason, Edward IV emerged as the winner. But even at this point, it was merely an apparent and not a final victory, due to the change of allegiance of the new king’s plenipotentiary, who joined the Lancaster family cause, after they had been exiled to France. Henry VI was again crowned, but was again deposed by Edward, and imprisoned and murdered. The war ended, although further cruel consequences were to follow. Edward IV strengthened the stability of his throne, no longer relying on the noble faction, but on the merchant class, rewarding them with protective measures. The impetuous rise to power of Richard III witnesses the opportunism and exploitation the two factions had recourse to. The future king had in fact forged equally strong alliances with the former friends of Edward as well as with the surviving Lancastrians. He managed to eliminate both and get himself proclaimed king. The only practical solution for his enemies was diplomacy, an alliance between the Yorkist opponents of Richard and the Lancastrians. In other words, a marriage between Henry Tudor, who had vanquished Richard III at Bosworth Field, and the daughter of Edward IV. § 8. Genres and ‘matters’ It is always difficult to get one’s bearings in periods of transition such as Middle English literature before 1350, which, at least until Chaucer, includes works that do not intrinsically stand out for their excellence. At first glance these three centuries are still represented by mostly anonymous writers; even if named, very few of them have definite identities. One could say that 15

The loss of France was really due to the collapse of the alliance between England and Burgundy, which was considered unbreakable; more exactly it was caused by the betrayal of the latter, and by the ineptitude of Suffolk, an official, who was later beheaded on board a ship, probably by the followers of Richard of York. A popular revolt was led by Jack Cade and is recalled in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II.

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documented authors are more numerous and certain than before, but in almost all cases we are unable to carry out research on them in the traditional way: their works, in large part compilations lacking originality, are like paintings without the painter’s signature. This difficulty is heightened by the fact that the period from 1066 to 1350 was not what one would call a ‘literary civilization’, even if the definition of the term is somewhat subjective. What fails to make it a literary civilization is the anarchy, or worse still the inexistence, of national schools. It is a literature which works on a regional basis, circumscribed geographically, written in different dialects, and characterized by the fact that the dating is uncertain and conjectural, and therefore often not influential: a literature therefore that is undated, and isolated, and which, apparently, does not significantly evolve. The only exception is the case of the inconspicuous political poetry, on historically and chronologically recorded events, of Laurence Minot (1300–1352). So, to place a work later or earlier, or in the middle of a century, would not change our perspective, as it is impossible to perceive any correspondence between the work and the time of its composition. The gravest deficiency in this kind of literature is that it does not flourish around one or more cultural centres and is not headed by any leading figure; also lacking is the mechanism that generally animates a literary civilization, the transmission of formal and thematic models, or imitation and emulation – except in one case, the series of writers represented by Monmouth, Wace and Layamon. Most of these works derive from a French original and are in the best of cases translations and re-translations.1 The dimensions and extension of this canon are also matters open to question. An unfavourable verdict can be due to the fact that Old English literature has come down to us mutilated, while Middle English literature has been transmitted to us in a

1

They include a thirteenth-century romance in rhyming octosyllabic lines, based on a collection of Oriental tales called of the ‘Seven Sages’, translated, manipulated and adapted in many European languages, before being translated into English. It is vaguely similar to the plot and structure of the Scheherazade cycle of the Arabian Nights. Original French and Spanish sources produced a most delightful story, modelled on them, also in rhyming octosyllabics, on Floris and Blanchefleur, dated around 1250.

§ 8. Genres and ‘matters’

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more complete form; in quantitative terms, Middle English literature up to 1350 is impressive, and not only very extensive, but also largely prolix and excessively wordy. 2. It is true, above all, that no past historian of this literature subdivides this period of three centuries into sub-periods, thus postulating its unity. 1066 is accepted without objection as the year in which the English language proper was born and started evolving. Old English went through three fairly evident and symptomatic phases of transformation, affecting the endings of nouns, which were full up to 1150, then levelled (i.e. with case endings reduced to ‘e’), subsequently omitted, thus disappearing from the spelling and from pronunciation. Immediately after 1066 multilingualism becomes quadruple: Anglo-Norman, Latin, Old English, the Celtic language group (above all in the West and the North, principally Welsh). Middle English was gradually to emerge in practice thanks to the fusion and amalgamation of Old English with Norman French. But the individual regional dialects did not evolve as rapidly towards the kind of utopia that is a unified, consolidated, no longer fluid, linguistic and therefore literary mean. Comparing texts in Middle English belonging to the same moment in time shows in fact much variability in the speed of linguistic transformation: some are still, in spelling and form, very far from that illusory ‘mean’ and that final goal; others close enough, already advanced. The dialect that became dominant, among the five principal ones that had their centres in the various geographic quadrants, was that of the East Midlands. The hesitant, multilingual propensity of AngloNorman literature is itself the result of a long and laborious operation that led to the birth and evolution of a substantially brand-new literary language. Writers may have had the ideas and the material but were still doubtful as to the language in which to express them. Many turned to Latin and some preferred Anglo-Norman. 1350 is effectively proposed as a historical watershed because that is when English flanked French in the schools, and was soon afterwards employed in Parliament and in Law.2 The translator John of Trevisa (1362–1402) reports that in 1385 French had 2

The Norman language was already much less used by 1204, when the English Crown ceded Normandy to the French.

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been definitely abolished as the current tongue in the schools: it was slowly becoming a foreign language, to study and learn, not the common speech. If one looks only at literature, there is basically a void for a good hundred years, and the centuries to be considered are two, not three, the starting point being from 1160 or even as late as 1190. A further, or alternative cutoff point is 1155, which was when the Chronicles ceased to be written in Anglo-Saxon and were known henceforth as the ‘Peterborough’ Chronicles. The intermediate examples are somewhat erratic, like Canute’s poem that tells of the king in a boat in the river who hears the monks singing in Ely Cathedral and stops to listen to them; or St Godric’s ‘Hymn to the Virgin’ (the first with four, the second with eight rhyming lines). At present, historians are debating whether there was a definite break between Old English and Middle English literature or whether there was continuity in the flow of one into the other. Broadly speaking, it is obvious that the two canons are written in two totally different languages, and that the newer one is influenced by French, which lacks rhetorical depth, halo effects and excessive embellishments (Praz’s ‘barbaric jewellery’),3 and is based on the conjunction of euphonic words, producing a less heraldic, pompous, periphrastic vernacular than Old English. In the area of prosody, the difference is mainly between the rigid syllabic principles of French or Latin and the English tolerance for extra syllables in metre and rhythm, which, in itself, is an allegory of the English language’s eternally lurking, wayward propensity to shake off Latinity and continental, ‘romance’ linguistic elements (or so it may appear). Alliterative literature was reborn in the late fourteenth century – after three centuries of predominance of the syllabic principle – in the areas most removed from French influence, although some say it was no re-elaboration but a new, unrelated foundation, and others that the Norman and therefore romance winds would, in any case, have reached the English shores. The terminus ad quem could be put forward by about ten years, to 1360, because it was in that year, as most scholars agree, that a definite, valid, sufficiently detached literary phase came into being: that of Gower, Langland, Chaucer and the Gawain poet. But other dates are

3

PSL, 8.

§ 8. Genres and ‘matters’

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symbolic and might be preferred: Chaucer’s year of birth, possibly 1343, or 1348, the year of the Black Death. 3. On the basis of its variety and importance the poetic canon in Middle English up to Chaucer resembles an army in battle formation, divided into troops, companies, platoons of artillery, knights, foot soldiers, and untrained recruits. Having come down to us with remarkable completeness,4 it already makes up an entire library, and reviewing it in detail would produce a very long list.5 In order to proceed in a more organized fashion, one could classify the material by: a) sub-periods, thus adopting a chronological procedure; b) historical editions, making use of the authoritative volumes of Old English literature (many of the texts are edited in the Early English Text Society [EETS] series, published at the end of the nineteenth century); c) matter, genre and language. So as not to make this discussion too unwieldy, I have decided to exclude the Anglo-Norman writings composed by Normans and English authors residing in Britain or working at the English Court. I have also chosen to skim over Latin texts, concentrating instead, depending on the aesthetic value of the works, on the poetry and prose written in the new-born, Middle English language. What causes the new, living sap to rise, after 1066, is the importation, the reformulation, the adding and the re-exportation of myths and archetypes most widely spread in southern Europe, following a historical process that has not really come to an end. The Germanic myth of the Nibelungen, which is a basically exclusive cult of masculine heroism with little elaboration of the symbolic role of women, was to lie dormant for centuries from then on, replaced by the Arthurian myth of courtly love. Incidentally, that Germanic myth never had much following in England; when Tolkien and some of his Anglo-Catholic acolytes in Oxford revived the tradition between the two twentieth-century wars, they aroused a fair amount of disapproval and hostility, chiefly because of the lack of female roles and of even sublimated erotic elements.6 With the Arthurian myth a soft wind 4 5 6

And, though self-evident but not to be forgotten, in manuscript form. There are seventy verse romances extant, excluding Chaucer’s, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. See Volume 7, § 48.5 n. 20.

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from the south reaches the British soil, and the Germanic element begins to wane. Apart from the incomparable gift of the Arthurian mythology, the Normans gave England a new world view that resembled the European cultural model, as defined and analysed in various, now classic studies, like those by Curtius and C. S. Lewis. The medieval romancing is the invention and eruption of a different range of colours, the darkness of the AngloSaxons giving way to light (allegorically, one could compare the earlier style to the crow and the later style to the falcon). All is filled with colour whereas darkness, and absence of colour, become the kingdom of evil. Religion itself is festive, and one cries more because one loves life more, whereas the Anglo-Saxons were better than the French at expressing the lugubrious and the sinister. Gentleness and softness replace an even expressionist, graphic violence. C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image7 reconstructed a unified model that survived until the end of the seventeenth century: the chain of transmission of legends and myths validated by ancient authority – a more or less unconscious chain, as the last link was oblivious to the fact that it was re-elaborating the ideas that came from the first, original source of the ideas themselves. Authors and books belonged to a moment of flux, and Christianity and paganism were still in the process of merging.8 If Anglo-Saxon England had been an importer of literary topics (even Beowulf was based on non-English material), during the Norman period England reshaped literary material and sent it back to the Continent. A good way of evaluating excellence in any literature is its capacity to transmit and impose enduring myths, allowing them to become archetypes of the collective imagination: such is the case of the legends of King Arthur, of Tristram and Iseult, of Lancelot, Guinevere and the Round Table, the Holy

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, London 1964. 8 C.  S. Lewis’s argument could be integrated by bearing in mind that medieval Englishmen lacked true critical consciousness, lumping most things together, and naïvely relying on mediocre, second-rate sources, rather than on the great classics (see the absence of Homer and Virgil in the ‘matter’ of Troy). This was mainly because they simply did not have access to these texts. 7

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Grail, or of Orpheus and Eurydice,9 which bounced back and forth from England, manipulated, transfused, mixed, as myths which would fascinate the arts for centuries, spreading and spilling over into painting and into music. The materials of the poetic literature in Middle English are conventionally called ‘matters’, and these ‘matters’ are three (we owe this classification to Jean Bodel). The literature of the Arthurian cycle derives, above all, from Celtic material, although we are no longer so sure that Arthur was Cambrian. The Celtic influence was synonymous, as in the case of Anglo-Saxon literature, of the marvellous and sentimental element.10 The second ‘matter’ was the Carolingian, the third the Roman, which included Troy, Thebes,11 and the stories of Alexander of Macedon made known thanks to Latin translations from the Greek.12 The chivalric ideal arose and coincided with the training of the nobles, owing much to the Christian ideal and to the Christian philosophy of love.13 A universally recognized archetype came thus into being – and one which would leave an indelible historical imprint: that of the wise, prudent, self-controlled knight, in the service of his ‘lady’ (or domina), who is both human and angelically divine, thus implying the interminable, ambiguous compromises ranging from 9

10 11 12

13

In the sprightly and graceful Sir Orfeo, by an anonymous author and in octosyllabics, the myth was blended with the Christian tradition, so that it became a parable on the exorcism of the demonic and of the hero’s recovery of divine grace after his soul has undergone ten years of hermit-like purging; so the tragic outcome of the classical fable is turned upside down and becomes a happy ending. Conceived in the Celtic spirit of the marvellous is the Voyage of St Brendan, which was to affect countless generations of writers. Not through Homer, but derived from Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia, from Benoît de Sainte Maure, and from Guido delle Colonne in Latin: all of which were sources for the popularity of the love story of Troilus and Cressida. The Carolingian matter is represented by very few examples, a Sir Ferumbras (in non-rhyming octosyllabics), a Sir Otuel (again, octosyllabic, but rhyming), and other anonymous poems derived from the French translation of the Latin chronicle of Charlemagne authored by Archbishop Turpin, and centred on the bitter conflict between Christianity and Islam, and on the attempted conversion, in many cases successful, of Muslims who then fight with prowess against their former co-religionists. Above all in the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung. As to how it penetrated the English tradition, see § 11.

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purely sublimated, mystical ‘service’ to a sometimes carnal one, accompanied by the religious allegories it entailed. In reality, there are at least two supplementary epics that can constitute a fourth and a fifth ‘matter’. The fourth consists of a slightly magical and fantastic, though basically realistic English epic in alliterative blank verse or more often in octosyllabics or rime couée verse, the main instances being Havelok and Horn (both composed towards the middle of the thirteenth century). The first, a rather spare account that shifts from one to the other of its settings, tells of the Danish protagonist’s love for Goldeboru (daughter of the good King of England). He marries her after having been entrusted by his traitorous guardian to a fisherman, in order to have him killed. Havelok will have a brilliant literary future as the prototype of the naïve innocent, rewarded because he is tenacious, courageous and full of initiative. Horn is, in a way, his twin: orphaned after an attack by the Saracens, he drifts, rudderless, in a boat to Westernesse where, after various adventures, he obtains the hand of Rymenhild and is knighted. In these epics the Arthurian knights are replaced by what appear to be rustic youths, unaware that they are of noble birth or incapable of making others believe that they are, enterprising enough to accept all challenges and to overcome all obstacles. In the end they demonstrate that knighthood can be granted even to the humble, who have proved, by their prowess, that they possess the required qualities.14 The spirit of systematic protest, of instinctive suspicion towards authority, and righteous rebellion against injustice, was introduced when the legend of Robin Hood was first formulated (Taine saw this as clearly anticipating the Reformation). The favour of later Englishmen went soon enough, in this repertory, to these rough but genuine stories, in no way plagiarizing French models; they became known as ‘metrical romances’ in English settings, such as, besides those already named, William of Palerne,15 Guy of

14 Both poems have a French source behind them, but the English versions in adopting the story-lines have none of the finesse and the intellectual cogitations of their sources. 15 A variation on the werewolf theme, which will return in the twentieth-century fables of Angela Carter: Prince William of Apulia escapes being assaulted under the protection of a wolf who is, in reality, the heir to the Spanish throne.

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Warwick,16 Bevis of Hampton,17 Athelston, or Richard Coeur de Lion.18 All the metrical romances mark the advent of an accessible verse narrative on a popular level, sometimes in a sentimental vein, which reflects the growth of bourgeois readership and is the forerunner of the serial and of its spirit of half a millennium later. However, impregnated as they were by amour courtois they evolved rapidly towards a grotesque or absurd representation of this topos, introducing mockery and Don Quixote-like satire. The fifth ‘matter’ of the metrical romances is mixed and includes examples of Oriental adventures and even salacious, sensational themes, modelled on the French fabliau.19 Flanking these five blocks are genres and subgenres, none of which can be properly defined as ‘matters’: such as the devout sermon in the form of a poem, songs and a wide variety of models of lyrical poetry. 4. At the same time the poetry and prose in Middle English from the beginning of the thirteenth until the fourteenth century were heavily influenced by the religious surge leading to the foundation of the Mendicant

16

17

18

19

The stale and conventional storyline is that of a brave Englishman who, while waiting to obtain the hand of his disdainful lover, travels the world, fighting for honour and the Christian faith. The episode of the duel with the giant Colbrand is the most memorable (the story was also revisited by Lydgate, in one of his worst works between 1423 and 1426), and is recalled by Shakespeare too. Guy’s Cliff is near Stratford (Rowse 1967, 13 [see Volume 2, Shakespeare Bibl.]). The rejected son of a countess, who has plotted to kill her husband, is the combative protagonist, tenaciously engaged in reclaiming his dignity. After various adventures with the Saracens, he marries a converted Sultan’s daughter, and regains legal possession of his county. This canon consists of extremely long, verbose tales, often recounted at great length with obvious patterns, such as honourable knights confronted by evil characters, leading the former, after countless adventures, to obtain the hand of a most beautiful and pure beloved; or, for penance, making heroic promises and leaving on pilgrimages to Christian shrines. Sir Eglamour of Artoys is among the less conventional, for the triple trials that the hero must overcome to aspire to a Crystabell, which looks forward to Coleridge’s heroine. Dame Sirith (ca. 1250) is based on a locus classicus: the attempts of a cleric to seduce a lady while the husband is absent, and who succeeds with the help of a go-between. This is also the plot of the oldest exemplar of English theatre, the Interludium de clerico et puella.

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Orders. This resulted in devotional works which were mainly transcriptions and translations from French and Latin saints’ lives, and sermons mostly in praise of chastity. The Poema morale of around 1170, in stanzas of three or four lines with seven accents, has come down to us in seven manuscripts, which demonstrates its wide circulation. According to its title it advocates the need to convert and renounce the world and, to this end, it dwells on the horrors of Hell. An Augustinian friar in Mercia, Orm, was the author of Ormulum (around 1200), an unrhymed summary, in lines of fifteen syllables, of some forty Gospel passages from the liturgy. The language and dialect used by Orm is idiosyncratic in his odd use of signalling a short vowel when followed by two consonants, or long if followed by one. In prose, the Ancrene Riwle or Wisse (end of the thirteenth century?),20 is a collection of rules of ascetic life for the benefit of three ‘pious sisters’ who have decided to renounce the world and enter the religious life. Both the latter, as well as, above all, Handlyng Synne (1303) by Robert Mannyng of Brunne, and Cursor Mundi (written between 1300 and 1320, and a reworking of passages of the New Testament) spice up the arid classification of devotional material with colourful stories, historical information and picturesque anecdotes. The Cloud of Unknowing, from the middle of the fourteenth century, by an unknown author (or, according to some, by an Augustinian canon, Walter Hilton)21 addressing a twenty-four-year-old, formulates austere instructions for his mystical encounter with God, separated from man by an impenetrable cloud that can only be pierced by prayer and by the ‘pointed dart’ of love. The hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole (ca. 1300–1349), a prototype of the visionary Protestant to be, wrote voluminous works in Latin prose, but was long held, erroneously, to be the author of the verbose and mediocre poem, in almost 10,000 lines, The Pricke of Conscience.22 He was one of

20 Written by an unidentified ecclesiastic of broad, liberal ideas. 21 Hilton, who died in 1396, wrote Scala Perfectionis, often reprinted, which are the instructions written for a woman about to enter a nunnery and describing the steps of the ladder of perfection and the ‘dark night of the soul’, which means the separation from all worldly things to purify herself. 22 On the ‘four last things’, Purgatory, Judgement, Hell and Paradise. One might be led to think that Joyce superimposed the treatise Ayenbite of Inwit (bearing almost

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the first English writers whose adventurous life we know something about. A tortured, fretful Oxford student, he imitated St Francis, sewing himself a patched, harlequin-like habit, and wandered through the country as a hermit preacher, before dying in the nunnery of Hampole. Not included in literary manuals, until recently, because they were women and because they were active in the borderline contexts of literature and para-literature constituted by mystical and confessional writings, are the two contemplative Norfolk visionaries, Julian of Norwich (1342-ca. 1416) and Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–1438). Today, however, they have gained a huge following and great appreciation since the literary canon has been enlarged, even if for other and indirect reasons, such as the instrumental use of style – a naïve choice that goes against the grain and, in itself, innovative – and the fact that their prose and confession concentrate upon minute, humdrum aspects, detached from the life of their times, commonly avoided by other, more decorous contemporary writers (therefore for an explicit lack of what is commonly defined ‘literariness’). The sixteen ‘Revelations of Divine Love’, or contemplative visions of the sufferings of Christ on the Cross were received by Julian when she was an anchoress in the church of the same name in her native town, after a miraculous cure from illness.23 They occurred, as Julian relates, on 13 May 1373. As with all mystics, one admires her almost cheeky familiarity with the figure of the Father, the

23

the same title and with the same meaning) on this poem. The four last things are the subject of a Jesuit father’s sermon, transcribed in the third chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Ayenbite, dated 1340, is actually a translation, but in prose (a very colourful and undisguised Kentish dialect), and made by one Michael of Northgate, of a French manual on devotional practices. A short version, drafted on the spur of the moment, was followed by a second, more organized and more concise, twenty years later. The standard edition is A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. E. Colledge and J. Walsh, 2 vols, Toronto 1978; both versions are translated into modern English by E. Spearing, London 1998. See also Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translations, ed. Sr A. M. Reynolds CP and J. Bolton Holloway, Firenze 2001. Julian’s aphorism in chapter XXVII, ‘Sin is behovely’, was used in the last of the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot (Volume 7, § 100.1).

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audacious tropes that foreshadow the Metaphysical poets,24 as well as her trusting optimism as to the ultimate salvation of the world, seemingly in the devil’s grasp. Some of her theological concepts are rather bold, such as the Motherhood of Christ – developed in many extended metaphors – and making us think of a Bernadette of Lourdes in whom a girlish candour is joined to the theological wisdom and ardour of a St Catherine of Siena. The Booke of Margery Kempe, for a long time only available in a quarto edition of only eight pages, and printed in 1501, was discovered and published in full in 1934 and 1940, five centuries after it had been written under dictation.25 Though Julian’s disciple, Margery was never a nun. Daughter of the Mayor of Lynne, and mother of fourteen children, she decided, when her husband was forty, to embrace chastity and live as an apostle in the world. A pilgrim to the Holy Land, she journeyed far and wide to European shrines, battling indomitably with the Church’s representatives, like the great saints of Christianity. She died in the decade following the burning of Joan of Arc, between 1430 and 1440, thus a contemporary of the ‘Maid’ and her spiritual twin, thanks to the frequent inquisitions and trials she was subjected to and the whiff of heresy attributed to her words.26 Her ‘Book’, which relates her prostrating and melodramatic mystical crises, is a factual, frank, unprejudiced autobiography written in the third person as if she were reporting events that had happened to someone else. Margery always refers to herself as ‘that creature’, and veers in dizzy leaps from mystical discussions to quotidian details. It is therefore very different from Julian’s learned and refined spirituality. 5. The canon of miscellaneous poetry also includes ballads and songs for music, some patriotic, others on hunting or drinking themes; there are beast fables and other forms such as the alba, the pastourelle, the carol, the fabliau. There is, above all, a plethora of folksongs27 in which one sees the

24 The celebrated reduction of the universe to a simple hazelnut in the palm of her hand (chapter V), and the following discussion of the indissoluble union of man with God, will be echoed literally in the poetry and sermons of Hopkins. 25 Standard edition in modern English ed. B. A. Windeatt, Harmondsworth 1985. 26 BAL, 314, recalls Shaw’s genius in dramatizing her life. 27 A full repertory is in MS Harley 2253.

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germination of a genre unrestricted by time or space, one of airy, enchanted or disenchanted rhapsodizings on natural phenomena that would be echoed by Donne, Herrick, Burns and Shelley, as well as by many other successors. The model and the stimulus underlying most of them, leading to the rejection of accentual and alliterative metre, is the Latin poetry composed by rowdy students, even if rhyme, in some cases, co-exists with alliteration. One of these compositions, The Owl and the Nightingale,28 probably by a Nicholas of Guildford (about 1250), reverts to the French genre of the débat and adopts its procedure to represent the conflict between the world and the cloister, or joy and sadness. These are antithetical visions of the religious life and the horns of a dilemma that becomes rooted in English literature, with a tension also found in Luve Ron.29 6. Historiography is abundant, entrusted to the Latin of the chroniclers of the school of William the Conqueror, which, initially conceived in a rapidly superseded parochial perspective, tell the history of England up to their own day. Among these authors are the monks Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, whose name was derived from his being schooled in Paris; William of Malmesbury, who wrote the colourful and shrewd Gesta Regum Anglorum; Henry of Huntingdon and Jocelyn of Brakelond, whose account of daily life at the Benedictine monastery at Bury St Edmunds inspired Carlyle. Oxford was the birthplace not only of Roger Bacon, but also of the Bishop of Chartres, John of Salisbury (ca. 1120–1180), considered the greatest intellectual of his age. His Policraticus suggests a theory of the well-ordered state very similar to those of the Renaissance, as well as of Shakespeare.30 The very identity and literary persona of Sir John Mandeville, as a traveller, are pretty vague and legendary, concealed by a sort of ‘whodunit’ that the intervening centuries have only made more obscure, 28

It is introduced and narrated by an external voice, which frames the debate. The owl often quotes proverbs attributed to King Alfred. 29 The Rune of Love. 30 Curtius (CEL, 53) sees in him a bastion against the growing discredit of the classics: although he did not know Greek, John gave his works Greek titles of obscure significance. Curtius also remarks (77) on the importance rhetoric had for John, as the union between reason and expression, and finds in him an ‘intellectual kinship’ with Petrarch.

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rather than shedding light on them. Although, up to 1798, one could read, on his presumed grave at St Albans, that he had been a French knight who emigrated to England, known as Jean de Bourgogne à la Barbe, the latter is however also the name of another totally different and identified author. However, this does not solve the mystery at all, unless we suggest that Mandeville was an alias for Jean de Bourgogne, or that both names were the pseudonyms of a third real and incognito author, whose name might have been d’Outremeuse, a chronicler from Liège. Other, even more elaborate theories have been advanced, however. Mandeville’s Travels, written first in Norman French and translated into Middle English in four versions, is an ably stitched together digest derived from other accounts of travels to the East. The compiler of this account probably never travelled to any of the places described or ever even left his library, although he claimed to have seen everything he described. It was therefore the first great instance of plagiarism in English literature. He recounts how he departed for the Orient in 1322 and journeyed for thirty years, and having received the Pope’s blessing returned in 1356 to his own country, afflicted by gout, to write his memoirs, first in French, then in Latin and finally in English (the first translation is dated 1377). In itself, the work is an immense inventory, an encyclopaedia overflowing with curiosities, digressions, reminiscences and anecdotes of the most various kinds, and creating the very successful ‘voyage’ genre, yet a voyage that progresses into the marvellous, the naïve, or even the grotesque, in untrammelled crescendo. Some have called it a sort of English Marco Polo’s Milione. It was to influence Coleridge (some chapters mention the Great Khan, and the redaction of the two texts presents similar vicissitudes) and the early nineteenth-century adepts of the exotic – or a kind of less venomous Gulliver reviewing the physical deformities and oddities of creation. Reading all of it is exhausting, but occasional cameos are inserted in anthologies and still amaze readers; and some critics have seen it as the first example of self-conscious English prose. Outside England, in Ireland the myth of Cuchulain – the great warrior who fought single-handedly and victoriously against overpowering forces – developed, only to dissolve and be forgotten, along with other interlinking myths, until the early nineteenth century.31 Another, even more infectiously 31

See Volume 6, § 253, for the Irish Renaissance, with O’Grady, Lady Gregory, Yeats and others.

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fascinating myth is the saga of the chieftain Finn or Fiann, from which the Oisin myth was derived. Oisin was Finn’s companion, and his legend, in turn, links Oisin to St Patrick. This myth, too, had to wait until 1762 to be revived in Macpherson’s Fingal. In Ireland, the 1066 watershed is 1169, the year in which the island was conquered by the Normans. At the end of the millennium the Irish monk scribes had produced lyric and elegiac poetry both in Irish and Latin. § 9. The Arthurian romances: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon The first and most important poetic ‘matter’, among verse epics up to 1350, is the Arthurian. Faral, in his La légende arthurienne (1929), attributes the first instances of this kind of epic to the French, thus resolving the diatribe between the ‘inventionists’ and the ‘Celtists’. Chrétien, writing between 1160 and 1190, undoubtedly precedes Layamon, even if the contents of the romances are Celtic and British.1 The Celts are always in the background in English literature, and are responsible for a kind of pervading sensitivity that is evoked whenever the cult of heroic prowess is softened into elegy, melancholy and mystery: this kind of atmosphere will recur repeatedly up to Matthew Arnold, as a sort of literary trump card. The prehistory of the legend features a British king, Constans, whose crown was transferred to his son, a monk called Constantine, killed in a court conspiracy led by Vortigern, who was deposed by Uther, Arthur’s father. Not named by Gildas – the second of the great British Latin historians – Arthur, a valorous tribe-chieftain of Roman descent (Artorius), was mentioned by Nennius (the Welshman Nyanniaw, a Latin writer of about 800), who recalled his deeds at the battle of Mount Badon (960 warriors killed by Arthur). Arthurian traces are found in the Mabinogion – which includes eleven stories in Welsh prose first edited in 1838 by Lady Charlotte Guest – as well as in the poetry of Welsh bards and in early poetic sources dating from the seventh to the eleventh centuries.2 As for Lancelot, he was

1

2

As regards my conjectures in Volume 7, § 96.1 n. 81, the title of T. S. Eliot’s most famous poem could have been drawn and translated from Chrétien’s Perceval. Chrétien, in the initial phase of his romance, and before Perceval meets the Fisher King, causes his knight to wander through a ‘terre désolée’. Taliesin and Aneirin do not name Arthur. Other engaging, but obscure, Welsh epics refer to legendary undertakings of the king, like the expedition on the ship

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called ‘of the Lake’ because he was seized from his mother by the nymph Vivian, Merlin’s lover, to be educated at the bottom of a lake; at eighteen he was taken by the nymph to Arthur’s court. Victorious against the Saxons in various campaigns, Arthur fell after being wounded in battle against his treacherous nephew Mordred, who had seduced his queen Guinevere. Buried on the Isle of Avalon he was thought to be, in some versions, merely asleep, and would, one day, return. This main body was to be enriched, with time, by a host of branches, or peripheral and subsidiary legends as early as the pioneering Geoffrey of Monmouth’s (ca. 1100–1155)

Pridwen to bring back a cauldron from Hades. The text, commonly known as the Mabinogion, is the conflation of two books, the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, the manuscripts of which are kept respectively at Aberystwyth and at Oxford. The general title of the collection, resulting from the union of the two books and the inclusion also of Hanes (that is the tale of ) Taliesin, was given by Charlotte Guest in her first edition in English, but she misunderstood the meaning of the word mabinogi, plural according to her, and which is at the centre of a hitherto unresolved etymological debate amongst scholars. The philologically weak edition of the Mabinogion by Guest was then replaced by the one edited by G. Jones and T. Jones (London 1949, 1978). The story of the Mabinogion is divided into three branches and then into sections of four, four and three tales, all of them developed in a somewhat excessively detailed and desultory manner which is rarely enthralling. The first foursome recounts the marriages between small local Welsh and Irish dynasties, to bring about territorial peace. Some of the tales appear to be distant transpositions of Indo-European fertility myths. Of the four independent tales of the second foursome, Culhwch and Olwen can be singled out. Here Arthur, amid a mass of digressions, sluggish delays and incidental anecdotes, helps the young Culhwch to obtain the hand of Olwen, daughter of the giant Ysbaddadden: the tale includes above all a chaotic, grotesque and marvellous diorama of Arthur’s feats (the last scene is vaguely reminiscent of Beowulf ’s battle against the giantess). The last story of the second foursome is also linked to the Arthurian saga. The final threesome involves a series of parallels and even paraphrases of Arthurian material, and leaves the question open as to how much earlier or later the continental romances, and specifically those of Chrétien, were than the Celtic ones, and whether they influenced or were influenced. Although they include many more adventures, these tales effectively remind one of some of Tennyson’s Idylls.

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chronicle.3 An imaginative historian, and thus considered by some the father of the English historical novel, Geoffrey, an Oxford clergyman, or more precisely a bishop,4 claimed – in his Historia Regum Britanniae (1137) – that a certain Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas, landed in England to found a new Troy, and that the name ‘Britannia’ derived, with a vowel change, from this Trojan ancestor.5 The legend, contained in a ‘British book’ which Geoffrey said was passed to him by an Oxford archdeacon, was to become widely accepted. Wace (1100–1175), a Norman cleric from Jersey, translated the Latin of Geoffrey into French rhymes (Brut, 1155), stressing Arthur’s consummate and refined ability as a politician and statesman, with no mention, for the time being, of the later icon of a weak, melancholy and disconsolate monarch.6 These psychological traits were added by Layamon (or Laзamon), an English priest who translated Brut into alliterative verse with frequent middle rhyme in the thirteenth century (1190–1215). The Arthurian ‘matter’ was thus passed from hand to hand by three authors, who formally belonged to the same nation, but wrote in three different languages. Walter Map (ca. 1140-ca. 1209), too, was for a long time considered the author in Latin of the Arthurian legend and of its fusion with the legend of the Holy Grail, the platter or chalice of the Last Supper brought to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea, and lost through the victory of sin.7

3 4 5 6 7

The somewhat literal source of King Lear, but without the subplot of Gloucester, is in Geoffrey’s Book II, chapters 11 and 12. His patron was the Earl Robert of Gloucester, who had strong family and political links with Wales, the area in which the Arthurian myth had its origins (CHI, vol. I, 256–7). According to Walafrid Strabo, on the other hand, the name ‘Britannia’ derives from its ‘brutish habits’ (CEL, 497). The episode where Arthur refuses to receive the ambassador, sent by Lucius to urge the payment of tribute, was to reappear in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. And the king’s wise speech to his knights revolves around the concept that Rome was not invincible. The original manuscripts have never been found, however. Map is also supposed to have composed student songs in Latin and, in particular, a popular ‘anacreontic’ drinking song. What is indisputably attributed to him is De nugis curialum, an admirable collection of maxims, notes and impressions.

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2. Geoffrey claims to rival Gildas and, above all, Bede, stating he wants to fill in the gaps they have left. On the other hand, he is surreptitiously one of the first forgers in English literature: as we have seen he uses the wellworn technique of a probably inexistent manuscript by a certain Walter that he claims to have discovered. This deception explains, to a certain extent, the imperceptible mixture of fact and fiction, and the first phases, referring to Brutus and his wanderings, are a case in point. Geoffrey transforms the legendary founder into a sort of Jason, Ulysses, or Aeneas, while his companions become lotus-eaters. Inevitably, Albion is found to be inhabited by giants, whom Brutus kills one after another.8 The place names that we know are derived from the names of his warriors, and Trinovantium becomes city of Lud, then Londres. Before introducing Arthur, Geoffrey seems to be aware of writing in the manner of the biblical Books of Kings and Chronicles: brief little chapters, merely containing arid genealogical lists, outline one kingdom after another. However he also likes to include synchronic history, hardly ever failing to note that a certain English event occurred at the same time as another event in some other part of the world, like Israel or Rome. Nonetheless, he does not give a single real date, only indicating the time according to the Roman calendar, forcing the reader to search and infer. The style he adopts is that of a chronicler, listing facts, and hardly ever introducing striking interruptions, side comments or even metaphors; his drifting into metafictional estrangement and the humorous nudges is almost inexistent. With the arrival of the Romans, Geoffrey proudly insists on how strenuously the British resisted their landing, but cannot deny the Romans’ contribution to civilization. The three final books describe Arthur’s deeds, but the ingredients later to polarize the world’s attention – the founding of the Round Table, the betrayal by his nephew Mordred and Guinevere’s adultery – are very vaguely defined. Wace’s Li romans de Brut takes the story in medias res, and these res which interest the poet are different: not a succession of brave heroic deeds, but shady, 8

Mysterious echoes of Beowulf are in Book II, chapter 15, where a monster comes over the sea from Ireland during the reign of Morvid, who fights it in single combat but is swallowed as if he were a little fish; and in chapter 3 of Book X, which tells of the victorious combat of Arthur with another monster.

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deceitful manoeuvres, or ever increasing betrayals, ambitions, threatening prophecies, shadows. The reign of Vortigern is described at length, and his libidinous sensuality is underlined when describing his marriage to Hengist’s seductive daughter. He propounds an Anglo-Saxon and antiRoman view, celebrating Britain’s unquenchably bitter heroism. A long parenthesis follows the coming of Merlin, born by ‘immaculate conception’.9 When Lucius’ emissaries reach the court and indignantly claim payment of the tribute, Arthur responds that the Romans are his debtors, as he is the legitimate sovereign of Gaul and the other territories occupied by Rome. The final half of Wace’s poem is taken up by the deeds of the king, first against the Saxon hotbeds and then against the Romans, when he crosses the sea to meet them in Gaul and stops them. Arthur dies by the hand of Mordred, who has courted and seduced his wife, Guinevere, a kind of nemesis as Arthur was conceived by his father Uther and Igerne, the wife of Gorlois. Wace causes the curtain to drop abruptly in 642, the only date he gives, and leaves the reader with the image of Arthur’s tomb in Avalon, and of his companions awaiting his return, as if Arthur were a Messiah. Layamon, who recommences the tale with the traitor Vortigern, repeats its salient points, including the more readable anecdotes. His vein, however, is chronicle-like and rather unremarkable. Arthurian romances were written up to the beginning of the fifteenth century, about a century

9

One episode linked to Merlin concerns the transport from Ireland to England of the huge stones from which Stonehenge was built. The miraculous part chiefly relates to Arthur’s duel with a giant who has raped a defenceless maiden, which seems modelled, for the umpteenth time, on Beowulf ’s deeds. A life, or more exactly, a prophecy of Merlin was written in Latin by Geoffrey and added to an edition of the Historia Regum Britanniae in 1929. In this prophecy, Merlin was a child of prophetic powers who predicted to the King of the Britons the future overthrow, legitimization and consecration of Plantagenet power. The text opens with the supernatural vision of the fight between a red dragon and white dragon who have emerged from the water of a pond; Merlin explains to King Vortigern that the dragons are images of the Saxons who will be expelled and of the Britons. ‘A sad desolation will beset the kingdom / And the harvest-filled farm-yards will revert to barren slopes’, says Merlin. Geoffrey here is very close to Blake and his prophetic books, or to the visionary poems by Yeats.

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after Layamon. Le Morte Arthur, from around 1400, is in stanzas and in the Midland dialect, a vivacious and well organized narration that served as a base for Tennyson;10 the alliterative, almost identically entitled Morte Arthure, directly or indirectly derived from Wace and used as a source by Malory, concentrates on Arthur’s early European adventures and on his final defeat at the hands of Mordred. Other romances are basically paraphrases of Chrétien. § 10. Ricardian literature Is it possible to extract and discuss common elements linking the four poems which objectively stand out and emerge, for their overall artistic excellence, from the more anonymous texts of the last decades of the fourteenth century, such as those by Gower, Langland, Chaucer and the Gawain poet, whom I am about to introduce? In other words, can we posit a plausible category of Ricardian literature, in the same way as we take for granted the existence of Elizabethan and Victorian literatures? Can we do this when the only common denominator is that the authors were active in the reign of King Richard II, and despite the fact that, with one sole exception, they did not know each other, and could not have been acquainted with or influenced by each other, speaking and writing in regional idioms and in clearly distinct dialects, and on thematic materials that are apparently different? That the uniformity and convergence of their qualities were greater than the apparent quantity of their divergences is what J. A. Burrow argues in his book Ricardian Poetry.1 The author admits to there not being a well-defined or definable Ricardian period, according to the 10

In Tennyson’s re-elaboration we find the clearly defined episodes of the Maid of Astolat or Ascolat (which will become ‘Lancelot and Elaine’), and Bedivere’s consignment of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, to the waters.

1

BRP, a short, succinct, wonderfully economical book, full of truly essential observations, which was at the time a decisive step forwards, at least as regards Chaucerian criticism. As to the recurrence of ‘tags’, ways of speaking, interjections and word padding in the Middle English tradition, Burrow was preceded by Chaucer and the Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature, ed. D. S. Brewer, London 1966, whose introductory essay, 1–38, is worth reading.

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usual parameters, and that from the prosodic point of view there remains a vast gap between the persistence of the alliterative tradition and the rise of the rhymed couplet, and between the northern tongue and the London idiom. Richard II was not the beacon nor, as patron of the arts, did he receive the panegyrics and homage of these poets, for whom he reached the throne too late. Not only was there no poetic school or official and closeknit academy, but the four poets would, over time, enjoy a separate and dissimilar reception. The echo of alliterative poetry was to be long silenced, but for Langland, who reached the Elizabethans and the Jacobeans intact, and was praised as a satirist by Puttenham, Milton and Warton, the first historian of English literature. On the other hand, Chaucer and Gower were recognized as the beginners of English poetry from Sidney onwards, and held to be the first unofficial Poet Laureates, that is, those representing a transition in English poetry and literary art from a still obscure, primitive and barbaric period, to an adult, sophisticated and refined one. The stylistic test, undertaken by Burrow, proves that the four poems already share an oral mark, and are ‘minstrel-type’ compositions: for the ear therefore, and to be recited before an audience. 2. Critics like Burrow did not, until recently, disguise their nostalgia for the dry masculine tang of Old English poetry – and for the refusal to accept the conventions and the repetitive, space-filling formulae, of easy rhymes and glib commonplaces – although the poets of the late fourteenth century, like Chaucer, did use them in a slyly ironic manner.2 Addressing the audience with fixed commonplaces recurs, even further back in time, in the other branch – this is the principal distinction – of the alliterative poetry of Gawain and of Langland. Gower has also been charged with this negative trait, although later critics considered that his compositions were the epitome of direct and even lofty English style and simplicity. On the other hand Langland, who cares only about the content of his writings and not, in the least, about stylistic elegance, consciously rejecting formulae, creates a new style, or ironically reuses the same formulae whilst voiding them of their traditional impact. It is not a stylistic comment, but structural and 2

Burrow classifies the metaphors as ‘drastically’ extravagant, metaphysical and shocking, or tempered.

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constructive, to say that each of these Ricardian classics is told by a persona, reported by an internal narrator. This split between author and internal narrator causes the author to play with stylistic masks. Burrow concedes that the norm and the unity of measure of the four principal Ricardian poems is the sequence, not the single line, however memorable and exquisitely fashioned. Examination of the contents reveals a common propensity towards the narration of actual facts, rather than allegories, and narrations aimed both at setting examples and diverting the reader – lyrics supplant narrative genres in French and Anglo-Norman poetry, whereas the historian prefers to write in prose. It is here that we find an indigenous trait: a distinct taste for verse narrative. The Italian fourteenth-century models, followed by the English, were narrative too, even if tending towards the lyrical. Chaucer, on the other hand, never alludes to any personal autobiographical happening, but objectifies it. Specifically, the four most important Ricardian poems reveal a particular sense of the internal proportions and subdivisions of the action, with unprecedented and precisely defined articulations (fitt or passus); they fit into the scheme of the dream, and often appear as interpolated tales within tales.3 However, the succession of episodes and other insertions is not linear or causal: it is often arbitrary, or encircling. Burrow calls Chaucer the precocious specialist of the ‘scale’ technique, whereby he pinpoints minute, tiny details, fading out others. Ricardian allegory is not narrow and one-directional, but slides into and blends with the literal. If anything, the established mode is to provide examples, which the four poets do with greater or lesser bravura and subtlety, at times subverting their own example. What is common, in the end, to Ricardian writers, is their vision of man and the world. The single protagonists lack heroic stature, and even when they are warriors and knights the descriptions of the actual fighting scenes are not particularly detailed or realistic; there is more focused interest on what leads up to or follows the actual battle scene. Chaucer’s mask is incongruous among the effigies and busts of the epic poets of antiquity, and he tells twice the story of pious Aeneas in 3

This structural device was inspired by the Roman de la Rose, to which, as we shall see in the next section, the four poets were deeply indebted, though Burrow doesn’t mention it or minimizes its relevance.

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his works. The typically revisionist hero in Chaucer is, of course, Troilus. The arrival situation often reproduces the departure scene, without much variation, the common factor being a deep pessimism, due to the author’s conviction of the ultimate insignificance of the individual in the immensity of the cosmos. Chaucer’s view is that life is a ‘thoroughfare of woe’, and the practice of confession, penance, contrition, humiliation4 seems to be the prevailing framework within which everything happens. Amorous passion and its agony are de-sublimated by ever-present ‘confessors’, at times disguised or concealed in the four poems, but acting in the counterpoint of a humorous attitude, which corresponds to the relativizing coexistence of seriousness and flippancy studied by Curtius.5 § 11. The influence of the ‘Roman de la Rose’ Gianfranco Contini, the great Italian philologist, wrote of the Roman de la Rose as a ‘knot’ in medieval European culture,1 independently of the general low consensus that the poem normally receives. It is for Dante, for example, what literature – or an illustrated book, or a form of visualized literature – is for poetry, although various elements of the Roman entered the work of the Italian poet thanks to the intermediation of Brunetto Latini. Contini proposes the formula of a vertical and linear Roman and of a spiralling Divine Comedy. It is thus only apparently strange that English poetic literature of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and of the first decades of the sixteenth centuries should advance under the aegis, the tutelage and the model of a text in French. Chaucer was its translator (in all likelihood, 4

5

1

BRP, 106, calls attention to the new importance of the Sacrament of Penance after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215–1216. Dante, too, according to Burrow, found Guilielmus Peraldus’ Summa Vitiorum influential; this treatise is also important, as is Pennaforte’s Summa de poenitentia, for Chaucer. Gawain’s examination of his conscience seems to draw on this and other treatises. Theseus dampens the ardour of the two knights in Chaucer, and Amans, in Gower, reflects that love is not made for old men. This confirms the stance of Chaucer and Gower – through their internal narrators – as to the distancing and objectifying of passions. ‘Un nodo della cultura medievale: la serie “Roman de la Rose” – “Fiore” – “Divina Commedia”’, in Lettere italiane, 25 (1973), 162–89.

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with other poets), and a collective translation increases the prestige and the authority of the translated work, because it demonstrates a wider and more generalized influence. It could not be otherwise, because English culture, which centred on the court, had French as the official and in some cases only language, and the poets learnt their métier from the literary works in that language; there was moreover no poem or poetic example greater and better known than the Roman. The fourteenth-century poets naturally absorbed their culture in France, and at that time Chaucer and the others had a fairly vague, nebulous, not to say second or third hand knowledge of Italian culture and poetry. Chaucer, as an imitator and follower, could, just as usefully, have employed the ideology of love of the Stilnovo, which is not very different from that of the Roman, as it shared the same kind of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century beliefs and sensibility. The Stilnovo was for the English, however, a hermetically closed chapter, as they had never heard of it and it never influenced them. This state of affairs was to continue until Rossetti became an English Dantesque poet and a Stilnovo follower in the nineteenth century.2 The second point is to ask why the Roman so obsessively inspired English and Scottish Chaucerian allegorists, among whom one finds late fifteenth-century imitators such as Dunbar or even a sixteenth-century poet like Hawes. To explain this, we need to say what it is. From a general point of view, the Roman is a dream poem, and this recalls a medieval belief, derived from classical literature, that visions in dreams had prophetic value, as superior and credible revelations on divine and human things. The symbolic journey has the protagonist enter a flowering garden, or locus amoenus, where wise beings dispense their precepts, and the wandering dreamer undergoes an initiation experience and becomes acquainted on a number of truths: it is an oracular experience that ends with his waking. This kind of scheme had hitherto been principally employed to illustrate the definition, practice and etiquette of love. After the Roman, a model is established, which is both a model, as well as a genre and above all an epistemic vehicle. The dream, and that which is

2

To provide some idea as to how little knowledge of Dante there was, it seems that Sidney was the first to mention Beatrice’s name.

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recounted, imaginatively channel the mindset of fourteenth-century sensibility and beyond, until it is replaced by alternatives which will be the chivalric poetry and prose of Malory, or the pastoral poem or novel. At the end of the sixteenth century the two forms will coalesce seamlessly in Spenser’s poem and in Sidney’s romance. 2. To go back to what we were saying, and to English literature at the end of the fourteenth century, embedded in the dream model is the catechism of Love. Chaucer and Gower are both involved in making use of the ploy of courtly and Stilnovo poetry, as a way of transforming the sexual urge and the longing for a woman into spiritualized love. The Roman recounts, and allegorically dramatizes, all of this. But the allegories are so complex, wordy and elaborate, in these poems and their sequels, that at times they predominate over the truths to be proved, causing the latter to fade out. The Roman addresses both sides of the ambiguity of love. Above all in the interminable debates of the second part, we see the lover, who should and would like to conquer the rose, believing as he does in the purity of his love, listening to laborious lectures on the seamy side of love itself, on the impurity of women and the fraudulent nature of matrimony, and on a perfectly natural yearning which, derived from totally un-medieval or non-spiritual, ‘Shavian’ evolutionism, thanks to its impetus causes life in the universe to keep going. My third point concerns the legacy it accumulates: at first, the Roman addresses Chaucer, who, apparently, does not proceed beyond the first, radiant and sunny part of the poem. In reality, Chaucer’s work turns love upside-down, and after having illustrated it as the purest, sublime, fleshless flame, he also shows us its earthy, worldly side, describing the passion of the senses and the bestial gratification of the flesh: thus Chaucer learns from the first as well as from the second Roman. All literature at the end of the fourteenth century is dream literature. Gower does not compose a formal dream, but sends his lover to be catechized by his confessor, Genius. As in other cases, we find in Gower an improbably spiritualized Venus – a sort of absurdity, or mythological blasphemy – as the provider of warnings. All the numerous future allegorical poems will vary the situation of the lover, wandering dreamily about in a garden of love and taught by allegorical personifications. The Cupid-and-Venuswith-the-lover masque will continue to appear until the sixteenth century.

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Langland, however, seems to destroy the sunny dream and replace it with a nightmare, although it is really still a dream or a vision. This scheme will be unrecognizably changed in Pilgrim’s Progress. 3. A distinct thread comes to the surface when – and this happens in quite a number of cases in the poem – the motif of a fallen and corrupt nature (that Sidney will call ‘infected’)3 which has to be healed (and Sidney will speak of the ‘erect intellect’) – is introduced in the Roman’s debates. The locus amoenus, described by almost every other poet, is always connected, as here, with an early May morning and with birds which sing invitingly above a clear, rippling stream. This landscape is visited by a dreamer, who at the end of his dream tells of it. The effigies and statues on the garden’s walls are, in reality, dynamic allegories in the Roman; the prologue does not, in fact, introduce living, flesh and blood people as in Chaucer, but tableaux vivants, or moving statues. The locus can cease to be a place of delight, becoming elsewhere terrifying and infernal, but always full of figures, statues and images, as in Sackville’s Induction. The Rose in the rosebush cannot be plucked because it is protected by thorns, and Cupid lurks in the background, ready to shoot his arrows. Love is re-kindled by five benevolent arrows, shot by the god of love. The admonitions and commandments of love outline a sort of identikit of Castiglione’s Courtier. The concept of a subjugated lover, blocked and suffering, because of the unattainable status of the loved one, founds a Romantic Sehnsucht that was to have many followers. One could almost link this genre to Sidney’s numerous sonnets on Cupid. Yet it is also clear that all these skirmishes to get to the rose form an ersatz and a sublimation of the sexual conquest. Picking a flower means sexual possession. There is also a kind of allusion to the original sin, because picking a rose is like plucking an apple from a tree, if one considers that disobedience is often equated with carnal knowledge and with the prohibition involving copulation (Adam and Eve often cover their genitals in pictorial images). A suggestion of this kind is confirmed in the final page of the poem. The rose is really the female sexual organ, thanks to very precise allusions: the lover revisits the rose and discovers

3

§ 48.

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that it is not yet fertilized and therefore deflowered, and the seed which fills it is not visible. The kiss is obtained but causes the vengeance of further hostile forces. The rose bush is next surrounded by an impenetrable wall and a tower is beside it. The first part ends with the pain of love, the rose strictly protected, and Fair Welcoming imprisoned. 4. In Part two by Jean de Meung, we witness the assault on the castle on the part of the Lover, who finds himself in the midst of persuaders and dissuaders. Allegorical figures hypocritically force their way into the castle and speak with a Duenna. But the opposing forces regroup and push out the Lover and Venus sets the castle on fire. The Rose is granted to the Lover and he awakes from his dream. In a long section, the personification of Reason expounds misogynistic precepts echoing a sequence of Burtonian oxymora on the malady of Love; this is continued in a series of admonitions against exclusively carnal love. The Rose is thus more than ever equated with female sexuality. In reality, Reason introduces points often included in fourteenth-century sermons: Love as avarice, and the giddiness of Fortune. The use of proverbs and maxims in this section is more evidently than ever a foreshadowing of Burton’s Anatomy. Gower himself will adopt fables and historical and demonstrative anecdotes, such as that of Nero and Croesus, in his Confessio. Thus it is in the Roman that the poetic model of the confession is founded, or more precisely that of the spiritual instructions delivered by a figure of authority to a sinner who has not yet repented. This long, drawn out educational lecture is however rejected by the Lover.4 It is therefore easy to forget that the Lover is always waiting to enter the castle. But let us think at the same time of this preKafkaesque situation of a symbolic figure bent on conquering an enigmatic, symbolic, surreal castle guarded by threatening, hostile allegorical figures. In a similar, long drawn out interlude the Lover listens to predictable warn-

4

The Lover also rebukes Reason because, being a lady, she ought to have used euphemisms when speaking of testicles! It is an objection that leads to an agitated, grotesque and much too drawn out squabble on the extent to which euphemisms should be used instead of literal expressions. One point of the debate concerns the proposal that testicles should not be cut, a punitive provision that would impede the continuation of the species: ‘it is a great sin to castrate a man’.

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ings that the flame of love will die out in marriage, and that no woman and no wife is chaste: significantly love exists solely before marriage and that is the moment in which one loves par amour. The Lover is humiliated at the very moment in which he is about to rescue Fair Welcoming. There is a fairly grotesque scene when two hypocrites in disguise, as in some of Chaucer’s tales, pretend to plead the Lover’s case in front of Foul Mouth, who is guarding the entrance to the castle. The torrential moralizing of the Duenna seems, on the one hand, to remind one that all men are voluble, quoting innumerable examples from mythology; on the other she presents a code of conduct for women, who although they should always be modest, and care about their appearance and their manners, must always be temptresses, denying their favours to importunate males; thus she explains the arts of seduction and, at the same time, the ruses necessary to hold seducers at bay.5 In reality, the Duenna’s monologue is most interesting, at least in certain parts, because it is a free-wheeling rhapsody in which advice and personal memories, laments and cynicism alternate in an apparently unplanned fashion, so that we seem to be listening to an interior – and most certainly ‘grammatical’ – monologue that vaguely foreshadows that of Joyce’s Molly Bloom – another disappointed lover, embittered by old age and the miseries of life. We are reminded of a modern digital link when, recalling that at times one raises one’s eyes heavenward, the Duenna launches into a history of astronomical treatises. The association is made because if there had been no secret telescope or mirror, Venus and Mars would not have been caught in flagrant adultery. This digression then falls back into the macro-theme of celestial influences that determine everything, except human free will. Nature enters upon the scene, introducing herself to the Lover as the mediator and collaborator of the Creator, who is obeyed by the animal and vegetable kingdom, as well as by the weather. Suddenly, the story of Pygmalion is recounted in great and lengthy detail. It is the pagan way of illustrating the miracle of life infused into matter, like the miracle of love which blossoms and crowns it. But this fresh and genuine story of love 5

In a page, surely read by Chaucer, she speaks of the care with which a woman ought to dip her hand in the gravy, so that not a drop of grease stick to her lips or fall onto her clothes.

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is gradually corrupted and becomes a paradigm of ruin. The final assault on the castle assumes the appearance of a violent clash, as against a palisade, thus leading to further sexual allusions: the dreamer is armed with a kind of pointed, iron-tipped staff and a symbolic sack. The rosebud is plucked, and this act is compared to Adam’s gesture when he picks the apple. Only Joyce’s Finnegans Wake will be a longer dream than this one, with even more episodes developing in the same, chaotic manner, crowded with images and with unlinked stories, the compatibility of which is unexplained. § 12. ‘Pearl’ and ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ * Starting with the so-called ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl poet’, the plausibility and even, in a History of English literature, the 1

*

Pearl, ed. I. Gollancz, London 1891, 1921; ed. C. G. Osgood, Boston, MA 1906; ed. and trans. F. Olivero, Bologna 1930; ed. E. V. Gordon, Oxford 1953, 1974; ed. A. Guidi, Firenze 1958; ed. Sr M. V. Hillmann, New York 1961, 1967; ed. S. deFord, Northbrook 1967; ed. E. Giaccherini, Parma 1989; ed. J. Draycott, Manchester 2011. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, Oxford 1925, 1940, 1967; ed. I. Gollancz, London 1940; ed. R. A. Waldron, London 1970; ed. F. J. A. Burrow, Harmondsworth 1972; ed. W. R. J. Barron, Manchester and New York 1974; ed. D. Didoni and A. Matranga, trans. P. Boitani, Milano and Scandicci 1986, 2000. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. M. Andrew and R. Waldron, London 1978; ed. M. Borroff, New York 1978; ed. W. Vantuono, 2 vols, New York and London 1984. The Middle English Pearl: Critical Essays, ed. J. Conley, Notre Dame, IN and London 1984; J. A. Burrow, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, London 1965, 1966; Sir Gawain and Pearl: Critical Essays, ed. R. J. Blanch, Bloomington, IN 1966; P. M. Kean, The Pearl: An Interpretation, New York 1967; I. Bishop, ‘Pearl’ in its Setting: A Critical Study of the Structure and Meaning of the Middle English Poem, Oxford 1968; A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study, Cambridge 1970; W. A. Davenport, The Art of the Gawain-Poet, New Jersey 1978; P. Boitani, La narrativa del Medioevo inglese, Bari 1980, and Il tragico e il sublime nelle letteratura medievale, Bologna 1992; T. Bogdanos, Pearl, Image of the Ineffable: A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism, University Park, PA 1983; L. Staley Johnson, The Voice of the Gawain Poet, Madison, WI 1984; Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, ed. R. J. Blanch, M. Y. Miller and J. N. Wasserman, Troy, NY 1991; M. Marti, Body, Heart and Text in the Pearl-Poet, Queenston 1991; E. Giaccherini, Il meraviglioso e il sogno nella narrativa inglese del Medioevo, Pisa 1992, and Orfeo in Albione. Tradizione

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advisability of devoting only a cursory survey to the works of the canon in Middle English – apart from the exceptions that we have already encountered – can be dismissed. The works and the authors that we are about to confront will deserve more systematic and deeper analyses, because they possess a higher aesthetic value rather than a solely linguistic and documentary one. By almost unanimous consent Pearl as well as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were written by the same cultivated and well-read poet, an adept in French romances, metrically a virtuoso, and a theological expert, perhaps a priest. If this is true he would be – even nameless, faceless and placeless (though some say he was a Scot, named Hochoun, Huchown or Hucheon, or a Ralph Strode) –1 the first of the four major English authors of the second half of the fourteenth century. In reality, the theory of a single poet as the author of the two works – possibly due to a somewhat romantic delusion, unsubstantiated by any proof whatsoever – is literally full of holes, was already considered suspect by Saintsbury, and is now much discredited. The theory is only, or only partly based on the fact that the two poems are contained, together with the biblical paraphrases Purity and Patience,2 in the British Library manuscript Cotton Nero A.x., were transcribed in the Cheshire dialect,3 and were copied out

colta e tradizione popolare nella letteratura inglese medievale, Pisa 2002; From Pearl to Gawain: Forme to Fynisment, ed. R. J. Blanch and J. N. Wasserman, Gainesville, FL 1995; S. P. Prior, The Fayre Formez of the Pearl Poet, East Lansing, MI 1996; A. Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet, London 1996; A Companion to the Gawain Poet, ed. D. Brewer and J. Gibson, Woodbridge 1997 (twenty-seven uneven essays by super-experts, many of them centred on the surroundings of the texts while others aim at updating their perspectives by using Lacanian, anthropological, narratological and gender approaches); J. M. Bowers, The Politics of ‘Pearl’: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II, Cambridge 2001. 1

I. Gollancz sought to give him a romanticized one, in CHI, vol. I, 329–34. On Huchown ‘of the Awne Ryale’ see § 24.2. 2 The Gawain poet’s compositions are five if we add the legend of St Erkenwald to them. 3 It is markedly different from Chaucer’s London dialect. In Gawain, there are words deriving from Scandinavian languages which are not present in Chaucer. The Pearl manuscript is illustrated.

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by the same scribe. Metrically, Pearl is divided into parts and stanzas with alternating rhymes; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Purity (also called, with the same meaning, Cleannesse) and Patience,4 are alliterative; Gawain’s stanzas range from sixteen to twenty lines, with a free and vaguely dactylic rhythm with four accents (Saintsbury) that end with the ‘bob and wheel’, that is with a line with only one iambic foot and a quatrain of lines of six or eight syllables (the rhyming scheme being ababa). A similar disagreement prevails amongst scholars as to the dating: broadly speaking, without being too precise, we can say the four poems were written in the last thirty years of the fourteenth century, not before 1370 and not after 1395. 2. Pearl, the title given to the poem by its first modern editor, Richard Morris (1864), is divided into twenty parts, with a total of 101 stanzas (of which one is spurious, therefore 100) of twelve rhyming octosyllabic lines rhymed abab. Critics have long debated its genre and its literary type – whether it is an elegy, or the first dirge in English literature (therefore, whether there is some clear biographical fact lying behind it); whether, on the other hand, it is simply a stylized allegory, or even a symbolic poem. One could argue, I suppose, that all three aspects are present.5 The narrator says he has lost an incomparable pearl in a garden, and because of this loss is still enduring unspeakable sorrow.6 This purest of pearls is soiled by its contact

4

The two poems are paraphrases and didactic expansions of biblical episodes ( Jonah, the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah and others), resembling the similar and similarly popular biblical paraphrases in Old English (§ 5.2), but they surpass them in hallucinatory fancy and self-reliant descriptive vigour. They have thus been recently restudied and re-evaluated: Boitani 1980, 19–34, stresses the ‘dramatic individuality’ and the ‘extraordinarily narrative autonomy’ (30) of the two works. 5 The Pearl author had two traditions to draw from: the pearl as the type of authentic femininity, modelled on the queen of married Love, Alcestis; or that of the pearl in Matthew’s Gospel (13, 46). ‘Behold, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who goes in search of a precious pearl and who, finding it, goes and sells all he has to buy it’, that is, the Virgin (according to I. Gollancz in CHI, vol. I, 321). 6 The three literary sources most influencing it are the Roman de la Rose, the Chaucerian Book of the Duchesse and Boccaccio’s fourteenth Latin eclogue, Olympia. It is also true that Pearl has 100 stanzas, the same number as the cantos of the Commedia, and that Pearl is modelled on Beatrice and Matelda – although, as said above, it is unlikely that the poet actually knew Dante’s work.

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with the ground, but this has made the most beautiful and multi-coloured flowers grow around it, to symbolize the vast distance between the heavens and the earth, but also to reverberate an echo of the Incarnation. The pearl falls to earth and is defiled, as the stain of original sin sullied Eden’s stainless purity, a sign of the Fall. The fallen pearl, however, will cause the earth to be re-seeded, and stinking miasmas will be replaced by perfumes and spices. Christ is the first to cooperate in the Incarnation, but the Virgin carried him in her womb, and it is, after and above all, the Virgin who is the pearl ‘withouten spot’. Immediately afterwards in the poem comes the account of a dream of the narrator who, assailed by the fragrance of the meadow where the pearl had fallen, faints. He dreams of finding himself in a landscape of crystalline rocks and of woods, where nothing is dark, but sparkling with light, and where birds sing celestial music. He then comes to a river in the bed of which he notices diamonds and precious stones, and believes that Paradise may be on the other bank.7 This dream creates or reprises a timeless topos, that of the copse which, much unlike Dante’s ‘selva oscura’, or the medieval wood, is an enclosed garden (hortus conclusus) bathed in brilliant light, pierced only by a stream, in which it is lovely to wander, untouched by fear or disturbance – a symbol of a Middle Ages already tinged by the Renaissance, as Walter Pater would term it. Against the background of a crystalline hill, a little, golden-haired girl, dressed in white and adorned with pearls that cover her entire body, a crown of pearls upon her head and a large pearl in the middle of her breasts, appears to him. From the other side of the stream, she converses with him, and the girl urges the man not to grieve for the lost pearl, because he is now in a 7

A blatant premonition of Freud’s dream mechanism: from the waking reminiscence of the lost pearl, to – thanks to dream association devices – a totally pearl-covered maiden (‘Wyth precios perles al umbepyghte’). The allegorical procedure is ingenious: before the dream, the ‘jeweller’ has only lost an exquisitely pure pearl that has fallen into the grass; in the dream he wonders if this pearl is not his little daughter who has been taken from him – one believes – by death. Or perhaps, before the dream, he had only been reticent. In other words we are witnessing a transfiguration. The Pearl can be a synonym or indicator of Margarita (pearl in Latin) or Margery in English. In Purity we find the same use of the pearl as a symbol of purity: ‘Quat may þe cause be called, bot for hir clene hwes, / Þat wynnes worschyp, abof alle whyte stones?’.

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place in which no sorrow dwells. She adds that one can only attain God and spiritual life through fleshly and bodily death, purging oneself of Adam’s sin. The dreamer is repulsed, because he presumes he is allowed to cross the stream, without humbly asking to do so.8 He may not, therefore, even think of straightaway crossing the river to join her. The girl shows him how, lost, she was found by Christ and became his bride, without in any way affecting the prestige of the Virgin, since anyone reaching Paradise becomes king or queen without usurping any other’s place.9 All the brides of Christ dwell in the celestial Jerusalem, those described by St John in luminous procession and in a sort of celestial concubinage. The heavenly City is indeed seen by the dreamer, sparkling with incomparable lights, while a procession of virgins is led by the Lamb against a background of intoxicating music. After which he awakes. 3. Pearl promises, therefore, to be a secular poem, consisting in a kind of exquisitely coloured and heraldic idyll instead of an apologia or homiletic elegy preceded by a courtly prelude. Its length is justified by the paraphrase of the Gospel parable of the vineyard10 and of the vision of John’s heavenly Jerusalem. The more weighty the subject, the more it loses its exquisitely airy freshness when describing the dreamlike fantasy. In other words, it might appear, at first, to be a courtly lay by a knight harping on the death of a lady; in fact, the identity of the speaker is only revealed in the final lines, so the ambiguity is kept up throughout, and the entire narration might very well be the desperate lament of a lover who has lost his exquisitely pure beloved. The urgent request to sublimate all erotic feelings, and the hymn raised to chastity and continence – above all the stern prohibition 8 9 10

Reiterated exhortations to humility and reminders of divine forgiveness are delivered in heartfelt, stern sing-song tones that foreshadow Eliot’s Four Quartets (as noted, too, by Davenport 1978, 40). The fact that the jeweller is accused of lacking humility but turns the tables on the girl, by accusing her of the same fault, when she boasts of being a queen, bride of Christ and possibly superior to the Madonna, is involuntarily humorous. The interpretation of this notoriously enigmatic parable is interesting: it seems that Pearl – who died when only two years old – is rewarded by God in the same way as all the saved, no account being taken as to how long they have lived on earth, inasmuch as they have lived, above all, risking the danger of damnation.

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to enter, impure, into the divine area of the blessed, firstly by crossing the stream, and secondly by coming to the ‘tower’ – cause one to suspect an expurgated metaphor and be aware of too palpitating an underlying sensuality to dismiss some kind of erotic relationship.11 The man’s plea suggests a sensual lover and some brusquely interrupted relationship; it suggests then a lover who feels rebuked and taken to task by his pure, celestial vestal virgin. Traditionally, the narrator has been identified as a father who has lost his daughter,12 although the text only calls her ‘my lyttel quene’. Critics mention Dante and the Roman de la Rose, as texts underlying the poem; but the courtly style presents elements and refined metaphors, as well as other theological and far-fetched details (‘He gef me myght and als bewté; / In Hys blod He wesch my wede on dese / And coronde clene in vergynté / And pyght me in perles mascelle’),13 all of them foreshadowing metaphysical and Mannerist sensibilities. Pearl, however, is chiefly the prototype of all subsequent English allegories based on the marvellous, those that conceal vague counsels to pursue Christian virtues and harping on the themes of temperance and humility. It has the same iambic rhythm and the same, or similar, cadences as Coleridge’s two main ballads, which is why it also reminds one of the poetry of the founder of the English neoStilnovo, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Pearl could indeed be taken as a draft for the nineteenth-century poet’s first poem – The Blessed Damozel – which is about the sorrow of the lover, who converses from the opposite bank of ‘impure earth’ with his beloved, as she looks down upon him from the ‘gold bar of heaven’ (there is no river between the lovers, in Rossetti, but the starry spaces between earth and the Damozel’s heavenly dwelling).14 11 12 13 14

Well understood by J. Gilbert in Brewer and Gibson 1997, 59, insinuating, however, that between the father and daughter there is a hint of incest. At l. 483 he mentions that she is two years old. ‘He gave me power and beauty, / He washed with his blood all earthly stain, / He crowned me with virginity / And adorned me with immaculate pearls’. The celestial concert is played with the aid of an instrument that was later to be mentioned by Rossetti, known as the ‘cytole’. One of the Virgin’s five serving maids is a ‘Margaret’. D. G. Rossetti is not often recalled as influenced by this poem, except by Olivero 1930, xi, who includes a number of comparisons with Pre-Raphaelite paintings on the following page.

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The maiden in Pearl is grimmer, less covertly sensual than Rossetti’s. She gets onto her platform, puts on her spectacles, so to speak, and lectures, knowing all the scholastic ins and outs.15 There is no information as to the context, and the roles are much stylized. What we would like to know is where, when and how the action of the poem takes place.16 What is the social role of the protagonist/narrator? There is an enigmatic ‘prince’ who is briefly mentioned in the last section of the poem, and one is uncertain as whether he should be identified as Christ or as an enlightened vassal, in whose court this evanescent, courtly episode is supposed to have occurred. 4. I mentioned above that there is a legitimate doubt as to whether Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were actually composed by the same author. If the author of both is the same person, the second poem testifies to a more worldly, varied and relativistic mindset, when describing the knightly world. The allegorical and pedagogical scheme is looser, and less marked.17 The text shows this more advanced status18 in the meta­ narrative layer. Again and again the author states that the tale has been written down, but that it was conceived and should be considered as oral; time and again, he calls attention to the tale itself, pointedly explaining and exhibiting the author’s strategic choices, such as the leaps forward, the compressions and the digressions that have been planned and weighed

15

16 17 18

Her immediate promotion to bride of Christ, although flanked by a further 144,000 other virgins, is based on Matthew’s vineyard parable and on the celebration staged in heaven when a lost lamb is brought back to the fold, to be treated in exactly the same way as the lambs, which have never been lost, are treated. The initial lines allude to the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin on 15 August. Bowers 2001 states that Richard II’s grief over the death of his queen, Anne of Bohemia, occasioned the poem. As a further proof, Cleanness, if its author is the same as that of Gawain, in paraphrasing the story of Sodom and Gomorrah condemns perverted sex, but approves its righteous practice. Some say that Gawain was written earlier, and was dictated by impetuous youthfulness, whereas Pearl is more mature, more theological and official. BAUGH, vol. I, 237 n. 19, is one of the many who discuss the poems in the order I am following, but suggests, rather weakly, that the order in the manuscript should be taken as the chronological order in which the poems were composed.

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up, in order for the tale not to be boring, but, above all, entertaining for its audience. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is thus the second, great anonymous poem of the English Medieval period, after Beowulf. Pearl is heavily didactic; Sir Gawain is not, as it manages to be gripping and riveting almost to the end, thanks to its carefully organized plot, its wellbalanced episodes divided among 101 stanzas. To this constructive gift one must add the author’s ability as an illuminator, miniaturist, scenic director: he minutely and technically describes how the knights are armed before combat; he lists the tiniest details as to how game is disembowelled, during a hunt, and the bloody aspects of beheadings are dispassionately itemized and the interludes depicting winter or moorland landscapes are exquisitely defined in delicate word-pictures. The characters are, or become, aware of living or listening to an improbable, dream-like or marvellous experience no less than the reader, who shares this very embarrassment right from the prelude, when the curtain rises on an Arthurian world that, at the time, was the end-point after the Homeric and Roman historical cycles. In the end, the moral of the first poem is the opposite of the other. Man is weak in Pearl and the dreamer, although a father, trembles with scarcely repressed sensuality, whereas the Pearl is a mirror of virtue and of the sublimation of the flesh. In Gawain the male desperately resists the appeals of the senses, and the author transmits a covertly misogynous message. At times, a kind of Everyman’s morality seems to emerge from the tale, as Gawain is tempted by the devil or desperately fences with Death.19 One might be witnessing here that kind of merging process of the Teutonic or, by then, Celtic20 myths with the Christian, which we mentioned regarding Beowulf.21 If this is true, the actants are inverted or deformed. The chatelaine thrice tempts an 19

See Burrow 1966, 121–2, 129, 140. Burrow, however, systematically underestimates the objectively sinister aspects of the castle and of the Green Knight, which he interprets as totally domesticated, also insisting on an irreprehensible Gawain who dexterously juggles with the three basic rules of chivalry: clannesse (purity), cortaysye (courtesy) and trawþe (loyalty). 20 The most ancient form of the challenge and of the beheading is in Fled Bricrend, an Irish legend (CHI, vol. I, 327–8). 21 The game of beheading and the parallel exchanges are anthropologically derived from the Celtic tradition.

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Adam who resists her; she has a kind of alias or double in the horrible, evil ‘Morgan le Fay’, who may be meant as her even more seductive metamorphosis, to enable her to be a more formidable temptress. The temptation of the three kisses recalls the betrayal in Gethsemane; they are kisses received from a Judas and, due to human weakness, returned. Confirming the allusion to the Sanhedrin, ‘bi þat þe coke hade crowez and cakled bot þryse’.22 Gawain yields and compromises, accepting the belt, which he believes to be magical and capable of saving his life, above all promising not to say anything to anybody. The unnamed fellow traveller, who attempts to deter Gawain from his deadly combat against the Green Knight, reminds one of Herod trying to persuade the three Wise Men to follow his directions, or could be taken as a stand-in for Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness. Nonetheless, Gawain’s staggering adventures, that keep the reader holding his or her breath, prove, in the last stanzas, to be one of those colossal hoaxes or jokes that English theological literature was to be so full of. 23 5. At the court in Camelot, all the knights of the Round Table beam joyfully, thanks to the new golden age and dance, drink toasts and celebrate as the thanes had done in Beowulf ’s mead-hall. Nonetheless, a series of imperceptible signals warns us of a measure of Ariosto-like naïvety. Arthur is slightly ridiculous or, at least, childishly stubborn, refusing to dine, unless he can listen to a marvellous tale of a challenge between knights. As nobody accepts the challenge thrown down by the newly arrived and gigantic Green Knight,24 Arthur himself boldly comes forward, but Gawain intervenes 22

‘the cock had croaked and cried only three times’. The scriptural quotations and allusions attributed to the Gawain poet are everywhere and it is somewhat surprising that they are not generally noticed, even in R. Neuhauser, ‘Sources II: Scriptural and Devotional Sources’, in Brewer and Gibson 1997, 257–75. 23 See for instance the joke woven by Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday (Volume 7, § 45.2). 24 D. Brewer, ‘The Colour Green’, in Brewer and Gibson 1997, 181–90, after a very learned analysis of current opinions, reaches the astonishing conclusion that the meaning of this colour is ‘to be found in a wide range of possibilities’ and confirms the variability or perhaps even ‘the inexistence of its implications’ (190). The first later titles that spring to mind are The Green Child, Herbert Read’s only novel, and The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch (Volume 7, § 68.4 n. 11, and Volume 8, § 150.6).

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and takes the king’s place. From this point onwards, Gawain will take on a disarmingly ingenuous, slightly mentally retarded role.25 The way he hacks off the knight’s head is told in chilling, anatomical detail; the green knight takes his leave, by causing his own chopped off head to speak, while he grasps it, dangling from its green locks, as a puppeteer holds a puppet.26 There is no getting away from the fact that the pact governing the duel between Gawain and the Knight is absolutely senseless, as per the canons of medieval marvellous tale-telling, and even more senseless, if modern canons, regulating our contemporary conscience, are taken into account. If an axe blow is properly given, no second blow can be returned. Just as Arthur cultivates and controls his suspension of disbelief, the narrator pretends to consider the stupid, senseless rules as sacred. Chrétien27 teaches us how common it was for knights to conceal their names, and Gawain, who does not know his challenger’s name, also accepts a deadly riddle: to get himself killed, he will have to wander, without any indications, searching for the green knight’s abode, exactly one year after their first encounter. A few wise members of the court lament that he is fated to unavoidable death, but Gawain himself proclaims valiantly that he would rather die, than give up his mission. Once the initial scene has been told, the pace of the tale speeds up, summing up various valorous and miraculous deeds, such as for instance a fight against dragons, which Gawain carries out on his way towards the Green Chapel. When he reaches a castle, which he has been told is very near his destination, one is impressed by a kind of I agree with S. N. Brody in MAR, vol. I, 168–74, who draws attention to the author’s aporias, uncertainties, incongruities and deliberate ambiguities recalling those in Chaucer’s Troilus in emphasizing the diminishing credibility of romances towards the end of the fourteenth century. In this context, some have even argued that Gawain can be defined an ‘anti-romance’. 26 The holly shown by the Green Knight upon his arrival is not mentioned in the following stanzas. His gigantic axe too is left with Arthur when he departs, and is eyed by the courtiers with religious awe. Gawain does not take the axe with him when, a year later, he leaves for the Chapel; he only bears his sword and lance, as he does not intend to fight, but merely offer himself to be beheaded. The axe, with which the Knight threatens to chop off Gawain’s head, is of a new, Danish kind. 27 As in this poet’s chronicles, Gawain’s horse is called Gringolet. 25

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atmosphere that will be imitated28 by Keats in his ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and by Coleridge in Christabel, as the beautiful chatelaine and wife of the hospitable lord of the castle is accompanied by a sinister, unsightly old hag. Exchanging secret signals, Gawain and the lord of the castle, who knows the way to the Green Chapel, establish a pact to exchange what they will hunt down over the next three days with each other. The stay at the castle, which threatens to distract Gawain from his mission and even cause him to forget it altogether, thus overstepping the time by which it has to be accomplished, is the only overlong episode in the whole tale. It is meant to show us the immaturity of a hero who is fully human, and thus, not, or at least less, heroic. In the meantime, Gawain is fast asleep, rather than mustering all his inner reserves to tackle the forthcoming duel, and the chatelaine enters his room and unashamedly offers herself to him. This temptation is repeated on two successive nights and Gawain, in a semi-unconscious state, resists her overtures with great difficulty, only accepting her burning kisses. The hunts are simultaneous and parallel: one is real, the other figurative. In the figurative hunt, the tone is no longer epic, but farcical. On the third night, the semi-naked, very provocative chatelaine attempts a third assault and, after being again repulsed, gives Gawain a belt which is supposed to endow whoever wears it with magical powers. This scene, too, has comical and farcical undertones, as Gawain has no gift to give her in exchange, as he had left Arthur’s court without baggage or attendants. On his way to the Chapel, he is vainly dissuaded and refuses the possibility of becoming a ‘cowardly knight’. For the first time he suspects that a little hill with two mysterious clefts might be the cavern of a devil, which he has been drawn to. The atmosphere is like, or perhaps parodies, the death combat between Beowulf and the monsters, when Gawain, trusting in God, offers his head to the Green Knight, who has arrived. Gawain, at least, has enough common sense to dodge the knight’s blow, as if realizing, at the last moment, how absurd the trial is. When the second blow barely touches him, the Green Knight suddenly changes his aspect and reveals that he is actually Sir Bertilak, who blames him for the kisses Gawain had given his 28 This is a kind of optical illusion, as both Romantic poets composed their works before the first publication of this poem. It can be termed a topos, or shared theme.

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wife and for accepting the belt she had given Gawain. He has returned feigned, punitive blows for the kisses Gawain had accepted from his wife, as their mutual pact of exchanging the results of their hunting expeditions had established.29 Sir Bertilak thus reveals himself as a kind of good magician, who ordered his wife to give Gawain the belt to make him believe that it was magical. Wisely, he excuses Gawain for having moved his neck to save his life. Gawain has committed venial sins, merely in thought, but he also recognizes that uncontrolled erotic impulses can affect upright behaviour and offers himself to be killed. Sir Bertilak forgives him, admonishing him that the Gospel orders mankind to follow the law of forgiveness. In the course of the rapid conclusion, Gawain censures the ‘Ewig-Weibliche’ that had damned Adam, Samson and Solomon. Morgan le Fay, in an evidently Manichaean plan, is a diabolical principle and agent, which man can limit, but not eliminate. She has the Mephistophelian task of causing good men to stray from the right path (although she only means to frighten Guinevere). When Gawain begs him to explain, Sir Bertilak reveals that he had been transformed by Morgan le Fay into the terrible Green Knight and had been sent to put to the test the resolution and valour of the knights of the Round Table. She was the ugly old hag seen at the court. Gawain returns to King Arthur, where he is triumphally welcomed and all the knights decide to wear a green belt to honour his valour.30 6. The alliterative, secular, salty Wynnere and Wastoure31 (believed to be composed around 1352 because of internal evidence, and attributed to a North-West Midland author), unfolds simulating the device of the ‘mask of age’, that is begins with a general remark on the degeneration of current times. There are allusions or clearly defined descriptions of historical facts such as the Black Death of 1348. Adopting the overused contrivance of a dream, the author imagines the saver and the waster before a king in judgement in his tent, where each of them presents the reasons justifying their opposite choices. No verdict is forthcoming, as the poem was 29 Whenever he returns from hunting, Gawain always embraces and kisses Sir Bertilak. 30 This close may be a celebration of the recent institution (1354) of the Order of the Garter. 31 The Saver and the Waster.

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interrupted after 500 lines. Apart from the theme that is being debated and the historical aspects, Wynnere and Wastoure offers a rich variety, even bordering on unnecessary prolixity, of descriptions, such as those of the legendary armour, of the helmets surmounted by fantastic tableaux, of the pastimes, of the guzzling and even of the types of food and game; so that one is given a vivid, detailed, realistic portrayal of life in the busy town taverns. The prologue of the twin poem The Parlement of the Thre Ages32 predictably consists in the description of a hunter’s careful arrangements to hunt fallow deer on a traditionally radiant May morning, when he suddenly has a kind of vision-like dream in which he, too, is visited by three picturesque beings, representing the three ages of man. The poem ends and Old Age ventures into a wide-ranging account of historical anecdotes, in order to prove that death is invincible. § 13. Gower* Born into a well-to-do family in Kent (but of Yorkshire origins), a tradesman, financial speculator, estate agent, man of law and the owner 33

32

‘Parliament’ in the sense of ‘debate’, or débat.

*

Complete Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols, Oxford 1899–1902. An edition of Confessio Amantis in verse and in modern English (abridged by a third) is edited by T. Tiller, Harmondsworth 1963; there is another edition by R. A. Peck, Toronto 1980. The Major Latin Works of John Gower, ed. E. W. Stockton, Seattle, WA 1962; Selections from John Gower, ed. J. A. W. Bennett, Oxford 1968. G. G. Fox, The Mediaeval Sciences in the Works of John Gower, Princeton, NJ 1931; LEW, 198–222 (Gower as the master of plain style, synthesis, non-inclusion, an accomplished chiseller of verse, with a poor sense of vision, but skilled in intensive narrative; the eternal poet of the allegory of love: pages now slightly outdated on the ‘parallelism between erotic and moral law’, elegantly contested in the book quoted below by Fisher 1965, chapter IV, 135–204); M. Wickert, Studien zu John Gower, Köln 1953; J. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer, London 1965 (overburdened by an archival, bibliographical and documentary approach, rather than an attempt to interpret the work; argues that the objective of Confessio Amantis is to show that ‘unity and national peace can be fostered by love, under the guidance of a king’, rather than the ‘disavowal of romantic love’ [192]); BRP, passim; P. J. Gallacher, Love, the Word, and Mercury: A Reading of John Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’, Albuquerque, NM 1975;

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of two manors, John Gower (ca. 1330–1408) was sufficiently leisured to become acquainted with most of the cultural environment of his times. He became a very gifted linguist, an erudite bibliophile and the compiler of three imposing and (of their kind) important works, illustrious within their particular genre. Having taken up residence in London towards the end of the 1370s in the suburb of Southwark, he became friendly with Chaucer, who gave him power of attorney over his affairs during one of his absences and paid him affectionate – and humorous – homage in his works. We also know that he married a certain Agnes, perhaps his second wife and probably his nurse when he lost his sight in his old age. He was buried in Southwark Priory (now Southwark Cathedral), where his tomb is surmounted by a recumbent statue of him, his head supported by the three books that made him famous. Gower’s literary trilingualism, a primacy unrivalled even by Joyce or Beckett, is not synchronic, but subsequent, and to some extent ascensional: from French to Latin and then to English, in that order. Written in a somewhat artificial Anglo-Norman, far removed from Parisian French, is his Mirour de l’Omme, also known by the title of Speculum meditantis, unearthed as late as 1895 and handed down to us in a single manuscript. This encyclopaedic work is dedicated to man’s moral and religious life and shows the path to salvation. Its allegorical and prophetic narrative is based on the contest between the devil and human conscience for supremacy over man, who is redeemable through the exercise of his free will. This skeletal frame is padded out with a complex convolution of details and sub-specifications.1 His Vox clamantis in Latin, dated 1382, and based on Wat Tyler’s Peasants’ Revolt of the previD. Pearsall, ‘Gower’s Narrative Art’, PMLA, 81 (1966), 475–84, and Gower and Lydgate, Harlow 1969, 5–22; Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis, Cambridge 1983; R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion, Woodbridge 1990; K. Ollson, John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis, Cambridge 1992; D. Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics, Minneapolis, MN 2003. 1

Another work written in Anglo-Norman is Cinkante Balades, dedicated to King Henry IV. This work is more widely known, and often more highly acclaimed, than Gower’s other less significant and marginal works.

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ous year, focuses on a second tangible example of decadence in history, while presaging the ominous future lying in store for the nation unless it repents. The tone is that of a Ruskin ante litteram.2 The two versions of this poem3 reveal a change in Gower’s political and moral attitude: the first apparently absolves King Richard II of all responsibility; the second holds him accountable, while hailing his successor Henry IV as the saviour of the world. This uncompromising apocalyptic moralism is mitigated in Confessio Amantis, although Gower’s good-natured disposition is to be taken with a pinch of salt. His cantankerous nature had, in the meanwhile, become known to the public ever since Chaucer’s understatement – ‘moral Gower’ – had made it clear that his friend had his phobias and bêtes noires, for instance lawyers and Lollards. He was what we would term nowadays a right-wing intellectual. A typical country squire whose income from his estates provided him with a comfortable living, he strenuously opposed any kind of change or subversion of the established order. 4 No courtier, and a man not actively engaged in court life, he enjoyed a virtually unlimited intellectual independence. 2. Confessio amantis is Gower’s most important work for our purposes, inasmuch as it was written in Middle English and in the variety spoken in London, despite Praz’s insistence on Vox clamantis being his best work, in the light of the tribute paid to the latter by Legouis and Cazamian. Highly popular, it was handed down in forty-nine illuminated manuscripts,5 and printed by Caxton in the late fifteenth century. According to the Prologue, the work was devised in a single day, when King Richard invited the poet to enter the royal barge on the Thames and suggested the theme of the poem, 2 3 4 5

Specifically of the two ‘Storm cloud’ lectures (Volume 6, § 48.3–4). We hardly need to add that Gower’s title echoes St John the Baptist’s voice ‘crying out in the desert’. Gower was a ‘constant reviser’ (Pearsall 1969, 9), as is also confirmed by C. S. Lewis (LEW, 204). Cf., in Fisher 1965, 97, the view of Gower as an ‘excellent topic for a Marxist analysis’ of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie. On the basis of these manuscripts, we can date a first version in 1390, a second in 1392–1393. The third, as I am saying, deleted a few laudatory lines dedicated to Chaucer. The text reproduced in the Macaulay edition follows the Fairfax 3 MS. On this issue cf. Fisher 1965, in particular 125–6.

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lamenting the scarcity of poets writing in ‘our English’. Gower, heartened by Chaucer’s success, welcomed the proposal not only with determination but also with enthusiasm, and composed a poem of over 3,000 lines, the first version of which dates from 1390. As in Chaucer, the structure follows that of Boccaccio’s masterpiece, with a narrative frame comprising approximately 100 tales presented as exempla. According to the convention of the period, an elderly lover approaches Venus, who directs him to confessor Genius, who guides him through a highly complex process of soul-searching and, at the end of an unbelievably lengthy sitting, purifies and vaccinates him, that is, makes him adept at spiritual, Stilnovo-like love. However, the frame adopted by Boccaccio merges with a second, native and far from obsolete tradition, both in prose and in poetry, of the ‘pricks’ and ‘pangs’ of conscience described in the manuals of good conduct, in the hermits’ handbooks and in the manuel des pechiez. The priest confesses and absolves the lover singling out each of the seven deadly sins and calling attention to a vast range of other key issues and disputes in medieval philosophy (such as – and above all – the duties of a ruler). Love, even sensual passion, has its legitimate place in Christian life. This was endorsed even in mystical treatises, on condition that it remained subservient to the sovereignty of the established order, namely to self-control in every human sphere, and provided that it acknowledged the divine principle of universal harmony. The analogy with Pearl and with the poems attributed to the Pearl and Gawain poet is highlighted in the eighth and final book, when Venus gives the aged penitent a rosary of black pearls bearing the letters Por reposer; at this stage, the poem pays further homage to the classic genre of the ‘dream’ and to the Roman de la Rose. Having now regained his senses, the old man counts the pearls, the symbols of purity and of his newly attained clannesse. The didactic intent, the overt and prolix allegorism, the implausibility of the frame and the chaotic accumulation of the exempla are among the reasons why Gower was subsequently underrated, scaled down or even harshly criticized as compared with Chaucer, thus settling the debate as to who should claim the title of the first poet in the lyrical tradition to succeed in leaving the earliest emblems of an English linguistic and literary consciousness. Gower, like Chaucer, is indeed a poet endowed with literary consciousness. He did not choose to conceal his name when he wrote Confessio amantis. It is no coincidence that his works, all meticulously handed down to posterity in their final, revised form, carry humorous Latin titles and

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sub-titles in the form of syntagmatic and syntactic parallelisms (noun plus genitive). He certainly was less talented and less entertaining than Chaucer. In a handful of lines omitted in his second edition, he has Venus applaud Chaucer, the poet of love; Chaucer, in turn, refers to Gower as a licentious poet in the Canterbury Tales.6 It is hard to say how they influenced each other but, in all probability, this was a two-way process. Gower lacks all sense of proportion; his story-telling flows smoothly, yet he is incapable of – or maybe he is not interested in – creating true-to-life characters. From a metrical point of view, the iambic tetrameter is endlessly and tediously repeated without any rhythmic break. Yet it cannot be denied that Gower is a central figure in English literature for having enriched it with a certain amount of inspirational material, as well as an encyclopaedia of medieval ‘lore’.7 Is his Confessio amantis of the same nature as the compilations, the miscellanies of the type of Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto,8 or of those of Orosius or Burton,9 which encompass medieval culture in its entirety? The fact that two centuries later Shakespeare drew from Gower the subject matter for his Pericles, and made the poet the mouthpiece of his prologues to each act, guides us towards a different opinion and appreciation. The paradigm of separation, division and disunity in Gower is extended towards human personality and becomes a kind of psychic foundation. After the Prologue, the eight books investigate the various forms and phenomenologies of disharmony. This is where the novelty of Gower resides: he heralds Shakespeare in his morbid probing – almost as if he had already undergone the same experience himself – of the abysses of the psyche, reminding us of the general opinion that Shakespeare was the first to explore man’s innermost recesses. The poem begins explicitly with an investigation into 6 The exempla at times outstep the boundaries of the bawdy, though these are extreme cases described to prove moral truths. Ifis, for example, is a girl who is married to another woman, and the two sleep in the same bed for some time. Cephalus begs the gods to prolong the night, while Aurora lies naked in his arms, and Gower agrees that he is right. 7 It is no mean task to have gathered together an English catalogue of tales that include Pyramus and Thisbe, Hercules and Dejanira, Narcissus, Acteon, Theseus and Philomela. 8 This work is considered to be the origin of the seventh book (CHI, vol. II, 149 n. 1). 9 In Book III, melancholy is dubbed one of the forms of anger and the penitent is provided with maxims, proverbs and medical diagnoses.

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the dynamics, physiology and phenomenology of pride and envy, the fourth book being dedicated to avarice and the eighth to fornication. These are essentially the self-same impulses that trigger Shakespeare’s tragedies. 3. From the opening words of the Prologue, Gower makes it clear that he intends to dissociate himself from the homiletic and didactic tradition, opting for a middle ground, so as not to unduly tire his readers: he proposes to put into practice the Horatian formula of combining moral profit with pleasure. Furthermore, like Dante, he believes in the progressive decadence of history, which can only be redeemed by a regeneration enacted by a new saviour. He is not, therefore, a cyclical thinker. A macroscopic chasm separates an ancient Golden Age from the present time, more precisely the sixteenth year in the reign of Richard II (which, incidentally, enables us to attribute a reliable date to the poem). Historiography has the task of identifying the virtues of the righteous in the past, and to impart their upright behaviour to the present generation, with a view to counteracting its evil. However, the cause of this progressive decadence is something known only to God. Therefore the Prologue launches an indictment against political, moral and above all ecclesiastical degeneration, accusations which were fairly widespread towards the end of the fourteenth century. Such degeneration is to be attributed to the triumph of hatred over love and of disorder over order. There is a Dantean echo, restrained yet pungent, especially in his censure of the Church and clerics guilty of simony, and in his nostalgic veneration of primitive Christianity, poor and without apparatuses.10 Gower’s anger tends to overstep the mark as he mercilessly attacks them (we are in the period of the Great Schism of Avignon). The criticism levelled at the Lollards and at the absolute primacy of the Bible is equally as biting: ‘It were betre dike and delve / And stonde upon the ryhte feith, / Than knowe al that the bible seith / And erre as somme clerkes do’.11 When Gower casts doubts on the chastity of the clergy, and accuses them of a series of other vices, he is echoing Langland to the letter. Gower is not exactly a fatalist, but a follower of the voluntaristic school of thought: the world does not fall apart 10 The example of King Midas seems to be applicable to the criticism of monetary economics, and to approve the principle of exchange in kind. 11 ‘Better one who digs and delves / And who has never erred in his faith / Than one who knows the Bible word for word / And goes wrong, as some clerks do’.

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by chance, but due to the weak will of those who have the power to rectify it. Thus, throughout the course of history, the ‘golden world’ of the history of Israel was followed by a succession of ages of metals that are less and less noble. The commandments and practice of the good governor are laid down and discussed in the seventh book of the poem in the form of a report on the education of Alexander the Great by Aristotle. The frame of the poem can hardly be acquitted from the accusation of being inelegant, pretentious and passively reproduced from the models in circulation. Where, and how, and in how many sessions does this endless confession take place? No information is provided as regards the time and place, also because rites and myths are inevitably devoid of these. As for the month, however, this is certainly May, when the birds are chirping, and Gower enters a wood. He is in the throes of the sorrows of love, because a medieval courtly ‘lover’ is, by definition, desperate and yearning. Strangely enough, it is Venus herself who directs Gower towards the confessor Genius. The contradiction is blatantly obvious and, indeed, the poet’s aim is twofold: first of all to set up a debate centred on human vices and to foster deterrence from them, and secondly to create the identikit of the spiritual lover.12 Gower constructs and personalizes, in an embryonic phase, a dramatic and cathartic mechanism, inspired by the nascent dramatic genre of the morality play. The confession takes the form of a dialogue between the two hypostases of a confessor on the one hand and a penitent on the other. The Dantesque trail is undeniable: the confessor plays the role of a Virgil, who answers in great detail all his pupil’s theoretical questions, dispels his doubts and solves his perplexities. The exempla are based on the two typologies (persuasive, but more often dissuasive) employed by Dante; in the second case, they tend to comply, as in the episode of the avaricious ‘Emperor’ Crassus (in Book V, where the Romans pour molten gold into his throat) with the Dantean contrappasso or fitting punishment. Critics generally agree that Gower lacks the typically English sense of humour, yet the hoary penitent provides comical relief when he persistently protests his innocence and lack of involvement in the most grievous and contemptible sins. The exempla are derived from a plethora of sources, in primis from the Bible, history, legend and above all mythology, with Ovid as an inexhaustible

12

Pearsall 1969, 13.

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provision.13 Thus they reflect a certain amount of variation within the range of the marvellous, the metamorphic, the sensational, the fabulous, the picturesque, the pathetic or simply of everyday routine. However, Gower also invents a few simple and successful folktales of his own, as well as a few crisp, outspoken apologias, such as the story of Bardus, the poor carter (Book V) who saves the life of a rich man by pulling him out of a pit. The rich man is by no means grateful, yet Bardus will be rewarded by the monkey and the snake, also rescued by him. Every capital vice is introduced in general terms, and the range of cases is subsequently extended to encompass human love: for instance, a man can be literally intoxicated but also intoxicated with love. Gower’s ‘lover’ thus takes on features and contours that herald the perfect and impeccable knight as the embodiment of courtly manners, that is Castiglione’s courtier or the Renaissance gentleman. Gentilesse is not an innate quality, but fit, that is to say, it can be acquired.14 § 14. Langland* Legends and common opinion are clearly divided on the issue of the author of the poem Piers Plowman, conventionally assumed to be 15

13

14

*

The Greek subject matter is drawn from non-Homeric sources, for instance the Roman de Troie, with the amalgamation of various other apocryphal and bizarre episodes. A few anecdotes on wit and the ability to escape from difficult situations, such as an episode concerning Socrates, are derived from Boccaccio. The Testament of Love by Thomas Usk, who was executed in 1388, also describes, in an idiosyncratic, contorted, obscure and at the same time rhetorical style that foreshadows Euphuism, an ambivalent conception of love, the woman being as both a concrete terrestrial entity and an allegory of love. Historical edition of the three versions A, B and C, ed. W. W. Skeat, 2 vols, Oxford 1886, 1965; the B-text, the most popular of the three (and the one I follow here), is edited by A. V. C. Schmidt, London 1978 and 1987; the C-text by D. Pearsall, London 1978; a fourth text, termed Z, anterior to text A, is edited by A. G. Rigg and C. Brewer, Toronto 1983. All four texts have now been edited by A. V. C. Schmidt, 3 vols, London and New York 1995–2008. The most up-to-date report on the question of the textual controversies, in which notice is given of an ongoing digital transcription of all the existing manuscripts of the poem, can be found in TLS, 7 October 2011, 27. A translation in modern English is Piers the Ploughman, ed. J. F. Goodridge, Harmondsworth 1959, 1986. J. J. Jusserand, Piers Plowman: A Contribution to the History of English Mysticism, Eng. trans., London 1894; T. P. Dunning, Piers Plowman: An Interpretation of the ‘A’

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William Langland or Langley.1 He is presumed to have been born in 1332 (probably illegitimately) into a family of landowners of humble origins in Shropshire or in Worcestershire, possibly in the town of Ledbury,2 and to have been educated in the mid-west area of the Malvern Hills, where he received a thorough grounding in theology and in the rule of Text, Dublin 1934; D. W. Robertson and B. F. Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition, Princeton, NJ 1951; R. W. Frank, Piers Plowman and the Scheme of Salvation, New Haven, CT 1957; M. W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse, New Brunswick, NJ 1962; J. Lawlor, Piers Plowman: An Essay in Criticism, London 1962 (a weighty, authoritative essay, meticulously subdivided into paraphrase and commentary and an extremely detailed general framework); E. Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, Oxford 1962, 1969; N. Coghill, Langland: Piers Plowman, London 1964 (an attempt at collating the three manuscripts); Interpretations of Piers Plowman, ed. E. Vasta, Notre Dame, IN 1968; Style and Symbolism in Piers Plowman, ed. R. J. Blanch, Knoxville, TN 1969; Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, ed. S. S. Hussey, London 1969; P. Calì, Allegory and Vision in Dante and Langland, Cork 1971; E. D. Kirk, The Dream Thought of Piers Plowman, New Haven, CT and London 1972; D. Aers, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory, London 1975; D. Lets, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory, London 1975; P. Martin, Piers Plowman: The Field and the Tower, London 1979; M. E. Goldsmith, The Figure of Piers Plowman, Cambridge 1981; A. P. Baldwin, The Theme of Government in Piers Plowman, Cambridge 1981; J. Coleman, Piers Plowman and the ‘Moderni’, Roma 1981; M. Stokes, Justice and Mercy in Piers Plowman, London 1984; A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. J. A. Alford, Berkeley, CA 1988; H. White, Nature and Salvation in Piers Plowman, Cambridge 1988; W. Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism, Cambridge 1989; M. Godden, The Making of Piers Plowman, London 1990; J. Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text, London 1990; T. L. Steinberg, ‘Piers Plowman’ and Prophecy: An Approach to the C-Text, New York and London 1991; L.-A. Crowley, The Quest for Holiness: Spenser’s Debt to Langland, Milano 1992; J. S. Wittig, William Langland Revisited, Boston, MA 1997; J. M. Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition, Notre Dame, IN 2007; S. A. Kelen, Langland’s Early Modern Identities, New York 2007; L. Warner, The Lost History of Piers Plowman, Philadelphia, PA 2011; S. Wood, Conscience and The Composition of ‘Piers Plowman’, Oxford 2012. 1

2

His nickname, Longe Wille, was due to his height and thinness; his surname, which similarly means ‘long field’, possibly originated from his place of birth. He was in the habit of dressing in beggars’ clothing and was considered mad or bizarre by some, due to his irreverent attitude towards those in power. Both references are included in the poem, in the opening lines of Passus XV. As conjectured by Coghill 1964, 12–13, by virtue of the interrelation of the surrounding landscape and the magical atmosphere described in the opening of the poem.

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St Benedict at the local monastery. He took minor orders, without however embracing the priesthood,3 and may have died in 1387 or, according to other sources, in 1400, in London, where he had emigrated and lived in poverty with his wife and daughter, working as a clerk and topping up his meagre income by reciting prayers in the funeral ceremonies of the wellto-do. Piers Plowman, the only work attributed to him, enjoyed enormous popularity at the time, as attested by the over fifty manuscripts handed down to us of the three versions, labelled A, B and C by the philologist Skeat, and approximately dating respectively from 1367 (certainly not prior to 1362),4 1377–1379, and from 1385–1386. Thus Langland, an author unius libri,5 devoted his entire life to the revision and amplification of the poem. Nevertheless, not all scholars are unanimous in attributing it to just one author: some consider the work to be the fruit of as many as five different writers, among whom a certain John But.6 However, it was not until 1813 that the poem was reprinted after 1561.7 The period in which the poem was composed (around 1380, and subsequently during the last two decades of the fourteenth century) coincided with the first revolutionary or reform movement within the Church and in society. On the literary front, this atmosphere of innovation is echoed in Piers Plowman. In an unprecedented attack on the hierarchical structure of the Church, the author fervently defends the need for an austere, unadorned religion, launching the same accusations that were destined over the centuries to become constant in the literature of religious dissent, from the Reformation up to the present time. More precisely, the poem is linked to Wyclif and the Lollards and to the 1381 uprising, and it is no coincidence that the hero in the title is a 3 4 5 6 7

This has been explained by some as a sudden lack of resources on the part of his family for his upkeep in the convent. Coghill 1964, 16–17, on the other hand, suggests that Langland felt unworthy of the priesthood due to his resurgent sensuality. This is substantiated by an internal reference to a cyclone, later to become proverbial, on Saturday, 15 January 1362. Critics are unanimous in affirming that Langland is not the author of Piers Plowman’s Creed; however, in all probability, he is the author of a second alliterative poem, Richard the Redeless, on the deposition of the king of the same name. Coghill 1964, 8. However, this opinion, advanced in particular by J. M. Manly in his chapter on the poem in CHI, vol. II, 1–48, is now discredited. 1st edn Crowley, 1551.

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‘ploughman’, although he is not the protagonist of the poem. Moreover, the ferocious attack on the thirst for riches, and the consequent exaltation of material poverty, was the dominant theme of the preachings of the mendicant orders.8 The author is not, however, in favour of the king being dethroned; he simply urges him to play an active role, in the same way that the workers of the fields should refrain from laziness and indolence. Virtually all – or at least most of – Langland’s vision is centred on the supremacy of St Paul’s notion of charity, as expressed in the famous passage in 1 Cor. 13, 1,9 and on the suppression of avarice and ecclesiastical and political simony. In the field of human vices and in their ideal order of succession, the first figure on the scene is Lady Mede, whose alter ego is gain or profit, the worst of all the iniquities afflicting the world. The first part of the poem reaches its climax in the dispute on forgiveness: Piers, already a righteous man, is made to believe that he is in need of a written pardon in order to gain salvation, but he becomes suspicious and tears up the paper. The formal knowledge of the Law and of the Scriptures is inferior to love, charity and honesty. What counts is conscience, genuine integrity and concrete deeds, and this is the reason why the second part of the poem hinges on the ways in which salvation can be attained. Piers is the embodiment of an innate form of religion based on a genuine sense of unpretentiousness and integrity, viewed as an anchor against the winds of change or degeneration. In one of his aspects he is the ‘good sower’, whose task is to keep his fields free from certain weeds, as well as the owner of the vineyard who employs his labourers in the Gospels. Will the dreamer and Piers the ploughman (his mirror-like self ) are two figures destined to acquire popularity in English literature as the first two clear-cut embodiments of the honest and upright citizen, the enemy of verbal ploys, only to a certain extent naїve, and a sort of opening link in the chain of the ingénus or of the ‘intelligent artisans’.10 Nevertheless, Piers Plowman is not a ‘comedy’,

8 9 10

St Francis and St Dominic are mentioned in XX, 251–2. Cf. Calì 1971, 126 n. 11, and 120 n. 3, where the critic’s just observation that ‘Fides sine operibus mortua est’ can be considered to sum up the intent of the poem. Lawlor 1962, 219.

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however much it may engage and debate with Dante.11 Langland is an obsessed, tormented soul, whose temperamental disposition infuses into the poem the rancour of the social nonconformist, instinctively suspicious of all highly professional categories, and convinced that the world is corrupt and rank. Thus Piers Plowman becomes an open-ended poem packed with suspense of an allegorical and theological nature by virtue of sudden, unexpected turns of events. The final victory of Good is apparently a foregone conclusion, while it is always at risk, and, with a lash of his tail, the Devil, or Antichrist, returns in full force to undermine the unity of the Church. In the end, Piers the ploughman, the human and superhuman hero, the hypostasis of the incarnate Christ, disappears off stage. The curtain falls upon this absent saviour, who leaves humanity – now at the mercy of the forces of evil – to fend for itself. Langland may not be a Protestant in pectore, as some have said, but he is perhaps already an existentialist contemplating a destabilized world and a decadent or lapsed humanity. He composes a genuine parable of the fall of the human condition from grace. 2. The language in Piers Plowman, purged of the last traces of refined Norman French, is alliterative, rugged, zesty, akin to the one of the common people that had been Anglo-Saxon. For all that, Piers is far from being easily accessible; on the contrary it is structurally unwieldy, repetitive in its subject-matter, and overflowing with abstruse erudition. It is a hotchpotch of allegories, a pot-pourri of quotations from the Bible and the Scriptures, an avalanche of aphorisms foreshadowing Robert Burton’s famous compilation. C. S. Lewis justly remarked12 that Langland ‘hardly makes his poetry into a poem’, and that Piers pales in comparison with Chaucer’s exemplary clarity. The three versions of the poem tend to become longer and longer due to the subsequent elaborations. Texts A and B undergo minimum variations until the twelfth Passus, which generates a sequence twice as lengthy as the first part. It can be argued that all three versions are the work of the same author; however, at times, the clarity and lucidity of the

11

More precisely, critics are divided on the hypothesis that Langland had read Dante. The poem is mainly influenced by certain types of French poetry on states of trance, such as Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century. 12 LEW, 161.

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text become so compromised as to justify those critics who accuse Piers of blatant incoherence. As laconically stated by J. J. Jusserand,13 ‘[Langland] est la victime et non le maître de sa pensée’. Stifled by its allegory and abstract personifications, Piers is devoid of any element of descriptivism or naturalism, nor does it venture to attain these. For this reason, in spite of the linguistic dissimilarities, it is more akin to Gower’s poem. The frame of a confession or of a maieutic dialogue, albeit within the illusion of a dream, appears to be a constant in fourteenth-century literature. Whereas Gower copiously exploited – or was to exploit – the mythological and literary exemplum in his most important compilation, Langland rarely indulges in this practice.14 However, Langland is even more well versed in quotations from the Scriptures and knows by heart entire sections of the Bible, which leads him to embellish his scriptural Latin quotations with a variety of popular aphorisms. The consequence is inevitably the usual interlinguistic medley. Gower’s diachronic succession of French, Latin and English is adopted and implemented synchronically by Langland, as he touches upon – in a pre-Joycean approach, that is to say, simultaneously – the registers of the three parallel languages of the period, and he grafts the Bible in Latin, together with the odd word or two in French, onto the broad substratum of the English language. In some cases, the end product constitutes a highly suggestive pastiche, with certain lines verging on the macaronic, such as the following: ‘For “quant OPORTET vient en place il ny ad que PATI”’.15 3. Due to the fact that medieval allegory in England died out as late as the end of the seventeenth century, Langland’s name has been automatically associated with a number of authors, and his writings have generated a stream of echoes and reverberations up to and including Bunyan (for Bunyan is, undoubtedly, the next link in the chain). For the same reason, with the decline of the genre after the end of the seventeenth century, he became – and remained – unpopular for two whole centuries. The 13 Quoted in CHI, vol. II, 24. 14 When Langland does not avail himself of mythology as a source of examples, he occasionally ventures into legendary and anecdotal explanations, such as in the legend of Mohammed and the dove in Passus XV. 15 X, 436. On the links with the fourteenth-century macaronic tradition cf. Schmidt 1987, xxxi.

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contemporary debate as to the purely literary merits of the poem, which critics generally consider to be rather limited, has been soon closed, whereas focus has been placed on other issues concerning the sources as well as the cultural and historical setting. Such issues include the importance of the philosophical debate and of its propagators as filtered through Langland’s vision; the legal theories of the period; the political and ideological ambiguities in the poem, which could – and still can – be considered as defending the status quo, while at the same time supporting the Lollards and the peasants.16 In this way, Piers has been downgraded to an instrumental and documentary text. As a result, we tend to overlook the fact that Piers Plowman embodies the greatest theological poem in the whole of English literature and is second only to Paradise Lost, inasmuch as both seek to ‘justify the ways of God to men’, both allegorize the contest between Christ and Satan and both reject the embellishments of rhyme in favour of the powerful expressiveness of the four-beat alliterative line, or of blank verse. The opening of the poem is a blaze of visionary and oneiric verse suggesting a deliberate adaptation of Dante,17 whose poem had been brought to a close approximately half a century earlier.18 The allegorical landscape – a tower, a dungeon and a field, albeit in the absence of the three wild beasts – is a clear and conspicuous variatio on the opening canto of the Inferno, and also Dantesque is Langland’s utopian yearning and dream of a reformed and morally righteous world. Praz refers to Langland as ‘the

16 17 18

Cf. D. Aers, ‘Piers Plowman e le tradizioni di protesta sociale e religiosa’, in MAR, vol. I, 182–206. The explanation of the allegorical vision is given by Lady Holy Church, the epitome of purity: the Tower symbolizes Truth, the Abyss Falsehood, namely the Devil, and the field the whole of mankind. Calì 1971 stages a risky tour de force to demonstrate the existence of a marked parallelism between the two poems by Dante and Langland, despite their essential differences; apart from the vague circumstance that the allegorical remedy remains unvaried – that is to say: know sin in order to defeat sin – the critic’s affirmation that Piers and Beatrice share ‘the same allegorical model’ (131) is particularly mystifying. Calì makes no attempt to clarify whether Langland had actually read Dante or not. Lawlor 1962, 253, says explicitly that Dante and Langland have little in common.

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little democratic Dante’,19 perhaps with the intention of placing emphasis on the word ‘little’, rather than on the word ‘democratic’. The fifty-year time shift did not, however, contribute to making Langland’s allegory a more natural one. It is probably more akin to Nordic allegory, that is to say, still immature and overburdened with detail. In Dante’s case, allegory may be dispensed with: his narrative is readable even within the context of human probability, the balance between the purely doctrinal, the homiletic, the famously deprecated ‘didactic’ and the solely realistic elements being always guaranteed. In Langland this is certainly not the case. Instead of simplifying, he deliberately complicates, amplifies, magnifies and re-opens debates that have already been concluded, thus becoming disorderly and pedantic. Piers remains a largely utopian and visionary figure taking the place of Dante’s ‘greyhound’ (from which Piers probably derives), namely the new legislator, the man sent by providence in the role of the alter Christus contemplated by Dante in order to regenerate Christianity. As in the case of Dante, the point at issue is whether Langland had a particular individual in pectore, or whether Piers was a mere hypostasis. Hopkins20 equated Langland and Chaucer in their defective scanning of verse, due to the oscillation in the pronunciation of the final e of individual words, and he traced in Langland’s poetry the use of ‘triple time’, a variety clarified by him in the letter to which I refer in the footnote. Given that over the years Langland had acquired the fame and stature of the greatest English Catholic poet, Hopkins inevitably felt obliged to voice his opinion not only on metrical issues. A second letter21 encloses an extremely critical peerto-peer assessment, from one religious poet to another. If, in his previous letter, Hopkins had admitted to not having read Piers Plowman, now, in October 1882, he claims to have done so, having reached the conclusion that ‘it is not worth reading’. Nevertheless, having identified in Langland’s work a distant forerunner of his sprung rhythm, the Hopkins of the future sonnet ‘Tom’s Garland’ and of the previous ‘communist letter’ could not but detect in Piers Plowman a foreshadowing of his social thinking – so 19 CLA, vol. II, 55. 20  Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, Oxford 1935, 107–8. 21 Ibid., 156.

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to speak – as clearly stated in the third Passus, where fair and equitable wages – fair pay, therefore, as opposed to gain and profit – is what oils the wheels of a just society: ‘That laborers and lewede [leodes] taken of hire masters, / It is no mannere mede but a mesurable hire. / In marchaundise is no mede, I may it wel avowe: / It is a permutacion apertly – a penyworth for another’.22 Recompense or reward is not frowned upon, whereas the corruptio of an optimum certainly is. Harry the ploughman in Hopkins’s sonnet of the same title is a direct descendant of Piers.23 Audacious modernist anticipations have even been detected by Gabriele Baldini,24 who notices in the sequence of events in the poem a foreshadowing of the stream of consciousness. That is not all: by its use of multiple styles and languages, and because Piers is in itself a ‘work in progress’, we inevitably end up at Finnegans Wake. Will dreams and, once awake, he narrates the events that took place in his dream; having finished his description, he goes back to sleep and resumes his dream; thus the work becomes a sort of uninterrupted Traumdeutung, the Middle English employed in the narration embodying, as I said, unconscious, subsequent aspects of Joycean macaronism in Finnegans Wake. Langland’s penultimate Passus prefigures a genuine case of oneiric juxtaposition, which is also the theme of the poem, namely that Piers the ploughman and Christ are one and the same person, in the same way that Earwicker embodies a variety of archetypal cyphers: ‘Thus I awaked and wroot what I hadde ydremed, […] In myddes of the masse, tho men yede to offryng, / I fel eftsoones asleepe – and sodeynly me mette / That Piers the Plowman was peynted al blody, / And com in with a cros bifore 22 ‘What labourers and lowly folk obtain from their masters / Is by no means profit, but adequate salary. / There is no gain in commerce, I may well assert that. / It is simply an exchange, one pennyworth for another’. 23 Like Langland, Hopkins also employs personification in his ‘terrible’ sonnets and could also be termed as an allegorical poet: see for example Fury in ‘No worst …’, or Despair in ‘Carrion Comfort’ or Patience in the sonnet of this title. In the second part of the poem Langland occasionally has recourse to extravagant and ‘metaphysical’ arguments which bear a certain similarity to a few passages in Hopkins’s sermons: see for instance the comparison of the Holy Trinity with a hand, its fingers and its palm (XVII, 140ff.). 24 BAL, 140–1.

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the comune peple, / And right lik in alle lymes to Oure Lord Jesu’.25 Critics understandably have a certain amount of difficulty in deciphering the ‘simultaneous identifications’ or the ‘fluctuations’ of Piers, who symbolizes the prophets, Christ, God the Father but, above all, the whole of humanity, like Joyce’s HCE. Just as we witness in Joyce a synchronic overlapping between Finnegan the bricklayer, the giant Finn McCool and Earwicker the innkeeper, Piers the ploughman is a mirror-like idealization of Will the Dreamer and vice versa. Both Langland and Joyce get the titles of their works wrong (Langland’s might have been more suitably entitled Will the Dreamer). ‘Circuitous’, 26 that is to say circular and concentric, is an appropriate term to define Langland’s train of thought. Regrettably, the oneiric visionary inspiration is not adequately elaborated in Langland, and the dream remains a ploy for this most diurnal of eschatological sermons. 4. The unit of measurement within the poem is the passus, an original Latin term coined, quoted and employed as it stands by Langland; the B-text consists of twenty, in addition to a general Prologue. Sequentially, the diegetic unit is the individual vision or the individual dream,27 and the poem narrates the visions dreamt by Will the Dreamer over a period of almost half a century. More precisely, the poem departs from a Prologue and winds through seven Passus, all of which constitute the first part, known as the Vision of Piers Plowman, or Visio; the second part is entitled Vita de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest (a triad of allegorical personifications interpreted in a wide variety of ways by critics, including the internal characters, which essentially represent subsequent levels, states and stages of the spiritual life) and comprises the remaining thirteen Passus. The dreamer of the visions 25

‘So I awoke and wrote what I had dreamt, […] In the midst of the Mass, while the people were placing their money in the collection box, / I fell asleep once more, and all of a sudden I dreamt / That Piers the ploughman was stained with blood, / And came in with a Cross amongst the common people, / And he was identical to our Lord Jesus in all his limbs’. 26 This is an adjective expressly used by Lawlor 1962 (157, 175 and passim, as well as ‘cyclic’ [228]). He also refers to ‘epiphanies’ (ibid., 162) to define Piers’s sudden apparitions. 27 The poem apparently comprises eight of Will’s visions; Skeat, on the other hand, counted eleven of them. The mystical works of Julian of Norwich (§ 8.4) also consisted of ‘visions’.

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described in the poem – an alter ego of Langland, not exactly Langland himself – dreams that he has embarked on a pilgrimage along these three stages of the gradus. The vision recounted in the Prologue – scenic in structure and of a pictorial nature, portraying a swarming and teeming of subsidiary scenes as in certain paintings by Bosch, Bruegel or Hogarth – is concerned with the multi-faceted humanity of his time. The dreamer’s gaze, which occasionally focuses on the righteous, is however riveted on phenomena of secular ambition, or vanity, but primarily on the economic exploitation of the peasantry and poor people by those in power. Even more prominent is the behaviour of the ruthlessly ambitious clerics and men of the Church. In the dream, the unexpected appearance of a king – or maybe the king – in the midst of the crowd is accompanied by an equally unexpected account, as an integral part of the dream, of the fable of the cat and mice, a tale that masks the attitude of the king towards his subjects and the relationship between monarchy and parliamentary government. The Parliament of Mice decides to bell the cat, or in other words the king, in order to monitor his actions and to keep them under control, but the faction inclined towards indifference or non-participation – or worse still, cowardice – is the one that prevails. Throughout the first part, the dominant theme is hinged on the poet’s censure of cupidity and hence avarice, as can be seen right from the onset in the episodes of Falsehood and Gain, incarnated in Mercy, a maiden gaudily rigged out and bejewelled, who represents fair and equitable remuneration, yet at the same time gain, namely the extra profit on what has been asked for and granted; this also therefore comprises usury. Langland always nurtures an authentic sense of deference towards the king figure and, at this stage of the poem, he is confident that the king, with the assistance of reason and conscience, will prevent and thwart the nefarious nuptials between Conscience and Mercy, the incarnation of Profit. These pseudo-Dantesque echoes are confirmed by the procession of the personified Seven Deadly Sins, each of which bows down in repentance. This time the confessions are not of an abstract nature, but are structured in such a way as to represent concrete episodes of contemporary English social life, exuberantly and salaciously sketched, as in the tale of the miser or the glutton. Piers the ploughman indicates the path towards Truth and convinces the penitents to help him attend to the pasture-lands, before they embark

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on the pilgrimage. A military leader, ploughman, sower, a genuine disciple of the apostles and fishers of men, Piers is a lowly tiller of the land endowed with the potential to command a cosmic crusade to return to Truth and Righteousness; however, his apathetic followers opt for non-participation. In the last Passus of the first part, a priest translates for Piers, ‘in simple English’, his ‘pardon’, making him aware of the fact that there exists no intercessor between man and God. Nor is there any guarantee that God may speak through his intermediaries in order to justify man who, on the contrary, must justify himself by performing good deeds, rather than by producing credentials to exempt him from his daily duties: ‘And so I leve leelly (Lord forbede ellis!) / That pardon and penaunce and preieires doon save / Soules that have synned seven sithes dedly. / Ac to trust on dise triennials – trewely, me thynketh, / It is noght so siker for the soule, certes, as is Dowel’.28 From the opening lines Piers Plowman tends towards asymmetry and disorder. The dreamer often finds himself having to point out that he is narrating a dream, and often forgets that he is doing so, thus allowing himself to be transported by an irresistible urge to preach and moralize. He is inclined to exaggerate in the repartee between an allegorical figure who is holding court and a sinner whom he harangues or indoctrinates. He occasionally succeeds in providing an effective – but above all grotesque – description of physical appearance and somatic idiosyncrasies, as well as of a few typical behavioural elements. He is unquestionably a master of fast-moving scenes packed with characters and panoramic descriptions. 5. From the beginning of the second part, and throughout the second group of thirteen Passus, Piers undergoes a striking change of pace and 28

‘So I firmly believe (The Lord forbid otherwise!) / That pardon, penance and prayers are the salvation of souls / That have seven times seven committed mortal sins. / But I am certainly convinced / That to trust in these indulgences is not so safe for the soul as is the desire to Do Well’ (VII, 177–81). Lawlor 1962, 79, who comments on Piers’s impulsive nature, interprets this controversial extract as the ploughman’s decision to advance from an altogether uncritical attitude towards religion to a passive and meditative one. In the pages that follow, Lawlor comments on the exceptional integrity and honesty of the priest when he insists on the fact that ‘pardon’ is not tantamount to an indulgence. On another occasion the critic comes to the conclusion that ‘deeds and actions […] are everything’ (81).

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proportion. There is no trace of diegesis, and the occasional touch of humour on the part of the poet is crushed underfoot in a cadence of lengthy, tiresome, unwieldy exhibitions of a purely theological nature, or in prolix paraphrases and biblical exegeses. Some of the topics concern the history of mankind from the Creation since Adam, related by Abraham in a new dream; the explanation of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; the Passion and Death of Jesus; the foundation of the Church; the threatening prospect of the Antichrist. The narration is overpowered by the author’s sermonizing, as he yields to the urge to plead and becomes totally immersed in his personifications. This is perhaps where the specifically inventive nature of the poem falls short and leans towards the genre and the rules of homiletic compilation under the pretext of an oneiric narrative frame. In this way, it resembles the typically interminable, cumbersome assemblages of exempla, and the handbooks of maxims such as Ormulum. This lack of inventiveness and creativity, this self-evident yielding of the poem to a forum for debate, substantiate, at least in part, the arguments of those critics who advance the hypothesis of a second or third author.29 On the subject of Dowel, Dobet and Dobest the accent is invariably placed on the prefix do,30 hence the outspoken criticism hurled at the mystifying and deceptive words of the friars in particular. Dame Studie’s lengthy tirade (Passus X) is hinged on the need for temperance and generosity and cautions us against theological arrogance and the avarice of the rich who donate nothing to the poor. In Passus XIII the dream is centred on a banquet in which the scholar gorges himself, while leaving just the crumbs for the dreamer. The way to salvation is always through love and poverty. The figure of Piers reappears just when the Antichrist is about to take by storm the castle of the united 29 Langland lays great emphasis on the legend of Trajan who, although unbaptized, was traditionally considered to have been saved and rescued from Hell. Another realistic encounter is the one between Will and Haukyn the baker who, guilty of having committed the Seven Deadly Sins, however benefits from the teachings of Patience, once more hinged on the need to lead a life of poverty; the man repents and the dream is temporarily suspended. We are thus offered both a vivid portrait and an authentic catalogue of vices and foul deeds. Another legend cited by Langland is that of Mohammed, demoted to a sorcerer. 30 As clearly stated by Lawlor 1962, 298.

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followers of Christ, already wounded in spirit; the Tree of Charity, tended by a team of workers under Piers’s guidance, is therefore the counterpart to the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. § 15. Chaucer* I: Stereotypes of courtly love and symptoms of modernity Were the metaphor of the human body to be applied to literature, with Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400) English literature ceases to 1

*

Works, ed. W. W. Skeat, 7 vols, London 1894–1897; in one vol. 1912; ed. F. N. Robinson, Boston, MA 1933, and, rev. edn, 1957, both now replaced by The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson et al., Boston, MA 1987; The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. J. H. Fisher, New York 1989, Boston, MA 2012. The Canterbury Tales, ed. M. Praz, Bari 1957, 1961, contains a still useful introduction (5–158). Life. Chaucer Life-Records, ed. M. M. Crow and C. C. Olson, Oxford 1966; J. Gardner, The Life and Times of Chaucer, London 1979; D. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography, Oxford 1995 (very few new elements, due to a systematically sceptical attitude towards the allegations of previous biographers); G. Ashton, Geoffrey Chaucer, London 2011. Criticism. T. R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, His Life and Writings, 3 vols, London 1892; G. G. Coulton, Chaucer and His England, London 1908 and further edns up to 1963 (among the first standard critical works on the medieval episteme, as illustrated in Chaucer); E. Legouis, Geoffrey Chaucer, Paris 1910; G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, Cambridge, MA 1915, repr. London 1970; B. Ten Brink, Chaucers Sprache und Verskunst, Leipzig 1920; R. K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer, Boston, MA 1922; C. F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, 3 vols, Cambridge 1925, New York 1960; G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer, London 1932; J. L. Lowes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Oxford 1934, 1956; A. Castelli, Chaucer, Brescia 1946; N. Coghill, The Poet Chaucer, London 1949; J. Speirs, Chaucer the Maker, London 1951, 1972; R. Preston, Chaucer, London 1952; D. S. Brewer, Chaucer, London 1953 and 1960; Chaucer and His World, London 1978, A New Introduction to Chaucer, London 1998, and, as editor, Chaucer and the Chaucerians, London and Edinburgh 1966, and CRHE, 2 vols, London 1978, 2001; A. Zanco, Chaucer e il suo mondo, Torino 1955; C. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, Berkeley, CA 1957; H. G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson, London 1957; Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. E. C. Wagenknecht, New York 1959, 1960 (an excellent anthology of the most outstanding contributions published in journals); W. C. Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, London 1960; H. F. Brooks, Chaucer’s Pilgrims, London 1962; M. Praz, ‘Chaucer e i grandi trecentisti italiani’, in PMI, 29–96 (originally from 1942); D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer,

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develop at a natural, orderly pace and matures overnight to adulthood, making such a gigantic leap that, after him, for almost half a century (for some critics even for two centuries) a kind of stagnation or even recession sets in, and we witness a process similar to the transition from Brobdingnag to Lilliput. Chaucer is the first accomplished modern artist in the history of English literature and, by virtue of his overall literary production, he Princeton, NJ 1962; M. A. Bowden, A Reader’s Guide to Geoffrey Chaucer, London 1965, Syracuse, NY 2001; G. G. Williams, A New View of Chaucer, Durham, NC 1965; E. T. Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer, New York 1970; P. M. Kean, Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry, 2 vols, London and Boston, MA 1972 (one of the most convincing and balanced studies); I. Robinson, Chaucer’s Prosody, London 1971, and Chaucer and the English Tradition, London 1972; Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. B. Rowland, Oxford 1979; J. D. Burnley, Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition, Cambridge 1980, and The Language of Chaucer, London 1989; E. Giaccherini, I fabliaux di Chaucer: tradizione e innovazione nella narrativa comica chauceriana, Pisa 1980; G. H. Roscow, Syntax and Style in Chaucer’s Poetry, Cambridge 1981; H. Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales, London 1983, and The Canterbury Tales, Oxford 1989; V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, London 1984, and Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II, Stanford, CA 2009; I. Bishop, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’: A Critical Study, Bristol 1985; Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1985; D. Aers, Chaucer, Brighton 1986; The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. P. Boitani and J. Mann, Cambridge 1986, and, rev. edn, 2003; R. O. Payne and E. J. Howard, Geoffrey Chaucer, Boston, MA 1986; D. R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World, New York 1987; G. Brunetti, Sui ‘Canterbury Tales’, Padova 1988; P. Strohm, Social Chaucer, Cambridge, MA 1989; F. Buffoni, I racconti di Canterbury: un’opera unitaria, Milano 1991; J. Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, London 1991; J. Dillon, Geoffrey Chaucer, Basingstoke 1993; M. Hallissy, A Companion to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, London 1995; A. J. Minnis et al., The Shorter Poems, Oxford 1995; Chaucer, ed. V. Allen and A. Axiotis, Basingstoke 1997; S. H. Rigby, Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender, Manchester 1997; C. Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English, Cambridge 1998; Critical Essays on Geoffery Chaucer, ed. T. C. Stillinger, London 1999; D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, Stanford, CA 1999; A Companion to Chaucer, ed. P. Brown, Oxford 2000; H. Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction, Context, Basingstoke 2000; G. Rudd, The Complete Critical Guide to Geoffrey Chaucer, London 2001; R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity, Basingstoke 2002; Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. R. M. Correale and M. Hamel, Cambridge 2002–2005.

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towers above both Langland and Gower, as well as the Gawain poet. He can be said to exemplify the first, definitive rules governing language and prosody in English literature. He is accessible even to non-specialists, with the minimum support of a parallel modern English rendering or a glossary. Indeed, the language (South-East English) employed by Chaucer was to become the predominant variety in the formation of so-called ‘modern standard English’ and of its lexis, where words of Teutonic1 or Danish derivation were gradually and almost imperceptibly ousted by those of French or romance origin. Although Chaucer’s dialect was, in any case, destined to become Modern English, the poet’s works enhanced its prestige. Ipso facto it is a linguistic variety closer to that of Spenser and Shakespeare. On a specifically prosodic plane, Chaucer invents, stabilizes and transmits to posterity the long-lasting scheme of a rhyming pair of iambic pentameters, the so-called heroic couplet; he patents, that is, a peculiarly flexible and successful metre, of which he becomes a master, and by means of which he succeeds in giving full utterance to everything he desires to express and to what is expressible, ranging from the theoretical and the abstract to the concrete and the practical. Yet it is in the sphere of literary competence and professionalism that Chaucer distances himself immeasurably from his contemporaries. Prolixity, amplification, excessive digressions, the loss of the logical and diegetic thread, the lack of all sense of proportion: Chaucer is obsessively conscious of these endemic contemporary flaws and declares war against them, while endeavouring, to the best of his ability, not to stray from the subject at hand. He frequently calls himself to order: ‘But now to come ageyn to my matere’. In other words, he is fully aware of the diegetic necessity, and, although he is partial to digressions, he repeatedly informs the reader that he will dominate his urge to ramble. The analogies of the Canterbury Tales with the two most significant poems of his predecessors and contemporaries are reduced to a few remnants of catalogued exempla, as in Gower’s Confessio. These are part and parcel of a consolidated convention and tradition, and Chaucer’s works are still linked, albeit only minimally, to the literary genre of the 1

On the term ‘Teutonic’, with the meaning of ‘Germanic in its most archaic and undivided phase’, cf. MIT, vol. I, 6.

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exemplum and of enumeration. Langland’s poem also opens with a crowded, panoramic scene.2 Chaucer is undoubtedly an ‘architect’ – or rather the first architect – in English literature, and a dramatist or novelist ante litteram who, however, preferred to express himself in verse, verse occasionally gracious and sculptured, but at times drab and second-rate, as sometimes in a novel.3 He has the power to master a brief but also a lengthy plot, and to handle a pithy, tense narrative involving real-life down-to-earth characters, as opposed to allegories and personifications (although we cannot deny that he handles these expertly, too). However, if necessary, his magnifying glass also focuses on detail, on the tiniest particular, the infinitesimal trait, the imperceptible peculiarity. Transfusion or transposition is an ennobling expression that can be rendered by the word translation; indeed, however skilful his final product may appear, Chaucer might be, wrongly, downgraded to a mere translator or transliterator (albeit an exceptionally gifted one – French contemporaries such as Deschamps viewed him as such). Yet, paradoxically, this theoretical limitation becomes a merit. Chaucer avails himself of the pre-existing French and Italian repertoire as raw material, creating a collage that modifies the original intents, often also due to his prosody, which is unsuited to and incompatible with the subject matter. In this way, parody becomes the prevailing genre in Chaucer’s work. The chasm that distances him from his contemporaries lies also in his mastery of literary rhetoric, which works in him like a filigree or a kind of open repertoire. He familiarizes with and becomes proficient at handling the French and Latin rhetorical treatises that were the height of fashion at the time and which provided him with a pre-established key to poetic modes and conventions.4 Thus, one of the obvious preliminary issues concerns the sources on which Chaucer drew. Critics still come to blows over the question of whether Chaucer had read certain classical authors in the original or in French translation, and persist in drawing up first- and second-degree lists of 2 3 4

On this Ricardian topos cf. BRP, 122–4. Kean 1972, chapter II, 31–66, refers to the prevalent features of Chaucer’s style as the ‘urban manner’. Cf. BRP, 73, on the model of Geoffrey de Vinsauf ’s Poetria Nova.

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influential authors, that is to say, authors of whom he had gained firsthand or filtered experience. Source researchers have provided evidence of Chaucer’s astonishing literary memory, of the ease and confidence with which he combined his acquired knowledge, and of his conjurer’s skill in forming associations. In truth, this was a practice that was anything but shameful or disreputable, given that plagiarism was not put on the index in the Middle Ages, which, on the contrary, thrived on it.5 However, critics still widely contest the assumption that three periods (French, Italian and English)6 can be clearly distinguished. Other critics tend to reduce this threefold distinction to a bipartition, between youth and maturity, or to reword it as the period ‘of the rose’ and that ‘of the daisy’, or even to make them correspond to the supremacy of the one or the other of the two authors of the Roman de la Rose, with their respective natures: that of Guillaume, candid and sincere, and that of Jean, caustic and scathing. Yet it is also true to say that Chaucer takes his cue from the stereotype of the ‘dream’, or rather the ‘somnium’, only to gradually break away from it and concentrate on a purely diurnal observation. One cannot leave the topic of Chaucer’s originality, or his tendency to derivativeness, without a reference to the quaestio of his borrowings from the fourteenth-century Italian authors whose influence, superimposed on classical and French models, proved to be highly and vitally productive. From a certain time onwards, the knowledge of Dante becomes an established fact, and Chaucer admits to having drawn certain topics and suggestions from Petrarch, although he distances himself from both, and from Dante in particular, in his religious attitude, which was undoubtedly less staunch, 5

6

In this connection, critics often cite St Bonaventure’s quadripartite division in the first book of the Sententiae, that of the scriptor, the compilator, the commentator and the auctor. The latter ‘writes his own words and those of others, yet he gives priority to his own and only uses other people’s words to sustain his ideas’. From the etymological point of view, auctor is related to augere, and thus to the enhancement of knowledge and wisdom of mankind. It is also true, however, that Chaucer was neither a university student, nor was he therefore a graduate, and that he was undeniably less learned and educated than Gower; he perhaps lacked the ability, or above all the inclination, to attempt a Latin or French version of his works.

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less complex and more disenchanted. He negotiates the stoical and otherworldly ideals of both authors. His ideal affiliation to Boccaccio and to his secular Weltanschauung becomes stronger. Since Chaucer never cites him by name (nor, for that matter, does he ever mention the Decameron), it has been hypothesized that either he was unaware of having drawn material from books that did not bear the Italian author’s signature, or that he deliberately kept silent. However, Praz objected that Chaucer invariably makes reference to the primary source, and not to the intermediary one, and that he might even have confused Boccaccio with Petrarch, to whom he attributed certain works of Boccaccio. Praz also reminds us that in 1373 the stature of the Decameron was downgraded by contemporary scholars. On the other hand, none of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales appear closely derived from Boccaccio’s masterpiece, and Petrarch’s famous short preface to the Decameron did not encourage Chaucer to read an early work, in which the only part that was worth keeping was the tale of Griselda, handed down in the Latin version by Petrarch himself (or rather from its re-translation into French). The issue of Chaucer’s debt to Boccaccio is one that is destined to remain forever unsolved; it has even been suggested that he was indebted, for the overall plan of his masterpiece, to an obscure Italian poet by the name of Giovanni Sercambi, the author of a coronet of novelle within the frame of a pilgrimage, all of which are narrated by the author himself.7 Such assumptions and inferences are not intended to imply wilful misconduct, or excessive naїveté on Chaucer’s part in his decision to refrain from citing Boccaccio. It seems, however, a twist of fate that, under these circumstances, a bookworm like Chaucer should be ignorant of such a work as the Decameron,8 the most probable and most evident model for his magnum opus. 2. While being thoroughly English, Chaucer is the first author to be endowed with a European and pro-European outlook. His knowledge of 7 8

A summary of the work, and a comparison of a few of his tales with some of Chaucer’s, can be found in BAL, 184. The assertion that Chaucer considered only Latin sources and not vernacular works to be worthy of imitation and citation is unsustainable, because in this case he would similarly have disregarded the Divina Commedia.

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foreign languages came not indirectly, or by hearsay, or even thanks to the normal coexistence of idioms, but thanks to his extensive travelling, and his experience of and familiarity with the world at large. On a historical level, he has long been described as a synthesis, the synthesis of medieval culture and spirit: on the contrary, I tend to view him as an antithesis, as the writer who experiments and inaugurates a new literary and cultural episteme. He becomes the first English humanist or proto-humanist, which probably explains why he eludes the ties and constraints of religion and homiletic literature, although there remains in him a constant feeling of being oppressed and threatened by them. He occupies a position halfway between anonymity and individualism, between the annihilation of the individual in the mass and the surfacing of an even unrestrained egotism. Chaucer lived at a time when London had only 40,000 inhabitants, that is, half of the population of Florence;9 English was gaining strength as a language while French was losing ground; the nation was fast becoming bilingual, and a new legal system was being formulated. The power of Parliament was increasing, as were the number of non-religious people who now occupied positions that had been previously restricted to the clergy; anticlericalism was on the rise. The years from 1327 to his death in 1400 are marked by the deposing of two monarchs, in 1327 and 1399. Winds from the south were conveying, together with Dante and the first humanists, the principle of free thinking. In England the culmination of the fashion of courtly love coincided with the onset of its decline: love remained ideal, but was also carnal and materialistic, aimed at enhancing one’s property and economic profit. Chaucer no longer believed in, indeed felt indifferent to the Arthurian cycle, and refrained from writing tales and anecdotes taken from that particular repertoire.10 Typical and yet an individual, he can serve to reconstruct the academic curriculum and training of an educated late fourteenth-century Englishman. The adolescent Chaucer’s sources of inspiration are, as I have said, the two compilers of

9 10

Brewer 1960, 50. The Wife of Bath’s Tale may prove that Chaucer had read Sir Gawain, but it is also its parody.

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the Roman de la Rose and the almost contemporary Machaut and Froissart, who were not acquainted with Chaucer’s work, and Deschamps who, on the contrary, was a friend of his and with whom Chaucer exchanged literary works. This bookish culture was based on the transcription of a number of important classics: no Homer, but a ‘moralized’ Ovid along with the Aeneid, Thebaid and Pharsalia available in the original, but more often than not assimilated via thirteenth-century French romances. The ‘matter of Troy’ also reached Chaucer indirectly through Dictys, Dares and Benoît. In the religious sphere, the points of reference were Boethius, whose treatise on spirituality was the most widely read and translated throughout the English medieval period, Pope Innocent III (De contemptu mundi), Bishop Bradwardine’s treatise on predestination and Macrobius’ comment on Cicero’s Somnium. It would, of course, be erroneous to affirm that, given the absence of specific references to the historical calendar – the plague, the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, the Lollards, or Wyclif – Chaucer turned a deaf ear to contemporary events and conflicts: he filtered them, softening them down by creating a sort of buffer or screen between these and the reader. One of Chaucer’s most renowned lyrics reflects on the ‘preceding age’, and ultimately celebrates the topos of the Golden Age, when overindulgence in food and drink was unheard of, when greed, especially of an economic nature, was not rampant, when everything was in a primeval state, even if almost by magic or by some optical illusion. This leads us to focus on other qualities of Chaucer as an artist and modern thinker, and on the further implications of his poetics and aesthetics. His neutrality can be best illustrated with a musical metaphor, by defining him as a chromatic, as opposed to a diatonic, author; or alternatively, with the metaphor of a skilled ‘blacksmith’ who amalgamates the most diverse cultural and real-life experiences. In his combination of metals, and thus materials, he proves to be an accomplished blender and mediator who avails himself of telescope and microscope at the same time. One of the few autobiographical passages in the Canterbury Tales provides us with a description of the poet – or perhaps a projection, or a mask – as a plump, stout man (a description which incidentally finds confirmation in portraits of the author), taciturn and with his head held high, but with his gaze fixed on the ground like a hare hunter (which indeed Chaucer was also in everyday

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life).11 He is certainly one who scrutinizes man and human nature, and we are reminded of Christ’s statement ‘I will make you fishers of men’.12 Chaucer has indeed no theories to propound or demonstrate, or palingenetic schemes to launch. On the contrary, he portrays human weaknesses and treats them benevolently, passing over them in silence, and therefore making a more extensive use of the classical rhetorical device of preterition. Judging and condemning human behaviour are two things that are alien to him. It should be noted how delicately, subtly and objectively he handles the episode of Aeneas and Dido in The Hous of Fame. In this work Chaucer leaves a definition of his aesthetic theory: that of writing poetry ‘Withouten any subtiltee / Of speche, or gret prolixitee / Of termes of philosophye, / Of figures of petrye, / Or colours of rethoryke’ (855–9). Such declarations have been cited by critics to support the interpretation of his self-effacement as faint-heartedness and apathy. In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women Chaucer declares that he is sceptical with regard to the existence of the afterworld, and satirizes Dante’s cast-iron certainties. This led Praz to hypothesize a clear-cut dialectical contrast with the Italian poet, whose religious and spiritualizing ardour and political credo were not shared by the ‘placid bourgeois’, Chaucer. 3. This last statement, echoed and paraphrased by many critics, is however only partially true: behind the mask of placidity and composure Chaucer conceals anxieties and even extraordinarily precocious contradictions. He was above all volatile, moody, even schizophrenic at times, on which account he was prone to bouts of depression; and he was both nocturnal and diurnal. A chronic insomniac, he was in the habit of reading in order to fall asleep and, during his sleep, he dreamed and largely elaborated on what he had read. Once awake, he sculpted in polished and less incandescent verse the mysterious visions he had experienced in his dream. In contrast, in his daily life he was a conscientious, esteemed, efficient and level-headed clerk. However, once he returned home, it was the 11 12

Lowes 1956, 98. A metaphor expressly evoked – but in order to insinuate how people can be deceived (‘I walke, and fisshe Cristen mannes soules’) by the mendicant friar in the Summoner’s Tale.

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introverted and irritable dreamer that gained the upper hand. His sense of modernity, or his sense that the Middle Ages were near their end, lies in the rediscovery of the classics and in the full-blown conviction that all possible knowledge is encased in them. Hence, while donning the robes of the protagonist and pioneer of his own vernacular, in practice he quite naturally shared the desire to return to the pre-eminence of Latin which flourished towards the end of the fourteenth century. However, Chaucer probes into the self-awareness of the writer and instinctively senses the possibility of playing with his masks: for instance, masquerading as a false first-person narrator, but being fully conscious of the fact that the real author and the implicit author must necessarily be kept distinct, and that he can avail himself of a whole range of possibilities. A significant dichotomy in Chaucer’s art is that his work targets a specific audience and therefore needs to be declaimed and recited; on the other hand, there is the veiled intention that it should present itself as a written text. For this reason, we are faced with a text teeming with colloquialisms, hints and cues, or criticisms directed towards a potential reader, and with seemingly premeditated slips of the tongue. As proof of this, Chaucer is an unflagging experimenter of forms, modules, genres, and of a never-ending stream of proposals and of unprecedented patterns and solutions. His entire literary production is imbued with the spirit of fluidity and openness,13 being the work of a seeker or a ‘hunter’ whose gaze appears, at first sight, to be rapt and disoriented. In his oeuvre, we witness the juxtaposition of polished, refined and marmoreal neoclassical works, such as his Troilus, alongside other ‘romantic’, unfinished works, which are the majority. Certain individual stories in the Canterbury Tales are fragmentary, left half-finished or even in an embryonic state; others are complete, yet encased within an open structure, thus creating two separate aesthetic orientations and demarcations, which contribute to the creation of yet another of Chaucer’s incongruities. Others end almost mimetically – prevalently due to the catcalls and boos of the internal audience. The unfinished state is, of course, a hallmark,

13

See the conclusions to this effect by Kean 1972, vol. I, 111, with regard to the epilogue of The Hous of Fame.

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not of artistic mediocrity, but of torment, and the mark of a creator who is incapable of attaining the perfection of form. Chaucer is therefore a writer who re-writes his own works, as in the case of the two alternative Prologues of the Legend; and Troilus, his only totally completed work, is in itself open-ended because the hero fades away, vanishing into a nimbus that transports him to some unknown destination. Chaucer’s decision to disguise himself as a maladroit, inept amateur poet was not solely made to pay homage to a literary convention. The Canterbury Tales were not – and still are not – arranged in a definitive order, and, above all, they are a demonstration not only of Chaucer’s reluctance to organize his tales but also of the frenetic and almost destructive haste with which he demolished his fragile house of cards. Gower, on the contrary, followed a rigid, though somewhat superficial, ordering criterion. The implausible oscillation of genres, planes and horizons in the Canterbury Tales is accompanied by the author’s vehement and biting self-criticism, the authentic demiurgic gesture of a sort of Super-ego, as embodied in the Parson’s Tale, which forges as with fire an explicit description and vision that had been disputed until then – an unexpectedly sharp cut, and the descent of an axe. Finally, the transition towards unequivocal orthodoxy in the ‘Retraction’ seems rather impetuous after all his discordant and contradictory ramblings and digressions. Chaucer often finds himself doubting whether Creation may be, or may have been, ordered and whether it may constitute an order in compliance with the prime intent of the Divine Will: could God have created disorder and chaos ab aeterno? Four hundred years later, Hopkins was to nurture the same concern, while at the same time finding a solution to the enigma; for him, as for Chaucer, the cosmos was ‘dappled’, that is to say, speckled, mottled, variegated, but God the Creator embodied all opposites and bestowed on mankind the faculty to perceive the innermost unity of the multiplicity of forms. Those who are reluctant to detect rules and regulations established by the author within the work, or any explicit intentions in the layout and conclusion of the Canterbury Tales, reach the foregone conclusion that Chaucer limits himself to echoing voices and visions that neutralize one another, without taking a stand. The caveat we apply when reading Browning and the Victorian dramatic monologue has a precedent in Chaucer. Browning describes his monologues as objectivized,

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rather than personal confessions. Thus the voice of the first-person narrator becomes subjected to this process of objectivization. A similar principle is also applicable to Chaucer’s masterpiece, polyphonic in a Bakhtinian sense, as the author gives a voice to the ‘other’ and apparently withdraws without obstructing, even partially, the lens or the auditory field. The Tales thus present themselves as a series of enunciations, not as one of énoncés. However, by 1387 Chaucer had already put into practice a few strictly personal choices, and had translated the Roman and above all Boethius. Are we to deconstruct these works, too, by affirming that they were translated by some other author? At this rate, we might even go as far as to contest the fact that the voice that pronounces the ‘Retraction’ is Chaucer’s and to attribute it to the persona who qualifies himself as ‘I’, and says his name is Chaucer. I personally do not subscribe to such an annihilation of the coherence of the authorial ‘I’. 4. The two volumes dedicated to Chaucer in the Critical Heritage series14 verge on 900 pages, and Chaucer finds himself placed on an equal footing, for all this assessment is worth, with other great and illustrious English authors, and second only to Shakespeare, who prides himself on six volumes. This prominence is less gratifying than it may seem at first sight, considering the temporal extension of Chaucer’s reception, far wider than that of any other major writer. The Chaucerians who came immediately after, and whose two distinct ramifications will be illustrated and discussed below,15 were mediocre and second-rate poets. The almost two centuries that followed Chaucer’s death, leading up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, give occasional evidence of a variety of acknowledgements, both of his poetical and rhetorical skill and of his linguistic creativity (especially for Sidney). In the seventeenth century, editions inclusive of apocrypha gained him the fame of an irreverent protester and reformer; yet he also became a test in the debate on the purity of the language. Strangely enough, in that period he began to be perceived as linguistically obscure (or to be defined as such), and his works were modernized, or even worse, retranslated. His lowest ebb, which heralded his revival, occurred towards the end 14 15

There is a similar collection edited by Spurgeon 1925, in 3 vols. § 21 and § 25.

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of the seventeenth century, with Dryden as his main re-discoverer and the most important promoter of Chaucerian criticism, although his translations are unfaithful reinventions of the original texts. Dryden’s view of Chaucer was that of a writer of novels, and therefore of short stories, and of the father of English poetic language, unadorned, natural and realistic. As was only to be expected, by the Romantics and Victorians Chaucer was viewed, in the wake of Schiller’s theories, as sentimental, spontaneous, naïve, if not immaturely candid. At the same time, an alternative critical current, having postulated that poetry is tantamount to self-expression, relegated Chaucer into a secondary role. However, the whole of the nineteenth century shows a marked disparity of judgements. The debate on the essence of Chaucer’s language was distorted and became relativistic, and what one observer considers as ‘ornate’ may be considered ‘simple’ by another. Nevertheless, by this time, the hoard of emulators and imitators of his works had become fairly substantial and, without taking into account transnational acknowledgements, Sidney and Spenser are followed by Pope, Crabbe,16 Wordsworth17 and Tennyson under the sign of the courtly tradition and that of the poetry of feeling, just as Dickens succeeds Fielding in the humour tradition. Dryden had already censured in no uncertain terms Chaucer’s ‘immodest’ tales, while Ruskin coined for Chaucer a new category, that of ‘fimetic’ literature, that is to say, a type of literature stained by wanton vulgarity and void imagination, and crosses the Canterbury Tales off the list of books in the library of the Guild of St George.18 Arnold’s disapproval can be related to the same reasons, and formally due to the absence in Chaucer’s works of ‘high seriousness’. On both sides of the Atlantic, academic criticism engaged in an archaic con-

16 17

18

Cf. Speirs 1972, 204–6, on the re-exhumation of Chaucer’s heroic couplet, even if Crabbe lays greater stress on the uneven battle between man and the forces of nature. Chaucer is the first noteworthy Englishman characterized by the love for simple things and humble delights; he is also the first example of a recluse, with minimal and sporadic intrusions into the world, like Wordsworth. The comparison between the two poets is frequent in nineteenth-century criticism. It was Ruskin who pointed out that no description of the sea can be found in Chaucer’s entire works.

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troversy until the mid-twentieth century with all its experts, authorities and pundits. The issues that hold court – dates, metrics and, above all, the reliable affiliation of certain of Chaucer’s works to those considered to be authentic, with the exclusion of other spurious ones, or the compilation of the list of lost works and the estimation of their value – are therefore of a philological and ecdotic nature among a smug, self-righteous élite of scholars. In the meantime, the notion of Chaucer as the poet par excellence of the nascent national spirit had become consolidated, and he had been triumphantly awarded the merit of being an ante litteram Protestant like Langland, armed against the corrupt clergy and against every form of fraud, in defence of the wellbeing of the less privileged social classes. Chesterton’s standpoint was subsequently branded as jingoistic and xenophobic, an attitude that was also discernible in Leavisites such as Speirs, who identified and emphasized in Chaucer the poet of an organic community.19 Until 195020 Chaucer’s greatness was thus of an axiomatic nature (‘an art which in the end eludes analysis’),21 and critical terminology provided a plentiful supply of exclamatory, high-sounding and often glorifying adjectives. Presumably, the scholars’ skill lay in their ability to detect between the lines Chaucer’s boredom every time he slavishly dogged his models. This entire preliminary phase of academic criticism seems today rather outdated, and, more often than not, prolix and inconclusive. The major authors of the second half of the twentieth century, on the other hand, hailed with the advent of Chaucer the closing phase of the medieval period, torn apart by the sense of sin and by the exhortation to repentance. For Orwell, who insisted that obscenity resided in the ‘rebellion in the moral sphere’, 19

Cf. in CLA, vol. I, 144–8, Praz’s review of Chesterton’s book dated 1932, which traces the history of Chaucer’s reception in England to that date, a reconstruction that is somewhat arbitrary and debatable (did his fellow-countrymen really not take Chaucer seriously?). Praz expands on Chesterton’s view of Chaucer as the last bastion of the Middle Ages before the leap into the unknown towards the irrationality and scepticism of the Renaissance. In practice, Praz appears to subscribe to the view from which he claims to diverge. 20 CRHE, vol. II, 1, maintains that the year 1933 represents the dividing line between amateur and professional literary criticism. 21 Lowes 1956, 167.

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Chaucer and Boccaccio were even much less moralistic than Shakespeare.22 Chaucer took for granted the fact that society was morally corrupt. Orwell is basically in agreement with Lawrence,23 who saw Chaucer as being free from ‘terror’ and endowed with a ‘real natural innocence’, despite the fact that subsequent writers went back to being gripped in a state of fear – the fear of ‘the consequences’, and specifically the fear of sex. In the last five decades, critics have adopted and worked on a variety of approaches. On the one hand, each minor work and, in particular, each and every story in the Canterbury Tales, have engendered a wide range of independent literary interpretations, like each Shakespearean drama; on the other hand, we have witnessed a proliferation of initiatory studies based on historical or computational linguistics, stylistics and lexicography, mainly aiming to demonstrate the extent to which Chaucer availed himself of a tradition already permeated with romance influences. Each of the last decades leading up to the present has naturally focused on a particular facet of the author – with deconstruction, feminism, gender and psychoanalysis – taking cues from real or variously instrumental elements. § 16. Chaucer II: Biography Chaucer’s life, as reconstructed by his biographers, while possessing a documentary solidity far superior to that of Gower and above all to that of Langland, is to a large extent a chain of assertions preceded by the adverb ‘probably’, and very rarely by the adverb ‘undoubtedly’. Among the probable and conjectural elements feature: the date of birth, the birthplace and the birth house of the author; his law studies; his affiliation to the party or ‘faction’ of the king;24 almost all the composition dates of his works; the number of his children (one, two or three); the loss of two ‘comptrollerships’, namely the position of tax inspector, due to the fall from grace of the supporters of King Richard II; the miserable state of his finances during his last years; finally, the year of his death. Doubtful is likewise the date of 22 OCE, vol. II, 155, and III, 326–7. 23 Phoenix, vol. II, 551–5. 24 In addition to this, there were two other factions, the Lancastrian faction headed by John of Gaunt, and a baronial faction hostile to the first two.

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his translation of the Roman de la Rose, as well as the exact portion of the three extant fragments for which he was responsible; nor, unfortunately, do we possess any original manuscript in his own handwriting. A master of objectification, capable of expressing himself in and jesting with a variety of masks, Chaucer very rarely discloses any revelations or indiscretions regarding his personal life; moreover, the testimonies of his contemporaries (such as Lydgate) provide scanty information regarding him. In reality, critics in general have been quick to exploit this paucity or latency of precise data, and this atmosphere of uncertainty has given rise to the most daring flights of fantasy and inductive soul-searching. Chaucer led a ‘double life’, spearheading a recurrent typology of English part-time writers, obliged as he was to compensate the luxury of his art with the decidedly less sublime occupation of the civil servant.25 He was obviously endowed not only with a highly refined literary talent, but also with a flair for decision-making and with practical and organizational abilities, which explains why, at Court, he was more appreciated for his diplomatic skills rather than for his prowess as a poet. All this paints a different picture with respect to nowadays. Chaucer’s works, with no exceptions, were not destined for the public at large, but were read and recited before a selected audience of cultured people, mainly courtiers. Yet it is the second or the first of Chaucer’s ‘double lives’ that has provided posterity with important reports and documents which are lacking in the other poets during the Ricardian period. 2. Chaucer’s presumably adoptive surname was linked to chauffecire,26 namely the actions performed by those whose task it was to affix seals to royal signature; or to chausses, that is, trousers, breeches or hose, articles of clothing which had been manufactured by Chaucer’s ancestors (or alternatively shoes).27 Thus his surname was of etymological origin, like many others in the Middle Ages. Yet subsequently the family trade had

25

Lowes 1956, 45, cites a list of writers and artists who worked as customs officials, and in particular Hawthorne. If Chaucer is a painter in verse, we cannot help thinking of Henry Rousseau ‘Le Douanier’. 26 Coulton 1968, 10. 27 The difference is negligible because, as Praz points out, those trousers extended to the feet and also served as shoes.

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taken a different turn; the poet’s father, whose family had been merchants in Ipswich, was a vintner, but, once settled in London, he held a number of royal posts as a diplomat and attendant to the king. While still an adolescent, Chaucer was a page to Elizabeth,28 one of Edward III’s daughters-in-law. At the age of nineteen, he took part in the expedition against the French, was captured near Reims, released and ransomed for the sum of sixteen pounds by the king in March 1360. From 1360 to 1367 he was promoted to valet to the king, during which time he is likely to have studied law at the Inns of Court. In 1366 he entered into a marriage – considered to have been far from happy – with Philippa Roet, a lady-in-waiting in the queen’s household, and sister or sister-in-law to John of Gaunt’s third wife. Philippa bore him a son, Lewis by name, who died at an early age.29 From the year 1368 or 1369 he was engaged in military and above all diplomatic missions on behalf of the Crown, including one to Milan in 1368 (not, however, clearly documented), which marked the festive occasion of the marriage of Lionel, the king’s son, to Violante Visconti; on that occasion Chaucer might possibly have met Petrarch. In 1372 he certainly departed on another mission, this time to reach an agreement with the Genoese regarding a seaport for English trade, after which he headed towards Florence to negotiate a loan from Florentine bankers. A third or second mission to Italy was undertaken in 1378 in Lombardy, to conclude an agreement for assistance against the French. Altogether, the estimated length of time

28 The year of birth (1342 or 1343) is more compatible with the age, twelve, in which pages were employed at Court. 29 To Lewis, a student at Oxford, Chaucer dedicated his prose treatise, structured in five parts, on the ‘astrolabe’, a compendium of Ptolemaic astrology derived from a work written by the Arab Messahala. Only two parts (the second part being incomplete) on the astrolabe instruments, the signs of the zodiac and star distance measurements, have come down to us. Chaucer appears to be responsible for two poorly documented acts of violence: as a student, he was alleged to have assaulted a monk; as a mature married man, he may have committed a rape, for which he underwent trial in 1380. Pearsall 1995, 216, is of the opinion that Lewis might have been the son of the woman who accused him, Cecily Champaigne. Critics are unanimous in attributing to Chaucer a second son, Thomas; there is slightly more doubt as to whether he was also the father of two daughters, Elizabeth and Agnes.

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of these two sojourns in Italy, with the exclusion of the first, was no less than ten months, an important detail that can certainly shed light on the extent of the poet’s knowledge of contemporary Italian literature. However, strangely enough, in Florence Chaucer is thought to have been more impressed by the financial organization and by the well-established book industry of the city, rather than by its cultural activity.30 Subsequently, from 1374 to 1386 he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies on Wool, Skins and Hides in the port of London; to this were added the positions held in various other offices, such as Justice of the Peace for the county of Kent, member of Parliament, and Clerk of the king’s works overseeing royal building projects (notably the restoration of St George’s Chapel in Windsor), and inspector of the walls and ditches along a stretch of the Thames. He lived on gifts, donations and extra contributions ever since the year 1374, when King Edward jokingly rewarded his services with a daily tankard of beer. Well aware of his partiality for alcoholic beverages, King Richard II also gave him a cask of wine in 1398. From 1374 he was awarded for life a rent-free house overlooking Aldgate, from which he enjoyed a splendid view of city life. His fixed annuities were munificently supplemented in the form of interest from property holdings, recovery of fines, generous rewards and even secret missions.31 His status flourished and reached its pinnacle with the rise to the throne of Richard II, when Chaucer was in a position to appoint a deputy. He left his house in London and moved to the countryside, near Greenwich, where he lived almost until the end of his life. Before his death he returned to London, where he took up residence in a house adjacent to Westminster Abbey. The last prestigious administrative position held by Chaucer was that of Deputy Forester of the Royal Park of North Petherton.

30 According to Praz (PMI, 90–1), Chaucer returned from his journeys to Italy, like the Elizabethans and all other literary figures up to Browning, overwhelmed by the ‘pageant of life’ and by the ‘dramatic’ nature of the Italians. 31 Saintsbury (CHI, vol. II, 158) calculated that in 1399 Chaucer commanded an annual income of approximately 600/700 pounds sterling (1932 valuation). BAL, 146, writing in 1958, estimated a total of 8,500,000 Italian lira.

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§ 17. Chaucer III: Dream-vision poems Several of Chaucer’s juvenile works have gone lost; the surviving works provide precious information on certain references, tendencies or, more precisely, issues of fundamental importance. If this is the case, Chaucer ranges from the genuinely pious, almost naïve faith portrayed in the Roman de la Rose,32 to the progressively pessimistic agnosticism of his last years. From the age of thirty, and even in his forties, if the chronology is reliable, Chaucer is a hagiographer and follower of Boethius. Undertaking the task of translating De Consolatione is tantamount to embracing a fundamentally fideistic view of existence, which combines human free choice with divine foreknowledge. For all that, it must be stressed that, every time he makes a profession of agnosticism, Chaucer feels a sense of guilt and returns to seek refuge once more in orthodox faith. Of the very few short lyrical poems, only one, estimated to be an early one, a hymn to the Virgin in the form of a litany, is clearly of a devotional nature; others, composed by the poet as lover, probe the conventional theme of female fickleness. The classical formula, also via a mythological intermediary, is that of the lament or planctus of the requited, or the rebuffed or sorrowful lover. These excessively tormented and prolix compositions are variations on a theme; immature and rudimentary, disproportionate and repetitive, they are probably indebted to the Stilnovo stereotype (the servant lover and the modest lady) – albeit with prosodic variations and ambitions to check the intrusiveness of the rhyming couplets or alternating rhymes. The counterpoint is that of curt, almost condensed, witty and vivacious bits of verse of limited scope. His brief recollection of the Golden Age, apocalyptic and yet nostalgic at the same time, stands somewhat apart. Therefore pessimism co-exists or silently alternates in Chaucer, who now and again envisages the world plummeting towards its doom. 2. Four of Chaucer’s five lengthy minor works (the fifth negates this classification and is to be numbered among his major works) are not of a 32

The translation The Romaunt of the Rose, which distinguishes Chaucer as an adherent of the French tradition, has survived in only three fragments, and there is a considerable amount of doubt as regards its authorship; the first of the three is generally attributed to Chaucer.

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distinctly homogeneous nature, but they exploit the stylistic feature of the text within the text, or of the dream within the sleepless vigil. They take the form of the imbrication. Although we cannot affirm that the dreamer and the real author are one and the same person, it would be erroneous to separate the two roles altogether. Too much insistence has been placed on the insomniac poet being a medieval stylization. Chaucer slept and dreamed and, above all, he was in the habit of reading before falling asleep, and occasionally he went to sleep very late. The preludes to the four above mentioned works all tend to confirm that everything Chaucer wrote had its origins in the books he read. This was part and parcel of a medieval convention, according to which poems were to be modelled on other poems; yet, at the same time, from a real-life biographical point of view, Chaucer was an avid reader who fantasized on the traces of the books he read and which remained imprinted on his memory. Critics nowadays have difficulty in pinpointing the genesis and circumstances that triggered The Book of the Duchesse – the death in 1369 of the beautiful Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, because no explicit reference is made to the duchess in question, or to any other duchess. However, this was compatible with the conventions of the time, and Chaucer could simply direct this allusion to his educated and élite audience. The backbone of the Book hinges on a dream, initially dreamt and then expertly and glibly narrated, and above all on the dexterity with which the poet transposes and camouflages the occasion and sublimates his grief over the duchess’s death in two suggestive parallel scenarios. In the Prologue, a mythological figure falls asleep and, in her dream, sees the ghost of Morpheus, who inhabits the body of her lost husband, and then dies of grief: this is a chiasmus, or mirror-like prolepsis, with respect to the ‘black duke’. The sleepless poet has gained knowledge from Ovid of Queen Alcyone, the widow of Ceyx, anxious to bury her husband’s body. All in all, this first story offers a description of a happy marriage put in danger and then broken by the husband’s adventurousness and thirst for heroic deeds, with the implicit Ulyssean dilemma between fulfilment and audacity, a dilemma that was soon to become a typical Chaucerian leitmotif. Once awakened from his deep slumber, Morpheus takes possession of Ceyx’s body and appears before the queen as a ghost to announce the truth, thus giving life to a dramatic scene of visionary hallucination. The

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curtain falls on Alcyone’s grief and death, which is nothing more than a paraphrase on the part of the poet who is reading and which gives rise to the symbolic parallel with the death of the English duchess. The poet, now gratified and finally asleep, falls into a dream in which he finds himself in a sunlit garden on a clear, entrancing day in the month of May. This is a Chaucerian topos, because the poet repeatedly draws upon and moulds it from the opening of the Roman de la Rose translated by his own hand. The lengthy introduction is skilful and free-flowing, precisely because it reflects standard stereotypes, yet in an impressively professional manner. The lexis is also repetitive, the term ‘swete’ recurring to the extreme. At this point, the dream continues with a deer hunt, in which the dreamer takes part, and a knight in black clothes, pensive and distraught, comes into sight. Just as Ceyx’s corpse ‘lies’ several ‘fathoms’ under the sea (the same word used for the supposedly dead body of Ferdinand’s father in Shakespeare’s The Tempest), so the knight is the prototype of Keats’s knight who ‘ayleth’, in despair over the death of his lady, a lifeless knight whose blood ‘was fled’. For his part, the poet acquits himself like Dante with certain damned souls, because he urges the knight to speak and give vent to his emotions, thus easing his pain.33 However, we can reasonably suppose that there is an echo not only of Dante’s Commedia but also of his Vita nuova, inasmuch as the lady is also the epitome of human perfection and the incarnation of the divine countenance, and she has mesmerized and revitalized the Duke ever since his youth. What is more, there is a pre-announcement of Troilus, in the wild, passionate and desperate love that tends towards suicide, with the poet playing the role of the sagacious, emotional realist Pandarus. The lai stereotypes are based on a suppressed note of satire on the most pompous hyperboles of the courtly language and codes: ‘For I am sorwe and sorwe is I’. The spiritless voice of the poet at the beginning softens into an enticingly mellow one, as he endeavours to persuade the knight, untimely struck by the harmful consequences and by the mental affliction caused by his loyalty to the courtly love tradition, to review his position.

33

The knight’s tirade against blind Fortune and her wheel is in itself a Dantesque topos (see Inf., VII).

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Moreover, he offers the knight a few suggestions based purely on common sense (‘whiche a fool’, referring to Dido as an example of someone who committed suicide for love). Blanche, the lady bemoaned by the knight, is the compendium of all virtues, the acme of physical as well as intellectual perfection, thus a typical figure of the courtly love tradition. At the end of the commemoration, the timorous knight, initially tongue-tied, proposes to the lady who, moved to compassion, rewards him with a ring, but only shortly before her death. 3. The Hous of Fame, a work composed certainly after 1374 and probably before 1378, left unfinished in three books and written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, is a highly delightful, witty and succinct work, the product of a consummate master of dream-vision poetry, a story-teller, minstrel and cataloguer. Thus, in one respect, Chaucer, an advocate of the literary opus viewed as a collection of exempla, here vies with his friend and contemporary Gower, mimicking and usurping the sheer delight of the illuminator of mythological cameos. This is also a composite work, and the story begins on the night of the tenth of December, when the poet has a dream which takes place in a temple dedicated to Venus. Here many other visions converge, including those of the wanderings of Aeneas until he finally lands in Latium, as well as the lengthy analysis of a series of unfaithful men, whose betrayal led to the death of their deceived lovers. Never, as in these first 500 lines, has Chaucer perhaps narrated, or rather paraphrased, his sources in such a smooth and polished manner. The opening lines of his brief complaint, ‘Anelida and Arcite’, already raise the issue of fame and of a kind of fame – given that time is the edax rerum that corrodes memory – that fades and finally obliterates the traces of Anelida’s story, ‘devoured out of our memorie’. This, too, is a legend of an exemplary woman and an adulterous lover. In The Hous of Fame, in the temple where the pilgrim dreamer has entered, a sort of slideshow is enacted; statues or niches embody legends that give rise to a scene or make a particular episode in Aeneas’ peregrinations come to life. This entire mythological preamble is based entirely – it must be noticed – on classical authors, and is thus a case of fame handed down, or of an item of news requiring confirmation. Given that Chaucer is the bard of love and among the disciples of love, while he himself is frustrated and without love, his reward consists in a similar dream journey which

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will enable him to gain greater knowledge of Love and its dealings. Love is also callous and uncaring, and all that glitters is not gold. Dido’s suicide demonstrates that she is already a victim of fame, and a link is established with the continuation of the dream in the next two Books, when a Virgilian eagle swoops down from the sky and abducts the pilgrim. The Dantesque remake, another of Chaucer’s skills, becomes unequivocal, as the eagle wisely instructs the captured pilgrim, by means of a short treatise on the theory and properties of sound, and as it introduces the House of Fame as a boundless repository of every kind of sound wave, and consequently of every word that has been pronounced and written ever since the very beginnings of history.34 The poem defines itself as an allegory of verbal transmission, which can be of a dual nature, both true and false, or even futile. The theme of the poetic truth, or rather of the ultimate non-fallacy, of the myth itself is subtly interwoven. In the House of Fame we witness the parade of the great dispensers of fame, and thus of stories (some more reliable than others), namely the poets from their respective nations from Homer onwards. Before the goddess Fame clamour groups of people who have acted and spoken justly or unjustly, people in search of fame or of no fame at all (some have acted in the service of God and not for their own personal benefit), and others who are punished with the discordant notes of Aeolus’ black trumpet, which metes out fame and infamy at the whim and prompting of the goddess herself, with no regard whatsoever for merit, like Dante’s Fortuna with her wheel. As in Dante, Fame is a dispenser of punishments and rewards, a benevolent yet fearful judge; a Minos that wraps his tail around his body and assigns the doomed their respective circles in Hell. Perhaps it is superfluous to point out that good fame, or the correction of bad fame, or the request to mitigate or suppress their infamy, is exactly what the majority of the damned in Hell ask of Dante, and with firm determination. Fame is herself not a graceful and attractive goddess, 34 Cf. the eagle that carries Dante during his dream to the circle of fire in Purg., IX, 19ff. Yet Dante hurriedly disposes of the episode of the dream in very few lines and there is no real contact between the eagle and the dreamer. However, the poet is rapt in ecstasy by the majestic upward flight of the eagle, with its wings of gold. Then the dream is interrupted by the fire.

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but a monstrous figure, shaped by Chaucer by means of a grotesque imagination akin to that of Dante. At the outset physically minute, the goddess’ body is expandable, it increases in size and swells – thus symbolizing the very nature of fame – until it becomes gigantic, through a series of horrific metamorphoses, including countless eyes, ears and tongues, and winged feet. The building next to the House of Fame is that of the flatus vocis, of uninhibited Rumour, of gossip that spreads like wildfire.35 In a decidedly modern fashion, or even with postmodern foreshadowings, The Hous of Fame illustrates the heuristic function, or rather the issue of the deceitful nature, of the human word, and is thus an allegory of literature itself and of historiography. Poets themselves have put in verse not history, but fables and legends, those which Chaucer himself takes pleasure in churning out. In short, literature is essentially restrained mendacity. 4. The Parlement of Foules (1382) provides further confirmation of the central role played by the Somnium Scipionis in English mediaeval literature. Chaucer’s conception and theory of dream-vision poetry hinge on a sort of link between the dream itself and its immediate ‘diurnal residues’ in everyday life. Having read about Scipio Africanus in the Somnium, the poet allows himself to be guided by Scipio himself through a park, whose gates bear two explicitly Dantesque inscriptions, because the path splits in two directions: one leads to the Paradise of the blessed, whereas the other leads to the Hell of the doomed. They then reach a luxuriant and resounding garden adorned with various types of trees, where animals innocently play and on the branches birds are singing, surrounded by allegorical figures of virtues and vices. In this interlude, the poet puts to the test his powers of description in the pictorial narratives of the pagan goddesses inside the temple,

35

The sudden ending (critics tend to affirm that this was due to boredom on the part of the author) coincides with the appearance on the scene of an unknown character ‘of gret auctorite’. The house of Rumour, over which Aeolus presides, also known as ‘Domus Dedaly’, a place where the most inane conversations pass from one person to another, represents an evident imaginary anticipation of the seventh episode, in the newspaper offices, of Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce’s familiarity with Chaucer is almost certainly due to Skeat’s edition, published when Joyce was attending university. Skeat is also the editor of an English etymological dictionary, cited as one of Stephen Daedalus’ most frequently consulted volumes in Joyce’s two Portraits.

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and sings the praises of a kind of eternal, undying love, while expressing his profound disenchantment with short-lived, transient love, similar perhaps to that of his own broken marriage. This is also one of the first instances of the game of ‘hide-and-seek’ that Chaucer plays with the first-person narrator, thus creating a dual-personality effect. As in Dante, we witness in Chaucer a clash or conflict – which however aims at creating a compromise – between pagan mythology and the new Christian monotheistic dispensation. Having benefited from Scipio’s teachings, the pilgrim dreamer delights in the enticing visions of paganism that swirl into phantasmagoria. This particular moment in the text, prior to the actual ‘Parlement’, resembles a visit to a circle of Hell, with a surprising element of audacious and allusive surrealism (Priapus and Venus undraped and in the nude). Everything works out in the end, with the appearance of vicarious and Solomonic nature who takes office on the judge’s throne. On St Valentine’s Day, she presides over a council of discordant opinions, or démande d’amour in which each bird will choose his or her companion to mate with. 5. The extremely important Prologue (in two versions) of The Legend of Good Women (1385–1387) comes as later confirmation of the final notes of The Hous of Fame. Here Chaucer resumes the theme of the need to verify the validity of legends, myths, rumours, of simple gossip and therefore of transmitted fame. A story handed down or retold cannot be verified through personal experience, but at the same time, it is not possible to live in total epoché (suspended judgement) – a remote anticipation of critical empiricism, or at least of Victorian scepticism regarding issues of faith, the authenticity of the Gospels and the existence of the afterlife. Chaucer begins by reminding his readers that no one has ever come back from Paradise or Hell. What surfaces is a clear sensation of estrangement and light-heartedness, and Chaucer announces that the stories he is about to narrate are true, or they could be – and indeed they are – false, and therefore they are nothing more than magnificent and delightful lies. The epistemologist ante litteram wonders about the validity of historicolegendary transmission but, having raised the issue, he puts it aside. The story of Aeneas is picked up once again in the context of the debate on fame. Chaucer himself awards the hero a different kind of fame from the one he had attributed to him in the preceding poem: now he inverts the terminology and emphasis, stating that women are faithful and men are

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unfaithful – truth is twofold, ephemeral, according to one’s point of view. On the whole, the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women is unusually lyrical, personal and autobiographical, in its narration of Chaucer’s passion for flowers, the spring season and the month of May, and in the topos of a pleasurable dream during his slumber amid the flowers. It also provides us with an indirect catalogue of Chaucer’s written works, along with his lost ones, as well as giving precious information on their dates.36 In the prologue, in the manner of Poliziano, Alcestis appears on the scene. She is the chorus leader, with a garland of flowers around her hair, the personification of the beautiful daisy, and she is followed by a train of faithful wives chanting the ballad of Love. Indeed, Cupid is surrounded by them. The final part of the prologue turns into an act of self-defence on the part of Chaucer the poet, reprimanded by Cupid and defended by the compassionate and forgiving Alcestis. In this case, the defendant has to clear himself of the charge of having depicted Criseyde as an inconstant woman without taking into account the multitude of faithful women throughout the course of history. Stung to the quick, Chaucer feels the need to make amends, and having written five books on the story of a frivolous and disloyal woman and of a naïve but perfect lover (Criseyde and Troilus), subscribes to the opposite view of males as traitors and cheaters and females as paragons of integrity to the point of self-sacrifice. If the eulogy of female fidelity obeys a precise literary genre, this is the same oscillation that we will find replicated in The Canterbury Tales. The nine stories of historical women and mythological heroines loyal unto death form an anthology of classical cases narrated from a distinctly feminine point of view, reflected in the seething impatience with which the third-person narrative switches into the direct address, and in restrained and more often impassioned empathy. Even-tempered and skilful as usual, Chaucer here appears to be rather detached. The episodes are described without marked originality; his remake is far too mechanical with respect to Ovid, Virgil and other sources. Dido and Aeneas had already been evoked in the first part of The Hous of Fame, and the high-handed Chaucer, as previously stated, ‘defames’ Aeneas with respect to the traditional icon of 36

All the rest of Chaucer’s works are listed, apart from The Canterbury Tales, with the exception of the first tale, that of the Knight.

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the ‘pious’ hero.37 Theseus is not the just, level-headed, Solomonic monarch and civilizer of the first of the Canterbury Tales, but a supporter of the basic principles of the faithless male. Ultimately, The Legend of Good Women is an instance of canonical selection: Cleopatra, Thisbe, Lucrece are figures who will later be resumed above all by Shakespeare, alongside other ubiquitous and amazingly analogous myths in English literature of the future, such as those of Tereus and Philomela. The nineteenth-century heir of Chaucer (and of Chaucer as a composer and remaker of myths) is obviously William Morris, who reprinted him in a stylishly illustrated edition. § 18. Chaucer IV: ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ In the five books of Troilus and Criseyde (written in the early 1380s, perhaps in 1385 or, according to other scholars, between 1379 and 1383, composed in rhyme royal, that is to say in seven-line stanzas),38 Chaucer’s attribution of the story to his ‘authors’ has become so insistent as to be almost contradictory, as is his constant assertion that he was writing as if under dictation. He had two precedents, first Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne,39 but he claims to take inspiration from some mysterious Lollius; for all that, he actually translates – occasionally verbatim – Boccaccio’s Filostrato, while making significant changes to the plot.40 On at least two occasions, Chaucer’s poem was to pave the way and give a

37 38 39

Cf. BRP, 98–9, on the reaction of the Scottish poet Douglas towards this distortion. So called because it was inaugurated by James I, King of Scotland. On the increasing importance in the Middle Ages of the narrative framework of the two lovers, which is merely touched upon in Homer, see BAL, 170. 40 The poem is conceived and composed with the explicit objective of offering an exemplum to a ‘filostrato’, as a cure for his malady, and Pandarus is initially a physician who promises to heal Troilus of his wounds and make him see reason (but in I, 58–9, Chaucer has Troilus recite the translation of a Petrarchan sonnet). It is generally agreed that Chaucer creates Pandarus, merely adumbrated in Boccaccio; moreover, he develops the character of Criseyde, and extends its source by almost a half. The comparison between the two texts has been, and continues to be, a hunting ground for the most illustrious scholars in the field of comparative literature, such as Pio Rajna, C. S. Lewis and above all the spectacular Praz in PMI (who more explicitly speaks [41 n. 1] of a ‘land of plenty’ for a source researcher).

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few precious hints to Shakespeare for his Troilus and Cressida. If he apparently lags behind Shakespeare, this is merely due to the fact that the two writers were operating at a distance in different contexts and different genres, with the result that the two works defy any kind of comparison. Chaucer’s work is justly lacking in outdoor scenes and in a certain variety of personae; above all, the absence of Thersites and Ulysses, as well that of an ideological and argumentative contest regarding political power, is to be noted. Yet this remains a dialectical or indeed a dramatic poem, as opposed to an action-packed one, consisting as it does of an endless war of words for the most part between two characters. Thus, on principle, Troilus and Criseyde is at odds with Chaucer himself, and is marked by intensity and obsessive rigour, as opposed to the delightful variety of the Canterbury Tales; in short, it is monochromatic as opposed to polyphonic. The two lovers act out a heated, frenzied war of positions in a series of what we may define as arias and concertatos. It is important to note that this type of poem is the very first of its kind, considering that in Chaucer’s time stylized allegory predominated over psychological analysis. The poet stresses the need for celerity, and informs his public every time he recapitulates, summarizes or makes an omission, almost as if he foresaw that, far in the future, readers would consider excessively prolix a poem teeming with flowery Homeric and classical similes, almost invariably related to the alternation of the seasons and their natural scenery, and to the hours of the day. In actual fact, what Chaucer brings into focus, for the very first time in English literature, is erotic pathology and amour fou. Troilus, wildly in love, is an exact replica of Tristram,41 smitten and infatuated with passion; a valiant warrior, he becomes obsessed with his beloved and drives himself towards the maelstrom of self-destruction. It would then be more appropriate to compare this poem with Shakespeare’s Othello rather than with his Troilus and Cressida. Loyal Pandarus uses his matchmaking skills to unite Troilus and Criseyde, yet unwittingly forges the first link in the chain that will ultimately lead to jealousy and betrayal, thus involuntarily playing the part

41 Book III begins with Criseyde’s comforting visit to Troilus, sick in bed.

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of Iago.42 On the strength of a few subtle details, concerning the background and setting of the story, as well as the content and themes of the dialogues, Chaucer’s Troilus is also a remake. The event is transposed from the period of Homer to that of chivalry and courtly love; indeed, the estranged reader is continually prompted to consider that the story has been post-dated.43 What is more, Chaucer foreshadows the much later novel of seduction, betrayal and jealousy. Here the world of mythology and heroism is abandoned in favour of the era of men and bourgeois society. The precariousness of love is analysed in a genuinely Hardyan atmosphere of honourable promises that are destined to fall apart and become frustrated: the immature and weakwilled Troilus, with all his story-telling and philosophizing, resembles – and foreshadows – the obstinate and ‘obscure’ Jude of the novel of the same name. Pandarus and Troilus are paralysed by human respect and therefore by the fear of rumour, and the love story between Troilus and Criseyde must remain secret; Diomede is the judicious lover whose career must be ouverte aux talents. 2. Availing himself of his best and most consistent skills, Chaucer unites grace and order; and he masters his subject matter by observing his characters’ actions in the guise of an impartial arbiter. Knowing that he is also the author of The Canterbury Tales, we cannot help being taken aback by the absence of humour and satire. The stylishness of the translator and transposer, the dexterity with which he monitors and interchanges the various central themes remind us of another supreme recreator and transcriber, namely Alfred Lord Tennyson, the author of Idylls of the King five centuries later. In the same way that Tennyson victorianizes the palimpsest of King Arthur, so Chaucer medievalizes and domesticates one of the most distinctive of secondary episodes of the Trojan War. It would be improper to label Troilus and Criseyde as a chivalric poem, but not so improper if we bear in mind that, although this episode has its place in ancient Greek literature, Chaucer filters it through the sieve of chivalric codes. Strangely 42 On the subject of Shakespearean anticipations, P. Boitani, in MAR, vol. I, 219, sees in Troilus ‘a decidedly pre-Hamletic character’. 43 Speirs 1964, 51ff., enters into a debate with C. S. Lewis, who affirmed that Chaucer portrays the background in the allegorizing spirit of Guillaume de Lorris.

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enough, he revived this specific ‘matere’44 of Troy, which in the past decades or half-centuries had remained very much on the sidelines. Yet we are dealing with a rudimentary blending of materials, because there are many suggestive correspondences between Tristram and Troilus, and both stories overlap on the theme of irrational and self-destructive love and of female seduction. If we classify the work as a chivalric poem, then surely we are dealing with the greatest and most far-reaching one of its kind before Spenser. Chaucer is, of course, not renowned for his lyricism but for his epic and narrative poetry, but he occasionally assays the same ‘romantic’ poetry and romanticism of the Sehnsucht, as in the case of Troilus, who returns full of nostalgia and regret to see the palace abandoned by the now fugitive Criseyde, or vents his woe on the moon. This represents the inauguration of the narrative poem in several cantos and various metrical structures, a pattern adopted in Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh or in Tennyson’s narrative poems; above all, it is a foreshadowing of Byron’s Don Juan, although Chaucer lacks Byron’s taste for mockery and improvisation. A strong sense of everyday life transpires from the frequent scenes of a hero captured in his moments of privacy ‘in chaumbre’; the urban setting of Troy has been inevitably fantasized as a fortified medieval citadel, with roads, palaces and windows with ‘lattis’, that is, lattices or grates; the palace is surrounded by a garden in which the damsels stroll and while the hours away. Criseyde indulges in bourgeois pastimes, such as reading books on the siege of Thebes. The demeanour of the individual characters is modelled on manuals of etiquette, and the perfect – almost Renaissance – courtier possesses ‘excellence’, ‘wit’ and, at the same time, ‘governaunce’. The letters exchanged between the two lovers are signed in the formal French courtly manner ‘Le vostre T.’ and ‘La vostre C.’, but the prosaic rain intervenes and indeed contributes to their first embrace.45 Never could any Greek warrior like the desperate Troilus in the temple – and here is a blatant anachronism – have 44 This is a term used above all by Pandarus, in its secondary meaning of ‘objective’ of his own mission, that of making the two characters fall in love and of keeping them united. 45 Also in the ‘legend’ of Queen Dido, she and Aeneas are driven by the rain into a cave, where their love blossoms.

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commented so disproportionately on the medieval, Boethian controversy between predestination and free will. It might be worth mentioning that Troilus is very much younger and consequently far more immature with respect to Criseyde, already a widow; moreover Pandarus, being her uncle, is a sort of presumably youthful spiritual father, while Priam is an aged man, totally immersed in the war and in political issues. Not until we reach Book V (stanza 116), are we given a detailed physical description of Criseyde, who is ‘mene […] of hir stature’, with plaited hair adorned with a golden ribbon, and heavenly eyes (stanza 117); however, the poet confesses that he is ignorant of her age. In the next stanza, 119, he offers a brief description of Troilus’ character: gentle and courteous by definition, he can virtually compete with a woman on this account; and, indeed, he lacks two qualities, bravery and the gift of speech. Being reserved, he avails himself of Pandarus to intercede on his behalf;46 in doing so, he lets Criseyde slip through his fingers, and he loses her forever, instead of winning her over. After his tremendous loss, he becomes a snivelling, excessively submissive hero, a prey to fatalism. Diomede, like Pandarus, wields the weapon of rhetoric and, in next to no time, he achieves the objective that took Troilus an endless amount of time to reach. If Troilus is instinctive by nature, Criseyde treads very carefully, ‘in no soden wyse’. Fate or human frailty induce Chaucer to acquit the heroine or to suspend judgement. On the other hand, the modern code of conduct of treachery and even Machiavellian self-interest and expediency surfaces in Calchas, the soothsayer who flees from the now vanquished Troy. The Trojans, however, react with another code, that of loyalty, and Criseyde, unlike her father, is reinstated and esteemed. In Book III Troilus, visited by the heroine as he lies sick in his bed, devotedly places himself at her service, and the climax coincides with the evening meal at Pandarus’ house, with Troilus entering Criseyde’s bedroom, where we witness one of the longest and most extenuating scenes of seduction. In 46 A schemer like Iago, innocent and naïve but also extremely malicious, Pandarus is perhaps powered by indirect sexual intents; otherwise, it would be impossible to explain – and Chaucer fails to do so – why he so actively und unflaggingly keeps running back and forth from one to the other. He goads the even-tempered and poised Criseyde with the verbal weapons of slander and gossip.

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Book IV, the text gains vigour and Chaucer excels in stanzas that do not describe orderly skirmishes and wars of words, but the making of actions and decisions. Criseyde, who will later be traded for Antenor, is sincerely heartbroken for having to abandon Troy but, after rationally reflecting upon the situation, she devises and proposes her plan to Troilus, who is merely intent on slashing his veins. Initially the two lovers had deplored the arrival of daybreak, and also their agreement to defer matters for ten days. Criseyde’s promise to return to her lover reminds us of the wishful thinking of the two Shakespearean ill-fated lovers of Verona. ‘Fatal’ Troilus does not expect Criseyde to keep her promise and return ten days later; he falls victim to Diomede’s proposals, also because the latter has sworn that Troy will be burnt to the ground and not a single inhabitant will be saved. Troilus plummets into the abyss of desolation. In the last lines, Chaucer gives a detailed account of how Troilus is thunderstruck when he sees the gift he had given to Criseyde adorning the Greek warrior’s armour. § 19. Chaucer V: ‘The Canterbury Tales’ I. The poem as a field of contrary vectors A few of The Canterbury Tales were written separately prior to 1380; later – around 1387 – Chaucer decided to make them parts of a single text. The work became then a collage of pre-existing texts incorporated with, or adapted to, other new ones. It was presumably shelved before its completion, around 1395, not, therefore, cut short by the author’s death. The work was then reproduced in over eighty manuscripts, and printed for the first time in 1478 and later, in 1484, by Caxton. Originally created with the aim of entertainment, the tales were subsequently interconnected and reordered. The obsessive dilemma of what came first, the chicken or the egg, that is to say, whether the characters in the Prologue were created before the stories attributed to them, or vice versa, has been solved once and for all: Chaucer wrote the stories and then the characters were adjusted and matched to them, even if the combination appears at times to be hardly noticeable, inexistent or even contradictory. Similarly, at the risk of sounding somewhat pedantic, we must add that Boccaccio concludes his work with a perfect number of 100 tales, whereas Chaucer sets out to compose 120, but founders and throws in the towel before the end. We witness the same intermingling of themes and genres; but Boccaccio’s work is written

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exclusively in prose, whereas Chaucer alternates poetry and prose, with the predominance of the former. Boccaccio makes an orderly subdivision of the tales in terms of genre, whereas Chaucer deviates from this pattern. These are all gestures of independence. According to the original plan, the poem, as I mentioned, was to be a mammoth structure of 120 tales, given that the group of pilgrims on their way to Thomas Becket’s shrine consisted of thirty people, each of whom was supposed to tell two stories on the outward journey and two on the return journey. The project was left unfinished, and was tacitly abandoned or downscaled during its composition, with the result that only the General Prologue and twenty-two tales are complete, with two additional fragmentary ones. Above all, the sequence, not so much of the tales themselves, but of the ‘groups’ (nine, commonly identified with the capital letters from A to I) in which they have been assembled and into which the work is divided, requires further investigation.47 Each group encloses two or more tales, interconnected by interludes and prologues; however, there is a lack of diegetic and discursive links between one group and the other. Nevertheless – just as episode ten of Joyce’s Ulysses is symbolically crucial to the novel, mainly due to its opening and closing scenes – the Tales must begin with the Knight’s Tale and end with the Parson’s Tale, two symbolic figures, or allegories, or banners of medieval cosmology and everyday life. The list of pilgrims does not include any specific representative of political power or any official symbol of law and order, but it is the Knight who acts as their spokesman. With the Parson, the embodiment of religious power, the work comes full circle. It is interesting to note that both the most lowly and the most influential social classes have been excluded, above all for the sake of mimesis, inasmuch as neither the nobleman nor the yokel could realistically have been included in a company of pilgrims. In truth, the question of the order of the tales conceals a few more deceptive implications. It would have been rational to arrange for the tales to follow on from each other according to the order in which the characters make their entrance in the Prologue and

47 The manuscripts which have been preserved follow different sequences; the Ellesmere manuscript, in California at present, is the highest rated, even if the most recent research deems the Hengwrt, kept in Aberystwyth, the closest to Chaucer’s holograph.

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are there introduced; yet this is not the case, even in the various groups, with the result that we come up against the first striking and unexpected incongruity. Moreover, some of the characters in the Prologue have not been assigned a tale, as can only be expected in an incomplete work. The lack of correspondence between the order in which the characters enter the Prologue and that of their respective tales depends on random selection, that is, drawing lots; the first name drawn is that of the Knight, but this is obviously an expedient of the real author.48 The need for order, we infer, clashes with the threat of disorder in the Canterbury Tales, and heralds the major Elizabethan theme of discordia concors. 2. It is common knowledge that the pilgrimage constitutes a hackneyed narrative framework handed down by tradition, yet Chaucer succeeds in firing it with unprecedented – at times compelling – realism. The group of pilgrims is recruited at the Tabard Inn in Southwark on 18 April of an unspecified year,49 and, to a certain extent, it is possible to follow the route every step of the way as they proceed. At ten o’clock in the morning of the same day, the Man of Law’s Tale begins, and shortly after we are informed that the town of Rochester is now in sight. By the time we reach the third tale in group A, the company has arrived at Deptford, already halfway through the first day of the pilgrimage.50 Considering the period in which it was composed, the poem is more than a skeleton of a road novel, by virtue of the interchange of the story itself and the information pertaining to its enunciation. In the narrative fiction the pilgrims travel on horseback and, as has been agreed, they pass the time by telling stories.51 The Host of the inn,52

48 Kean 1972, vol. II, 73, appears to believe that the work might have been complete, but not according to the type of sequence attained and described at the end of the Knight’s Tale. 49 Conventionally taken to be the year 1387. 50 The text is apparently discontinued at the gates of Canterbury at the end of the fourth day. 51 Praz (PMI, 80) finds it unlikely that thirty people on the move, either in a line or on horseback, could all hear each tale clearly and distinctly. 52 He is known in the text as Harry Bailly and, like other pilgrims, he might have had a counterpart in real life.

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having now joined the company, is the one who takes note of the passing of the hours and establishes both the duration and sequence of the tales. He comments on and distorts them, being the only person who is not a storyteller, but simply a moderator and a judge. The Host is essentially the character who orders the text, insofar as he is the one who organizes the journey, devises the storytelling game and sets the rules and timeframe, in spite of the fact that the scribe is Chaucer himself, or an alter ego of Chaucer. Though a good-natured fellow, the Host dictates fairly strict rules, and ratifies the agreement, which gains the approval of the whole company. A similar ‘social contract’ adumbrates the constitution of human society, also due to the fact that the medley of the pilgrims is its mise en abyme. The pilgrimage was, in fact, a societal ritual which, on an exceptional basis, eliminated the rigid disparities based on class and area of origin and, at least for a short period of time, made it possible for men and women, and the most heterogeneous social classes and trades, to live together in harmony, thus unifying the country. The narrators are distributed according to medieval customs, practices and categories. The unprecedented realism of the Tales is confirmed by the following observations. While being rigidly structured in verse form, the tales at times appear to respond to an irrepressible urge to reply in kind to a preceding speaker, and the whole sequence is edited on the basis of vindictiveness and personal rivalry. Between the introductory tale of the Knight and that of the Miller, we witness a bathos, both in terms of internal time (from the mythological era to contemporary times) and of theme (from the high and noble to the base and sardonic). The two tales are diametrically opposed, also due to the dissonance and at the same time the similarity of the contexts, since in both tales two men are rivals for a woman. However, no sooner has the Miller told a story in which he disparages a carpenter than the Reeve (himself a carpenter) immediately retorts, with the result that one tale gives rise to another, thus enacting a catalytic process. Similarly, the Friar’s Tale departs from a long-standing grudge of his against the Summoner. Historians remind us of the parochial rivalries and proverbial hostilities among the various categories and trade associations in Chaucer’s time. Secondly, the overall design is sufficiently adaptable to be able to accommodate sudden unforeseen changes of plan. Further along the way a panting knight, accompanied by his squire, joins

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the company of pilgrims, whereupon an interlude in the form of a short, delightful tale in its own right comes to life: the knight is a quack who makes a living by hoodwinking simpletons, claiming that silver can be obtained from melted coal, but the squire, pressed by the Host, finds the courage to expose him and reveal his evil arts, thus forcing the unmasked swindler to make a getaway. Another unexpected event is afforded by the drunken cook who, for this reason, is unable to fulfil his duty of telling his story when the Host calls out his name. It is Chaucer himself who makes amends for the firm rejection of his chivalric parody and tells the story of Melibee, which is, however, awarded a less than lukewarm applause (he jests over his own incompetence and moves on to prose, after swallowing their criticism – or rather his own self-criticism – on account of his limping rhymes). It is not surprising that the taste of the period should appreciate tales spontaneously invented and transposed into verse, invariably in rhyming couplets of decasyllabic pentameters; especially since, due to a similar correspondence between theme and metre, Chaucer’s tale of Melibee and the final tale of the Parson, which externally resemble a treatise or debate, are written in prose and with numbered paragraphs. 3. As previously stated, the exact year of the pilgrimage is not specified, but the month and also the place of departure are. There is no dreamvision or surreal geography in the Tales; everything is ascertainable and plausible. At this point, the distinction between the internal author and the real author virtually fades away, given that Chaucer – in his own name – joins the other twenty-nine pilgrims as the thirtieth member of the company. The ‘layered’ communication model in the Canterbury Tales is as follows: ‘Chaucer’, the internal narrator, with his own viewpoint and bias, has the group of pilgrims as his audience; his words are recorded by the real author, the historical Chaucer, whose name appears on the title page; the final audience is constituted by us, the readers of posterity. It is, as it were, a game of retransmission, more or less as in Wuthering Heights. In the Prologue the first person ‘I’ is predominant, but our modern critical conscience, after Bakhtin, is now well skilled in the art of exploring the ambiguity of the statements pronounced by the mask of the author, and thus with no guarantee. Very rarely have critics asked themselves whether Chaucer had really been to Canterbury on a pilgrimage, or whether he had ever gone through a similar experience, and therefore whether he was

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describing a real event; they limit themselves to stating that Greenwich, the author’s town of residence, was a privileged observation point to watch the groups of pilgrims on their journey towards Canterbury. The narrator plays on this ambiguity and hastily takes cover behind a few categorical judgements, which are, however, to be interpreted within the context of this game of make-believe and of the not totally convincing Erlebte Rede. The ‘voice-over’ says ‘I’, but reports only what he sees, what he witnesses, what he listens to, and has thus sometimes a limited knowledge. He also weighs and organizes spaces and times at a later stage, enters into considerable detail but also abridges and summarizes. Moreover, in the tales where two or more plots run parallel, he zigzags, and skilfully shifts from one to the other. Occasionally, as in the Knight’s Tale, he gives prior notice of, and includes, a crucial digression, for instance a description of the statue of Venus, in order to illustrate the overwhelming power of Love (Chaucer is notoriously an unrivalled master of ekphrasis, and is superbly captivating when he describes pictorial and architectural details, as in this case).53 Like Boccaccio, and like Browning, he is therefore a ventriloquist poet ante litteram, capable of imitating various fake voices and registers. A wide range of narrative rules can be derived from the narrative practice. The first internal rule is related to the inclusion in the General Prologue of the poem of a global overview and a kaleidoscopic slideshow of the pilgrim narrators, instead of giving a description of each storyteller before each tale. The only physical portraits and descriptions of clothing that are postponed are those of the Canon and the Yeoman, a necessary transgression, due to the fact that they join the group later and are not present at the inn at the moment of departure. Another internal rule is the interlude or the preamble, that is to say the interstices between one tale and the other, extratextual skirmishes that are part of the story frame: one character protests, another gives a lecture, another churns out lengthy, orchestrated prologues,54 yet another formulates captationes or preteritions or professes false modesty. 53

This is the learned and well-argued view, based on medieval visual and iconographic culture, advanced by Kolve 1984 and 2009. 54 These prologues are invariably short, yet the one which introduces the Wife of Bath’s Tale reverses this tendency and, in this case, the world-famous Wife of Bath’s Prologue overpowers the tale itself.

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At the same time, the Host takes it upon himself to devise a sort of collective feedback, speaking on behalf of the group and expressing a rating of approval, although not systematically: for instance, how can the pilgrims listen to the tale of Melibee without yawning? The blatant discrepancy of the Yeoman’s Tale lies, at least in the first of the two parts, in the fact that it is not a fictional tale involving imaginary characters far removed from the narrator – which seems to be the general rule – but specifically an autobiography dealing with the narrator himself, his master and his trickery: in short, a canon’s yeoman speaks about or maligns canons. The Squire’s Tale is, in turn, the most explicitly metanarrative of tales that are occasionally metanarrative: he affirms point blank that it is possible to make introductions and defer pathos, but at the cost of a certain amount of verbosity. Being self-aware, for the very reason that they are all ‘offspring’ of Chaucer, having been born from his kaleidoscopic imagination, the several narrators take account of what exactly reaches the recipient. For this very reason the need for narrative economy unites different storytellers from all walks of life, all of whom are unanimous in their decision to dispense with all the marginalia; thus they tend to punctuate the flow of their tales with self-addressed appeals for conciseness. Variety, a rare quality with which Chaucer is clearly endowed, is reflected first and foremost in the dimensions and the planning. Alongside more traditional diegetic models, the Monk’s Tale assembles isolated and detached snippets dealing with mythological and biblical themes, in order to exemplify the reversals of fortune: at the same time, it is a prime example of an extraordinary mise en abyme, reflected in a series of short stories linked by a theme, but each with a different protagonist and with remarkable variations in terms of time, space and geographical location, in accordance with the principle of variety underlying the Canterbury Tales as a whole. Moreover, in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, two or more plots are interwoven in the main plot before they finally surrender to it. Could it be that the Cook’s Tale was curtailed, interrupted and abandoned because in the narrative fiction it turned out to be just too mediocre? As previously stated, Chaucer personally takes the floor in order to deliver a tale, which is, however, destined to be nipped in the bud due to its marked inferiority. The connecting thread is the aforementioned bickering among the representatives of the

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rival categories; however, this thread may also be thematic, when two tales are linked like the horns of a dilemma and present two conflicting sides of an issue. The so-called ‘Marriage Group’ camouflages one of Chaucer’s haunting obsessions: is marriage a wise course of action, are wives an asset, and is marriage a blessing or a curse? On this topic, Chaucer launches an investigation that is destined to become a constant and common theme in English literature up to Hardy. Internal cohesion is also provided by the fact that the pilgrims themselves have good memories, make links and find connections: the Wife of Bath is not easy to forget. 4. In the first interlude preceding the Miller’s Tale (in current editions usually the second tale in the series), the author states explicitly that the subject matter of The Canterbury Tales provides a 360-degree view of human life. We can expect a series of tales regarding nobility and baseness, and covering the whole range from the sublime to the brutish. It is not inappropriate to quote Joyce for the second time, because the carnal and sexual do not gradually evolve towards the sublime, but they very often ascend, only to crash down again haphazardly, with the result that they coexist shoulder to shoulder. Both authors report unabridged sermons, steeped as they are in homiletic culture and Catholic theology and exploit this material, though not entirely in the form of parody. The shift in tone and theme from one pole to another is as disconcerting and astonishing in Chaucer as in Joyce. The shortlist of literary genres alternates in Chaucer from the realistic to the mythological, the fantastic, the surreal and the sensational. His sources are common knowledge handed down over the ages, the repertoire of legends, original observation, or false rumours. The Clerk reports a story he heard from other people, and which turns out to be Petrarch’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda. Chaucer’s alertness to historical issues is exemplified by the tales dealing with the relations between Christians and Jews (as in the aforementioned Prioress’ ‘anti-Semitic’55 tale of the young martyr Hugh of Lincoln) and

55

It is hardly realistic and plausible that the Jews should kill the boy simply because he sings the praises of the Virgin. Orwell (OCE, vol. III, 385) probably relied on this tale in recognizing in Chaucer the beginning of a ‘perceptible antisemitic strain’ in

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those between Christians and Muslims, a common theme in many previous epics on the Crusades and their historical context (Constance in the Man of Law’s Tale). There is a never-ending series of tales regarding amorous or erotic affairs, tales on lost or unspoiled virginity, on adultery and on the marital Decalogue. 5. The Tale of Melibee is one of the two Chaucerian transpositions of a tedious religious treatise on medieval spirituality and a manual of righteous Christian behaviour,56 and it elaborates on the necessity and nature of Christian virtues. It is wholly theoretical rather than narrative, and the frame of the story, which describes Melibee’s intention to take revenge on his enemies after their attack on his house and family, merely serves as a pretext. It takes the form of a typical lectio swamped with constant references to Cicero, similar to the one imparted to Langland’s pilgrim by the allegorical figures and incarnated virtues (in Chaucer the lesson is delivered by Prudence, and Melibee is also ‘one who feeds on honey’).57 From a conceptual point of view, however, this is a crucial tale, because it attempts to inspire and instil in the audience the power of self-control, something that they specifically lack, or which Chaucer’s male but also female characters violate in the tales. The Tale of Melibee thus gives the impression of a series of rules (more often than not spurned or flouted in the subject matter of the other tales), such as the writer’s pleas for temperance, moderation, abstinence or control over one’s compulsions; it also attempts to dissuade his audience from vindictiveness which, ironically, is the driving force that powers the tales of trickery. Melibee lays the emphasis on human inadequacy and fragility. We pass from a pilgrimage towards the other world to a horizontal, concrete one; and, in this precise sense, Chaucer is an ‘English Dante’ or in any case a Dante, because the latter was an expert

English literature. Others argue that there were no Jews in England when Chaucer wrote, and that he based himself on popular hearsay. 56 The source followed slavishly is a French translation of a treatise by Albertanus of Brescia. 57 In her interpretation of the name of Cecilia, the Second Nun indulges in etymological fantasies that herald Ruskin: the name Cecilia means ‘lily from heaven’, ‘the way of the blind’, ‘absence of blindness’, ‘heaven of the people’.

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in making the sublime and the vulgar clash jarringly. In the Summoner’s interlude, a small masterpiece of bitingly satirical and lewd wit, he visualizes Hell like Satan’s rear end, from which 20,000 friars come swarming out.58 Yet, as opposed to Dante, Chaucer impassibly depicts the human individual in the grips of an extremely volatile psyche and the precariousness and unpredictability of human existence. His valediction strikes us as being somewhat bizarre or humorous and, at any rate, enigmatic, insofar as the author retracts his entire works, in primis his licentious tales in the manner of Boccaccio. This retraction is an obtrusive, discordant diegetic intrusion, a veritable discursive incongruence, almost as if Chaucer had caught himself, or had been caught red-handed, by some external authority, or even by a hypostasis of his own conscience.59 Chaucer’s Weltanschauung precisely hinges on the overpowering fear that humanity may not be governed by reason and that the flesh may gain the upper hand; he apparently downplays the issue, but in actual fact it perturbs him, and the Parson has to bring down his axe, as it were, to admonish the company, in an interminable sermon, that the senses need to be kept in check. His tale goes as far as to pose the question of whether the entire text of The Canterbury Tales might not be governed by a mechanism based on transgression and atonement: whether the price to pay for this carnival parade might not be, also in terms of emphasis, this unbearable manual of Christian life. For this very reason – due to its excessively abrupt appearance in the work – some critics are still in doubt as to whether it was, in fact, really meant to be a finale; some even have reservations regarding its authenticity. The poem certainly has a carnivalesque evolution, even if it is not sequential, but rather in the form of almost simultaneous alternating cycles, apart from the fact that the Parson’s prose tale, while vehemently and menacingly exhorting

58

59

The idea impressed, and indeed fired, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s imagination in his film dated 1972, which Chaucer scholars hardly ever, or never, take into consideration. Two detailed data sheets, compiled by the present writer, and comparing Chaucer’s text with the film script, can be accessed at , dated 16.9.2012 and 19.9.2012. This crisis is attributed by Coulton 1968, 62, to Chaucer’s fear of the unknown, but also to a few visits he received from monks urging him to repent.

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the company to repent, marks, so to speak, the end of the carnival and the advent of Lent. Similar visions have the effect of making the majority of Chaucer’s male characters suspicious and chauvinistic misogynists; having said that, we witness the bursting on the scene of the pugnacious, aggressive wife of the Host in the following prologue. Chaucer’s typical female character is ambivalent – vulgar and chaste, lascivious and virginal. Three female figures, self-confessed virgins and champions of chastity, stand out as paragons of virtue and resistance towards carnal desire: Constance, Griselda and Cecilia. Chaucer therefore juxtaposes, without voicing an opinion, two contrasting points of view. Incontinence affects the clergy itself, albeit not systematically, and often in the very moment when its representatives preach against it. The most despicable Chaucerian clergyman, who thirsts after sex and riches, is the one described in the Shipman’s Tale, where he is portrayed as the perpetrator of a string of misdeeds, committed suavely and almost absent-mindedly. Monks, in the Host’s opinion, are failed procreators, whose libido has obviously been channelled elsewhere, but at the cost of enormous sacrifice. Behind the façade there lurks a bogus ideology, whereby something unnatural worms its way into the bachelor’s life and corrupts it. With the Pardoner we border on unadulterated Langlandian territory and, sooner or later, we can expect a tirade or an insurgence on the part of the more sound and virtuous of the pilgrims. Yet the Pardoner meekly confesses to the trap, making no mystery of the guile with which he extorts alms; thus the self-confessed criminal unmasks himself. Browning might have taken a cue from this tale, above all in the monologues in which he demonstrates how this ancient, corrupt Catholicism retains the power to seduce and deceive the common people, by putting into practice the fraud to which the Pardoner pleads guilty. Chaucer espouses, in particular and in all honesty, the idea that one’s life should be spent in the world, far away from the desolation and darkness of the convent. He invariably frowns on the advocates of monasticism. For his part, the layman’s duty is simply to put his talents to good use, thus sanctifying his existence: in the exercise of their trades, very few other people surpass the thirty pilgrims, for which reason Chaucer very often avails himself of hyperbole and indulgently glosses over their failings: ‘Ther nas no man nowher so vertuous’. The array of characters alternates righteous monks with lecherous and villainous friars, who appear to be out of place at a pilgrimage, just like the

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Shipman, the Summoner and the Pardoner.60 Langland’s whip is wielded contrary-wise: the Parson is not the kind of priest that goes in search of offerings, nor is he corrupt, like many; on the contrary, he unassumingly does his duty. Scrolling down in the Prologue, we see the appearance of an honourable, just ‘plowman’ – a nod or a wink to Langland is de rigueur. The fact that this pilgrimage takes place during the daytime and has nothing to do with dream-vision is evidence of Chaucer’s thorough realism, and one that can therefore be more accurately assessed with respect to Langland’s. Ironically, the reward at the end of the pilgrimage is not so much the arrival at the agreed spiritual destination, as the ‘soper’, the evening meal awarded to the winner of the storytelling competition. § 20. Chaucer VI: ‘The Canterbury Tales’ II. The internal texture Critics, as I have already mentioned, have been unanimous in stating that variety is one of the most evident and indisputable merits of The Canterbury Tales. For this reason, it is customary, analysing them, to start from an inventory made according to genre. The tales of the Knight and Squire, as well as that of the Franklin, belong to courtly romance; those of the Miller, Reeve, Friar and Summoner belong to the fabliau tradition; those of the Lawyer and the Prioress derive from the hagiographic genre; those of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner from the didactic; Chaucer’s tale of Sir Thopas and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale fall into the burlesque and parodic genre. Chaucer’s main problem was orchestration, which also becomes a problem for modern readers. There are several possible solutions, that is, regarding the rearrangement of the collection for the purpose of a more detailed discussion: the distinction between poetry and prose, between the earlier and the later tales; the list of places and settings and thus also of historical periods, from ancient Greece to almost all the rest of Europe, to Asia and other purely fictional and imaginary lands; or the alternating of contrasts and similarities, or the ascending or descending order according to the social spectrum and prestige of the narrators. In the text the tales challenge one another without interruption, but they do so for

60 The poet Crabbe seems to have been the first to draw attention to this discrepancy (see CRHE, vol. I, 263).

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reasons that go beyond a mere repartee; and in the definitive arrangement the connections might perhaps have worked even at a distance, according to principles and criteria we have no way of knowing. As matters stand, we are of course in no position to be able to speak of the nexus between the ‘groups’ of the surviving tales. I propose to follow a descending order in terms of theme, also along the lines of the degree of ‘nobility’ of the various genres; a thematic division is, in practical terms, tantamount to a division in terms of genre.61 It must, however, be underlined that such a procedure, after my initial emphasis on the ‘openness’ of The Canterbury Tales, is necessarily a practical and arbitrary one, adopted for the sole purpose of critical discussion. 2. In the General Prologue Chaucer is a caricatural illuminator who dwells on minute, unusual, infinitesimal detail and on the microscopic element, without the visionary distortion of a Langland, whose work, after all, begins on the same thematic chord. As previously stated, we are dealing with ekphrases, in the manner of a Flemish painter ante litteram, with a keen eye for the exterior aspects (hats, fashions, wristbands, demeanour and speech); thus shedding precious light on the psychological connotations linked to these. Chaucer could perhaps be more accurately defined as a water-colourist, without Rembrandt’s depth and his masterly use of chiaroscuro, as stated by Praz who, with his own optical anachronisms, underlines the analogies with the paintings of Altichiero and Pisanello; or simply a naїf artist. Notably, and strikingly, this Prologue thronged with portraits lacks the author’s self-portrait, which is reflected much later in the hare-hunter with his lowered gaze. The dominant aesthetics is that of apparent disorder. Yet basically the method employed in the introduction of the characters, in which discontinuity, and even dissonance and coincidence reign supreme – according to what attracts the author’s attention as he goes along – has repercussions on the layout of the work in general, if only as regards a felicitous or unavoidable circumstance, namely the mishmash created by the tales being read in the established order, or in any other order. In maintaining objectivity, Chaucer sits back and allows himself to

61

This is the pattern also adopted by the first-rate study by Kean 1972.

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be entertained by the kaleidoscope of English life, which he is determined and obliged to accept in its unquestionable reality, and pretends to do so on the spur of the moment, without amendments. The task he sets himself is that of the authentic chronicler who reports even the various accents and dialects of his characters. He is decidedly tolerant towards human idiosyncrasies, being armed with a vision of man ontologically a victim of powerful, uncontrollable passions. Only at a later stage comes the prompt, even merciless, admonition to dominate our instinct ‘che virtù nol guidi’ [‘lest we run where virtue guides not’], as Dante had said. Chaucer is already a budding humanist because his man, with his multifaceted charismas, is nevertheless endowed with some degree of ‘vertue’; in other words, he excels in his own professional sphere. Chaucer, in fact, very rarely accuses his pilgrims of being incompetent, for which reason each and all of them are gifted with a coherent form of pride and self-esteem. He does make a few vitriolic comments on some of his characters from a moral point of view, but he ends up being merciful towards them and compensating their vices with other virtues. Life is already a struggle for physical, material and intellectual supremacy within a temporarily horizontal range; and sexual mockery is the rejoinder to fraudulence, as in the Reeve’s Tale, and represents the possibility of compensation, even if taken to extremes. A similar concurrence of conflicting attitudes can be seen above all in the figures of the clergymen. All in all, Chaucer does not appear to be unduly outraged by the fact that, for the most part, they are worldly, pleasureseeking, epicurean, amorous individuals, because he seems to think that a cleric’s mission lies in the world of the living and not within the walls of a convent. A similar predilection for life and good living is only contradicted by the category of university students. The myth of chivalry, in the Knight’s Tale, is already impaired by the sarcasm directed towards the two relatives or cousins, who in words profess their fervent love for each other, only to foolishly become, in practice, bitter enemies and rivals for the same woman. Yet, just to suggest the extremely abrupt breaks in continuity, the following scenario is immediately that of a rural context with thoroughly commonplace characters, like the carpenter ridiculed by the student, and fooled with the aid of culture or magic, such as astrology or predictions of impending doom. Contemporary events continually alternate with historical, mythological, legendary and esemplastic ones.

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3. The Knight sets out to narrate, and indeed gives a summary of the ancient clichéd story of the heroic deeds of Theseus,62 from the defeat of the Amazon women to his marriage with Hippolyta, a story which looks ahead to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and especially to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Beginning in medias res, it begins with Theseus’ meeting with a company of dishevelled Theban widows, clad in black, who stop him and entreat him to wage war against Creon, by whom they have been denied burial of their husbands. Like an authentic medieval knight, Theseus immediately decides upon a change of schedule and routs the tyrant. The Knight’s alleged concision is merely a semblance, and is overtly infringed in the unfolding of the misadventures of the two cousins Palamon and Arcite, captured and deported to Athens. Having both set eyes one day on Emelye, Hippolyta’s sister, through the prison bars, the two Thebans immediately fall in love with her and come to blows over her. One of the fundamental rules in the chivalric code is at issue, but at the same time the absolute primacy of love over any other human law is recalled. One of the two hopes that there will be a free contest, as they have both been condemned to remain prisoners for life. Through the intercession of a friend of his, Arcite is set free but, on pain of death, he is never to show his face again in Theseus’ kingdom. Paradoxically, Arcite’s newly acquired freedom becomes a prison for him. For the first time, Chaucer pronounces an adage, which is subsequently to recur in his work, to the effect that fortune does not always produce favourable consequences and is sometimes short-lived.63 For his

62 The task of narrating the Theban wars will be undertaken by Lydgate (§ 21.3), who attributes the story to Chaucer’s knight on his return journey. 63 At a distance, the Monk’s Tale is intended to respond to the tale of the cunning, unscrupulous and profiteering priest who is the protagonist of the Shipman’s Tale, with a view to rehabilitating the category. He is boldly described by the Host as a ruddy, lecherous monk in his sexual prime, a potential procreator of offspring; however, in the manner of Gower, he churns out a mediocre chain of descriptions of illustrious men from mythological times, for the sake of morality, underlining the fact that fortune is ephemeral and, once it reaches its zenith, it plummets. Therefore these are all examples of downfalls in a historico-fictional timespan extending from Adam to Croesus, attributable above all to women, responsible for the heroes’ reversals of fortune. With a certain amount of imagination, and with one of his simplistic generalizations, Praz (SSI, vol. II, 243, expanded in PMI, 56–63) identified in the

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part, the jealous Palamon gives voice to his hatred of the cruel gods, as well as the moral law that differentiates men from beasts. Therefore there is an abundance of moralizing reflections and debates in the disguise of topical medieval issues. Pining over his lost love, Arcite, acting upon Mercury’s advice, leaves Thebes for Athens and works as Emelye’s steward’s footman. At this point, the Knight telling the story adopts a technique which is later to become frequent in Chaucer, whereby he passes from one side of the story of the two suitors to the other. One night in May, Palamon also decides to flee the city, with the intention of winning Emelye over; and in a wood outside the city, on hearing Arcite’s love song dedicated to his beloved, he comes out in the open and challenges his rival to a duel. The Ariostesque flavour of this somewhat mock-heroic duel consists in the fact that Arcite himself, seeing that Palamon is disarmed, provides him with the necessary arms for the contest, as well as a place to sleep for the night. When the time comes to open the hostilities, the two heroes turn pale. Theseus, engaged in a deer hunt, encounters the two duellists and stops the fight, calling them to order according to the rules of chivalry and above all to the more enlightened laws of social life, on the basis of the medieval supposition that he was the mythical originator of an evolutionary chapter of history, that of art and civilization. For this reason, there is a digression dedicated to the temple of Venus and to her statue, as well as to Diana and her legends. Using a fade-out technique, the narrating Knight returns to the two suitors, whose quarrel will be settled a year later, each flanked with 100 knights, described in great visual detail and with the same microscopic observation witnessed in the Prologue. Parallel actions are accomplished at the dawn of the duel. Palamon enters the temple of Venus to pray and, shortly after, Emelye also goes to the temple of Diana to offer a sacrifice and, although she is contrary to the prospect of marriage, she dedicates a

cameo of Count Ugolino the birth certificate in English literature of ‘bourgeois pathos’, of the ‘sentimental’ genre and the ‘Flemish style miniature’, in short of the Biedermeier sensibility. Following this cue, the incipit of the Franklin’s Tale might be considered to mark the birth of the Romantic Sehnsucht of the restless, yearning woman, similar to the protagonist of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who finds in the symbolic and evocative craggy rocks an objective correlative of her state of mind.

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prayer to the goddess, who miraculously appears before her and tells her that, even against her will, she will have to marry one of the two suitors. For his part, Arcite goes to the temple of Mars to pray. Parallelistically, the god appears before him to assure him of the victory. The scene is shifted to the heavens where discord reigns supreme among the gods, and where Saturn devises a stratagem to favour Palamon. However, on the day of the contest, Theseus announces that bloodshed is to be avoided, for which reason the duel will be conducted using weapons for hand-to-hand combat, in itself an allegory of another advancement in civilization. The Homeric veneer is filtered: among the rules the respites to enable the warriors to regain their strength are also included. Theseus proclaims Arcite victorious but, during the celebrations, Saturn and Pluto cause him to be thrown off his horse and, mortally wounded, he lies in the palace, until he finally dies, entrusting Emelye to Palamon. In his funeral speech, Theseus elucidates a few concepts of medieval philosophy, like that of the ‘First Mover’ and of the duration and limits of human achievements. Emelye marries Palamon. The tale glorifies, yet at the same time undermines, the medieval concept of chivalry: Theseus enacts rigid and impartial draconian laws, and the friendship between the two Thebans runs counter to and is unable to resist the compelling attraction of the flesh. Love is a tyrant, and overrides the laws of chivalry, by mutual agreement of the two heroes. At the same time the artlessness, or chivalric and Ariostesque ‘gran bontà’ [‘goodly truth’] of the two duellists reaches a climax when they agree that death is the preferable alternative to losing one’s beloved. 4. The Squire’s Tale opens with a manifest reference to Sir Gawain: a knight arrives at the king’s palace, where a feast is taking place, on a brass, flying horse, and with a magic ring and a glass mirror that reflects the emotions in other people’s hearts; he is also armed with a sword that wounds and heals. The horse resembles a contraption similar to the machines in H. G. Wells’s fiction, because, by twirling a peg, it is possible to perform simple acts of magic. In this particular case, the knight bestows on Canace the gift of understanding the language of birds and conversing with them. She speaks with a bleeding peregrine she-falcon that laments the betrayal of a false tercelet who has seduced and abandoned her, an episode of innocent female love betrayed, transposed in the context of the animal kingdom.

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The Franklin’s Tale overturns the situation of Griselda: a knight suffers the humiliation of obeying and suffering at the hands of his wife, a lady of noble birth. For this reason, we witness the frequent ambivalence or even the mutual interference of certain Chaucerian tales, because the themes of chivalry and romance intersect with that of marital issues. The married couple Arviragus (a name which will later recur in Shakespeare) and Dorigen vow to live according to endurance, tolerance and equal rights. Arviragus puts their union to the test by embarking on noble quests, thus compromising the basic principles on which they had founded their marriage. His departure, while being a source of heroic gratification for the husband, brings in fact grief and the risk of separation for his wife. In a splendid soliloquy, the wife wonders why God has created the sea rocks, whose sole purpose is to kill any and every kind of life. Shortly after, she begins to nurture an adulterous passion for a squire. The woman’s self-deception is admirably portrayed, as she professes eternal loyalty to her husband, but at the same time plays with fire, as she sets the squire an apparently impossible condition: she promises to yield to him on the day he makes the cruel sea rocks disappear. Chaucer has recourse to his usual irony with regard to astrology, by making the squire resort to the magic arts, after having beseeched Phoebus and Lucina in vain. The magician actually succeeds in making the rocks disappear and, when Dorigen realizes her error, she would prefer to die rather than betray her husband; when she reveals the truth to Arviragus, he delicately comments: ‘Is ther oght elles, Dorigene, but this?’ with perceptive, almost tragic undertones. At this point the characters in Chaucer’s tale are faced with a dilemma: the husband consents to his wife keeping her word, in deference to the code of chivalry: in other words, Dorigen has to yield to the squire’s desires, but as discreetly as possible, without anyone knowing. Yet, all’s well that ends well, and the squire, in a contest of nobility, chooses to let Dorigen’s promise go unfulfilled, although he is overcome with grief. This is a tale that can be interpreted as a new condemnation or criticism of the absurdity of the chivalric code and, at the same time, as a caution against irresponsible behaviour in love, which invariably masks a certain element of self-deception. The situation could have been disastrous, and even the magician gives a display of magnanimity. The legendary Wife of Bath seems to be a – or the – mouthpiece of

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Chaucer’s human and humanistic philosophy: she has had five husbands, in obedience to the Holy Writ and the teachings of Jesus on the subject of matrimony, and justifies her polygamy, though not contemporaneous, by citing the example of Solomon. In the abstract debate on spiritual virginity (and fertility) versus carnal fertility, dating back to St Paul, there can be no doubt as to whose side the woman is on. In her tale, a man rapes a young woman, but his life is spared and he goes in search of the reply to the question: ‘What do women most desire?’ However, in the meanwhile, we are presented with a profusion of mythological digressions. The answer is that women love to better their husbands, dominate them and keep them under their thumb, but the old lady who gave her the answer had made the knight promise to marry her. Dorigen, too, had committed a similar act of imprudence. Yet, miraculously, the old hag turns out to be a young and fair lady, after having given her husband a good talking to. An idea and suggestion for Joyce’s Molly Bloom?64 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue takes indeed the form of a rambling speech, disorderly and instinctive like that of a stream of consciousness, with a host of overlapping, jumbled and haphazard memories, all of which pertain to sex and marriage. 5. The fabliaux have been recently reinterpreted as allegories, parodies, masquerades, carnivalizations, for example of the mystery plays or of Pentecost. The act of breaking wind is tantamount to sacrilegious mockery, as splendidly surmised also by Pasolini, with the release and emanation of pressurized air. The finale of the Shipman’s Tale, in particular, is bursting with similar irreverent allusions. This tale is rather unique in the sense that neither the author ‘Chaucer’, nor the narrator, ever let slip any comments or opinions; indeed they tend to cynically connive with the disgraceful, glib philandering of the priest and the attractive buxom wife. It is in fact the Host who has the task of tying up loose ends and, through his comments, of encouraging the company to unearth some moral lesson or to launch a grievance. I cannot avoid mentioning that this type of parodic associationism recurs dynamically in Joyce (let us recall the opening of a bottle of beer 64 A man must use his ‘sely instrument’ [‘fine tool’], an allusion to the male organ as in Joyce, the poet of Chamber Music. Also in the Miller’s Tale the cleric takes the psalter and ‘plays it loud’.

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in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’), and that flatulence is employed in his works with the same semi-serious intentions. This Chaucerian group of fabliaux therefore conceals explosive and corrosive elements. The endings of the individual tales display extreme chaos: and to think that in the past they had been viewed as the re-establishment of poetic justice! On the contrary, they originate in a state of disorder only to conclude in an even more chaotic one.65 In the Miller’s Tale, the deception is of a dual and interlaced nature. Nicholas and Alison cuckold the carpenter and, in addition, trick Absolon the paramour with a despicable prank; but Absolon gets his own back on them by branding Nicholas’s backside with a redhot ploughshare. The latter had offered his backside (in place of that of Alison) to be kissed by Absolon himself. The comical element is assured by the fact that Nicholas cries out ‘Water!’ and his exclamation has the effect of waking the carpenter, who is convinced that he is trapped in the midst of a second universal flood. Then he cuts the cord and his tub falls to the ground, which is perfectly dry. The carpenter is the laughing stock of the passers-by and is made to appear a madman. This tale consists of a chain of mockeries in which the dupe becomes the duper, and therefore there are no winners or losers. In the following fabliau of the Reeve, Symkyn is a dishonest miller, who grinds the corn from the local college. Being well aware of his bad reputation, two students, Aleyn and John, go to the mill to supervise him. The two clerks, having gained permission to stay the night, play a nasty trick on him by having sex with, respectively, the miller’s wife and daughter, with the aid of a ruse. In the ensuing pantomime there is a third change of beds, thanks to which the miller discovers the ploy, as he finds himself lying next to one of the two clerks. The moral appended at the end is that those who do evil should not expect good. ‘Somnour’ is the old English word for ‘summoner’, indicating the profession of one who goes in search of corrupt and degenerate citizens in order to report them to the Archdeacon, or to save them by obtaining money from them by threat. The fabliau that deals with this particular topic, narrated by the Friar, takes on a surreal hue when the wicked yeoman – the mirror-like 65

The clash between order and disorder is also Kean’s interpretation (Kean 1972, vol. II, chapter I).

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image of the summoner, in other words the Devil – takes him away with him to Hell, together with all his fellow summoners, as witness to yet another wicked deed committed by the summoner himself. The Summoner’s Tale describes, in turn, a friar in extremely negative terms; and it is the most merrily ‘dirty’ and slanderous of Chaucer’s tales. The smarmy mendicant friar, who cancels the name of the benefactors and pockets all the donations, with fine words but with dire deeds, gives a sick man a lecture and, in return, gets waited on hand and foot. Moreover, he sings the praises of abstinence and moderation while brazenly cramming his mouth with food. Yet the sick man, Thomas, stands up to him and finds an excuse to let fly a colossal fart in his face. Thomas is not such a dupe after all, and even asks the friar to split up the ‘gift’ equally among the other friars in the convent (could the Devil have had a hand in this irreverent design? Chaucer gives this comment between the lines with a masterly touch of irony). The conclusion is a totally unexpected one, because a shrewd fellow suggests using a cartwheel to spread out Thomas’s formidable fart, with the friar’s nose on the hub, on which the sick man will have placed his backside. Thus a veritable coprolalic firework display is enacted.66 6. There is a clear link with a new, alternative type of story about good, saintly women and wives in the Man of Law’s Tale regarding Constance, a nomen omen after the interregnum of two immoral, adulterous, insatiable women in the Miller’s and Reeve’s Tales. Having been put to sea, Constance ends up in the hands of the English pagans;67 she refuses however to yield to a knight who makes an attempt on her chastity and, defamed and unjustly accused of murder, she is forced to escape and sail away for the second time. After a series of agnitions and indescribable adventures worthy of a Shakespearean drama – the ‘romantic’ Pericles – the couple formed by Constance and her husband the king is finally reunited. The tale is a caution66 The finale rings like a premature parody of the scientific theory of the conductivity of materials: here the spokes of the wheel ‘conduct’, diminishing gradually and proportionally, the sound and stench of the fart. 67 Chaucer glorifies or describes allegorically the successful transformation of England, from a barbaric to a civilized form of government, and from a pagan to a Christian country, in the figure of the penitent King Alla; but Islamism remains ostracized.

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ary one, but in reality it cautions against the inconstancy of human fortune, and the inexorably ephemeral nature of human possessions and happiness. The Second Nun’s tale tells of the chaste Cecilia and her husband Valerian, baptized in secret, together with his brother, by Pope Urban. The angel has placed crowns of lilies and roses in the married couple’s bed. The two brothers are captured, forced to renounce Christianity, and decapitated, whereas Cecilia is first condemned to be boiled to death, and then slain in the bath. The Clerk’s Tale is a story retold and modelled on Petrarch’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda. Walter of Saluzzo, a pleasureseeking and unrepentant bachelor, is urged by the populace to take a wife and his choice falls upon Griselda, a virtuous woman of humble birth. The extravagant marquis resolves to torture her gratuitously, taking away from her first their daughter and then their son and sending them into exile; however, his wife suffers all these insults and affronts in silence. By means of a counterfeit Papal Bull, Griselda is on the verge of being repudiated (we witness the scene of Griselda returning naked, clad only in a simple peasant’s smock, to her father’s house), and is even compelled to suffer the humiliation of planning the marquis’s wedding ceremony with his second wife, who in actual fact turns out to be Griselda’s daughter, whom the marquis has ordered to return. Finally the truth is unveiled. The marquis comes to his senses before it is too late. This tale, second only to that of Constance, has an extremely effective dramatic – virtually Shakespearean – structure, and heralds The Winter’s Tale, where the daughter is lost and then found again, and Walter’s son anticipates the character of Florizel. It is even more closely linked to Measure for Measure, in which the Duke devises a plan in order to put his subjects to the test. The marquis redeems himself finding the fundamental values of life reflected in his wife; in both cases, the risk of a tragic epilogue is averted and supplanted by the happy ending. The story of Constance is connected with another group, that of the stories of saints. The Prioress’s Tale of the slaying of Hugh of Lincoln on the part of certain Jews living in the ghetto is a reverberation of the Slaughter of the Innocents.68 Maybe someone of the likes of Browning

68 Cf. M. Padgett Hamilton’s essay in Wagenknecht 1959, 88–97.

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would have re-written the story, and refrained from laying the blame on the Jews, and defended them. 7. The Nun’s Priest tells a story about Chaunticleer the cock and Pertelote the hen in order to discuss, under the veil of allegory, the issue of the veracity of dreams and the correspondence to reality of episodes in dreams, especially if these are of an ominous nature. The story evolves, in the manner of Aesop, towards the final humiliation of the fox who, having held the cock tightly between his teeth, now lets go of his prey because the latter forces him to open his mouth and speak. The Merchant’s Tale, one of the most refined, humorous and most authentically Boccaccesque ones in the entire Canterbury Tales, is also enfolded in a fairy-tale atmosphere. The beginning reviews the opinions voiced by sixty-year-old January’s brothers, who engage in a debate as to whether he should marry, whether marriage can bring happiness, or whether women are harlots or paragons of virtue. However, the plot is gracefully set in motion when January’s choice falls on the highly vivacious May, and the marriage is consummated on the festive first night. Chaucer’s humorous description of the intercourse between an old man and a young woman is unrivalled: ‘With thikke bristles of his berd unsofte, / Lyk to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere’. The impending threat consists in the fact that, quite rightly – as the narrator seems to infer, considering the unnatural nature of this marriage – May falls in love with a young squire named Damyan; but the climax of the sequence of events is tragicomic. The aged January, now blind, is still eager to have sex with his wife, and takes her to a garden, which Damyan also manages to enter. Having stood on January’s back to climb a pear-tree, May copulates with the squire on one of the branches. However, at the very moment of climax, January regains his sight and roars with anger: the subtle element of comedy lies in May’s prompt reply, to the effect that, despite his newly regained sight, he is not yet seeing clearly and January merely thought he saw the couple indulging in sex. It is tantamount to say that an old man should refrain from marrying a young woman because, sooner or later, she will be tempted to cuckold him. The more specifically moralistic tales include in particular that of the Pardoner, a grimly pre-Poesque and pre-Gothic one69 regarding the meeting of three drunkards with the spectre of Death, the 69 Thomas Gray saw in Chaucer, far in advance, ‘images of horror’ and ‘a certain terrible grandeur’ (quoted in Brewer 1966, 260).

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evangelical Thief who arrives without warning like the plague, as well as, in its ambiguity, the sign of punishment for sin70 and a satanic symbol – or rather the moral consequence – of covetousness. The protagonists, under the guidance of Death itself, come across a treasure near an oak tree. They decide that one of them will carry the treasure away during the night, but the other two promptly conspire to stab their companion and split the gold between them. However, the third drunkard maliciously devises a similar plot, with the result that the three companions inflict death on one another. The atmosphere enfolding the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is equally sinister. The yeoman, obliged to spend his time blowing in the fire in order to fuse metals and produce other substances, is now free to censure his master’s scheming sorcerous arts. This is one of two instances in The Canterbury Tales in which the narrator is unmasked by the tale itself: the Pardoner divulges the tricks and wiles of his art in the same way that the Canon’s Yeoman discloses the frustrating attempts of another canon to hoodwink a gullible priest. This is not exactly a case of self-unmasking, or at least it is, in two oblique forms, insofar as the yeoman pretends to refer to another canon – a clever expedient – and therefore the narrator of the tale and its protagonist are not one and the same person. This tale can also be considered as a precocious satire on the pseudoscientist and quack, and it launches a highly popular literary sub-genre, which extends as far as the most powerful nineteenth-century novella on the dismantling of mesmerism, George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’. It would appear that the Parson’s Tale was included on the spur of the moment by Chaucer, now moribund, in order to seal and orient the entire work.71 This extremely lengthy tale challenges and violates the narrative genre and deviates into the purely homiletic one. It is no coincidence that it dwells on the necessity of penitence (also addressed to Chaucer himself, as previously mentioned), and unleashes the terror of the Last Judgement. By degrees – having retraced the steps leading to a life of righteousness, and the formalities of confession, and after the appeals to banish lechery and covetousness, and a close examination of the Seven Deadly Sins – towards the end Chaucer verges on the key issue in Langland and in Piers Plowman, the accusation of economic fraud and simony. 70 The Black Plague in this case. 71 Probably derived from the treatise of a French Dominican friar.

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§ 21. The English Chaucerians: Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes* If we go in search of prominent personalities and signs of vitality or continuity among the authors active from 1400 onwards, the scenario, as previously stated, is that of a wasteland or even a desert.1 There is a dearth of figures of any significance until we reach, in the realm of poetry, Skelton and the Scottish poets Henryson and Dunbar (who can be considered as sixteenth- as opposed to fifteenth-century poets) and, in the realm of prose, Malory, whose Morte d’Arthur was however composed at least seventy years after Chaucer’s death. On the other hand, it would also be true to say that this interim period saw the birth of the English medieval theatre, as well as that of the popular ballads.2 This is also confirmed by the fact that biographical information regarding fifteenth-century poets is, to say the least, scanty and irregular. As will be more fully illustrated in the follow-

*

Hoccleve’s works are in 3 vols, EETS 1892–1970; selected writings ed. M. Seymour, Oxford 1981; by B. O’Donoghue, Manchester 1982; by R. Ellis, Exeter 2001. J. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Aldershot 1994; E. Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, University Park, PA 2001. Lydgate’s works are edited by various editors, EETS 1906–1966; selected and ed. J. NortonSmith, Oxford 1966. W. F. Schirmer, John Lydgate, Tübingen 1952, Eng. trans., London 1961 (an excellent historical reconstruction, weak as criticism); A. Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate, London 1967; D. Pearsall, ‘John Lydgate’, in Gower and Lydgate, London 1969, 23–42, and John Lydgate, London 1970; M. Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, Cambridge 2005; N. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts, Oxford 2005; John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. L. Scanlon and J. Simpson, Notre Dame, IN 2006; Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed. L. H. Cooper and A. Denny-Brown, New York and Basingstoke 2007. Hawes’s The Pastime of Pleasure is edited by W. E. Mead, EETS 1928 and 1971 (a superb critical edition, preceded by a highly commendable introduction [xiii-cxiii]); The Minor Poems, ed. F. W. Gluck and A. B. Morgan, EETS 1974. A chapter in CHI, vol. II, 223–38, is one of the few critical overviews of any appreciable length on Hawes. However, Hawes is currently on the rebound.

1

A revival of the French language is documented during Henry VII’s reign. A blind French poet, Bernard André de Toulouse, was awarded the title of Poet Laureate for his panegyric of the king in his native language. § 27.

2

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ing section, such a literary void is explainable, even if only in part, from a sociological point of view, in the sense that after the year 1400 the foreign wars and internecine strife in which the sovereigns were engaged prevented them from fostering and providing a fertile ground for the flourishing of the arts – which, in times of peace, is one of the Court’s main priorities. From a psychological standpoint, Chaucer’s influence had the effect of triggering a paralysing sense of intimidation on the next generation of poets; technically speaking, the discontinuation of the pronunciation of the final e in the lexis and the shift in stress from the final to the penultimate syllable, thus transforming the pentameter into a tetrameter, gave rise to a certain amount of disorientation in the field of metrics. The chasm is populated, rather than by isolated authors, by isolated literary works, an assortment of approximately fifty of variable quality, mostly consisting of translations and re-translations conceived in the spirit of the Roman de la Rose. These constitute a corpus of Chaucerian apocrypha, which were to feature for a considerable period of time in Chaucer’s printed editions, and which, due to fact-based counterevidence of a lexical and metrical nature, have been gradually excluded from these and tentatively attributed to minor poets. Dryden considered The Flower and the Leaf to be an authentic work of Chaucer and translated the poem, transforming the rhyme royal metre into rhyming couplets. Hazlitt made the same mistake of attribution, going as far as to extol Chaucer’s excellent description of landscape. The Flower and the Leaf sets off from a Chaucerian topos, that of a sleepless spring night, with its sweet gentle rain and the first flower buds on the trees; but despite the appearances, we are not dealing with a vision, or a dream. The sleepwalker is, uncommonly, a young woman who enters a field, where a series of marvels and wonders are unfolded, in a lavish and sensual kaleidoscope, as in Keats’s juvenile poetry, or in Spenser. The climax of the poem is the dance in a magical arbour of a group of ladies, dressed in white with splendid garlands, belonging to the company of the Leaf, followed by the arrival of nine knights who engage in a joust. In a triumphant display of stylized gestures, each knight who wins the contest comes forward to pay homage to a lady. The other company on foot, that of the Flower, is caught in a violent storm but, with a similar exquisite display of courtesy, the company of the Leaf provides the new arrivals with succour and sustenance. As stated by the Queen in White, queen of Diana’s handmaidens, the gentlewoman has witnessed a ‘moral

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exhibition’ exalting female chastity and the values of chivalry. The Court of Love preserves the external format of the dream, with all the typical stereotypes, such as the May morning, the chirping choir of birds, the allegorical personifications, the introduction to love as well as the lover’s meeting with his lady and subsequent declaration of love. He will only be rewarded with her hand in marriage after having passed several tests. Being a relatively late work, it echoes the genre of the allegory of love, but in a now parodic key. Other apocryphal works reproduce the stylistic elements of contrast (between the cuckoo and the nightingale, reminiscent of The Parlement of Fowles), and of the love debate, with a few touches of originality. 2. First and foremost, the Chaucerians or post-Chaucerians set about the task of completing The Canterbury Tales. The far too short Cook’s Tale was continued with the story of Gamelyn, whose elder brothers deprive him of his legitimate portion of their father’s inheritance. After many trials and tribulations, justice is done.3 In the tale of Beryn the final seal is set on Chaucer’s general design, with the arrival of the pilgrims at the cathedral. Taking as a starting-point the secret or alluded inclinations of the Pardoner, the author follows the character as he is in the throes of seducing a housemaid. These tales were regularly annexed to the editions of the Canterbury Tales until the end of the nineteenth century. The three literary figures that elude anonymity have often been categorized as prolix versifiers enslaved to the imitation of past models. This kind of paralysis is, in many ways, similar to the stagnation that affected the early Victorians after the death of the great Romantics. In other words, Chaucer, far from providing fertile terrain for the following age, gives the impression of hindering any further developments and, in the short term, of having annihilated literature with his masterpieces. Thomas Hoccleve, or Occleve, gives us some idea of the typical atmosphere that reigned after the year 1400 (and of the orphaned nation after Chaucer’s death) in various poignant epicedia, or funeral songs, embedded in his works. His date of birth, either 1368 or 1369, or even more probably 1367, can be inferred from internal evidence, but we know nothing of his family, and his surname (as in the case of Langland, who took 3

Thomas Lodge is said to have drawn one of his tales from this story, or from another text derived from it (§ 152).

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the minor orders which Hoccleve decided against) might have derived from his native village of Hockliffe in Bedfordshire.4 When he was about twenty years of age, maybe in the same year that Chaucer launched The Canterbury Tales, he was employed as a clerk and copyist of official documents in the Office of the Privy Seal, a position that required knowledge of French and Latin, which would seem to suggest that he had benefited from higher education. Although not particularly enthralled with his routine job as a clerk, he held the post, off and on, for thirty-five years, being paid, often with some delay, by King Henry IV. Like Chaucer, he therefore composed poetry during his free time from work, debuting in 1402 with a ‘Letter to Cupid’, which is, however, no more than a translation from the original French version which, in turn, had been written as a reply to or confutation of Chaucer’s Troilus. ‘Wommen, be waar of mennes sleighte, I rede’: the attitude that prompted this riposte is identical to that of the repentant Chaucer after his Troilus, or the Chaucer of the Legend of Good Women. Yet Hoccleve also argues against Ovid and the second author of the Roman, citing the same examples as Chaucer, for example that of the unfaithful Jason. The ‘Male Regle’ (dated 1405 or 1406, in eight-line stanzas) is a rich source of autobiographical information and retells Hoccleve’s previous life of dissipation, ending with a prayer to the Lord Treasurer to pay him his salary arrears. A discontented clerk during the day, Hoccleve frequented taverns and disreputable haunts at night; he took to parading around like a man-about-town and bon vivant; and in return for a tip given to the boatmen, he delighted in receiving the gratifying address of ‘Sir’. The ‘Male Regle’ marks a turning point. Hoccleve comes to his senses and repents, marrying in 1410 and setting up a family, after having rejected the idea of taking sacred orders, while still composing a considerable amount of poetry of a prevalently moralistic and homiletic nature (he was also the author of two hymns dedicated to the Virgin Mary, attributed to Chaucer).5 4 5

The date of his death, traditionally supposed to be around 1450, has been predated by approximately twenty-five years to 1426 by the majority of modern scholars, because the retirement benefit in his name was paid to another person after that year. Of which ‘Ad Beatam Virginem’ certainly does not strike one as being ‘lacking in inspiration’, according to traditional opinion, just as the roundels to the summer and

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Meanwhile, he had become politically subservient and religiously orthodox after his affiliation to the Lollards, to the extent of launching a dissuasive remonstration at the heretic Sir John Oldcastle. In 1414 he was affected by a serious illness, a sort of nervous breakdown, or state of depression, from which he recovered, managing to find the energies to compose, above all, the ‘art of accepting death’ and to translate two stories from the Gesta romanorum.6 In 1424, discharged from service, he retired with a small annuity to a monastery in Hampshire. He is thought to have died perhaps two years later. The historical appraisal of Hoccleve embodies an element of truth, because he lacks a terse, curt and concise formal style and any sense of artistic wholeness. Until not long ago, his devotees could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In his poems, he is accused of being a mere syllable-counter, lacking the power to instil in his verse anything but metrical precision, and perhaps not even that. Notable exceptions are a few isolated brief lyrics, or rather the odd flash of genius here and there, that is to say, a few individual, incisive lines garnered according to that process of dismemberment of the whole poetic unit so dear to Matthew Arnold. After much disparagement and ostracism, critics began to appraise his work more objectively, once they managed to view his discontinuity with respect to Chaucer in the correct perspective. The exaltation of the illustrious dead poet is a medieval convention;7 at any rate, whereas Chaucer tends to objectify, Hoccleve is an independent, innovative, overwhelmingly idiosyncratic, lyrical and dramatic poet: a pre-Romantic, we might hazard, and one heralding the tormented Metaphysical poets like Donne, and subsequently Hopkins. From the metrical point of view Hoccleve – though a declared disciple of Chaucer – gives preference to and employs a less elegant, Frenchified verse style, indeed a rather harsh and contorted type of versification less pleasing to the ear both from the lexical and constructive point of view, and one giving the vague impression of being modelled on memories and echoes of alliterative poetry, as opposed to that of Chaucer (it

6 7

to money are, in my opinion, delightful compositions. These four constitute, together with a fifth composition, the work known as Hoccleve’s Series. On the stereotype, typical of medieval panegyrics, of the superiority of the illustrious poet, with respect to all his predecessors, cf. CEL, 163.

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must be remembered that Hoccleve was not a native of London). With respect to his master, he disregards and abandons the last traces of mythological poetry and the irresistible attraction of the May morning, as well as the various ‘matters’ of Troy and Rome and the Breton saga. Being indifferent to nature, he is not tempted by word painting and ekphrasis, and is insensitive to allegory. Transcending the discretion of the enigmatic and ambiguous Chaucer, he emphasizes his personality as a social outcast. He recaptures Chaucer’s idea of the wheel of fortune and the precariousness of human affairs, but he extends the concept to man’s state of mind and fluctuating psyche, lacerated by visions and hallucinations. In English literature, he inaugurates the motif of the sleepless wayfarer, who wanders at dawn through the still slumbering city of London, real but at the same time spectral, a motif that looks ahead to Dickens and to his solitary promeneur, or to Thomson B.V. These dispassionate outpourings of his burning existential torment – ranging from sin to repentance – must however be conjoined with, and occasionally subjugated to and repressed by, the poetic conventions of the period. His most accomplished and famous work, datable to the year 1411, is the Regement of Princes or De Regimine Principum, composed in royal rhyme for Prince Hal before his ascension to the throne as Henry V.8 This work, extant in forty-three manuscripts, is seemingly a treatise on virtues and vices modelled on French and Latin originals and on other diverse sources (Aristotle, Solomon, Egidio Colonna); and yet over 2,000 of the 5,000 lines of the poem offer us the description of a series of reminiscences of his turbulent and schizoid existence: ‘Be waar of thoght, for it is perillous; / He the streight way to desconfort men ledith’.9 The stylistic feature of the insomniac is of Chaucerian inspiration, but Hoccleve walks ad extra not through a spring meadow but through the roads of the city of London. The dialogue with an old white-haired man first of all takes a dramatic turn, being interwoven with a curt repartee, with a mark of realism, although it rapidly merges into a confession in the manner of Gower, with the old man reclaiming the allegorical role of Christian

8 9

It was in a manuscript of this poem that the most authentic portrait of Chaucer was included, the author being Hoccleve himself. In Hopkins the ‘mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’.

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wisdom, or sounding like Chaucer’s Parson doling out wordy gnomic admonitions.10 What is particularly striking in Hoccleve’s ‘lament’ and ‘dialogue’ is the unprecedented anguished sense of pain and alienation, as confirmation of the fact that he is the first English poet who probes in depth the heartstrings of a real, as opposed to a stylized, self; he is the first ‘religious’ poet who identifies in God the Father the source of all his misfortunes, but ultimately for his own good. His state of mind is that of a penitent John Donne, the author of the hymn addressed to God ‘in his illness’; or of Hopkins’s sonnet ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’.11 3. With John Lydgate (ca. 1370-ca. 1450) we return – decades, if not centuries later – to an author (or a periphrastic identity if we refer to the Anglo-Saxon period) who can be quantified and classified according to weight. No historiographer, critic or authority has ever failed to begin discussing Lydgate by drawing attention – with a certain amount of embarrassment and thinly disguised unease – to the mammoth size, in numerical terms, of his literary output. Lydgate has left us 145,000 lines of verse and his compositions total 250. There is no escaping the fact that every critique that deviates from the monographic has taken on the form of a reasoned catalogue of his works, without the possibility or even the desire to enter into or enlarge upon any kind of detailed and meticulous exegesis. Yet this succinctness conceals an underlying message: that it is not worth the effort. The recognition and appraisal of this poet can be rapidly summarized as follows: a modern edition of his opera omnia is not extant even to this day; critical works on the poet are few and far between and, of his entire output, only a 100-page anthology seems to have been extracted half a century ago. Lydgate is therefore another surviving author, to be commended for a few chosen fragments and to be savoured in small doses. The above mentioned anthology reproduces an unabridged version only

10 11

The Dantesque reminiscence or analogy resides in the old white-haired man who recaptures the desperate man who has wandered into a kind of dark forest. For O’Donoghue 1982, 103, he is a ‘mendicant priest’. For reasons of space, I refrain from listing the numerous verbal recurrences and echoes I have detected in Hoccleve and Hopkins, the fruit, I believe, of a totally fortuitous and unconscious sixth sense.

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of his allegorical poem ‘The Temple of Glass’, which, thanks to this privilege, should, and is intended to be tacitly designated as the poet’s most continuous, compact and most legible work; if this is the case, that says all. The only characteristic Lydgate has in common with Hoccleve is his veneration, albeit on a more concrete basis, for Chaucer; apart from that, the two poets are polar opposites. Lydgate lacks the compelling dramatic sense of the individual and concrete self. The poet remains a persona, not a frustrated, tormented, reminiscent self. Lydgate led a more peaceful and temperate life, bereft of conflict, which in any case he had the power to mask and sublimate.12 A native of the town of the same name in the Suffolk area, he was admitted to the Benedictine monastery of Bury St Edmunds (the scene of Carlyle’s Past and Present), where he was consecrated to the priesthood in 1397. Nevertheless Lydgate, a court poet as well as a religious poet, is an uncharacteristic Benedictine monk of the high Middle Ages, insofar as he adapts and modernizes the ora et labora motto, and plays an active role in the outside world rather than retreating to the cloisters. He is indeed a prominent cultural figure in the intermediation between political power and the Church in the first half of the fifteenth century. The qualms and misgivings of the other Benedictine poet (in pectore at least), Hopkins, are alien to him, and he is unaware of their existence. Having probably pursued his studies at the Universities of Oxford and perhaps Cambridge, he was a master of rhetoric at the monastery for the sons of noblemen. Nominally ordained parish priest in 1423, he retired in 1434 and spent his final years at the monastery, where he died. Curtius frequently reminds us13 that the duty of the monastic orders was to transmit the sacred and profane knowledge enshrined in books, and adds that the role of the monk was that of a compiler of summae and catalogues of facts. This is substantially how Lydgate views his role as a poet. His main works, adaptations of

12

13

His ‘testament’ concludes, after an endless asphyxiating litany addressed to Christ the Saviour, with a few pleasurable personal reminiscences of his unruly and dissolute adolescence. For this very reason, this epilogue is one of Lydgate’s most admired anthological pieces. See for example CEL, 312.

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other previous ones,14 were composed under the patronage of three sovereigns and other influential figures. The Troy Book (1420), commissioned by Henry V, draws once again upon Guido delle Colonne; The Siege of Thebes15 (ca. 1420–1422) makes up for the omissions in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale; Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale, as well the French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus, are the sources of his voluminous Fall of Princes (1439, after a gestation period of eight years) in royal rhyme. The first Elizabethan tragic dramatists were to draw material and allegorical admonition from this repertoire of exempla (of the ruinous falls from glory of great men of fame) for the benefit of the rulers, rather than from Chaucer. The War of the Roses was approaching and the suppressed threats to social peace and the consequences of civil conflict were soon to come to the surface.16 The three above mentioned epics of Lydgate were an immediate success with the populace, having been repeatedly printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they ended up by falling into oblivion in the libraries without reprints in philologically respectable editions. After a long period of obscurity Lydgate was rediscovered by Gray and remembered in fairly positive terms by Coleridge. Both were unable to subvert the prevailing opinion – destined to become axiomatic, and harshly voiced by an editor – of an ‘extremely verbose and voluminous poetaster’ and ‘delirious monk’. Lydgate is undeniably a highly professional transcriber, a seasoned and worldly storyteller and a consummate mass producer of second-rate verses in a variety of stanzaic and prosodic models. On the rare occasions when he succeeds in curbing his encyclopaedic learning and his indulgence in digression, he shows the necessary skill to tailor a pleasurable anecdote. In truth, the three epic poems, while representing virtually half of his legendary 14 Or translations tout court, like that of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. 15 The frame is patently Chaucerian, given that in the Prologue Lydgate claims to have participated, during a period of convalescence, in a pilgrimage to Canterbury, to have encountered Chaucer’s pilgrims, and to have narrated this poem on his return journey. For the underlying allegorical design – the need for peace, hindered by the domestic party advocating war with France – see Schirmer 1961, 64–5. 16 The warning addressed to the nation in Lydgate’s sole prose work, The Serpent of Division, on the Roman civil war, concerns the consequences of discord.

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output, embody only one of the genres – and not even the most fortunate – of his repertoire.17 Lydgate, who was personally acquainted with both Chaucer and his son Thomas, reinterprets a variety of classic Chaucerian genres even if, owing to his profession, he steers clear of the fabliau. He revisits The Book of the Duchess in ‘A Compleinte of A Loveres Lyfe’, and ‘The Temple of Glass’ is positively teeming with Chaucerian echoes, ranging from the poet’s dream and the parade of the icons of Greek epic heroines abandoned by their lovers, to the lament of the beautiful lady to Venus, who promises that her lover will be faithful to her and sanctions their union. Chaucer’s hagiographic stories are the source of various legends of saints and of a life of the Virgin Mary. For all that, every trace of Chaucer, his vigour, and his subtle irony have been lost. Lydgate is also the author of a few Aesopian fables and propitiatory epistles in verse addressed to various sponsors. One way of recognizing his value consists, as previously in the case of Hoccleve, in subverting the hierarchies and focusing on the occasional, brief samples of poetry of a commonplace nature, witty, outlandish and entertaining, pertaining to a medium-to-decidedly low genre, rather than on his overblown and pedantic epic compilations. In recent times, scholars have given Lydgate the final blow by excluding from his canon ‘London Lickpenny’, a remarkable satire in ballad form on the London world of bureaucracy, where the country yokel fails to get a hearing. In this spontaneous type of output the imperfections of a metrico-prosodic and stylistic nature are somewhat mitigated. Critics have gone so far as to affirm, and prove, that Lydgate is a poet excessively focused on the signifier, or tending to exhaust his energies in style, or rather in parodies of style. His ballads and epistles in verse flaunt an extensive, even amazing lexical range and an abundance of new coinages; polished, well-proportioned and arranged in stanzas often with a refrain, they seem to belong to a different poet, who cannot be accused of linguistic mediocrity and monotony and of ‘aureate diction’ reflected in a hyperbolic, pompous and Latinate language. Some of his delightful lyrics even look forward to the harmony and peace17

Among which are the mummings, plays in verse to accompany short pantomimes on festive occasions, which played an important role in the history of drama (cf. Schirmer 1961, 100–8). Cf. Pearsall 1969, 25, for other new and unusual genres.

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ful serenity of the contemplation of nature so characteristic of the Caroline poets, as for example in his ballad on the topos of the ephemerality of all things human, which he compares to ‘a mid-summer rose’. 4. Lydgate, however, did not die without leaving a number of followers. Benet or Benedict Burgh (†1483) continued a pseudo-Aristotelian compilation undertaken by Lydgate (the Secreta Secretorum); among the didactic and hagiographic poets who took inspiration from him are George Ashby (†1475) and Henry Bradshaw (†1513); among the ‘alchemists’ (encouraged by King Henry VI, who had inaugurated the trend), and therefore the authors of curiosities, were George Ripley (whose death is presumed to have occurred in 1490) and Thomas Norton (active in the mid-fifteenth century). The Augustine friar Osbern Bokenham (1392 or 1393–1467 or later) wrote stories of the lives of male and female saints, the object of a recent rediscovery, in an even more ‘aureate’ diction. William Nevil (1497ca. 1545) has been attributed with a Castell of Pleasure18 dated 1518. The latter poet, and Stephen Hawes (1484–1529, but both dates are unreliable),19 are proverbial examples of the kind of drained, uninspiring and clumsy poetry that was rather commonplace at the turn of the fifteenth century. Hawes is a sort of case in point. The first editions of his poems are extremely difficult to trace and nowadays constitute bibliographical rarities; various literary manuals do not even include his name but, while remaining unknown to most people, he is discussed at length and treated with respect by others. Looking at his identity card, we realize that Hawes died only thirty years before Shakespeare’s birth and was born 140 years after Chaucer; yet his poetry still bears the hallmark of the courtly love period. As regards his poetic nature, he is therefore a medieval man, a nostalgic bard, a revisitor;

18 19

A rather flat ‘allegory of love’, invariably in the form of a dream vision, occasionally enlivened by a few masterly descriptive passages, especially during the journey towards the ‘castle’. Perhaps the illegitimate son of Richard III, like Chaucer he was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII. He was educated at Oxford University and travelled in England, Scotland and France. A courtier from the year 1502, he became famous as a jester, choreographer and master of ceremonies. He was able to repeat by heart – a rather extraordinary ability – the entire works of Lydgate.

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though in biographical terms he is a Renaissance poet. He is also an impulsive and eccentric character, a kind of erudite and pedantic mannerist who defies classification, a figure of which there are a few sporadic examples through the centuries up to Ronald Firbank. He is not so much a prized precursor of the modern era, as a laggard struggling to stay in step with the times.20 The persistence with which he professes his reverence for the Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate triad 100 years later is in itself an indirect confirmation of the continuing dearth of literary figures of some magnitude, and of the poetic impasse of the times. Hawes’s major work is The Pastime of Pleasure21 (1503–1506, printed in 1509 with woodcuts, divided into sections after the manner of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in seven-lined stanzas, with only one episode in couplets). This is a first-hand account of the gradus to perfection of the sixteenth-century gentleman, who is at the same time a lover, a knight and a staunch follower of the precepts of the Church. A young man named Graund Amour sets out in quest of La Bel Pucel, at the suggestion of Lady Fame, but not before gaining knowledge, in the Tower of Doctrine, in the trivium and quadrivium.22 La Bel Pucel is the incarnation of Music, the seventh art. The fact that the damsel agrees to marry him but is compelled to leave for some distant land, where the young man will later join her after a series of vicissitudes, sheds light 20 Hawes is therefore unmistakably an author dear to Praz, full of extravagances, whims and eccentricities, and whose diction was rugged, convoluted and immature: however, the three lines in PSL, 43, which incidentally contain a minor inaccuracy, are apparently the only discussion dedicated to Hawes in all of Praz’s writings. 21 Mead 1971, cv, observes that the title is to be interpreted as ironic, given the didactic intent of the poem. 22 This particular stage of his progress, often judged to be incongruous and excessively technical and digressive, is therefore obviously modelled on the Marriage of Mercury and Philology by Martianus Capella, on which subject cf. Mead 1971, xlvi and xlix. It is indeed regrettable that Curtius (in CEL, 38–9, pages dedicated to Capella) failed to capture this detail, which confirms the genesis of Hawes’s poems within the context of the long-lasting ‘Latin Middle Ages’. Another source not cited by Curtius is the Latin treatise Margarita philosophica dated 1503, by Gregorius Reisch, which proved to be even more influential than Capella on Hawes’s poem, as demonstrated by Mead. The relationship between Capella and Hawes did not, however, escape LEW, 81.

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on the poem’s ideal connection with the romance epics dating even as far back as the late thirteenth century (for example Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton), and even with Langland’s Piers. While having nothing in common with the latter’s apocalyptic tone, it however revives the overflowing crowd of allegorical personifications and Langland’s narrative style. If Hawes emulates Chaucer, we are necessarily referring to the early Chaucer inspired by the Roman de la Rose. On his journey to La Bel Pucel’s abode, Graund Amour tackles and slays giants, encounters a garrulous and misogynous dwarf and finally reaches the island of his beloved, plagued by another monster. Graund Amour is taken up to Heaven after a dispute between destructive Time and Eternity. The poem was praised by Gray and by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘one of the four marble pillars’ that supported the Faerie Queene),23 but panned by others, like Scott, on the basis of it being dreadfully boring. We are presented with a succession of improbable events, a mechanical hotchpotch of pre-established scenarios; nevertheless, we are also inevitably made to savour the odd flash of poetry and, above all, a few unintentional humorous, caricatural, even grotesque episodes, such as that of the three-headed giants, of the evil dwarf and of the fire-breathing monster. In short, this is a miniature Arthurian mockheroic poem but also a parody of Beowulf, mingled with a few echoes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In his previous work, The Example of Virtue (1504), virtually identical to the Pastime but even more extravagantly overflowing with allegorical personifications, Hawes recounts the allegorical union of Youth with Cleanness, after having resisted the temptations of Sensuality and Pride in yet another dark forest, and defeated a dragon. After a hard-won victory, Youth, now sixty years of age, renamed Virtue, visits the lost in Hell and ascends to Paradise. The cultural milieu in which Hawes composed his poetry witnesses the birth, in the wake of Malory, of the need to exhume the now old and outworn myth of chivalry within the framework of a most complex system of allegorical personifications; and it is no coincidence that Lydgate’s ‘The Temple of Glass’ was attributed by some to Hawes. His upholders draw attention to the fact that he is an important connecting link with Spenser, substantiating their opinion

23

Mead 1971, cxi.

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with the quantity of loan words – even letter-perfect – from Hawes in Spenser’s poetry, not to mention the common objective of the formation of the self-controlled gentleman.24 As previously mentioned, it is generally agreed that Hawes can be historically classified as a prime example of literary Kitsch and of the unpoetical. At any rate one of his couplets – which tautologically describes the closing of the day to the sound of the evening bells – has now become legendary, although the composer of these lines is unknown to the most. Hawes is also rather wayward as regards lexical idiosyncrasy and above all in his stylistic and prosodic deviations. In one of his minor poems, composed as a deterrent to blasphemy, an unexpected passage consisting of mono- and disyllabic lines heralds the pattern poetry of the Metaphysical poets, in particular of Herbert. § 22. Barclay The advent on the literary scene of Alexander Barclay (1475–1552) enables us to take stock of how English literature measures up to other more evolved European literatures. A cursory glance at the period that goes from 1387, the year in which the Canterbury Tales were composed, to the year 1509, which saw the publication of Barclay’s most important work, The Ship of Fools,1 reveals a scarcity of noteworthy literary figures and works in the sphere of poetry, and fewer still in other genres. Barclay represents a break with the past, although on a minor scale, showing a few timid signs of revival but, when all is said and done, we have the impression that he has missed out on a golden opportunity. The first observation is that, by 1509, English literature lags two centuries behind its European counterparts. This stasis can be attributed to a series of circumstances. First and foremost, as fortune would have it, there was an absence of great intellects during this century and a half; but even a budding genius ceases to be such, if he operates within and for the benefit of an intellectual void. In other words, in England there was a lack on the one hand of a propi24 Mead 1971, cxii, casts doubts on this. 1

A work completed in the first year of Henry VIII’s reign, at Ottery St Mary, Coleridge’s native village.

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tious recipient and end-user, and on the other hand the driving force of the great literature that characterized the late Middle Ages. Thanks to its bad fortune in the political sphere, but to its privileged position in the literary one, Italy represented a multi-centred model, with a cluster of minor but autonomous city-states, each of which yielded a fruitful output of literary works. On the contrary, in England all power was concentrated in the hands of the monarch, and every initiative in the realm of literature lay in the hands of the court, at times solely in those of the monarch himself. Therefore the relative paucity of great literature in England up to this date is certainly attributable to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century literary system. Queen Elizabeth is the first English monarch to take a particular interest in literature and the arts. King Edward III, partial to French manners and customs, was a bellicose monarch whose primary concern was that of annexing France; Richard II and Henry IV found themselves faced with the problem of maintaining stability within the country and among the various factions; Henry V, and even more so Henry VI, were pious and religious sovereigns. While not being insensitive to art, they tend to commission from poets narratives of ancient heroic deeds and historical compilations, as well as hagiographic and homiletic literary works. To quote the words of the poet Horace, English monarchs up to Henry VII sacrifice the dulcis to the utile. This explains why pure enjoyment and entertainment are not admitted at the royal court or, at least, not to the extent to which they became predominant a few decades later. This is evidently the reason why court drama, the dominant genre from the sixteenth century onwards, had still not got underway. This tendency is matched, as in a perfect jigsaw puzzle, by the total complacency of the poet, who readily gives in, without objection, to the requests of the public. Far from proclaiming the pre-humanistic pride of the awareness of a monumentum aere perennius,2 the poets of this period avow their mediocrity and make excuses for their monotonous and commonplace compositions. The notable exception is Skelton. Many of them compose, and even accumulate, vast oeuvres, but none of them can be considered poets in the true sense of the word; while donning the stylish livery of the poet, they are devoid of authentic poetic 2

Cf. CEL, 515–18.

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identity, and make no attempt to reflect on the significance of their role. These part-time poets, who during the day are employed as diplomats, royal clerks, scribes and copyists, are manoeuvred by some patron or noble courtier, king’s spokesman, or even by the king himself: they simply forward their invoices and receive payment. Once again Skelton is an exception. The limits of English literature up to the mid-sixteenth century reside in the fact that the recruitment of men of letters was solely confined to the spheres of the Church and bureaucracy, very rarely from the lay sector of the population. Moreover, the late onset of the poetry of a concrete, historical, biographical self, implanted and sublimated in verse with all its human, emotional and intellectual, as well as erotic, components is due to the fact that fifteenth-century England, having little or no knowledge of the lyrical poetry of the Troubadours, or of Stilnovo, or of Petrarch, failed to import and assimilate these models. Strangely enough, they all embarked on a grand tour, only to return with their saddlebags half-empty. Chaucer had at least been influenced by Dante and was personally acquainted with Petrarch, but did not know his Canzoniere. At any rate, Chaucer is universally acclaimed as a master of versification and prosody, having established the prosodic model of rhyme royal. How can we explain the fact that these travellers – nascent artists – upon their return to England lacked the courage to supplant a type of literature of an exclusively exhortatory and moralizing nature? Dante had also composed the Comedy in the form of a series, or ‘skewerfuls’, of imaginary encounters, but, with his astounding powers of imagination, he had revisited the classical topos of the descent into Hades. For the same reasons, we have to wait until Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney to see the birth of the sonnet, a metrical form exceptionally apt to express the poet’s love for his condescending lady. Yet we must hastily add that this delay on the part of English literature is just as mysterious as the extraordinarily short space of time in which this gap is bridged: in the latter half of the sixteenth century, English literature is on an equal footing with the rest of Europe, and overtakes it towards the end of the century. 2. This preamble is necessary for a correct appreciation of the figure of Barclay, albeit as a precursor as opposed to a creator: as an intermediary link, or trait d’union, between the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the English Renaissance, which was still, however, to bear for

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some time distinctive traits of medievalism. Barclay leaves a mark on English literature, although the process spans over several decades: in particular, in the realm of satirical poetry – a challenge undertaken and also put into practice simultaneously by Skelton – and in pastoral poetry, which was to reach its heyday with Spenser at the end of the sixteenth century. These are Barclay’s sole intrinsic merits; his aspiration to grandeur required talents such as originality and creativity, both of which were foreign to his ambitions. He essentially remains a translator or transcriber of pre-existing texts, with very few added extras.3 Perhaps of Scottish origins, he emigrated during his childhood to Croydon and was a student in one of the English universities. In all probability, he travelled throughout Europe at a later date, acquiring familiarity not only with modern, but also with ancient languages and, having become a diocesan priest, he was affiliated to several Benedictine and Franciscan monasteries in the south of England. Held in high esteem at court, on the occasion of the ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ (marking the summit between King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France in April 1520 near Calais), Barclay was awarded the task of composing texts for public entertainment. A convert to Anglicanism after the Reform, he died shortly after having been assigned the rectory of a church in London. His name remains historically linked to the translation – for the first time not from French or Latin, but from the original German – of the Narrenschiff (1494), the bizarre idea of Sebastian Brant or Brandt, inspired by German carnival pageants, in which it was customary on Shrove Tuesday to hold parades of ships drawn by carts and laden with grotesque masks. While taking into account the three German, French and Latin versions, Barclay embellished his own free rendering, entitled The Ship of Fools, with the original German woodcuts. It was these woodcuts, at least in part, that gave rise to the subsequent spreading and fame of the seventeenth-century emblem poetry (at least two similar poems appeared in quick succession). The ship and the crossing constitute yet another patent stylistic element serving the purpose of assembling, in one single

3

Among his other works are translations of a French allegory, of Sallust’s history of the Jugurthine War, of other late Latin works, as well as a version of the Life of St George and the intriguing compilation of a manual of French writing and pronunciation.

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convenient container – as in the case of the pilgrimage to the cathedral – the most hybrid representations of human stupidity and folly. In this way, Barclay’s translation, or more precisely adaptation, provides a display or phantasmagoria of contemporary England. The ship, whose helmsman is the poet himself, wanders aimlessly over the seas, with no port of call in sight. In itself, The Ship of Fools remains an endless, chaotic and incomplete parade of vices and their perpetrators, and the ship becomes a sort of Dantesque infernal pit in disguise where, in line with a meticulously detailed medieval categorization, the various departures from virtue are catalogued, portrayed and punished with apt retribution in the manner of Dante’s contrappasso (visibly in the links between the text and the illustrations). Barclay’s merit lies in his additions to the original text, wherein he occasionally gives vent to splenetic, obsessive and arbitrary misanthropy, targeted at the usual victims (Skelton, women, the Turks, the French, pagans and, of course, politicians and men of the cloth). Without being either a reformer or a Lollard – on the contrary, he has a distinctly conservative outlook – Barclay can be vaguely compared to Langland; like Gower, he is a cataloguer. Nonetheless, he shares with Chaucer the far from negligible merit of displaying not abstract figures but true characters that now and again gain concreteness and recognition. However, prosody historians reproach him for his unpolished and run-of-the-mill verse. His second historical merit is linked to five eclogues, for which Barclay owes a debt of gratitude to Mantuan (also known as Johannes Baptista Spagnolo) and to Pope Pius II, Enea Silvio Piccolomini; having been composed during his youth, they were set aside and later reviewed for publication in 1515. Although disregarded by Spenser, they mark the birth of English pastoral poetry,4 even if on close inspection they also contain a vein of satire and, through the mouthpiece of the various shepherds, they deplore the mendacity of court and city life, while exalting the simple amenities of life in the country.

4

The trajectory of the genre probably concludes with the twentieth-century eclogues of MacNiece (Volume 8, § 18.1), who was surely inspired by Barclay’s fifth Eclogue, ‘The Cytezen and Uplondyshman’.

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§ 23. Skelton* Literary critics over the centuries have been invariably cautious, if not sparing in giving praise, with regard to John Skelton (ca. 1460–1529), and unanimous in dampening the enthusiasm of those who ventured to award him the status of one of the greatest poets of all time in English literature. I am of the opinion that the arguments in his favour outnumber those to his disadvantage, and Skelton proves to be the most prominent figure on the literary scene in the period from Chaucer to Wyatt, being the author at least of a modest collection of delightful medium length compositions whose vitality has remained intact over the centuries, and which deserve a place of honour in any anthology of English poetry. Such glorification stems from a relatively recent change of attitude, insofar as Skelton tends *

‘Monumental’ poetic edition, ed. A. Dyce, 2 vols, London 1843, 1844, repr. 1965. The Complete Poems, with modernized spelling, ed. P. Henderson, London and Toronto 1948; The Complete English Poems, ed. J. Scattergood, Harmondsworth 1983, with an unpretentious but constructive comment. W. H. Auden, ‘John Skelton’, in The Great Tudors, ed. K. Garvin, London 1935, 55–67, repr. in CRHE (listed below), 176–86; W. Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate, London 1939; L. J. Lloyd, John Skelton: A Sketch of his Life and Writings, Oxford 1938; I. A. Gordon, John Skelton: Poet Laureate, Melbourne 1943; H. L. R. Edwards. Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet, London 1949; E. M. Forster, ‘John Skelton’, in Two Cheers for Democracy, London 1951, Harmondsworth 1970, 141–59; A. Lombardo, ‘Magnificence’, in Il dramma preshakespeariano. Studi sul teatro inglese dal Medioevo al Rinascimento, Venezia 1957, 128–43; P. Green, John Skelton, London 1960; R. Graves, ‘The Dedicated Poet’, a lectio magistralis delivered at Oxford, in Encounter, XVII (December 1961), 11–18 (other writings by Graves in CRHE, 27–9, listed below); A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire, Chicago 1961; E. Schulte, La poesia di John Skelton, Napoli 1963 (Skelton ‘was acquainted with the works of the Italian fourteenth-century writers, of the Latin satirical writers and of those of the late Renaissance humanistic period’, and distinct verbatim echoes of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bracciolini, Folengo and Poliziano can be noted in his works [10–11 and 29–30]; this view is contested by Scattergood 1983, 406); S. E. Fish, John Skelton’s Poetry, New Haven, CT and London 1965; N. Cooke Carpenter, John Skelton, New York 1967; M. Pollet, John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England, Eng. trans., London 1971; CRHE, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, London 1981, 1995, 1999; A. F. Kinney, John Skelton: Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery, Chapel Hill, NC 1987; G. Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s, Cambridge 2002; J. Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak, Oxford 2006.

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to transcend the literary preferences and tastes of his own and of the following periods, and to appeal to those of a more modern audience. He was triumphantly reassessed and acclaimed in the early and mid-twentieth century, more or less in the light of the same criteria that had previously determined his condemnation.1 At first glance, his life and works appear to support the cliché of the man of letters recruited from the only social class that continued to replenish the ranks of the poets, namely the Church. Leaving aside his poetic output in English, Skelton is indeed a highly erudite cleric, a first-class, well-versed Latinist, a refined and methodical translator of works written by authors such as Diodorus Siculus, which earned him the praise of Erasmus and Caxton, as well as being a poet in his own right in that language. The author of a lost Latin grammar in English, he is in his own way a Browninguesque ‘grammarian’. He was probably a native of northern England, more precisely from the Cumberland area, the son of humble craftsmen. He graduated at three universities, including that of Leuven, for which reason he was improperly referred to during his lifetime as ‘Poet Laureate’.2 Judging from the fact that he was young King Henry VIII’s respected tutor, we can infer that his erudition was held in high esteem at a national level. Appalled by the corruption rife at court, and imprisoned for some unknown offence, he was ordained priest in 1498 and in 1503 he was assigned, with no obligation as regards residency, to the parish of Diss in Norfolk. Yet it is highly likely that he continued to travel back and forth from Diss to London, considering his active – or rather, morbid – interest in current affairs, both in the political and social sphere. Many previous English poets had been priests and monks, but it would be difficult to imagine a less zealous, pious and subdued man of the cloth than Skelton; donning the cassock was perhaps an ersatz in order to survive. Until he was in his thirties, he had led a life of enjoyment, indulging in every kind of pleasure and striving to excel; he had also perhaps 1 2

In the 1934 edition of CHI, vol. II, 67–79, Skelton is still the object of negative criticism, due to the violation of the imperative canon of brevitas and to his ‘lack of constructive ability’, that is to say, his innate technical negligence. Almost all of Skelton’s poetic compositions open and close with the words ‘Skeltonidis Laureati’.

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led a life of dissipation, and above all had made many enemies, whom he provoked, slated and mocked in his verse.3 Skelton, however, differs from other poets in that he is not a wayfaring cleric and could never have been such; he hardly ever (or perhaps never) ventured outside the confines of England,4 and he was likely to have been awarded his degree by the University of Leuven thanks to his established reputation, in absentia. In 1512 he was summoned back to the court from Diss as ‘regius orator’ and composer of interludes, but the last decade was tainted by his unrelenting hostility towards Cardinal Wolsey, second-in-command and factotum of Henry VIII. He succeeded in escaping a sort of manhunt staged by the Cardinal himself, taking ‘sanctuary’ in Westminster Abbey. However, maybe putting on an act, he finally resolved to bow down to his enemy with the aim of obtaining grace and pardon, for which reason he was obliged to render him a sycophantic dedication in his last work. Those critics who find fault with fifteenth-century poets in general for their mundaneness and total lack of idiosyncrasy and individuality will surely give credit to Skelton for his genuine, virile egocentricity and insatiable fiery rancour. Skelton’s poetry is permeated with a Super-Ego of enormous proportions. Woe betide those who offend him; but, luckily for us, his creative verve is catalysed by his calumny, and the words seem to pour out of their own

3

4

The fact that Skelton lived with a woman and on one occasion proudly and audaciously exhibited, from the pulpit of the church in Diss, the child born from their union, and married his partner when he was on the brink of death, is considered by a few sceptical biographers to be fictional, and indeed this information was drawn from The Merie Tales, a collection of anecdotes included in Dyce’s edn, vol. I. Due to this scandal Skelton seems to have been reported by the Dominicans to the Bishop of Norwich, but no action was ever taken against him by any ecclesiastical authority. Schulte 1963, 18–19, is among those who show a certain amount of perplexity vis-àvis this anecdote; Fish 1965, 82, with whom I agree, has instead an open-minded attitude towards it. The overt analogies with the life of Luther, which emerge from what went on behind the scenes, have been exploited by some critics to identify in Skelton a Protestant in pectore, a hypothesis strenuously rejected by others. It must be underlined that officially Skelton was a sworn enemy of Luther, as well as of every heretic sect, beginning with Wyclif. Edwards 1949, 46, is of a different opinion.

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accord in self-generating chains of surly alliterations. When Skelton singles out an adversary, he is not content to floor him; having knocked him out, he helps him to his feet and revives him only to continue striking him and to finish him off. For this reason, his invectives are never-ending, and no sooner do they seem to come to an end than they rise to the surface yet again. Such frenzied and ferocious satires ad hominem are destined not to reappear until the eighteenth century in English literature.5 Such vigour is not, however, instrumental to any kind of enlightened progressivism. His fixed target is ‘double delinge’, that is to say duplicity, in the name of a moral code of righteousness and integrity. Politically speaking, Skelton is terrified of chaos and thus he tends towards an apocalyptic Weltanschauung.6 At the very moment when he feels the age-old, traditional cosmos moving under his feet and witnesses the ominous arrival on the scene of Luther and other heretical doctrines, he keeps a firm foothold and lashes out at old Wyclif and all the disruptors, in defence of the rock-hard unity of the Church. An Englishman through and through, a chauvinist and xenophobe, he therefore defended King Henry to the hilt, and ferociously vituperated the dissidents, the opportunists, and the Scots. 2. Deconstruction, or even Oscar Wilde, might argue that inflexibility is the outward manifestation of some deep-seated conflict or contradiction.7 Like any psychopath or manic depressive hungering for affection and sincere care and attention, during his moments of peace and tranquillity Skelton becomes the most sensitive and charming poet imaginable. His impassioned ardour is kept under control and at bay; yet, at times, he gives free rein to pure verbal ranting which inevitably degenerates into the illegible. When hard pressed, he changes languages and speaks and

5 6 7

His is the quotation from Juvenal, his favourite Latin author: ‘Quia difficile est / Satiram non scribere!’ A ‘radical right-wing Catholic’ for Green 1960, 38. R. Graves’s reference in The White Goddess, New York 1976, 425, to the group of poets – in which Skelton finds himself in the company, among others, of Donne, Swift and Hopkins – who found it ‘impossible to combine the functions of priest and poet without doing violence to one calling or the other’, seems to be particularly appropriate.

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writes in Latin. Several of his compositions, after grandiose prologues of great consequence, take the form of notes and jottings that suddenly become a medley of incomprehensible fragments and other irrelevant multi-lingual additions of dubious attribution. Crammed beyond description, they give the impression not of being incomplete, but muddled and cumbersome. Apart from that, Skelton, as regards poetic praxis, is an innovator above all because he is not an official poet with ‘objectivizing’ tendencies, but a subjective one,8 preceded only by Hoccleve in this respect – albeit to a minor degree. Yet we are surprised to discover that his inclination is almost towards drama, as opposed to poetry or argumentative debate. Indeed, he deserves a place in the history of the dramatic monologue, some of his compositions being vocal exploits that are to be imagined as being recited on stage. One of his works, perhaps the most impressive, although the least successful, remains one of the incunabula of English pre-Shakespearean drama. Subjectivity could be synonymous with humanistic conscience and in the last of his most significant compositions Skelton, proud of his stature as a poet, goes as far as to audaciously crown himself, in true Petrarchan fashion, as the most illustrious poet of his age. If he is not a fully fledged humanist it is not – as critics traditionally suppose – because he is ‘still’ a representative of the Middle Ages. Skelton even possesses certain characteristics not only akin to the Renaissance period, but also to the modern and (could this be an exaggeration?) postmodern cultures. While not having familiarized as yet with a concise, stark, self-contained type of poetry (on the contrary, he blatantly ignores it), on the other hand he permanently breaks with monumental poetry. Skelton’s poetry has been assembled in a collective edition of accessible specimens, without there being any need to glean here and there: we are dealing with a book of poetry of approximately 400 pages, a size which in future was to become canonical. We could hardly attribute to an exponent of the Renaissance period poems structured in such a bizarre and fanciful manner, and composed with the most startling linguistic and prosodic distortions, such as those relating to the funeral of a sparrow, with its blend of sacred and profane elements, the

8

Auden (CRHE, 182) also appears to have voiced the same opinion.

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dramatic monologue of a parrot, or the pursuit of a falcon inside a church, undertaken by a zany priest who delights in practical jokes. 3. While readily paying homage to a few outworn stylistic elements featured in almost two centuries of medieval literature, Skelton pulls out of his hat similar eccentric genres that herald eighteenth-century pathos, the Biedermeier or the fantasy genre. All his outrageous, pedantic flaunting of poorly blended late Latin, which has irritated many critics, nowadays strikes us being burlesque and parodic, and, as such, pleasurable. He foreshadows the postmodern notion of a medley text, disjointed in its still amorphous and unrefined components, with its constant illusionistic transitions from one narrator to another – a far cry from the harmonious, sculptured verse of the Elizabethans. In the final analysis, however, Skelton is one of those writers who, to quote Joyce, lays considerable, if not absolute, importance on style. He far surpasses Chaucer himself in his flair for words and dexterity in playing with language; in this respect, his compositions are, indeed, second only to those plays of Shakespeare that mainly hinge on the signifier, such as Love’s Labour’s Lost. For the first time in English literature we witness the entry of elements that satisfy no other purpose but enjoyment, for example, puns, neologisms, rhyming chants, multilingualism and macaronic language, rhymes between English words and other words in other languages, repeated three, four and even more times. His verse therefore pre-announces Carlyle, Lewis Carroll, the nonsense genre and, of course, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.9 For this reason, Skelton’s lexical repertoire constantly oscillates between polysyllabic Latinate words (invariably with parodic intent) and the crisp-sounding monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon derivation. For the same reason, he is a poet whose lyrics are even closer to the spoken language and leagues apart from ornate and aureate diction, a distant precursor of Hopkins’s sprung (or abrupt) rhythm. More specifically, he is at the head of a revolution in the sphere of prosody, second only to that spearheaded by Chaucer, whose rhyme royal had been at the forefront for a century and a half. As a master of prosody, Skelton varies from Chaucer’s rhyme royal to the twelve-line stanza, to the parody of the heroic couplet; 9

A reading of the alternating prose episodes in Skelton’s Replication will give the impression of a jumble of passages later to be found in Joyce’s novel.

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however, ‘Skeltonics’, a prosodic form of his invention, can be defined above all as lines of very few syllables (five, four, three, two, or even just one) in dipodic and trochaic metre, in compositions with rhymes repeated even as many as ten times. Let it be said clearly that, from a metrical point of view, Skelton draws generously upon the tradition of alliterative verse, in particular upon Langland, except for the fact that we are dealing with a binary system, where alliteration is coordinated with rhyme. Skelton has always been awarded the highest tribute (by Auden above all) for his skill as a prosodist, for the vibrant vivacity of his rhythm, for his unconventional and prompt inflections, for his replication of spoken language (by Auden once again), and for his exuberant, plebeian, outspoken, irreverent and off-colour vein. However, his linguistic and lexical creativity, his multilingualism and his use of macaronic language have been understated; in this regard, as far as we know, the name of Hopkins has been regularly cited, but not – or at least, to a lesser degree – that of Carroll, and never that of Joyce or Browning. Interestingly, the acclamations of Skelton were voiced by the modernists of the 1920s.10 4. Skelton’s idiosyncratic style has met with uncompromising criticism over the centuries and, among other contemporaries, Barclay and Puttenham disassociated themselves from his licentious and inappropriately clownish manner. As proof of this, no edition of his works was printed until 1718. He was certainly unpalatable for the Augustans, and Pope disbarred him, without considering that, as an argumentative poet and polemicist, Skelton was in actual fact an Augustan in pectore, although he lacked their wryness and understatement. Pope’s invective (‘beastly’ Skelton) was aimed at the latter’s infringement of good taste and euphemism. If Johnson opts for litotes, at the end of the eighteenth century Warton, the first historian of English literature, endorses Pope, invoking the law of ‘decorum’, a law in his opinion violated by Skelton. It was Robert Southey who was to spearhead a turning point, when he acclaimed Skelton as ‘one of the most extraordinary writers of every age or country’. Yet is the fact that 10

The only scholar who points to the ‘importance of the contribution made by Skelton to the lexical development of the English language’, with the inclusion of other idiolects, is Schulte 1963, 216–19.

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the Romantics were the first to re-evaluate Skelton so surprising? And that, in addition to Southey, other poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (the latter a Romantic poet writing in a post-Romantic period) should speak of him in such deferential tones? Given that Victorian criticism bears the hallmark of the Augustans and of Matthew Arnold, it is hardly surprising that the Victorians should virtually pass over Skelton in silence. A critic, Peter Green, underlines Skelton’s further upsurge of popularity in the 1920s, coinciding more or less with the period of the unrealistic ‘bright young things’ of Waugh and others, a period when Dylan Thomas was becoming a legendary figure. ‘Speak, Parrot’, it was realized, manifestly echoed and prefigured The Waste Land.11 Green was writing in 1960 under the influence of the modernist revolution and the long-term effects (three or four decades later) of the rediscovery of Hopkins. Skelton’s nineteenth-century pioneer, historical ambassador and plenipotentiary is the poet, historian and anthropologist Robert Graves. The imaginative Graves considered Skelton to be no less than the unacknowledged founder of a literary movement, or rather of a poetic practice between two possibilities in human history: Skelton as a ‘Muse-inspired’, as opposed to an Apollonian, poet, a poet who creates and writes from the back, rather than from the front, of his mind, intuitively, ecstatically, melancholically. Above all, Skelton is for Graves the historical counterpart of Milton: whereas Skelton’s poetry is wide-ranging, flowing and effortless, that of Milton is spasmodic, harsh and grim. The coupling of Graves and Skelton was tantamount to a summit meeting between two great poets so distant in time from each other. Graves hailed him as a kindred spirit in much the same way that Hopkins hailed Scotus, and this metempsychosis fired Graves to knock ill-informed critics and editors into shape. Shortly after, in 1935, Auden also championed him. Orwell confirms12 that Skelton could take pride of place in the domain of political poetry and literature, and that a few of his lyrics, such as his elegies on the death of certain female figures, and the fragments of other macaronic poems, formed an integral part of the poetic canon of the British intellectual in the inter-war period. 11 12

Green 1960, 13. OCE, vol. IV, 330.

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5. With the exclusion of all the dubious poems, Scattergood’s edition features only twenty-four items in a production beginning in 1480. Their dating is uncertain, questionable and based on conjecture, due to obscure allusions in the texts deriving from the scarcity of biographical documentation. This is the edition I shall follow in the presentation of Skelton’s works. The point of departure is the panegyric, the epicedium, the laudatio of the righteous, alternating with jest, abuse, a flood of meaningless or obscure but rhythmical, sapid, terse utterances, as well as with the strambotto, the nonsensical poem and the rhyming chant. Where Skelton excels is in his macaronic verse, with burlesques featuring a medley of English and late liturgical Latin, and outrageous insults drawing heavily on alliteration.13 Of this shortlist at least six poems stand out for their absolute value. Skelton’s impressive canon opens with ‘The Bouge of Court’.14 A merchant vessel docks at Norwich, where an allegorical pageant of personifications, individualized in the manner of Chaucer with minute descriptions of their attire and manners, takes place. Skelton’s pictorial spirit of observation is legendary, so much so that Dutch painters are often mentioned as close to him. The court is a congregation of privileged people, where there is no reward for merit; yet, amid this moral squalor, Drede (that is to say, modesty, who embodies the poet Skelton himself, without however the loss of the lexical nuance of ‘terror’) manages to save himself. For this very reason Drede is feared and is the object of a conspiracy. Just when the situation is becoming critical, the poet wakes up. Skelton therefore has recourse to a Chaucerian stylistic device, intermingled with an allusion to Barclay’s ship of fools. ‘Ware the Hauke’ dates from the period in which Skelton was rector of Diss. From the metrical point of view, it is structured in rhyming couplets, but with a tendency towards lines of no more than four or five syllables. It describes the bizarre actions of an irreverent falconer priest, and the exemplary punishment meted out to him by Skelton the rector; 13

His most vitriolic – yet at the same time entertaining and creative – invective, bursting with alliteration, is launched at Garnish, the Lord Chamberlain, whose bad breath is lengthily and obsessively commented upon. 14 ‘Bowge’ derives from the French bouche, meaning one’s right to sit and eat at the king’s table: something very similar to the modern luncheon voucher or meal ticket.

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however, it also underlines the sense of scandal with the addition of liturgical invocations of a composite linguistic nature.15 ‘Philip Sparrow’,16 Skelton’s masterpiece, consists of sixteen-line stanzas, in which the lines contain a varying number of syllables, although they are generally pentasyllabic, in a general pattern of rhyming couplets. The opening of the poem, written in a naïf style, is vivacious and of fairy-tale simplicity, with the use of the formulary of the Office of the Dead and – apparently with a solution which anticipates Browning and Joyce – with the rhythmical interposing of Latin biblical verses. I speak of naïf style because we are dealing with the idealization of a little bird, a pet sparrow, transformed into a fetish and into a little girl’s erotic ersatz. This work was subsequently to inspire Carroll, The Ingoldsby Legends, de la Mare, and the twentieth-century fantasy genre, of which Firbank was also an exponent. The poet gives the floor to his mask who, claiming to possess wide-ranging knowledge and to have read many stories, churns out a long list of historico-mythological issues, in the manner of Gower, after which he proceeds to compose the Latin epitaph. Towards the end, he takes over again and sings the praises of the little girl, whose face is ‘adorned’ by a wart,17 a deliberate instance of bathos. ‘The Tunning of Elinour Rumming’ is an even more astounding vocal exploit. It recounts a scene to be recited on stage and subdivided into ‘fits’, like The Hunting of the Snark, or Langlandian ‘passus’. For his love of vulgar, bizarre, extravagant and flamboyant micro-scenes, as well as his passion for coining neologisms and the use of obsolete words, simply for the pleasure of inventing new meanings, one is tempted to see Skelton as a previous incarnation of Carroll. Elinour, the owner of an ale-house, with her hooked nose and gypsy features, is depicted even more markedly and grotesquely than in Chaucer. She serves the neighbourhood women, who

15 16 17

On second reading, one notices resemblances between this poem and Pater’s Gaston de Latour, as well as the opening scene of the baptism of a pet dog in the cathedral in Firbank’s Cardinal Pirelli (Volume 7, § 88.5). This poem is vaguely reminiscent of Catullus and of Lesbia’s sparrow, as well as of numerous precedents in Latin poetry. Erotic passion and senile delirium, like Ruskin’s with his flower girls, or Joyce’s Bloom eyeing up (literally in the same way as Skelton) Gerty’s garter.

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are eccentric, filthy, with stinking breath and stubbly faces, badly dressed, penniless and ready to sell anything to pay for their ale. The first part of ‘Speak, Parrott’ could quite easily have been written by Browning, the Browning of the most eccentric and fanciful dramatic monologues; in the parrot’s linguistic prowess, reflected in the profusion of words from other languages apart from English, lies proof of Skelton’s truly Joycean macaronism. However, this is also a prime example of how certain lyrics of Skelton’s tend to degenerate as they go along. ‘Speak, Parrott’ founders, in fact, in the midst of a chaotic and disconnected collage of biblical references, pedantic allusions and invectives hurled at the Court and, in particular, at Cardinal Wolsey. Frankly, the text is essentially reduced to a series of disjointed multilingual telegraphic outbursts, almost an anticipation of the last stylistic imitation in the hospital episode of Joyce’s Ulysses. The poem gradually loses the stylish lyrical hallmark that characterized its opening, and this has the effect of enhancing Skelton’s oddity, eccentricity and peculiarity.18 6. Magnificence deserves to be extrapolated (and a few critics of Skelton as a poet have already done and do so) and included and assessed among the first experimental works of medieval and pre-Shakespearean allegorical drama, together with other lost works of his of which we know.19 In actual fact, it is a sort of drama version of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, since it offers a picture of the identikit of the just, righteous and judicious prince, a ruler who is neither a squanderer, nor incontinent, and lives according to ‘measure’. The stern admonition is that the king rely on counsellors who are equally upright, moderate and not deceitful. There can be no such thing as absolute freedom, to which certain limits need to be imposed, in order to avoid anarchy; in a similar way, unrestrained generosity can turn into wastefulness. At the end retribution lies in store for the negligent 18

19

Allegory yields to symbolism, and the parrot has been variously interpreted as the heart or soul or the poetic principle simultaneously of divine and human origin. Critics (cfr. Edwards 1949, 190–199) have deciphered with extreme difficulty the references to historical events and given a tentative reconstruction of a highly abstruse religious allegory of redemption. According to Graves (CRHE, 169), Skelton’s lost works constitute two-thirds of his total literary output.

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Magnificence who, now in the depths of despair, is captured as he is on the verge of committing suicide. Another personification, Measure, one of the key Renaissance virtues, was later to influence Shakespeare, insofar as it is Ulysses’ ‘degree’ in Troilus and Cressida, though something different in Measure for Measure. At the same time, the scene in which Magnificence, now in the throes of madness, banishes Measure and lies prostrate and afflicted on the ground, stripped of all his possessions, denuded and cold, is a preview of Lear wandering in the wilderness. Additionally, the ordeal is identical to that of Marlowe’s Faust, but with a happy ending.20 The hardly awe-inspiring interest of the play, or rather pageant, lies in the interchange of dialogues and soliloquys. The former are typically concise one-line speeches, but these alternate with longer speeches in various metres. On the one hand, we witness an attempt on the part of a number of Jonsonian ‘Volpones’, who hound Magnificence in order to corrupt him (hence the exchange of insults and abuse); on the other hand, salacious quips of already Shakespearean stamp fill the air.21 The verbal crossfire of adages and aphorisms look ahead to the Restoration comedy; from the point of view of prosody, they are highly alliterative lines, in the manner of Langland. The rest of Skelton’s output bears the hallmark and urgency of the invective, the unifying element being the author’s language play. ‘Colin Clout’ is Skelton’s mask, namely the make-believe outsider who criticizes the ways of the world. Written therefore in the first person, and pretending to produce a rough-hewn type of verse, which on the contrary appears to be finely structured, it launches an invective against the corrupt, gluttonous and remiss clergy. This is another of the endless examples of Skelton’s macaronic style, teeming with Latin words and expressions,22 as well as of his parodic vein in the series of short lines with the same rhyme, and short words alternating with other Latinate ones, echoing the prototype of the Dies irae. ‘Colin Clout’ sheds light on the turmoil prevailing in the 20 Cf. A. S. G. Edwards in CRHE, 13–14, for Skeltonian echoes in Marlowe and (with reference to what has been stated above) in Jonson, although these do not refer to Magnificence. 21 Note how closely this line resembles a Shakespearean – or more specifically, a Falstaffian – line: ‘By Cockes harte, thou arte a fyne mery knave’ (l. 1826). 22 ‘Of suche vacabundus / Speketh totus mundus’ (ll. 246–7).

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ecclesiastic sphere of his period and on the resistance to the Reformation, since Colin stands his ground in the face of the waves of heresy sweeping over the British Isles. The Reformation will be without effect, provided that the prelates and the upper reaches of power perform their duties. ‘Why Come Ye Not To Court?’, aimed at human folly, but at Wolsey in particular,23 takes the form of a deluge of exclamations and accusations denoting inexhaustible linguistic verve and peerless inventiveness. Though disjointed, discontinuous, overflowing and often unreadable, ‘Garlande or Chaplet of Laurel’ contains a few rather praiseworthy flashes of genius; its main aim is the poet’s bold self-glorification, which takes shape within the context of a hackneyed framework, that of the dream, in which the poet is seen walking through a wood and meeting with a few mythological figures. Skelton has no qualms about brazenly simulating both Dante and Chaucer at the same time. Under an oak tree he finds himself in the presence of Dame Pallas and the Queen of Fame, and is made to speak on his own behalf in order to demonstrate that he possesses the necessary requisites to win entry to her Palace. The poets of antiquity parade in front of the two figures, together with Bacchus, who offers them refreshment. This particular phase of the rhapsody is invaluable for its contribution to the definition of the English and continental literary canon at the turn of the sixteenth century, with its arbitrary estimates. The fact that Skelton fails to mention the name of Dante is just as incomprehensible as the fact that Chaucer makes no reference to Boccaccio, also considering that he celebrates his own place of honour ‘amid such knowledge’, that is to say amid a trio composed of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate. The crowned poet (in the Petrarchan sense) will not be awaited by a Dantesque quintet, which is confirmation, a century and a half later, of who exactly was considered to form part of the triad of unrivalled poets at that time. Notably Langland has been excluded, in favour of Lydgate, together with Chaucer and Gower; similarly, the anonymous authors – if indeed we are dealing with two distinct authors – of Pearl and of Gawain have also been excluded. Nevertheless Skelton, rendering an invaluable service to bibliographers, 23

A typical characteristic of the Renaissance clergy, embodied in Browning’s Bishop of St Praxed, is their ignorance of Latin (‘His Latin tongue doth hobble’).

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includes a complete list of his poetic ‘book’. At the Palace of Fame, his laurel garland is commissioned by a lady of his times, and Skelton closes his composition by dedicating to certain court ladies, whom he addresses by name and who therefore really exist, some of his most charming and delicate lyrics of varying metre and rhythm. As previously stated, doubts have been cast as to whether the pen of the unsophisticated Skelton could have produced such delightful little odes, which raises the issue of whether this coda represents the true birth of English Petrarchism, since the poems are addressed not to allegorical and conventional figures, but to real-life women, with all the ritual tropes and sublimations.24 At the end of this lengthy poem, the author states that it has also been a pageant, that is an allegorical and dialogued scene, and a vanishing dream. § 24. Fifteenth-century Scottish literature* Until the mid-fifteenth century any survey of the literature written in Scotland can only be conducted on a broad-spectrum – as opposed to a methodical and systematic – basis, owing to the scarcity of texts of a marked and well-defined intrinsic literary value, to be distinguished from others of a documentary, linguistic, historical, philological and archaeological nature. Scholars undertaking this task find themselves confronted with a series of cyclically recurring issues: the semi-anonymity of the authors, problems of attribution, dating of works, comparison and contrast of texts, the endless spiral of rhyming couplets alternating with alliteration in various prosodic forms, and stanzaic units of various numbers of lines, not to mention the mysteries that surround authors whose names are known but lack any matching works, or vice versa. However, the rebirth of Scottish literature coincides with the urgent request for heroic epic poems, in order to address the imminent need to create and promote a

24 This is an opinion shared also by Schulte 1963, 175–202. *

Bruce, ed. W. W. Skeat, 4 vols, EETS 1896, and ed. A. A. A. Douglas, Glasgow 1964; Chronikl by Wyntoun, ed. F. J. Amours, 6 vols, Edinburgh 1903–1914. The Kingis Quair by James I is edited by W. M. Mackenzie, London 1939, and J. Norton-Smith, Oxford 1971.

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nationalistic mythology sufficiently close in time, to underpin and fortify the nascent state of Scotland, to officially inaugurate its existence and to clearly distinguish it from the English monarchy. As in every other newly instated regime, this campaign lays emphasis on Scotland’s historical genealogy, even presumed to surpass that of England, while at the same time inevitably introducing a few minor feats of historical conjuring as well as numerous historiographic forgeries. From the late fourteenth century, we therefore witness the development of a heroic, even Homeric, phase in Scottish literature, embodied above all in two chansons de geste modelled on real-life heroes who had taken on legendary prominence. One of these is sung by a minstrel bard, of illustrious status and identity, referred to – not without reason – as ‘Blind’. The implications accompanying this reawakening are of a linguistic nature. As a result of the complex merger of all the ethnic groups living together on Scottish soil, a rift is created between the tradition of the populations or regions of Gaelic extraction and language, with their respective literary compositions (which remain outside the scope of the present historical survey), and the affirmation of a Scottish language comparable to that spoken contemporaneously in London, or elsewhere in England, but characterized by marked local inflections, in a period in which there still existed an elevated degree of flexibility in the variants from one speaker to another. By analogy with Middle English, this language is referred to as Middle Scots, bearing in mind that, at an earlier stage, Gaelic was known as ‘Scottis’, whereas Middle Scots was known as ‘Inglis’, which will subsequently become ‘Scottis’, in order to avoid any unwanted confusion with the terminology used to indicate the language of the enemy and oppressor. 2. A handful of poems upon the death of the Scottish king Alexander III, dating from just before 1286, as well as a few isolated lines of scorn and mockery, targeted at the English and handed down in other subsequent chronicles, constitute the entirety of the thirteenth-century repertoire documented in ‘inglis’ or ‘scottis’, as the case may be. The fact that the cultural relations were closer and more privileged with France, as opposed to neighbouring England, is demonstrated for over a century by the prevalence of Breton and even Arthurian models, with no counterpart in contemporary English culture (the legendary Thomas the Rhymer was the author of a Sir Tristram). The very first national epic poem, Brus by John

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Barbour (1320–1395), a graduate from Oxford University, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, and highly esteemed court dignitary entrusted with important diplomatic missions, does not make its appearance on the literary scene until 1375. Barbour, who was apparently not acquainted with Chaucer, compiled a simple yearbook in verse until he amplified out of all proportion the turning point of the victory of Bannockburn (1314), which was to mark the conquest of independence from England thanks to Robert and Edward Bruce and to Douglas, their ally. The historical events are sketchily outlined, with astonishing blunders and perplexing factual errors; at the same time, Barbour avoids any avowal of Manichaeism, by demonstrating that there is good and bad on both sides. As a man of the cloth, he tactfully displays a vein of allegory in the successful Scottish War of Independence, and at least one of his hymnal apostrophes to freedom has become a proverbial quotation. Good King Robert is, on the one hand, an invincible war hero and, on the other, a good-natured, sagacious humorist. The historian Andrew of Wyntoun (ca. 1350-ca. 1425), in his chronicle of the history of Scotland in verse dating from the early fifteenth century, traces the origins of mankind from the creation of the angels. He can hardly be termed as an original compiler, despite the fact that he subtitles his work as ‘original’ (in the sense of ab origine); he patches together miscellaneous bits and pieces from other sources, with very little self-assurance and historical reliability. His merit lies in his mention of the legendary regicide King Macbeth, with all the supernatural elements that will later recur in Shakespeare. In Scottish mythology the valiant and bloodthirsty William Wallace1 contended with Bruce for the title of national hero, and a poem in verse by ‘Henry the Minstrel’ or ‘Blind Harry’ was dedicated to him. This work, entitled The Wallace, a monotonous catalogue of battles and slaughters compiled in Chaucerian heroic couplets and ‘aureate’ diction, composed after 1460, and even less reliable as regards historical veracity, probably remained a – or even the – national-popular classic in Scotland for two centuries. It fomented the ingrained hatred towards the English until, having become incomprehensible, it was revisited and modernized in 1722. The mystery surrounding the figure of Huchown of the Awle 1

Captured and executed by the English in 1305.

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Ryale, to whom early tradition attributed stories based on Arthurian and biblical themes, has not been wholly clarified. This author has been hailed as a sort of Scottish counterpart of the Gawain poet. He has in fact been identified with a certain ‘little Hugh’ quoted in Dunbar’s ‘Lament’, or more precisely with the real-life knight and statesman Sir Hew of Eglinton. The specification ‘of the Awle Ryale’ would seem to indicate ‘judge of the Royal Chamber’. The above works are ostensibly more of English, as opposed to Scottish, character and quality. The most notable one composed by this mysterious author is another endless version of the death of Arthur and of the Arthurian ‘matter’, followed closely by two others, one a revival of the Trojan legend and the other a Carolingian legend (a coalman unknowingly gives hospitality in his house to Charlemagne, who rewards him in the end and reveals his true identity). The end of the century registers a host of poems of varying length and nature, including a poem on ‘Swete Susan’, also attributable to Huchown, and one regarding an owl who wants to impress with finer plumage with respect to that of the other birds, but is humiliated in the end.2 3. However, the period between the end of the fifteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth century witnesses the emergence of a limited, but refined, output of Scottish literary works, and of a literary civilization whose focal point is the Royal Court of Edinburgh. This is due to several factors: first of all, a few of the promising literary talents are Oxford graduates, secondly this is a period that marks the birth of the first Scottish universities, and lastly because the Court, having suddenly become more erudite, is rather more inclined to offer patronage. As a result, paradoxically, during the seventy-year period from 1480 to 1550, a second nucleus of literature written in English, which is in actual fact Middle Scots, becomes rooted in Edinburgh; and at least four poets, a forerunner and three successors, vie with the other quartet of English Chaucerians for supremacy, and indeed easily surpass them. Traditionally referred to as the makeris (that is, Scottish ‘verse-makers’ or poets), they are mirror-images of those engaged at the Tudor Court in London at the very beginning of the sixteenth century. 2

This is the cleric Richard Holland’s The Buke of the Howlat, in stanzas of as many as thirteen lines, each containing a varying number of syllables. It is highly likely to have been composed as a satire aimed at King James II of Scotland.

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From a historical point of view, this miniature Scottish Renaissance can be explained by the fact that the medieval models and formulae arrive later and therefore tend to wear out slightly later; they are in fact initially assimilated whole-heartedly and enthusiastically, and even revitalized. Although the medieval influence spread like a rising storm and its culture was inevitably to approach and eventually settle in Scotland, at a much later stage in the north than in the south of Britain, and although the tail end of the storm coexisted with other cultural influences, the Chaucerian tradition was established by James I of Scotland thanks to a classic, improbable stroke of luck in disguise. Having been made a prisoner at the age of eleven by the English near the coast of France, where he had been secretly sent to study on a merchant ship, James spent eighteen years in the Tower of London and in other English fortresses, but was chivalrously allowed to pursue and complete his studies. In this connection, he probably made the acquaintance of another hostage, the French Duke of Orléans. Once released from prison, James composed before 1437 The Kingis Quair.3 This work not only bestowed the name of ‘rhyme-royal’ on the seven-line stanza also known as the Chaucerian stanza; not only did it provide a direct, expeditious and stylish account of the successful outcome of his love for the beautiful Jane Beaufort, of whom he had caught a glimpse between the prison bars under the ramparts of Windsor Castle and with whom he had immediately fallen in love; but it also transmitted to his fellow nationals the layout and stereotype of the allegorical dream poem based on the Roman de la Rose and on the perspicacity of Chaucer’s translation of the same poem, as well as on other works of Chaucer inspired by it.4 As can 3 4

However, James’s authorship has often been challenged. Particularly evident in the poem are Chaucer’s outline of the Knight’s Tale and of the Book of the Duchess. On an archetypal bright May morning, the king dreams of ascending to Venus’ palace, where the goddess directs him towards the sagacious Minerva, who in turn sends him to the Goddess of Fortune, for his love to be blessed. He then wakes up to find a turtle dove and a symbolic, auspicious bouquet of flowers sent by his beloved. From a linguistic point of view, this short poem tends towards Middle English, as opposed to Middle Scots, with the exception of a few inflections ascribable to the transcription; it also abounds in Chaucerian lexical echoes and references to Boethius and astrology. However, the allegory is not particularly important, and the poem can be read from beginning to end without interruption.

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be seen, all this took place after a delay of over half a century. The heyday of Scottish poetry was destined to last only a century and a half from that date. All things considered, the saying that Scottish vernacular literature was the last to flourish and the first to degenerate is a truthful one. From the mid-sixteenth century, the influence of Chaucer, who had unseated the French, is in turn deposed by the Italian, and more specifically, Petrarchan influence, with the translations of the Canzoniere and the Trionfi, and the Scottish versions of the English Petrarchists. At the time of the fusion of the two reigns of England and Scotland, James VI still surrounded himself with a circle of refined poets, in spite of hostility on the part of the reformers; and from 1603 Scottish court poetry necessarily ceased to exist,5 even if poets continued to compose popular songs and ballads and Protestant hymnal poetry. In other words, Scotland plunges into anonymity until we reach Drummond of Hawthornden, or even Thomson and Ramsay, all of whom will, however, be affiliated to English literature.6

5

6

ELS, 113, notes the curious fact that the Reformation favours and sustains literature in England, while inhibiting it in Scotland, and is clearly diffident vis-à-vis the theory that in Scotland the Royal Court was a sine qua non of poetic vitality. Lewis concludes that, on the whole, teleology has no place in the history of culture. Praz in SSI, vol. II, 29–33 (‘Ariosto e la Scozia’, one of his weakest and most gratuitously polemical writings [aimed at M. D’Amico]), attempted to rebut the theory of the ‘pitch dark’ after Lyndsay by reappraising, in the light of a book by I. Jack, an Ariostesque remake dated 1582 by a certain Stewart, as well as the mediocre sonnets – some of which, Praz says, are ‘da colascione’ [suited to a ‘Neapolitan lute’] – composed by William Fowler (§ 25.2 n. 11). This century and a half is not, and can never be, characterized by elevated literary merit, and the only poet to rise above the general mediocrity is Drummond of Hawthornden. More than anything, as stated in his title, Praz is eager to demonstrate the fact that, from the end of the fifteenth century onwards, Scotland began to turn more favourably to Italian, rather than French, models, as well as the uninterrupted acknowledgement and popularity enjoyed by Ariosto in Scotland. Nevertheless, the authors and texts cited to endorse this ‘trend of Ariostesque influence’ are, apart from a few exceptions, mere literary curiosities.

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§ 25. The Scottish Chaucerians: Douglas, Henryson, Dunbar* In terms of the quality of their literary output, this triad of Scottish Chaucerians outclasses the three English Chaucerians, Hoccleve, Lydgate and Hawes. The vulgates indicate that Henryson or Dunbar vied with each other for the title of leader, although there is no definite consensus on this; in any event, Douglas always seems to come third in the list. One or the other of the first two is ipso facto the greatest ever Scottish poet, with the exception of, or even including, Burns.1 Indeed, Dunbar is occasionally judged to be the greatest British poet of his own generation, with the express inclusion of Skelton too. Other critics surprisingly opt for a fourth poet, Lyndsay. However, the tag of ‘Chaucerian’ is imperfect and partly misleading: it indicates above all that each of the three poets composed, in the midst of a great deal of material belonging to other genres, one or more short poems of a Chaucerian, allegorical stamp, or poems inspired by or deriving from Chaucer, but uninhibited by any kind of prosodic restriction. Their independence and self-sufficiency stand out in comparison with the slavish spirit of imitation characterizing the three English Chaucerians. Gavin Douglas (1474 or 1475–1522), a cleric and bishop from the year 1516, and a protégé of the Scottish Queen, Margaret, daughter of Henry

*

Works by Douglas, ed. J. Small, 4 vols, Edinburgh 1874; selection, ed. D. F. C. Coldwell, Oxford 1964. Works by Henryson, ed. G. Smith, 3 vols, London 1906–1914, and D. Fox, London 1980 and 1987; selection, ed. C. Elliott, Oxford 1963, 1974. M. W. Stearns, Robert Henryson, New York 1949; S. Rossi, Robert Henryson, Milano 1955; J. MacQueen, Robert Henryson: A Study of the Major Narrative Poems, Oxford 1967; D. Gray, Robert Henryson, Leiden 1979; R. L. Kindrick, Henryson and the Medieval Art of Rhetoric, Kalamazoo, MI 1993. Works by Dunbar, ed. J. Small, 3 vols, London 1884–1893, ed. W. M. Mackenzie, London 1932, ed. P. Bawcutt, 2 vols, Glasgow 1998; selections ed. J. Kinsley, Oxford 1958, 1968, 1979; ed. H. Harvey-Wood, Manchester 2003. R. A. Taylor, Dunbar, The Poet and his Period, London 1932; J. W. Baxter, William Dunbar, Edinburgh 1952; P. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, Oxford 1992. I shall enlarge upon Alexander Smith’s essay on Dunbar in the text. A general overview is provided in J. Speirs, The Scots Literary Tradition, London 1940, and, rev., 1962.

1

On the ‘return to Dunbar, not to Burns’ in twentieth-century and contemporary Scottish literature, cf. GSM, 57, and Volume 8, § 98.2.

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VII, but loathed by the ruler himself, died of the plague in London.2 He is an example of a Virgilian poet in a precise sense, despite the fact that he began his literary career with two short allegorical poems. The first, The Palice of Honour, is a belated and complex imitation of Chaucer’s Hous of Fame or of Hawes’s two dull short poems; yet it is occasionally fired by a few delightful descriptions of nature and by an uncommon search for the precise word. What we find here is the usual process of a cognitive Bildung within the framework of the May morning dream, with various prominent historical and mythological figures spied upon from a hollow in a tree, parading towards the Palace of Honour, which the dreamer also reaches after a series of fantastic events. The second work, King Hart,3 has an even more conventional medievalizing design,4 being an allegory of human life in preparation for old age and death, and concluding with an admonition to be on the alert at all times. Douglas is decidedly more famous for his translation in rhyming couplets of the Aeneid (completed in 1513), the first work of its kind written in any variety of English vernacular, in thirteen books, the last of which including a translation of the continuation of the poem written by the Italian Latinist Maffeo Vegio. Elegantly accomplished with the maximum lexical proficiency, to the extent of compensating, even with recourse to multilingual calques, the inferiority of the Scots language with respect to the distinctive compactness of Latin, this translation dispenses with any classical veneer and, like Chaucer in his Troilus, domesticates epic matter with deliberate anachronisms and Scotticisms.5 Moreover, curiously enough, each book is preceded by a prologue unrelated to the poem itself, where he displays an overtly reflective, but also argumentative, attitude, yet at the same time a precocious sensitivity towards

2 3 4 5

A prayer ‘for the plague’, even if the reference was not to this particular outbreak, was written by Henryson. Hart, or rather Heart, and therefore King Heart. Coldwell 1964, xxi, endorsed by two other sources, denies Douglas the authorship of this short poem. LEW, 287–90, passionately adheres to a different opinion and tends to make a clear distinction between Douglas and Hawes. C. S. Lewis discusses this issue in a work quoted in Coldwell 1964, xxvi-xxvii.

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nature, in a variety of creative and resourceful prosodic solutions.6 Critics have inevitably defined him an earlier James Thomson, only to conclude that Douglas was the more authentic and successful of the two, and that a comparison with Wordsworth and Blake would be more appropriate. He is, therefore, a Romantic avant lettre. Douglas shrouds Virgil’s sunny Mediterranean scenarios in melancholy, languor and winter hues.7 The difference between Virgil’s poem and Caxton’s translation was similar to that between St Augustine and the devil; Dryden’s version was supposed to be too neoclassical and unfaithful.8 Thus Pound correctly judged Douglas’s text to be the best among all the existing versions.9 2. There is a scarcity of reliable information on the figure and career of Robert Henryson (ca. 143010–ca. 1506), except for the fact that he was a simple but much-appreciated schoolmaster at the Benedictine abbey in Dunfermline. Nevertheless, his outstanding humanistic culture and his wide range of reading, which established him as a polished and original

The prologue to the eighth book is virtually a macaronic tour de force. Coldwell 1964 tones down this enthusiastic Romantic and modern interpretation: the inclusion of the prologues is found to be ‘in total harmony with the medieval and Renaissance tradition’ (cf. 136). 8 As stated by Coldwell 1964, vii-xix. Douglas is at least superior to Dryden in the more action-packed episodes (such as when the sea serpents emerge from the sea and strangle Laocoön), and in the episodes describing states of mind, as well as in nautical matters. 9 PGU, vol. I, 58, and E. M. Tillyard, quoted in Coldwell 1964, xxvii-xxix (where the sources of Pound’s judgements are provided). Tillyard is among the few critics who do not hesitate to point out the recurring flaws and weaknesses in Douglas’s translation. Between Douglas and Dryden there were translations of the Aeneid by Surrey (§ 43.1 n. 2), Stanyhurst and Phaer (the latter is the author of a ‘tragedy’ in the Mirror for Magistrates [§ 44]). The pre-eminence of Douglas is all the more significant if we consider that he had no previous models to rely on, although he availed himself of the comments of the Dutch humanist Ascensius. 10 His date of birth has been postponed to 1450 by some critics. The considerable number of homonyms in Henryson’s area of birth in that period led some scholars to attribute to the author such irreconcilable duties as those of a notary. The dating of the texts is purely conjectural, for which reason I have refrained from specifying dates. 6 7

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remaker, have often induced certain critics to imagine and hypothesize, with the intent of creating a missing link, a sort of joint-degree obtained by Henryson in his native land and in universities on the Continent.11 On the contrary, his three masterpieces appear to have been engendered in the silence, shadow and everyday routine of his daily office. The first is a collection of Aesopian fables in rhyme royal; the second is a Testament of Cresseid; slightly less noteworthy is his poetic re-elaboration of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Among a handful of other unassembled allegorical, hymnal and sententious compositions, emerges a delightful, amusing pastourelle entitled ‘Robene and Makyne’.12 A moralist in spirit, Henryson also displays a restraint that is alien to the impassioned preachers in poetry, and is as firm, but benevolent and temperate, as Langland is harsh and impetuous. The bulk of his finest lyrics are moral fables, in which the poet on the one hand makes amends for – or rather exploits – a certain lack of creativity and imagination, while on the other hand acknowledging a

11

12

Praz (SSI, vol. II, 29), for example, opines that the poet might have attended the performance of Poliziano’s Orfeo at the Gonzaga court in 1480; he then proceeds to document (cf. above, § 24.3 n. 6) the debt of gratitude owed by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scottish poets to the Italian humanists, as opposed to the French ones. Praz provides no supporting evidence, and there is absolutely no trace in the critical bibliography on Henryson of any tour made by the poet to the Italian courts at the close of the fifteenth century. As observed by Elliott 1974, xxiv, Henryson may have been awarded a degree at the Universities of Paris, Leuven or Cologne, even if there are no documents to support this. The title of ‘Master’ undoubtedly signifies magister, that is to say a graduate, but not in his case. In concrete terms, Italian influence in Scotland can be applicable to Alexander Scott (ca. 1525-ca. 1584), Alexander Montgomerie (1560–1612, who, however, translated above all Ronsard), and William Fowler (1560–1612), who was responsible for the translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi. All three, but in particular the second author, composed derivative lyrics, allegories and sonnets based on English models. Montgomerie’s tedious, sententious The Cherrie and the Slae was, until a short while ago, extremely popular among the Scottish. With reference to the issue under debate, this ballad or pastourelle contains a moral, which is not made explicit but is embedded in the text, concerning the lack of foresight or negligence: Robene is not aware that, due to his youthful capriciousness, he will have no alternative but to implore Makyne in vain. For her part, she had initially rashly promised the young shepherd ‘Eik and my madinhead’ [‘Also my virginity’]. Makyne’s reply was to remain proverbial.

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subtle and slightly pained sense of submission. This is due to the fact that he harbours doubts as to whether the effectiveness and simplicity of the allegorical tale have the power to elicit a moral lesson; so he plainly and whole-heartedly adopts a didactic approach, delivering his message in a brief appendix to each individual tale. Thirteen fables are taken from Aesop; the more gloomy, more moving and poignant, and therefore tragic, tales – tragic first and foremost in the medieval sense, with downfalls from a condition of prosperity, but already with a modern relevance – pertain to the renowned ‘matter of Troy’. The illustrious Chaucer had not drawn from the story of Troilus and Cressida all the possible moral teachings that could be imparted, and even the myth of Orpheus potentially lent itself to a Platonic, neo-Platonic, and therefore Christian interpretation. An excellent and incomparable storyteller, Henryson is the greatest and most skilful narrator in verse in the period that separates Chaucer from Shakespeare. Over and above the other aptitudes in the realm of both prosody and theme, which are generally attributed to him, he is endowed with a specifically Chaucerian technical art or talent: a sense of moderation and proportion. On numerous occasions, Chaucer happened to caution himself in extremis against straying from his topic: Henryson follows suit 150 years later. Between the fourteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, the centuries are almost equivalent to decades as regards literary status and impact; after the turn of the sixteenth century, however, each decade becomes equivalent to a single year. Yet Henryson transcends Chaucer, and handles the fundamental key moments of his narrative in a brief, perfunctory, even tumultuous and overwhelmingly anti-rhetorical fashion: it will be sufficient to count the number of lines, in his Orpheus, in which he describes the musician’s fatal loss of his wife after he had turned round to look at her. His poems are, therefore, few and far between; none of them exceed 1,000 lines, and only very few top 600. Contemporary taste identifies in Henryson one of the first poets in English literature who can be read without any complications of a philological nature, in an informal manner, and in a variety of English that suddenly appears – as if by magic – effortless and free-flowing. 3. Henryson imagines that he dreams of encountering Aesop in the fable of the lion and the mouse, and pretends that it is Aesop himself who is telling him the story. The Greek poet is considered to be an unwitting

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dispenser, almost on a par with Virgil, of moral truths attuned to those of the Christian faith and which are implicit in his fables. The mechanism of the animal fable proves a mask in order to conceal a discussion on irredeemable human nature. The Chaucerian element lies in the even-handed acceptance of the legacy of original sin, and yet with the awareness, however problematic this might be, that the entire cosmos is redeemable. However, like a wise schoolmaster, Henryson is not happy to assign the lesson and admonishment to the fable itself, but he includes these separately at the end, even if he is not in the habit of dwelling at length on the moral. Basically, each of the fables regularly converges towards an illustration of man’s failure to abide by the spirit, in pandering to irrepressible brutish, worldly impulses (the fable of the cock and the gemstone); or it extols a life of humbleness and modesty, devoid of luxury, because all earthly possessions are ephemeral and those who are insatiable will never be satisfied (fable of the city mouse and the country mouse). The charming little mouse is a symbol of poverty and destitution, even if this is not always the case; the lion is the epitome of cold and arrogant regal majesty; the wolf embodies the false judge and the fox exemplifies cunning. Negligence is probably the penalty of human nature on which Henryson repeatedly insists: it is by no means a trivial vice, because it has the power to put man’s eternal life at risk. A series of tales involving the fox repeat that ‘he who laughs last laughs best’, and that the Heavenly Father is to be taken seriously. Haughty and self-centred dupes will be an eternal prey to flatterers.13 The tales inevitably take on a political hue and are directed, as usual, at the ruling authorities. Hence it must be stressed that the order of creation is in decline and is constantly under the threat of diabolical incarnations; nevertheless, Henryson is confident that, in the final analysis, God will not abandon it. More precisely, in these fables he is already a seventeenth-century sacramentalist, as he sees divinity reflected in nature and God as a vital force imposing harmony on the entire cosmos. The demonic element always lying in wait is mentioned in the lengthy preamble to the fable of the swallow – a miniature, jubilant 13

The frog, like the fox, deceives the little mouse who asks to be ferried towards the other bank of the stream, and ‘paddock’ refers specifically to the most repugnant toad. In other words, ‘better to be alone than in bad company’.

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masterpiece. In his remake of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde14 Henryson follows Boethius in his representation of the wheel of fortune, which now transforms Cressida into a female foil of Troilus. After having been abandoned by Diomedes, she wanders desolately and aimlessly through the Greek battlefield; at the same time, Cressida is the living symbol of carnal ‘appetite’ which, by its very nature, is destined to be satiated and then instantly burn out. Henryson awards the same compassion towards Cressida as Chaucer and, in one stanza, he mimics the voice of the Greek chorus, imploring the deities to desist from the punishment imposed on her. However, he cannot resist the temptation to stage the uncompromising and exemplary allegory of her disloyalty, in a dream vision of a cosmic trial in which the seven planets, incarnated in the divinities from whom they take their names, engage in a debate. On waking up, Cressida sees in the mirror that her dream has become reality, and her face is disfigured by leprosy. The link with Aesop’s fables is seen above all in the use of the same didactic device, the inexorable consequences of negligence. The climax of the story coincides with the non-recognition of Cressida on the part of Troilus, who, contrary to what happens at the end of Chaucer’s poem, somehow remains alive or is brought back to life. In the hands of Henryson, Cressida is transformed into a symbol of the demonic power of the flesh and of the consequent inevitable decay that sets in. This grim, macabre twist is absent in Chaucer, and a tragic epilogue of this kind is also somewhat rare in Henryson himself. As the poet correctly states at the end, the poem is a ‘ballet schort’, a short ballad of an unprecedented conciseness, and one of the indisputable masterpieces in the realm of short narrative in verse prior to Shakespeare. In his Orpheus and Euridices15 the languid, frail and lifeless 14 Henryson describes the ‘setting’ of the composition of the poem. During a sleepless winter night he decides to pick up a book, Chaucer’s poem to be precise – a Chaucerian artifice in itself – and he invents the continuation of the story and begins to write it. The question he asks himself, similar to the one that was to engender Pater’s imaginary portraits, is ‘What has become of them?’ Henryson even goes as far as to ask himself: ‘Quh wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?’ [‘Who knows whether everything Chaucer wrote was true?’]. 15 Henryson skilfully, and judiciously, blends Chaucer’s rhyme royal with alliterative alternating rhyme. In the closing Moralitas he passes directly to the heroic rhyming

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Orpheus is wooed by the more dynamic and innocently sensual Eurydice, who flees from the unwelcome advances of a lusty shepherd, but ends up being bitten by a symbolic poisonous snake and immediately abducted by Proserpine to her cavern in the underworld. Orpheus’ lament is embedded in the story with a refrain at the end of each stanza. His voyage through the planets in search of Eurydice will be a fruitless one, so the story takes the form of a realistic, demonstrative journey into the depths of Hades. It is customary to identify in Henryson the Platonic debate between the active and contemplative life, or between the sublimation of the instinct and the surrender to bestial instincts. But the core of the poem is a realistically Dantesque vision of the degradation and suffering of the sinners condemned to everlasting punishment, and of the kind of life that people may and will be obliged to fully endure in Hell, unless they repent. The ideal caption is: sic transit gloria mundi. As further proof, Eurydice will not be found by Orpheus in his journey through the celestial spheres; she does not therefore reside in the heavens, because she is guilty of having committed a fault – however trivial this might be – during her earthly existence. In this ancient myth of Orpheus Henryson captured a theological nuance, or rather exception, consisting in the fact that a doomed sinner could leave Hell and return among the living, and that eternal damnation might not be such a definitive and irreversible verdict. At the end there is a recurrence of the parable of human negligence, or of human weakness in yielding to impulsive instincts: the impatient Orpheus destroys with his own hands a priceless state of bliss on earth, for which he has wept and suffered. 4. One of the essays in the collection entitled Dreamthorp by Alexander Smith,16 a Scottish poet of the nineteenth-century Spasmodic School, but balanced and cautious as a critic, is dedicated to William Dunbar (ca. 1460-ca. 1520).17 Although Smith is responsible for a few innocent

16 17

couplet. The least successful parts are those in which Henryson aspires to listing all the specific technical details of the tunes played by Orpheus’ harp; yet it must be added that, once he becomes aware of this excessive pedantry, he closes this section. London 1905 (1st edn 1863). Cf. 79–110 for the essay I quote (on Smith’s book, and for my discussion of it, cf. Volume 4, § 228). This date is a compromise solution. Since there is no information available after the Battle of Flodden (1513) some scholars have assumed that he died on the battlefield

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errors of a philological and attributive nature, as well as a few inaccuracies as regards dating due to the low quality of contemporary standards (1863), after a lengthy preamble extending over a good two-thirds of the essay, as is his habit, he finally focuses on his subject. Once Smith gets to the heart of the matter, readers of posterity are surprised to note that they are in total agreement with many of the opinions and judgements expressed. Smith introduces Dunbar first and foremost as a court poet and therefore justly offers a picture of the ‘Medicean’ court of James IV, a ‘merry monarch’ like his descendant Charles II, a polyglot and patron, a lover of the arts with a keen interest in various branches of humanist culture, an antiquarian and scientist, and the founder of the Scottish university institutions. During his reign, Scotland became an economically flourishing maritime power, but also a nation torn apart by baronial feuds. However, under the façade of the ‘merry’ monarch lay a disturbed soul, with melancholy and neurotic traits. Having risen up against his father, James suffered from periodic fits of depression and schizophrenia and from persecution manias. The priest, poet and courtier Dunbar was, or felt, a lifelong victim of the unpredictable nature of the largesse and favours bestowed on him by this king. Praise, welcome, adulation (also, if not especially, towards the queen), panegyrics and entertainment feature just as frequently in his poetry as envy, frustration, rancour, protest, scorn and abuse. The Scottish court, in some ways so cosmopolitan and progressive, was at the same time a claustrophobic milieu, and Dunbar the poet found himself composing within its limiting and conditioning horizons. Dunbar’s identikit presented by Smith is

in defence of the king. Lyndsay, on the other hand, traces his death to the year 1530. Born into a family from the local minor nobility, a Bachelor and Master of Arts at St Andrews University, Dunbar was a Franciscan novice and, having later abandoned the Rule, was ordained as a secular priest, a role that was not particularly suited to his temperament. From the year 1500, he was employed as a poet at the court of King James IV. Many other biographical details have been derived from his own compositions, but, as I shall argue, Dunbar skilfully manipulates his masks, so this information is inevitably to be taken cum grano salis. For instance, he is supposed to have spent some time in Paris, where he led a life of merrymaking and debauchery, at a time when the poems of Villon, with whom he shares clear affinities, were being posthumously published.

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that of a melancholic ante litteram, of a frustrated, disenchanted, marginal figure who vents his exasperation on those who have undeservedly obtained greater benefits and promotions than he.18 And yet, in the final analysis, Smith adds that Dunbar remains a sibylline poet, impenetrable behind his masks, the author of poems that cannot be linked to a specific biographical ‘self ’. There is no existing portrait of the poet,19 nor is his place of burial known; Smith concludes his essay, referring to him as ‘the Pompeii of British poetry’. The data collected hitherto seem to warrant and require a few preliminary comparisons. Dunbar earns the epithet of ‘Chaucerian’ not so much for his incurable malaise as a courtier, but because he wrote – apart from his other works – the allegorical ‘The Thrissil and the Rois’ on the occasion of the marriage of King James with Margaret, ‘The Golden Targe’ in the wake of – or rather at the tail-end of – the May morning dream motif, ‘The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’, apparently derived from or inspired by the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and a fabliau almost superior to those of the master, entitled ‘The Freiris of Berwick’. And like Chaucer, Dunbar expertly shifts from the profane to the sacred and vice versa, at his own desire and leisure. The most consolidated parallel, or contrast, is however with Skelton. Dunbar is, par excellence, the Scottish counterpart of Skelton, thanks to his sheer passion for words, his occasional whimsical oddities, and the bawdiness of his invectives aimed at both his enemies and rivals with the same unsuppressible vigour.20 However, he perhaps leaves a less indelible mark on the reader and, as a poet, he is also less unified, at least judging by the state in which 18

The confession of his chronic moodiness emerges in the lyric, consisting of only three stanzas, normally known as ‘The Headache’, whose incipit looks ahead to Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The poems in which Dunbar claims to be depressed and dispirited are not few in number, even if the poet tends, sooner or later, to view himself as the bone of contention between two opposing forces of allegorical personifications, as in another poem, entitled ‘A Meditation in Winter’. 19 Smith paints himself a ‘portrait’ having the same vagueness as those made by Walter Pater to depict the poets he studied. 20 The flyting between Dunbar and the poetaster Kennedy spills over 500 lines and can undoubtedly compete with Skelton’s invectives, and indeed often surpass them on the strength of their endless machine-gun fire of insults. The poem addressed to the

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the works of Skelton have reached us. We are under the impression that we would recognize Skelton if we saw him on the street (also because we possess more biographical, or legendary, information on his life and works), but this is not the case with Dunbar, who has always donned a protective mask, with the result that we never succeed in catching a glimpse of his private life or, to quote Lewis, see him ‘in literary undress’.21 Dunbar is suave and graceful even when he is ribald; only Skelton is genuinely and uncontrollably vulgar. Classicism versus Romanticism? From the point of view of form, Skelton is more intemperate, whereas Dunbar is guided by a keen sense of finish; in reality, none of his works have been left fragmentary, drafted or unfinished.22 What the two poets do have in common is their partiality for short poems; neither of them composed lengthy poems, and only one of Dunbar’s poetic compositions exceeds 600 lines. The author of 100 poems or so, he is the counterpart of the voluminous Lyndsay. Dunbar is commonly defined as a consummate master of rhyming refrains,23 and, just as Skelton is remembered for the famous line of the lizard lying lurking in the grass, so the refrain in the stanzas of Dunbar’s ‘Lament for the Makaris’, his most universally acclaimed poem, remains etched in memory, despite the fact that it is a line of trite ecclesiastical Latin: Timor mortis conturbat me.24 king as a plea for a rise in salary is proof of Dunbar’s prodigious skill in producing line after line of never-ending epithets. 21 ELS, 97. 22 There are very few examples of ‘macaronic’ language; these include a dramatic monologue attributed to another Kennedy. 23 He is also one of the greatest masters of the incipits, namely the plain, lengthy, perfectly spontaneous preludes that launch many of his various lyrics. However, they sometimes deteriorate as they go along. 24 A highly ingenious syntagma from the phonological point of view, Dunbarian ante litteram: timor and mortis are the same word repeated anagrammatically, apart from one letter, with the reversals [t/i/o/r] – [o/r/t/i]; moreover, the line is inscribed within the assonant syllables [ti] and [mi], and presents the reversal [im] / [me]. It has often been observed by scholars that Dunbar is not interested in issues of ethics, theology or philosophy. In this respect, he is therefore the exact opposite of Skelton, who is a staunch supporter of the Church and its unity, and a sworn enemy of every kind of heresy.

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5. However much he lacks Skelton’s typical idiosyncrasy and personal mark, Dunbar is nonetheless a poet who is able to imitate a series of fake voices and registers, covering the entire possible range of tones in poetic diction, from the soft and melodious to the coarsely plebeian, like a skilled ventriloquist. A second Midas, he turns to gold everything he touches. As Alexander Smith observed, ‘His genius combined the excellence of many masters’, also alluding to the fact that his talent and ability do not often go beyond imitation. Therefore editors usually classify Dunbar’s poetry – given the impossibility of establishing any reliable chronological order – according to categories or groups or genres, or even according to the poet’s state of mind. His two allegorical short poems distinguish themselves for majesty and ambition, but they represent the dying embers of medieval allegory, and they soon cloy due to their manifest excess of adulation. ‘The Thrissil and the Rois’ is a cold and lifeless scholarly exercise on an assigned topic, which cleverly blends tried and tested commonplaces. ‘The Golden Targe’ describes the lover, defenceless against Love, which wounds him even in spite of his shield of Reason. It is an extremely flexible, smooth, free-flowing and elegant variation which evokes Poliziano, the delicate settings of Botticelli, or the Roman de la Rose in its purest form. In this poem the poet dons a mask: Dunbar was a priest, and could not possibly present himself as being pierced by the sharp arrows of Love and Beauty, his Reason having been blinded. Obviously, just when the lover is on the verge of surrendering to love, the dream spell is broken and he is once more brought back to reality. The religious and amorous lyrics, in turn, herald metaphysical elements in their elated diction, in the orgiastic string of metaphorical and synonymic epithets, in the carefully designed construction of incisive prosodies and sound patterns.25 Therefore Dunbar should be 25

See by contrast the mysterious and delightfully humorous poem on the black lady ‘with the meckle lippis’ (‘Of Ane Blak-Moir’), whose mouth protrudes ‘lyk ane aep’, and who for some unspecified reason landed up at the court of Scotland. This lyric, among the most notable of Dunbar’s more trivial poems, preannounces Herrick’s female portrayals, which often dwell on physical details and the women’s attire. When Dunbar is relaxed and composed, he is capable of creating exquisitely humorous poems, such as that on Norny, the court jester, the ungainly dancing of the courtiers, or the haughty Keeper of the Queen’s Wardrobe.

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viewed and judged at his best, that is to say when he distances himself from this celebratory and official type of poetry, or a kind of poetry modelled on courtly love conventions, and when he physically withdraws from court to observe and participate in the aspects of everyday life. As Smith justly observes, Dunbar’s excellence resides in his comical scenes enacted on the street or in the tavern, in his fierce and arrogant satires and, above all, in his somewhat grotesque imaginary and visionary ballads, all the more successful when they are short, profit from the brilliance of the poet’s inventiveness and hinge on curious, unusual, wild and bizarre anecdotes. The Devil disguised as St Francis appears before the poet one night, urging him to don the habit, but the poet resists him and the diabolical spirit reveals the mystifying dogma of the Brotherhood the poet was on the point of entering, and its methodical exploitation of good, honest men. Sainthood was, statistically speaking, far more accessible to laymen and the secular clergy than to corrupt monks. The court presented a panoply of scenarios: on the one hand, solemn, romantic and heroic, but on the other hand, also comical, farcical, grotesque and ungenerous. A humorous anecdote describes a certain Friar of Tungland who could not be dissuaded from attempting to fly with the wings of a chicken.26 ‘The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’ portrays, isolates and distances the chit-chat of three tipsy ladies; for this very reason, it is a story, not a dramatic monologue, and is rather more prolix, and less explosive, than Skelton’s ‘Tunning’, although, as always, the scene of the widow hurling abuse at her husband, like a cluster of carefully chosen bullets fired one by one, is highly entertaining. Dunbar ends up wallowing in the macabre and sombre, and in that late medieval

26

This, and other surreal satires, are closely reminiscent of Skelton’s ad hominem satires: in this case, the poem is targeted at a globe-trotting careerist, a quack doctor, healer and alchemist, whose folly is ridiculed with a plentiful dose of sectorial language and with precise references to medical and alchemic practices. The victim, a certain John Damian, perhaps of Italian origins, had found favour with the king. When he takes flight, the birds in unison ask one another who this fellow is, and then go on to attack, furiously reject, humiliate and overthrow him; shaking with fear, the friar wets his pants. In the end, Dunbar reveals that this was simply a dream, nonetheless based on a true story narrated by contemporary historians. A similar escapade is that of Simon Magus in another ballad.

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taste for the decomposition of the flesh and rotting bodies – a diabolical, or even eldritch, that is to say, weird or ghostly element. The question of which of the ten or so single major poems attributable to Dunbar can be considered his masterpiece remains open: Smith, with whom I opened this discussion, opted for ‘The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis’,27 an allegorical dance composition directed by Mohammed in an infernal bolgia or ditch, in which the personifications of the seven sins parade, dance and perform Dantesquely obscene actions. § 26. Lyndsay* Scottish people nowadays are, however, inclined to acknowledge as their national poet and writer par excellence not one of the previously discussed trio, but David Lyndsay, or Lindsay (ca. 1485–1555, awarded the title of Sir in 1542). As tangible, symbolic and emblematic evidence of this, the first edition of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1948 (since then Scotland’s most important cultural event) included a performance, after an immemorial lapse of time, and albeit in abridged form,1 of Lyndsay’s Satire of the Three Estates. As a follow-up, the twentieth-century playwright John Arden was to draw inspiration from Lyndsay and his most well-known and provocative work for an impressive play of his own. At the same time, 27

This poem has an envoi consisting in a mock-heroic, exuberant and extremely scatological duel between a tailor and a cobbler. The lyric is classified by Dunbar as a ‘trance’.

* Works, ed. J. Small and F. Hall, 2 vols, Edinburgh 1869, repr. New York 1969 (with very useful summaries in the margins); ed. D. Hamer, 4 vols, Edinburgh 1931–1936; Minor Poems, ed. J. A. H. Murray, EETS 1871. The Satire has been re-edited by J. Kinsley, London 1954, and by R. J. Lyall, Edinburgh 1989; and adapted as indicated in n. 7 infra. W. Murison, Sir David Lyndsay, London 1933; J. S. Kantarowitz, Dramatic Allegory: Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Lincoln, NE 1975; C. Edlington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, East Linton 1994. 1

The original duration of nine hours, from nine o’clock in the morning to six o’clock in the evening, was reduced to three hours on that occasion. The text at the end of the first part states: ‘the pepill mak Collatioun’ [‘the public goes to lunch’], and the actors, as specified in the stage directions, leave the scene.

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Arden in 1964 dedicated to Lyndsay another historical play, Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, in which the Scottish poet and diplomat appears as the backstage director amid the chaos and turbulence of the mid-sixteenthcentury Scottish scenario, with the minor characters reciting in a more or less middle ground variety of Scots.2 Lyndsay thus deserves special treatment, because he is neither the tormented, fawning court poet, nor the pure artist, but essentially a political poet who has the power and desire to sacrifice art to a utopian project of moral reform of Scottish society, which takes precedence over art. The same protest, satire and censure that we find in Dunbar are also present in Lyndsay, but they are conscious, less direct and unrelated to personal causes, circumstances or even traumas. Humanist culture is no longer an end in itself and Lyndsay, among the few authors of his period, is not a Latinist. In other words, he sets aside his personal rancours or converts them into an objectivizing Weltanschauung. His tenacious, unfailing concentration on ethical, political and prophetic issues is incompatible ipso facto with the short and perhaps erotic lyric, with the devotional and hymnal lyric, with the tardy, exceedingly listless allegories of courtly love, as well as with the re-elaborations of the Roman de la Rose, which were still being cultivated by his fellow-citizens only very few years previously. In his impassioned, unwieldy yet compelling Messianic mission, with its pristine excess of allegorical personifications, Lyndsay reminds us of Langland. However, the character in flesh and blood, taken from everyday life and not from allegory, gains the upper hand and steals the scene. His works are interlinked by a few metamorphoses and reincarnations of the poor peasant, who undergoes a series of misadventures and who, disregarded by everyone, is an upright, virtuous and hearty man. This is the eternal reoccurrence of the Langlandian archetype or hypostasis which, picked up by Bunyan, survives in numerous key texts of English literature until Romanticism. Lyndsay was probably not a supporter of the Reformation, and he was certainly not a Puritan. He ruthlessly lashes out at the ‘scarlet woman’, but perhaps still from within the fold. For him, religion is merely an inconsequential restriction, because he views the stability of the state and appropriate democratic governance as the overriding objective. The 2

Volume 8, § 128.6.

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flip side of the Scottish temperament, namely the bizarre and explicitly gross and licentious powers of imagination, resurfaces however in a few of his minor compositions. 2. The son of a nobleman and landowner, Lyndsay was born near St Andrews, but modern biographers cautiously harbour doubts as to whether he studied at that university, and they begin to monitor his movements from the year 1511, when he recited in an interlude at the court of King James IV. At court he was supposed to have been engaged as tutor and pedagogue of the young James V and to have married a seamstress. Having been temporarily dismissed by the king, he returned to the service in 1528 as his personal counsellor, ambassador and diplomat engaged in various important missions in Europe, and he held the title of general master of ceremonies at court. He was also responsible for a masque to welcome the French queen. This first phase of Lyndsay’s career is reflected in ‘The Dreme’ (1528), in which the introductory epistle, addressed to the king, tenderly evokes the time they spent in each other’s company during the monarch’s childhood. The date marked James V’s accession to the throne and the martyrization of a Scottish reformer, burnt at the stake under the charge of heresy. Confirmation of the influence of Langland is to be seen in the appearance, here in ‘The Dreme’, of a certain John the Commonwealth, a name which, while being reminiscent of Piers Plowman and Will the Dreamer, also conjures up those widespread imaginative semantic nicknames, all of which prophetic, later to be coined by Bunyan. In the poem John, now unable to support himself in Scotland, is on the verge of emigrating beyond the confines of the country in search of employment; yet, in the meanwhile, he seizes the opportunity to condemn the misgovernment of the realm and to yearn for a ‘good and upright’ monarch.3 In short Lyndsay, through an intermediary, addresses

3

Some critics correctly detect a Dantean echo, and Praz in SSI, vol. II, 30, provides evidence to support a ‘small scale replica of [Dante’s] poem’. Lyndsay’s Hell is therefore mainly populated by monks and prelates smitten with ‘avarice’ and lust. However, Lyndsay already proceeds to indict the three ‘estates’ and to idealize the fourth, that of the poor country labourers. At the same time, Dame Remembrance performs the functions of Chaucer’s eagle (§ 17.3), imparting to the poet a lengthy and detailed

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James V, who has just ascended to the throne.4 All of Lyndsay’s compositions in verse – given that no prose work of his is extant – are in various metres, among which feature both rhyme royal, as well as the heroic rhyming couplet. Thus, at least outwardly, Lyndsay can be justly defined as the last Scottish Chaucerian. As will be seen, there are other substantial analogies to confirm this. Prior to any discussion of the Satire of the Three Estates, it should be stated that this work is the first Scottish (allegorical, for obvious reasons) drama to be handed down historically, though certainly not the first to be written and performed. It owes this primacy to the fact that specific documentation in this regard is rather inconsistent and that, given the prevalently popular nature of the dramatic entertainment, theatrical texts were, as a rule, not printed. Of the moralities that had been performed since the year 1445, as well as of other plays that lashed out against the clergy, the titles are known, but the texts have not been preserved.5 The Satire was published only in 1602, thanks to the popularity and success of the first performance, held at the Scottish court in 1540, followed by other revised versions. Nevertheless, no sooner had the play been printed than the copies were burnt by order of the Church authorities.6 Lyndsay’s drama is of paramount importance and it is the

4

5 6

geography lesson. Many other minor works by Lyndsay hinge on the corruption of the avaricious clergy and goad the king to reform them and to rid himself of bad counsellors. The same demands contained in ‘The Dreme’, together with a tactful plea to award him a monetary benefit, are echoed in the ‘lament of Sir David Lyndsay’ addressed to the king or, on a visionary plane, not infrequent in his works, in the ‘Testament and Complaint of the Papyngo’ and in the monologue of Bagsche, the king’s dog. The monumental anti-Papist poem The Monarche (1555), a history of the world up to the Last Judgement is, to say the least, discontinuous if not decidedly prolix, yet it has its admirers. C. S. Lewis, a fervent enthusiast of Lyndsay, accuses of obtuseness all readers who find this work monotonous, and judges the free-flowing story in verse (or romantic and romanticized biography) of a certain William Meldrum (a chivalrous knight with the fairer sex) a ‘masterpiece’, superior even to Chaucer’s verse tales (ELS, 102, 103, 104). This is the only work of the prolific Lyndsay that is not expressly political. Philotus, the first Scottish comedy, of unknown authorship, was published in 1603. PGU, vol. II, 191.

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greatest work of its period, superior to Bale’s King John (which is, at any rate, a later work), not so much for the ideological message it conveys, as for its revolutionary dramatic structure and for the innovative theatrical mode it spearheads. Basically, the allegorical design proves to be closely remodelled on Skelton’s Magnificence. In the first part a king, allegorically named King Humanity, and thus an alter ego of Everyman, is led astray by Sensuality and by other personified vices disguised as virtues, but he is saved from ruin thanks to the intervention of Divine Correction. The vices present distinctly exuberant farcical scenes in the attempt to corrupt the king; Verity steps in with an English Bible in her hand, outrages the clergy and is consigned to the stocks at a moment in history when Protestant vernacular translations were spreading like wildfire. The drama was allowed to be performed at court, with the king’s approval, because, already at the end of the first part, Lyndsay is still confident that order and justice can be restored. After an interlude, the second part, which is considerably more protracted, stages a sitting of Parliament in which, harangued by John Commonwealth (our old friend from ‘The Dreme’), the three estates of the Scottish nation – clergy, lords and merchants – reach agreement on a plan to eradicate vice and reform the kingdom of Scotland. The absence of any dramaturgic interconnection among the three parts of the drama, and its overall design encompassing a disjointed combination of genres – sacred and profane, serious and facetious issues, tragedy, farce and fabliau – give the impression of a parody of medieval allegory, now in its dying phase. At the same time, it can be argued that this extremely varied kaleidoscope of humanity (the characters are just under fifty in number) propounded with absolute objectivity, makes Lyndsay the most, rather than the least, Chaucerian of the Scottish makaris. Not surprisingly, the strains in Lyndsay’s poem coincide with certain fundamental elements in Chaucer: for example, the eloquent, noble, spiritual, vulgar and unrefined element. A poor man is tricked by the treacherous Pardoner, a key figure in the Canterbury Tales, and other personalities taken from everyday life are assembled in this diorama. As previously mentioned, the Satire has however inspired and fascinated in particular twentieth-century playwrights of the theatre of the absurd, and of existentialist, historical, ‘angry’, political and post-Brechtian drama. This is due to the hybrid, multi-layered, unsystematic structure of the Satire and

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to the concept of a public ceremonial event, as well as to the discovery of the theatrical medium as the primary vehicle for instigation, provocation, involvement, indoctrination, persuasion and propaganda. Lyndsay’s Satire is not only a work of protest, but it involves the spectator, addresses and urges him to participate in the theatrical event. We are not in a position to state whether Brecht was familiar with this work, but Brechtian dramas are, in themselves, a chain of deviations from the norm, and, besides dialogues, they stage songs, interludes, pantomimes and unexpected and impromptu sketches. The mainstay of the Satire resides in the interludes, which typify a Brechtian, didactic type of drama in the shocking selfunmasking of the clergy and men of power. A prioress preaches against monkhood and expresses the hope of a good marriage for herself and for the world; under her nun’s habit, the abbess wears a silk bodice worthy of a whore. The Poor Man, stripped of all his meagre possessions by the Church authorities, is rewarded with an indulgence lasting 1,000 years! The public is aware of the fact that what is being presented is a demonstration, and that any argument might ‘ruin our drama’. At the end, the Vices are hanged after their comical farewell speeches, but Folie delivers an irreverent sermon which casts serious doubts on the validity of the plan of reform previously agreed upon. All these potentials, as previously stated, were perceived by the director Tyrone Guthrie in his performance of the drama in the first Edinburgh Festival in 1948.7 § 27. Popular ballads and lyrics This section will be a condensed history of anonymous poetry composed in Middle English and Middle Scots from the mid-thirteenth century

7

Guthrie staged the play in the open-air auditorium of the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland. SES, 74, draws attention to the ‘thrust’ stage extending into the audience and reports one of the director’s ‘Brechtian’ declarations of intent, his objective not being that of encouraging the immersion of the public ‘in an illusion’, rather of making it consciously participate in a ritual. The text of the adaptation was created on that occasion by R. Kemp, London 1951; a further adaptation of this adaptation is by M. McDiarmid, London 1967, 1970. Mention has already been made of Arden’s plays and, as regards staging and casting, the performances directed by Peter Brook are also to be remembered.

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to the end of the sixteenth century. We must be well aware, however, that, to a large extent, these poems have reached us in a variety of later transcriptions that do not allow us to reconstruct their dates with any certainty, or reasonable margin of doubt. Nor do they shed light on the intermediate linguistic versions, or even the diegetic variants, to which the texts were subjected between their first oral genesis and their first written version. These are day-to-day issues afflicting critics and philologists. From an anthropological point of view, this canon is linked to the effects of the relatively painless, yet centuries-long, transition from paganism to Christianity. It is a well-known fact that written communication is subsequent to oral, and above all musical, communication, because human beings in every period of civilization have tended to express themselves first and foremost through song or by dancing to the rhythm of a song. The singer but not the author of the specimens proposed in this repertoire was the errant minstrel who served as a sort of trait d’union between the court and the populace. When confronted with this canon, and with the origins and mechanisms of oral poetry tout court (nineteenth-century German critics – who were later to be proved wrong – deemed these to be collective and community-based), literary historiographers inevitably enlist the help not only of philologists and anthropologists, but above all of scholars investigating popular traditions. The end result of this ‘catalogue’ is a division between pure, secular and religious lyrical poetry (dating from 1250, and without any demonstrable links or precedents, and for this reason of greater value, and assembled mainly, but not exclusively, around the year 1340, in the Harley 2253 ms.), hymns, carols (dances accompanied by songs dedicated to fertility rites, then subsequently adopted, Christianized by the monks and adapted to be sung at Christmas time), and ballads. The themes featured in the ballads range from the heroic to the pathetic, the comic, the surreal, and above all the tragic. The lyrical poetry that flourished to the north and south of the Tweed absorbed this immediately lyrical afflatus, never found in the official literature at court and in stylized courtly love poetry. Both the lyrical poetry and the ballads display conventional metric schemes, prosody and rhyme (rhyme goes hand in hand with alliteration), as well as typical technical and narratological procedures. The principal ingredients of the ballad-form, just as we have the sonata-form, are overwhelming speed, the abruptness of the changes in scenario, the inevitably rough sketching as opposed to

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the analytical description of human characters.1 Every trace of a first-person narrator has been eliminated. They are usually structured in rhymed quatrains initially accompanied by a flexible and unrelated refrain, which shortly disappears. The secular variety preludes to the Elizabethan lyric, while the ballad enjoys a far more long-lasting recurrence and tradition. 2. ‘Reliques’ of this entire cultural heritage were assembled for the first time by Bishop Thomas Percy in 1765, on the basis of a manuscript dating from the end of the seventeenth century. His anthology was followed by other collections in which the original versions of the texts, which were already forgeries of the oral version, were even more counterfeited and – as was generally believed at the time – ‘improved’, by stripping them of all the coarse, unrefined and primitive elements that were part and parcel of popular literature. Thus they were remodelled and reformulated in the ‘aureate’ diction, the linguistic ideal that they were unconsciously challenging.2 Even before Percy other men of letters were in the habit of softening and standardizing the ballads. This repertoire was hailed enthusiastically by the Romantics, and set the mood for the false, or only partially true, notion of a ‘tragic, magical medieval period, spectral in its content, spontaneous and simple in its form’.3 In actual fact, as if by magic, there are strong blood ties between the ancient ballads of love, death and supernatural events and some of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, reflected even in Wordsworth’s use of linguistic archaisms.4 It took Walter Scott ten years to write out and 1

2

3 4

Through the pressing questions addressed by the mother to her parricide son, ‘Edward’ succeeds in conjuring up within the space of approximately fifty lines of verse a story of emotional lability and nemesis. The ballad ‘Lord Randal’ is also structured upon a dialogue between mother and son, from which it becomes apparent that Lord Randal has been poisoned by his fiancée. Both ballads close with the device of the protagonist’s will and testament. Virtually the entire corpus – 305 ballads in 1,300 versions – was assembled for the first time in J. F. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols, Boston, MA 1882–1898; but it was subsequently expanded. Also Ballate popolari d’Inghilterra e di Scozia, ed. S. Baldi, Firenze 1946, is worthy of mention. PSL, 48. The ballad ‘Sir Patrick Spence’, which tells the story of a phantasmagorical sea voyage with a shipwreck, is thought to have been one of the main influences on Coleridge’s ‘Rime’.

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publish in the years 1802–1803, immediately after the Lyrical Ballads, the ‘minstrelsy’ of the Scottish Border, transcribing it directly from the living voices of the surviving bards, but allowing himself to fall into the temptation of constructing a ‘critical’ text of each single exemplar from the multitude of variants. The two most famous and widespread semi-anonymous Scottish ballads, attributed to King James I (although, from a linguistic point of view, they could feasibly have been composed by another later monarch endowed with an identical passion for poetry, King James V), are both poems which incorporate mass movements and groups of people giving vent to long-repressed and overly exuberant energies. On the English lyrical poetry scene, the famous fourteenth-century Cuckoo Song gives way to other exquisite poetic compositions devoted to the description of the seasons, to passionate, spontaneous and fervent fifteenth-century hymns dedicated to the Virgin Mary,5 and to carols and narrative ballads dealing with heroic or semi-heroic themes, notably those of Robin Hood, of which at least thirty are in existence. The last anonymous lyrics from the period of Henry VIII cleverly border on the riddle and suggest the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’. The raison d’être of the popular ballad was the mythicizing and romanticizing of some heroic event, in quatrains with a strongly marked rhythm, and characterized by the author’s complete abstention from any kind of judgement. ‘The Battle of Otterburne’ was the source of inspiration for the very famous ‘Chevy Chase’, with the conflict between two proud Border warriors, both of whom are killed in the end. One of the versions of this ballad made such a deep impression on Sidney that he could not imagine what a masterpiece it would have been if Pindar had been the author. ‘The NutBrown Maid’, published in 1502, is the story of a woman who could not be dissuaded from following into the forest a knight with whom she was in love. The lover finally reveals to her that he is not a banished man but the son of an earl.

5

The lyric dedicated to Adam’s sin (‘Adam lay ibouwndyn’) encompasses in its naïve simplicity a highly controversial theological issue: namely that the Incarnation of Christ was made necessary by Adam’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden (‘And al was for an appil’).

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§ 28. Medieval drama* The reconstruction of the English medieval theatre is not devoid of certain grey areas. However, after the decline and fall of the former autonomist and even negationist theories, according to which its development was detached and fragmented, and proceeded in a dead-end direction, it is now well established that the three main typologies of medieval drama – the mystery play, the morality play and the interlude – are interconnected and that the Elizabethan theatre in particular is the solid link that closes the chain. Remnants of very ancient pagan rituals survived until the late nineteenth century in England, as is reflected, for instance, in the opening scenes of Hardy’s The Return of the Native; and evidence of the protraction of a virtual and clandestine type of drama is provided by various forms of popular entertainment, fertility rites and seasonal celebrations. Those playing the parts of the actors were mimes, jesters, jugglers, acrobats, troubadours, peddlers, dancers, magicians and minstrels that flocked to the towns and performed in local festivals, processions, tournaments or carnival festivities, or they were employed in the dramatized Robin Hood sagas. As always, the Church partly opposes and partly hails, reformulates and panders to these primordial instincts, and the liturgical drama gives rise – whether consensually or unilaterally – to a secular type of drama. The improvement in quality in drama at the close of the sixteenth century – the sweeping away of all forms of popular art, of uncultured and coarse elements, of the absence of cultural filters, and of pure intuition unaccompanied by theory or elaboration – was eventually due to the contribution of the ‘university wits’ and of the compilers and translators, who widened the horizons of drama and facilitated the imitation of classical drama.

*

The four main cycles of mystery plays are available in various EETS editions. Collections of miracle and mystery plays and moralities are edited by A. W. Pollard, Oxford 1890; by A. C. Cawley, London 1960. Interestingly, Everyman and the drama of Noah and the Ark in the Chester Mystery Cycle were translated into Italian by Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus, in Teatro religioso del Medio Evo ( fuori d’Italia), ed. G. Contini, Milano 1949 (BAL, 300, defines this translation as ‘inadequate’). The bibliography on medieval theatre is now vast, and I shall limit myself to quoting The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. R. Beadle, Cambridge 1994.

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2. During the late medieval period the Church had everywhere suppressed the spectacular, licentious, barbarian or immoral performances of the late Roman period which, through an optical illusion, might be viewed as bearing a certain resemblance with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Yet, as early as the tenth century, the Church had retraced its steps and rediscovered the extraordinary homiletic and educational function of drama. The imposition of a monopoly on dramatic performances was also an excellent way to obstruct any critical interference and disparagement of religion in popular drama. The first form of drama in Christianized Europe is, indeed, the Holy Gospel itself, a script in the making abounding in dialogues and monologues enacted in specific, not stylized but basic, scenarios, often seasoned with quarrels, boutades, puns and minor wars of words. Dramatic episodes par excellence in the Gospels are primarily those of the questioning of Jesus in the Praetorium and the Passion. The liturgy is a sacred representation. In the technical and liturgical sense, the gradual is the song following the Epistle, and a musical elaboration of the final vowel of the Hallelujah, giving rise to a sequence, soon became common practice. This melody was supplemented by a brand new written text. Tropes – initially a musical, as opposed to a rhetorical, term – was the name given to the added texts sung in other parts of the liturgy, and the first of these tropes arose out of the episode taken from the Gospel of St Matthew in the Easter liturgy, in which the three Marys discover the empty sepulchre after the Resurrection. This distant antecedent assumed the conventional appellation of Quem quaeritis? or of Easter trope, and the procedure was soon repeated for the Christmas liturgy. The first known English ‘theatre director’ is Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, who in his Regularis concordia dated 967 issued detailed instructions as to the staging, acting and costumes for the performance of a Quem quaeritis? In this early phase the space reserved for the forthcoming drama was the inside of the church, the language was Latin, the texts were sung, and those reciting them were strictly members of the clergy. When the action required more open spaces than the choir, presbytery and nave in order to reach a wider public, the miracle or mystery plays1 came into being. These were performances that 1

The miracle plays, the most appropriate term according to certain critics (for example E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols, Oxford 1903), imply references to the

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initially took the form of symbiosis between the established Church and the arts and trades guilds, but were subsequently controlled solely by the laity and municipalities (although one might suspect that the transfer of power from the clergy to the laity was not a peaceable and painless one). The mystery play was, in fact, neither a court nor a church event, nor was it a prerogative of the élite, but of the people; it originated and developed far from the city of London, in the prosperous market towns in the central and northern regions. The first important evolution was then determined by the transition from the closed spaces within the church to the open air. The issue of dramatic space was destined to die out or go into hibernation with the advent of Elizabethan conventions, only to re-emerge centuries later and tickle the taste buds of twentieth-century playwrights, eager to appeal to the masses and not to a chosen, sectorial, bourgeois and paying public. The mystery play was no longer a stationary type of drama but a mobile one, performed every year during the religious feast-days and in particular on the newly instituted feast of Corpus Christi (1264, and observed from the year 1311). The dramatic procedure was unified, with a few local variants. Unconnected biblical episodes were cut down in size and adapted to form individual dramatic scenes in a cycle lasting one or even several days. This performance circulated in strategic points in the cities, such as squares and crossroads. There were also scenes performed on carts on wheels, and therefore in the manner of a carnival parade. This term is used deliberately, due to the occasional presence of certain profane and licentious elements which were, however, kept under strict control, in compliance with medieval aesthetics. Each pageant2 was acted out in

2

lives and miracles of saints or of the Virgin Mary, but constitute a genre of minor frequency (noteworthy examples are Mary Magdalene and The Play of the Sacrament); the mystery plays seek to draw the attention of worshippers to the ‘mysteries’ of Christian faith. According to others, the meaning of the word ‘mystery’ is derived from ministerium, the guild that was responsible for scenery construction, or from mestier, the trade of the performers. ‘Pageant’ is thought to derive from the Vulgar Latin word pagina. In the light of the momentum which the feast of Corpus Christi conferred to the mystery plays, they are also known as Corpus Christi plays. The pageant was both the unit of measurement for the whole performance and the two-tier cart on which the scene was enacted: the lower tier was a sort of dressingroom for the actors, whereas the upper tier was the actual ‘stage’; however, certain

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sequential stations, and was therefore repeated for the benefit of the groups of spectators, who were able to see all the scenes in the cycle before their eyes. There were several actors playing the same part – that of Christ, for example – in successive episodes, thus creating a minor, somewhat premature, estranging effect. Nevertheless, the opposite dramatic procedure was also possible: as in a Way of the Cross the people followed the scenes by moving to the various stations. Certain popular episodes from the Bible, as well as others of undeniable didactic import, featured in all of the cycles, with the inevitable creation of duplicates, and rival performances. The variety of individual pageants into which the entire history of the Bible was divided also sheds light on the fact that there were units of measurement and selection criteria that differed in each separate case. At the same time, creativity, improvisation, variation and the blending of the components gained ground with respect to passive paraphrase, and the first scenic mechanisms were devised. The register of solemnity collided with comical and humorous tones (with the Pharaoh, Noah’s wife, Herod and Pontius Pilate) and with occasional departures towards slapstick comedy. The assignment of individual acts in the drama to different guilds according to circumstances was a clever, if not subtly audacious, unconventional and irreverent expedient: such is for instance the idea of entrusting the Crucifixion to the guild of the ‘nailers’. The lengthy exchange of dialogue among the soldiers who are in the process of crucifying Jesus in the York Crucifixion appears, at least to a modern public, to be a grotesque sacrilegious parody, because it shifts the scene from the dying Jesus to focus on the detailed, painstaking, commonplace procedures of the crucifixion. This remains one of the most innovative and inventive episodes in the cycles. 3. Various English towns were accustomed to holding annual cyclical performances of these biblical dramas, but only the cycles from twelve of these towns are extant. Cycles that are – fortunately – almost complete include that of York in forty-eight acts (but nine other acts have gone lost); of Chester in twenty-four acts, perhaps deriving from French originals and re-elaborated by the monk Ranulf Higden; the Towneley, that is to say of scholars cast doubts on this, if only due to the fact that a two-tier cart would have had difficulty passing through the narrow streets in the medieval towns.

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Wakefield, in thirty-two acts, of N-Town, in forty-two acts, namely acts to be performed in different towns, also erroneously referred to as Ludus Coventriae, insofar as Coventry had its own independent short cycle. To these a small number of other cycles belonging to other towns and regions of the island can be added. As is customary in all anonymous and popular literature, there is a wide interval between the first performance of each individual play in every cycle and the first handwritten or printed version. None of the texts of the mystery plays date from before the year 1450, but they flourished during the period of the ‘Black Death’, the plague that ravaged Europe at the end of the fourteenth century, and which tangibly represented the threat of death without prior warning which resounded in the subsequent moralities. Some of these stand out above others, with the result that, as in the case of the Gawain poet, the appellation of ‘master of Wakefield’ has been coined. The so-called Secunda Pastorum of Wakefield is a subdued parody of the Nativity, because a shepherd replaces his newborn son in the cradle with a stolen sheep, in the belief of being able to outwit the other shepherds before being unmasked. In this figure critics have seen a rather entertaining preview of the out-and-out scoundrel of the Elizabethan and Shakespearean stage, such as Autolycus and Falstaff.3 Even in the mystery of Noah’s Ark, the patriarch’s wife is a ‘tamed shrew’, idle above all, with echoes from the fabliau tradition (with Chaucer’s variation on the theme in his Miller’s Tale). 4. The morality plays, which were also anonymous and even started to appear prior to the mysteries, and unrelated to the liturgical calendar, reached their pinnacle in the second half of the fifteenth century. However, these no longer take the form of a paraphrase of the Holy Scriptures, but they are self-contained allegories, psychomachias and contests between 3

The actual traditional scenario of the Nativity bursts on the scene at the tail end; the farce of the sheep in place of the newborn child opens the play, with the shepherds voicing their hardship and their veiled but also caustic protest against their masters, as in the ancient and modern eclogues. The parody of Christmas continues with the shepherds replacing the three Wise men and bringing rather implausible gifts, such as cherries and a tennis ball, to the newborn baby. As for the gifts to baby Jesus, the authors of the mystery plays naïvely and amusingly vie with one another: in the Coventry Nativity there are a flute, a hat and a pair of gloves.

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personified virtues and vices battling for the possession of men’s souls, in accordance with a fixed paradigm of temptation-yielding-redemption. The amateurism of the guilds has now, at the turn of the sixteenth century, progressed to the professionalism of the travelling theatrical companies, which provided entertainment for nobles during their banquets and, by that time, also on a fixed stage. Of the extant moralities, Everyman – the man who has reached the stage of redde rationem (the showdown) – is the most famous and appreciated, although its precedence over a similar Dutch text is still debated among scholars. There is no air of mysticism and transcendentalism in the scene, and the personifications that refuse to accompany Everyman on his journey put forward improper and even squalid excuses to withdraw: one claims to be suffering from leg cramps, another is inclined to participate in an erotic orgy with a friend of his. The Castle of Perseverance, the longest, is a striking dramatic variation on the allegorical poems of Hawes and Douglas, in terms of dialogues, actions and genre. It gives an account of Everyman’s resistance to the assaults of sin in the fortress of Virtue, where the Vices are repulsed by the Virtues armed with roses. Mankind hardly differs, because Mankind has to tackle the vehemence of three villains who wallow in their obscene language. The interludes asserted themselves as short comical and farcical performances embedded in the moralities, such as that of Lyndsay,4 or as independent plays linked to court celebrations. Another hypothesis advanced by Chambers, whereby according to the etymology the term indicated a ludus between two speakers, is, I think, to be rejected; yet another aetiological theory interprets the interlude as a form of entertainment between the courses of a banquet. The somewhat lengthy and hefty Fulgens and Lucres5 dating from 1494 (which however came to light in 1919), remains one of the

4 5

§ 26.2. The source of the play is a Latin novella written by Buonaccorso, a humanist from Pistoia, which was in turn translated into French. It recounts the story of Lucrece, who chooses to marry a plebeian rather than a nobleman. An unprecedented subplot, employed perhaps for the first time as a structural device, involves two servants named with the letters of the alphabet A and B, and provides an interesting foretaste of the symmetries and overlapping of registers in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.

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first plays in English to bear a signature, the author being Henry Medwall (ca. 1462–1502), a chaplain in the entourage of the Chancellor of Henry VII, which included also Thomas More.6 Mystery and morality plays coexisted without mutual interference for a considerable period of time, and their fruitful continuity and connection with the Elizabethan theatre is often based on the assumption that during his youth Shakespeare himself, a native of the Coventry area, had the opportunity, at least on one occasion, to see a cyclical play. By the year 1580, the newly reformed Church had vetoed all jocose and light-hearted religious performances, in the conviction that they harboured a dangerous vestige of Roman Catholicism; to say nothing of the Puritans. § 29. Fifteenth-century prose Amazingly, with the exception of a few occasional and less important writings of poets and authors previously discussed, as well as of those to be introduced in the following two paragraphs, fifteenth-century prose lies at the tail end of a literature which – although prolific as regards output – does not always stand out for its literary quality. For this reason, it can be condensed in a short section, even if we include non-literary and instrumental texts, or texts written in a type of ‘all-purpose’ vernacular. In reality, this was a period in which the vernacular, inch by inch, was steadily gaining ground with respect to Latin – the language par excellence of the highly cultured and erudite sector of the population – even in the impenetrable spheres of philosophy, theology, hagiography, polemics, debate and speculation. The three late fifteenth-century prose-writers featured below abandon Latin in favour of the vernacular for reasons of force majeure, that is to say, in order to be easily accessible to a public with a limited degree of literacy. However, in so doing, they become aware of the need to invent a brand-new lexical repertoire and a discursive mode hitherto inexistent, thus offering a precious contribution to the development of English prose. The state of deep crisis in which England found itself towards the end of the fifteenth century provided both the incentive and the context in 6

In another of his plays, Nature, the classical conflict between virtues and vices contending for the possession of Man’s soul is enacted.

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which prose could develop and flourish. The Lollards had not laid down their weapons even many decades after their upsurge, the grievances of the peasants had not been addressed, dynastic feuds for power were still ongoing, for which reason there was a need for timely and vigorous military intervention, as well as an analysis of the situation on a more theoretical and less provisional basis. Nevertheless, prose addresses another type of audience in the fifteenth century; it comes from different senders and orients itself to different recipients. A new cultured middle class with a taste for useful and entertaining books had emerged and developed. Thus we witness the birth of popular literary genres, such as practical guides, vademecums, manuals of etiquette and even culinary handbooks and hunting treatises. The simple and rather naïve work by Walter Hylton, The Ladder of Perfection, describes the pathway of the soul to a life of spiritual perfection, articulated in a basic and uninspiring fashion. Examples of private unofficial documents, not destined for publication, preserved and rediscovered in later periods, include notebooks such as those of William Gregory, a member of the Skinners’ Company who became Lord Mayor of London in 1461. As we shall see, a prominent work dating from the end of the fifteenth century, the Paston Letters, provides a reconstruction of a wellto-do Norfolk gentry household over a half-century period of time. There is also a praiseworthy contribution to translation (the Gesta romanorum, the Legenda aurea, the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum), the most exemplary work being that of John Bourchier, Lord Berners (1467–1533), who translated Froissart’s Chronicles and Guevara’s Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio, already adorned with euphuistic embellishments.1 2. Born in North Wales, a brilliant Oxford scholar and member of the court of Henry VI, Reginald Pecock (ca. 1395–1460) was ordained Bishop of St Asaph and subsequently of Chichester. He is remembered in particular for his controversial work Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (1455).2 He addressed it to the Lollards in the conviction that the arguments he put forward would persuade and permanently eliminate the sect solely on the strength of reasoning. The prelate was, however, 1 2

His translation of a French romance introduced the figure of Oberon, King of the Fairies, in English literature. This rather lengthy work was re-edited in 2 vols, London 1860.

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misled, and the plan backfired on him. Not only did he not succeed in swaying the Lollards, but he also alienated the Church hierarchies in his determination to keep an equal distance from the parties in question – something which is seen as commendable nowadays, but which at that time was viewed as an ideological admission of defeat, and even as a tacit legitimization of the heretics. He was personally accused of heresy, his book was blacklisted in 1457 and he was forced to publicly abjure his opinions (in the wake of the analogous episode of Joan of Arc’s auto da fé). His sentence was commuted to lifelong seclusion in an abbey. Pecock had fallen into disfavour with the English hierarchies also because he had unwisely defended the legitimacy of the payment of ‘annates’ to the Papacy. However, he was hindered and fell from grace due to his almost instinctive contestation of the Lollards’ view of the absolute primacy of the Bible as the origo and source of faith and morality, which could however be previously attained through a process of unaided reasoning. It is by no means an exaggeration to categorize Pecock as the greatest fifteenth-century English philosopher or theologian; yet he adhered to the wrong (or less successful or minority) school, namely the Aristotelian as opposed to that of Franciscan voluntarism.3 Self-destructive, provocative, often eager to rub salt in the wound, he obsessively applied Aristotelian logic by frequent uses of syllogism. Judging also from a passage selected at random from his prose writings, Pecock has other intrinsic merits, such as his Teutonization of Latin and Greek and also Romance languages. Among the first enemies of Latinate terms (being a well-versed Latinist!), he is a miniature Carlyle, Hopkins or Doughty.4 He inspired a whole group of bizarre and unconventional Utopians who were prepared to make any and every effort to avail themselves of Anglo-Saxon words in place of every ‘aureate’ term, even at the risk of producing linguistic monstrosities. Pecock was immediately disregarded and forgotten, and remained so until he was hailed by some Elizabethans as a proto-Protestant – whereas, on the contrary, he was among the most conservative of Papists. His idiosyncratic style had the power to kindle an unexpected flame of infatuation in the twentieth century.

3 4

§ 7.1 n. 2. On Doughty cf. Volume 6, § 141.1–2.

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3. John Capgrave (1393–1464), born in Bishop’s Lynn in Norfolk, estimated to be the greatest scholar of his period, was an Augustinian friar and Provincial Minister of the Order in England. A preacher and hagiologist, he is the author of an English chronicle up to the year 1417 and of lives of the saints. He is the conventional, orderly and everyday compiler, virtually devoid of individuality, the exact opposite of Pecock. A native of Devon and descendant of an eminent aristocratic family, Sir John Fortescue (ca. 1394-ca. 1476) embarked upon a legal career and became a magistrate. A court diplomat, he wrote in Latin De Natura Legis Naturae in support of Henry VI. After the king’s defeat and deposition, he fell out of favour but offered his services to Edward IV. He then wrote in English Monarchia, subtitled The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, which already exhibits the proud, chauvinistic awareness of English constitutionalism versus French absolutism. Evidence of the bizarreness of his reasoning is that the greater heroism of the English is measured on the basis of the number of robbers willing to risk the gallows. His is also The Governance of England, published in 1714. § 30. The ‘Paston Letters’ The fact that the Paston Letters were preserved by the members of the dynasty of the same name bears witness to the awareness and selftestimony of the rise of the mid-fifteenth-century English middle-class provincial merchants. These were essentially indifferent to the chaotic political vicissitudes of the period, being solely concerned with their welfare and the protection and expansion of their landed estates and their monetary income, thus creating the first form of compromise between nascent decentralized capitalism and the perfunctory deference towards religious practices. Significantly, letters of the same period belonging to other middle-class families, such as the Stonors and Celys1 (the latter being London wool merchants), are known and are preserved in manuscript. The Paston letters extend over a period of ninety years from 1422 to 1509; dating from the precise year of Henry V’s death, they span the reign of Henry VI and continue after his deposition and the advent of the York and Tudor 1

The Cely Papers, ed. H. E. Malden, London 1900.

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dynasties, to terminate with another historical landmark, Henry VIII’s rise to the throne. The letters were sold en bloc by the last descendant in the Paston line to an antiquary at the beginning of the seventeenth century; subsequently they passed into several hands during the course of the century. Their partial publication in separate volumes took place from 1787 to 1823, but meanwhile the originals were nowhere to be found, and in the wake of the controversies over the authenticity of Chatterton’s and Macpherson’s medieval and Ossianic poems there were rumours of a forgery. However, the original manuscripts were all retrieved by the year 1889. The complete correspondence collection comprises as many as 1088 letters.2 The first member of the family in the fourteenth century was a small landowner on the Norfolk coast, a Clement Paston (whose surname coincides with the family’s village of residence). His son William was able to benefit from a solid education, becoming a Judge of the Common Pleas, and he married the heiress Agnes Berry. The couple had numerous children, the eldest of whom, John (born in 1421), embraced the legal profession and became a London lawyer and politician representing his shire. The sixty-year period of his life constitutes the core of the correspondence. John Paston had also married a wealthy lady, Margaret Mautby, thanks to whom he had acquired manors and estates belonging to the Fastolfs, another local noble family, on the strength of a contested will and testament. The legal suit lasted several decades in an intricate series of events that foreshadow Dickens’s Bleak House; on John’s death, the dispute regarding the property was still raging. The sons of the couple were both christened with the name of their father, and are indicated in the letters as John II, cultured and gentlemanly, and therefore alien to the requisites of the capitalist landowner, and John III, the exact opposite in character, feisty and down-to-earth. The family had died out by the middle of the seventeenth century. 2. The Paston collection has therefore been of particular interest to historians because, from a decentred and privileged point of view, it offers an overview of the typical English provincial middle class, totally absorbed 2

Complete edition, ed. J. Gairdner, 6 vols, London 1904 (reviewed by V. Woolf, in TCR, First Series, 12–31), and by N. Davis, 2 vols, Oxford 1971–1976. A selection (a ninth of the total), with modernized spelling, is edited by the same N. Davis, Oxford 1983.

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in monetary matters, property disputes and other trivial transactions. News of life at court, where the monarch’s power was weak and corruption was rife, reached these areas in diluted form; and the Pastons were certainly men-of-law, but the law was impotent in the face of the continuous raids of the ruffians hired by the local squires. A letter written by Agnes Paston describes how the family’s ancestral home was one day put to fire and sword by Lord Moleyns’s men. In other respects, their daily lives went by peacefully and serenely within stiflingly narrow horizons. We gain an insight into the entertainments that are customary and those that are permissible after a bereavement, the conventional meals and medicines to cure illnesses, as well as gossip and topics of conversation. Parents’ complaints about their good-for-nothing children are interspersed with detailed lists of accounts. On very rare occasions, reference is made to books, and the Pastons’ preference goes to Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes or to the collection of stories in the Seven Sages of Rome (5.6.1472). Fashion is another topic of conversation. Personal clothing items were not too abundant, so we witness wives and children often asking, or even begging, for a new gown: ‘for i haue bot on gowne at Framyngham and an other her, and þat is my leueré gowne and we must wer hem euery day for þe most part, and on gowne wyth-owt change wyll sone be done’ (1.11.1462). The passing of time is governed by the liturgical calendar and the days are taken up by acts of devotion, with the result that thoughts converge partly towards the conquest of eternal life (or even eternal damnation), and partly towards the minutiae of everyday life. The letters written by the Paston women are particularly engaging, because they make no attempt to conceal the preliminary signs of female coquetry. Margaret repeatedly entreats her ‘right worshipful husband’ to bring her gifts in the form of necklaces and girdles. Mother and daughter constantly engage in verbal tiffs over the latter’s wedding with a bailiff. The educational system is still rather rigid; daughters are subjected to their parents’ authoritarianism, wives to that of their husbands,3 and schoolmasters were empowered to inflict corporal punishment on male pupils. However, this collection has found its place in literary histories 3

The absenteeism of husbands and the self-sacrifice of wives is emphasized by Virginia Woolf, who was perhaps thinking of To the Lighthouse, in the review cited above in n. 2 (see ‘But Mrs Paston did not talk about herself ’, in answer to the comment that her husband ‘was (as usual) away’ [15]).

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for predominantly linguistic reasons. The letters provide us with the very first examples of how English people of average literacy wrote and spoke in their private lives, without the constraint and obligation of official formalities, and without being either intellectuals or professional writers. The English language used by the Pastons chronologically represents one of the last varieties of the vernacular prior to the onset of the printing era in England, prior therefore to the process of standardization – above all as regards spelling – that it launched.4 We are dealing with a type of English for practical purposes, totally divorced from literary diction, and the style we find is factual, neutral and tinged only with the occasional metaphor, proverb or note of humour. For all that, it is still – albeit unintentionally – a literary language: it is the sort of idiolect that could be created by a particularly versatile posterior narrator. The inconsistent local and familiar idiosyncrasies in the Paston letters constitute an ante litteram sort of linguistic novel in the manner of Smollett, also considering that one of Smollett’s novels, indeed his masterpiece, belongs to the epistolary genre. The scope of the Paston collection also calls to mind Richardson’s trilogy of epistolary novels, whereas the relish of certain letters veined with solecisms and morphological variations evokes Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, apart from the fact that this is not an invented and devised collection, or a literary creation having no correspondence with real-life events. However, the future template of the letter in the eighteenth-century epistolary novel – in other words, the pragmatics of the epistolary text – is already contained in the Paston letters. A large percentage of the letters are written and finished ‘in haste’ – a mere cliché, an epistolary pretence, given the slow pace of everyday life in that period. However, it is in the Paston letters that we gain a foretaste of the family saga and of provincial life comedy which was to become a highly acclaimed and popular genre in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the chronicles of Barset and Carlingford, and with Middlemarch.5

4 5

To quote one example, the Pastons always write the plural form of the present tense of the verb ‘to be’ as ‘arn’, instead of ‘are’, and omit the final consonants ‘t’ and ‘n’ in words such as ‘it’ and ‘men’. On the ‘Mapp and Lucia cycle’ (set in the 1930s) by Edward Frederic Benson, see Volume 7, § 88.2 n. 7.

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§ 31. Caxton Had William Caxton (born between 1415 and 1422 and died in 1491) been a mere printer, his name would hardly feature in a history of English literature, although he would certainly merit special recognition for having been the first to import and establish printing in his country and to set up a publishing house. If this had been the case, the literary historian would have entrusted Caxton to the care of a bibliographer or of an expert sociologist in the field of the press and other means of communication. For every nation in the world, the date of the introduction of the press marked a major breakthrough, its importance being on a par with the modern-day advent of television or the Internet, insofar as they have the power to revolutionize the system of news transmission, and speed up communication on a global level. However, Caxton deserves a much broader discussion, because he combined with his skills as a printer other abilities that fall within and impact directly on the specifically literary sphere. Other printers in his wake are – and remain – printers tout court; Caxton, on the other hand, is an editor, in the two different meanings or nuances of the word: first of all, someone who prints and sells books by other authors and compiles his own catalogue; at the same time, he is also an author in his own right who ‘edits’ or ‘establishes’ the texts – wholly or in part – that he publishes, and ‘manipulates’ them, now pruning, now extending their content, now making arbitrary textual decisions.1 He is more specifically an author in the sense that, playing a superior role to that of the mere editor, he appends prologues and epilogues written by his own hand to the texts he publishes. For this reason, he should certainly be seen as a critic and interpreter. And he is also a translator. In the final analysis, however, all these multifarious skills and abilities can be summed up and encompassed in the role of cultural mediator, in which Caxton indubitably excelled and of which he was probably one of the first representatives 1

Generally speaking, he was disapproved of as an editor, above all with reference to Malory, whose work was revised, condensed and ordered by him in twenty-one books (§ 32); but C. S. Lewis (ELS, 156) is of the opinion that he ‘improved Malory’. In addition to his other abilities Caxton was also a reviser and even counterfeiter of other authors’ works.

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on the English scene. If it is true to say that he is the father of the English press, it is self-evident that he marked the first step in the development of a still ongoing centuries-old process. From Caxton onwards, editors were to adopt a cultural policy based on their own personal view of practicality and convenience. Certain authors on whom they ensured exclusive rights were promoted as showpieces, whereas others were rejected. They were aware of the fact that literature is a means of consensus, it influences taste and can occasionally be a mediator, also having the power to trigger political revolutions, as well as to modify literary preferences. It was Caxton who foresaw all these things. 2. A native of Kent,2 a region in which several languages were spoken, and an apprentice to a London mercer who became Lord Mayor of the city, Caxton emigrated in 1441 to Bruges, where he soon held administrative posts in the English Company of Merchant Adventurers located in that strategic bridgehead. Having left Flanders twenty years later, he moved to Burgundy, where he offered his services to Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, sister of King Edward IV, who proved to be a demanding patron. In all probability between the years 1470 and 1472, a visit to nearby Cologne, where printing had been in operation for almost twenty years, changed his life. On his return to Bruges, with the aid of a Flemish illuminator, he translated and printed the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy3 by the French Raoul le Fevre o Lefèvre. Having returned to England, in 1476 he set up in an annexe of Westminster Abbey the first English printing press, producing over eighty diverse works. Caxton’s publications were divided into three typologies in increasing order of importance: didactic works or works of service, chronicles and romances, initially handwritten and in the English language, but also ex novo translations by Caxton himself from French, Flemish and Dutch. He is credited with the first printed edition of

2 3

Cf. N. F. Blake, Caxton and His World, London 1969. Caxton, whose French at that time left much to be desired, was said to have suffered for many years before completing the translation, and to have hit upon the idea of printing it, due to the insistence of various members of the court of Burgundy that he make handwritten copies of it. In Bruges, Caxton also printed a chess manual and a work on the ‘last four things’.

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Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, of Gower’s Confessio Amantis and of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. His Recuyell is thought to have served as a repertoire and source of inspiration for various Elizabethan masterpieces. Caxton’s previously mentioned supplementary skills all form part of a deliberate project of cultural mediation, and are fully dependent on it. He does not herald humanism but he condenses the Middle Ages, one of the reasons being that, with the exception of Malory, he avoids publishing living and contemporary English writers. He tailors an ideal library and outlines his personal vision of two centuries of English literature; he offers a type of literature, both devotional and entertaining, with the exclusion of obscure, abstruse and overly mystical elements. In reality, he caters for the up-and-coming middle classes seeking to complete their acculturation. His historical merit consists in triggering the revival of Arthurian courtly literature, which he helped to establish and consolidate in the popular imagination, and in his contribution towards the rise from the ashes of prose, hitherto manifestly inferior to verse. Critics and readers have rightly observed that, far from opening the doors of progressive European culture to the English public, in his pursuit of outdated ideals Caxton caused the country to lag far behind and stagnate. There were therefore two distinct cultural channels in England at that time: the educated sector of the population secured Greek and Latin editions from foreign and continental printers, whereas the middle classes availed themselves of Caxton’s editions. A similar work of high or medium-high distribution was inspired by and at the same time suddenly gave rise to a mass readership, thus anticipating the infinitely more significant upsurge in the printing sector at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rapid promotion of literacy extended also to the working classes and, with the appropriate adjustments, the creation of new spaces for the publishing industry.4 For this reason, unlike other European printers, Caxton does not regard printing as an art in itself and he lacks the aesthete’s eye for the de luxe edition in terms of the type of character, binding, or the outward appearance of a book. The repercussions of Caxton’s editions were, first and foremost, of a linguistic nature, given that in 1476 the English language was a hotchpotch of dialects and the spelling 4

Volume 4, § 1.2.

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was erratic and inconsistent. In the Preface to his translation of the Aeneid (from a French re-transcription and not from the Virgilian original, albeit under Skelton’s guidance) Caxton, in his capacity as editor, is well aware of the intrinsically mutable nature of language and puts forward a sharp, concrete observation: Old English is now a remote and forgotten relic of the past and totally different from the variety of English spoken in his time, but also the language spoken in the various regions in England is far from being a practical vehicle of intercommunication. In other words, Caxton is well aware of the fact that a language is both a diachronic and synchronic system. Accordingly he tells the story of a merchant who, having landed near the Thames estuary to take refreshment, asks a farmer’s wife for some eggs. They speak two different dialects a few miles apart, and a basic term is referred to by two different words, and eggs are known as ‘eyren’ in the north and ‘eggs’ in the south. This anecdote serves the purpose of demonstrating the urgent need for a standardization of the English language, at least at a lexical level. Caxton’s translations (the most important are those of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and of the Aeneid) are all excessively literal, mediocre, uninspiring and unskilled, often even decidedly inappropriate, because Caxton’s main aim is to contribute to the creation of an uncomplicated, comprehensible type of English prose, by re-modelling the unstylish English spoken in his native Kent, after having ‘dipped it in French waters’; thus he hews and shapes English prose in the same way that Chaucer had modelled verse in the previous century. Thanks to his efforts, prose ceases to play second fiddle to poetry. He was the proverbial target of the fastidious Gavin Douglas, who tore to pieces his translation of the Aeneid, having branded it as abominable and as similar to the original as ‘an owl to a parrot’; but Caxton translated in order to make himself understood, unceremoniously, without any show of literary ambition.5 5

In the Preface to the second edition of The Canterbury Tales Caxton pays tribute to the civilizing mission of poetry and delivers a first-ever ‘defence’ of poetry, which informs, humanizes and educates mankind. He also expresses his own philological scruples, having decided to print a second more reliable version of Chaucer’s tales. The Prologues and Epilogues have been gathered together and edited by W. J. B. Crotch, EETS 1928. Caxton’s disciples and successors were less eclectic and simply went about

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§ 32. Malory* I: ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ I. Authorship, publication and popularity It is not style that makes the man in the case of a certain Sir Thomas Malory ‘from Warwickshire’ (1415/1418–1471), to whom Le Morte d’Arthur

their work, and certain Flemish printers took advantage of their indolence. Many of those working in England were foreigners: Wynkyn de Worde was from Alsace, Pynson from Normandy, a certain John, whose surname was Lettou, was Latvian. With the exception of Froissart’s Chronicles in Lord Berners’s translation, Skelton’s ‘Bowge of Court’, Barclay’s The Ship of Fools and Hawes’s allegorical poems, these printers published large quantities of reprints or minor works of erudition dealing with legal, educational and hagiographic topics. The confusion among the genres and the war among publishers ceased dramatically with the Reformation, which put a stop to the circulation of escapist literature. After 1525, and Tyndale’s New Testament printed in Worms, Europe was invaded by political refugees and above all by religious dissenters. *

Information regarding Caxton’s and the subsequent editions of the Morte up until the end of the nineteenth century is included below in my text. Le Morte d’Arthur, ed. E. Rhys, 2 vols, London 1906 (obviously Caxton’s version); The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3 vols, Oxford 1967 (Winchester version), 1971 (in one vol.), 1990 (rev. and ed. P. J. C. Field); Le Morte D’Arthur, ed. J. Cowen, 2 vols, Harmondsworth 1969 (a modernization of Caxton’s version). Partial editions of individual stories or anthologies, with commendable introductions, have been edited by D. S. Brewer, London 1968, by P. J. C. Field, London 1978, and by E. Vinaver, London 1978. P. Ackroyd has produced an abbreviated version in modern English, The Death of King Arthur, Harmondsworth 2010. E. Vinaver, Sir Thomas Malory, Oxford 1929 and 1970, also author of the essay ‘Sir Thomas Malory’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. R. S. Loomis, Oxford 1959, 541–52; M. C. Bradbrook, Sir Thomas Malory, London 1958; Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett, London 1963; R. M. Lumiansky, Malory’s Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte D’Arthur, Baltimore, MD 1964; E. Reiss, Sir Thomas Malory, London 1966; P. J. C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style, London 1971, and The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory, Cambridge 1993; M. Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’, New Haven, CT and London 1975; L. D. Benson, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Cambridge, MA 1976; Aspects of Malory, ed. T. Takamiya and D. Brewer, Cambridge 1981; M. Whitaker, Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure: The World of Malory’s Morte Darthur, Cambridge 1984; Studies in Malory, ed. J. W. Spisak, Kalamazoo, MI 1985; S. V. Smith, A History of the Mallory Family, Phillimore 1985; R. Merrill, Sir Thomas Malory and the Cultural Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, New York 1987; F. Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, Leiden 1987;

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has been attributed ever since Caxton printed the work. Historians and philologists have in fact often nurtured doubts when comparing this work with the biography of a buccaneer, man of action and highwayman; far from there being any correspondence between the two, they are decidedly discordant. Yet there is really no other possible alternative,1 and all the existing documents have led them to reconcile a Jekyll with a Hyde. So who was this man? Where did he come from? Where are the sources, and above all, what are the intents of his work? He was born in Newbold Revel, in Warwickshire, the son of a local dignitary, sheriff and Justice of the Peace; knighted in 1441, a member of Parliament from 1445, he fought on behalf of the House of Lancaster in the War of the Roses, but was also accused of being a turncoat and campaigning in favour of the White Rose, thus giving proof not of consistency but of cynical opportunism. His criminal record is irreparably and dishonourably compromised after 1443. For having committed a series of crimes and misdemeanours – robbery, livestock theft, rape,

T. McCarthy, Reading the Morte Darthur, Cambridge 1988, and, rev. with the title An Introduction to Malory, 1991; A Companion to Malory, ed. E. Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards, Cambridge 1996, 2000; C. Hardyment, Malory: The Life and Times of King Arthur’s Chronicler, London 2005.

1

Experts on the biographical issue have blown the matter up presenting an author with three, or possibly even four, lives. Even on the Malory from Warwickshire they are extremely divided and certain critics establish a very early birthdate, and claim that he was a soldier in Calais in 1414 (that is to say, even before his birth, in the opinion of others!). If this is the case, he would have completed the Morte at the unlikely age of seventy or over; and, anyhow, he was not in prison when the work was concluded. The second possible author is a Malory from Yorkshire, on the strength of evidence emerging from the internal idiolects: a soldier, but not a knight, he is an extremely unlikely candidate, also because he would have been twenty-four when the work was finally accomplished. The third and most plausible candidate is a certain Malory from Cambridgeshire: he was the right age in 1469, had perhaps been educated in France, was in prison in 1469, and had been awarded a knighthood at the last minute. A fourth candidate, a Welsh Malory, suggested by the editor Ernest Rhys (Rhys 1906) is also highly improbable. On this engaging ‘mystery’ cf. R. R. Griffith, ‘The Authorship Question Reconsidered: A Case for Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire’, in Takamiya and Brewer 1981, 159–77, McCarthy 1988, 171–8, and Field 1993, summarized in ‘The Malory Life-Records’, in Archibald and Edwards 1996, 115–30.

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ambush, even attempted murder – he frequently ended up in prison, from which he occasionally succeeded in escaping. Newgate Prison proved to be conducive to his writing.2 Denied a pardon by Edward IV, in the years 1469–1470 he completed his prose re-elaboration of French, Norman and English Arthurian romances. Prisons have engendered dozens of writers and works in several national literatures, but these often make direct reference to their imprisonment; this is, however, not the case with Malory. Unless we gain further evidence in the future, the gulf between the spirit of roguery that characterized his life and the plaintive whisper, the hushed and subdued tone of voice of his writings is blatant and unbridgeable. How could such a work have been written by that Malory? C. S. Lewis spoke of a kind of chivalric coherence, less rigid with respect to French dogmatism, between the man and the work. If this is so, Malory is a premature ‘Newgate’ criminal, a prominent figure in the Augustan and early Victorian tradition.3 Whoever the author may be, critics are unanimous in considering the Morte d’Arthur to be the masterpiece of fifteenth-century English prose (and not only as regards the romance genre, with the partial exception of Sir Gawain). As an opus magnum and landmark it makes its appearance almost an exact century after the date of composition and compilation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, thus worthily celebrating the centenary. For over four centuries English prose-writers and poets were to draw inspiration from it, on reading the reprints of the first two versions (the first of which dated 1485) edited by Caxton, who had received from the hands of the author the original manuscript, missing to this day. With the exception of immediate posterity, now affiliated to Puritanism (like Ascham, who branded the Morte as an outrageous and obscene chain of episodes of murder and adultery), it was only the eighteenth century that proved to be impervious to Malory’s charm. Therefore the artistic value of a book which had the power to captivate Milton (who also conceived, but subsequently abandoned, the idea of composing an Arthurian epic poem), Spenser, Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, and other authors up 2 3

The Scottish King James I’s Kingis Quair was the end-product of a preceding, equally fruitful period of captivity (§ 24.3). Volume 5, § 3, and ‘Newgate novels’ in the Thematic index of the volume.

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to T. E. Lawrence, not to mention hordes of other followers and sympathizers, is certainly self-evident. Southey’s confession, ‘It has been my delight since I was a schoolboy’, could be applied to virtually all these writers. After 1934, which marked the rediscovery of the (or a) manuscript, and a 400-year timespan during which Caxton’s text had clearly stolen the literary scene, a heated philological and textual debate ensued. This merged with a previous predilection for the Arthurian myth on the part of militant modernists, who readily acknowledged the parallel between the decline of King Arthur’s court (above all after the unsuccessful search for the Holy Grail) and the state of the world in the post-war period. This was particularly evident in the case of T.  S. Eliot, who had undertaken academic studies in anthropology and on myth in general, but also on that particular myth. Joyce (probably basing himself on the 1889 edition) had been fully conscious of the fact that Malory’s prose had spearheaded a literary evolution (parallel to Eliot’s view of Chaucer in the realm of poetry), and parodied it in one of the episodes in Ulysses.4 In the period that separates Chaucer and Spenser, Malory is the intermediate author who has elicited the most substantial critical bibliography, even if on the one hand it appears to be polarized by issues regarding the sources and the transmission of the text, while on the other hand, in many of its titles, it appears didactic and paraphrastic. 2. Caxton had received a manuscript from Malory – so he claims in the Preface – and had edited it in an admirable, yet not philologically impeccable, manner. He had restructured the text and above all, apart from the additions and omissions, had maladroitly assigned to it a grammatically and orthographically incorrect title.5 This frequently reprinted version is, as previously stated, the one read by all future English Arthurian authors until eighty-five years ago. The miraculous discovery in 1934 in Winchester of the manuscript of the Morte – although written by a scribe and not by Malory’s own hand – therefore enabled the replacement of H. O. Sommer’s ‘critical’ edition published in three volumes in London in the years 1889–1891, 4 5

However, this passage from Ulysses (in the hospital episode), which is normally considered to have been imitated from Malory, exhibits no typical and stylistic features, apart from the absolute superlative with ‘passing’. As is often remarked by critics, the title given by Malory to his work is unknown.

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as well as of all other previous editions. This was the task accomplished, on the basis of the new-found manuscript, by Eugène Vinaver, a Russian scholar and naturalized French citizen, and a lecturer in English universities. Whereas Caxton had subdivided the work into twenty-one books, Vinaver segmented it into eight books, in accordance with the Winchester manuscript. Nevertheless, Caxton has the priceless merit of having published and consequently preserved for posterity the work of a contemporary author, which would otherwise have been lost and therefore would have been unable to transmit to posterity its extremely fruitful influence. Even nowadays, critics bow to the absolute authority of Vinaver, although the majority regularly – and elegantly – distance themselves from the theories of this illustrious Arthurian scholar, who for his part did not seem to be unduly perturbed by their criticism. His edition bore the revealing title of The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, namely Malory’s various independent Arthurian ‘romances’. From 1963 D. S. Brewer, another ‘super-expert’ on Malory, challenged Vinaver’s edition, proposing the opposite hypothesis of a single book divided into eight parts but interconnected by prolepses and analepses;6 and this, indeed, is now the prevailing theory. 3. All, or almost all, of Malory’s sources have now been identified and are to be found in the French vulgate version of the Arthurian legends, invariably referred to by Malory as his ‘French book’, and in the two Middle English works known as the stanzaic Morte Arthure and the alliterative Morte Arthur.7 The question we need to ask ourselves is why Malory has captivated and bewitched readers throughout the centuries. The answer lies, perhaps, in his narrative vigour, his talent as a born storyteller, his ability as a director and scriptwriter, or rather arranger – an art of no little value, at least in music. Malory’s acumen as an anthologist is shown in his

6 7

‘the hoole book’, in Bennett 1963, 41–63. § 9.2. The only story missing in the sources is that of Gareth, also known as Beaumains. Malory might have had books brought to him from the nearby library of the Greyfriars’ convent. However, Griffith (in the book quoted in n. 1, 172) rejects the hypothesis that the sources he used were available in that library. And, judging from Field’s documentation (book quoted in n. 1), the Malory from Warwickshire had never been to France, either as a soldier or for other reasons.

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compilation – although I shall question the degree of independence with which he performed this task – of a semi-complete compendium, catalogue or repertoire of firmly established Arthurian legends, which had always exerted a certain fascination on popular imagination. His fortune lies in his creation of modern narrative realism – of naturalism itself, even – inasmuch as Malory’s narration is orderly and objective, without digressions or comments on the part of the author, or any type of explicit ideological or moralistic constraints. His narrative, in whatever shape or form, has absolute priority and ‘must go on’. He is thus an exceptionally talented organizer, who knows exactly how to construct a sort of ‘Grand Fugue’, returning to the main issue after various departures and countermelodies. The urge to narrate spurs him on to such an extent, that he overlooks descriptions of time, space and of the seasons. He gives the impression of being obsessed by haste, such is the quantity of minute detail he has to relate. A notable exception is the last chapter in Book XVIII (following Caxton’s numeration), where he describes the temperate month of May as the season that marks the return of man’s vital energies.8 The characters take turns to hold the narrative focus; others are kept in reserve and remain behind the scenes at length, like Guinevere, Mordred, Launcelot, Percival. The narrative is therefore intermixed, skilfully slowed down, or even packed with rather detached and dreary episodes. Technically speaking, this work has been dubbed as an ‘interwoven or polyphonic narrative’.9 These are skills and accomplishments that have the power on the one hand to elevate the ordinary and mundane and, on the other, to tone down the exceptional. Even the key scene of Arthur’s death is sober, and not dwelt upon, but speeded up. This is why the Morte could be most appropriately defined as a two-dimensional tapestry. Moreover, the subject matter becomes fused with the style; evidence of this is provided by the numerous critical studies that focus specifically on it and categorize Malory as a prose poet. As previously mentioned, this is a type of style that is devoid of sophistication, while retaining a certain charm and appeal thanks to its archaic tone; basic and unpretentious but never uncultured, its simplicity is a response 8 9

This reduced level of description is noted by Field 1971, chapter V. C. S. Lewis in Bennett 1963, 13.

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to ‘aureate’ diction which, indeed, it contrasts and destabilizes. In one of the most fundamental and technical works on Malory, P. J. C. Field10 argues that Malory is devoid of any conscious stylistic strategy, and writes instinctively; Field accompanies this view with another hypothesis, namely that Malory’s linguistic and stylistic technique is in line with the English spoken by the cultured bourgeoisie, reflected in that of the Pastons – almost as if to endorse a newly achieved maturity and autonomy of a variety of English whose origins were of popular and parochial extraction.11 It would certainly be true to say that the mark left by Malory’s style is unrelated to lexical creation and coinage, and that the author almost unconsciously incorporates – effortlessly and without show – new words of French origin already in common use. He is by no means an author who looks outside England for inspiration, nor is he a Skelton or a Nashe. Nor does he exploit rhetorical figures more than the average authors of his time. With reference to Malory’s style – as confirmation of its intangible, indefinable and highly ambiguous nature – many incompatible comparisons have been suggested and discussed: some have called into play Perrault and the style of the fairy-tale writers, others maintain that he is the medieval equivalent of Walter Pater,12 others have detected an attempt to alliterate the spoken language. His curt, concise, direct and down-to-earth dialogues even reminded Praz13 of Hemingway! Indeed, Malory’s prose is endowed with the same ‘diaphanous’ quality as that of Pater, who theorized this kind of prose also historically and aesthetically. 4. But what was his aim? In the final analysis, why did Malory – or a Malory – write the Morte? There has been only one answer in this case, too: in order to glorify the world of chivalry and its codes in a later epoch that was now witnessing its sorrowful decline. In an England riven by conflict and discord, the Morte covertly addresses the king and admonishes the English nobility. Arthur is the symbol of a strong king who embodies and 10 11 12 13

Field 1971. For a debate and rebuttal cf. J. Smith, ‘Language and Style in Malory’, in Archibald and Edwards 1996, 97–113. An opinion firmly rejected by C. S. Lewis in Bennett 1963, 24. PSL, 52.

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unites conflicting national sentiments and factions. We are, however, justified in casting doubts on these intents, even if there is a lack of evidence to support an alternative hypothesis. Thus we are still in search – a search justly defined by Lewis as always an ‘elusive’ one – of the intentio operis, as well as the key to understanding to what extent and how this coincides with the intentio auctoris. In other words, Malory’s nostalgic vision of the feudal system and the chivalric code, and the interpretation of this major work as a political allegory and masked appeal for the unity of the English kingdom, now in disarray due to the Wars of the Roses, are not totally convincing. The prominence of the celebratory intent was shared unanimously up to the end of the 1970s but, with the advent of deconstruction, many of these consolidated and unshakable tenets ran the risk of being upturned in favour of new, hitherto unsuspected, interpretations, to the extent of insinuating that what Malory was really doing was a criticism of the world of chivalry itself. He occasionally undermines it, deflates it, exposing the baseness, shortcomings and blatant contradictions to which its adepts are forcefully subjected. He portrays, not thinking and feeling human beings, but automata devoid of any decision-making capacity, who act according to ideals that have been instilled, but not accepted and incorporated. Malory’s control over his subject matter is so absolute that what he seems to be unspooling is a series of scenes from a silent movie. At this point, the hypothesis of another person of the same name as the author of the Morte would seem to regain credibility, because only a hired writer, whose work was assigned and commissioned, could have unfolded such an Apollonian tapestry. Malory makes no attempt to conceal the blindly accepted contradictions in this chivalric code; if anything, he highlights them. 5. Malory’s knights act – they joust, and sometimes engage in duels for fun and for show, whereas on other occasions they kill for real – according to a sort of automatic mechanism, almost a feverish and obsessive determinism. Reason, often a problem-solver in allegorical poems, and an illuminating factor, is now in crisis, in retreat, and powerless, as the knights instinctively rush headlong into the tournament or duel. The characters in Arthurian legend have no time to pause: they are always clad in armour, ready to joust. Dilemmas of an ethical nature – especially when these verge on erotic issues –

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waft over their heads like a gentle breeze or a passing cloud, and they are quite happy to be subject to a dual dispensation. A certain Sangreal ‘vessel’, the cup containing the blood of Christ’s Passion, makes its appearance rather late on the scene. Yet it appears as if by magic, as a kind of enchantment, and is brought by a maiden dressed in pure white robes: after having given restoration to the knight and healed his wound, she then disappears equally miraculously.14 Yet the author’s concluding words are to be interpreted in a dramatic or confessional sense: he invokes prayers for his body and soul, in the hope of being ‘delivered’ (symbolically?), and he appeals to divine power. Malory has a modern-day attitude with regard to sex: he simply excludes it from the dominion of morality. He views extramarital sexual activities as a normal procedure and the same applies to the state of bigamy. The excellence and nobility of Launcelot are ultimately reflected in the stability of his loyalty to Guinevere – that is, the stability of a violation of the moral protocol. Malory abstains from reiterating medieval ideology, as he does not associate events with allegories, and he certainly does not view them in terms of a divine design of reward and retribution: his ethical outlook is solely of this earth. The knight’s defeat is not attributed to spiritual negligence, nor is the search for the Holy Grail a benchmark of true or false chivalry. Concrete reality overrules all kinds of stylizations, parallelisms and externally imposed structures, and the Morte mirrors the nebulous and random nature of everyday life. Malory was writing in the thirty-year period that preceded the end of the century, at a safe distance from all possible backlashes of the Roman de la Rose, which had held sway in England for over two whole centuries after its initial appearance – and, it must be stressed, continued to feature in certain poems by Hawes and Dunbar, as well as in other poems issued and printed even various decades after the Morte. If the allegory in the Roman can be defined as old and jaded – and, in the manner in which it is presented, it certainly is – Malory can be considered an innovator, in the sense that he harks back to a highly

14

The debate among critics regarding Malory’s attitude towards the supernatural element, so predominant in the French sources, has been a lively one: C. S. Lewis (‘The English Prose Morte’, in Bennett 1963, 12) held the somewhat convoluted view that underplaying the supernatural element was tantamount to intensifying it.

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exploited topic that does not particularly lend itself to a precise and clearcut type of allegory. The Arthurian cycle could no longer be resuscitated and revitalized for the allegorical purposes of a contest between virtues and vices, but solely for metaliterary, parodic, symbolic – or even prematurely postmodern – purposes. Malory does not extract any implications from the narrative plot: he simply narrates for the sheer pleasure of telling a story and entertaining; he escapes from time, seeking oblivion in this mare magnum of Arthurian legend. His concept of human behaviour is a simplified but well-defined one: man is loyal, yet villainous; and desire is a flame that lights up and burns, thus automatically leading to carnal union. His adulterers do not beat their breasts in repentance or descend into ‘the dark night of the soul’. Reality consists of saintly principles and diabolical semblances, intermittently good and evil, such as Merlin or Morgan le Fay. § 33. Malory II: ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ II. The stark kaleidoscope The individual stories contained in the Morte are in part cyclical, because the various would-be knights, having completed the preliminary stages, converge as soon as possible towards the Round Table, and their entire preceding lives are no more than a training ground for their investiture. Once they have obtained this, they embark on a chivalric routine, whereby the knight finds himself operating within a kind of impasse or concentric motion. In other words, he performs the same actions as other knights, of whom he is a duplicate or counterpart. Thus the roles and the identikits of the knights are identical and recurrent from one story to the next. Once this point is reached, the time within the narration comes to a halt, becomes synchronous, or even regresses. Only Arthur ages; at the beginning, he is young and then becomes immediately old within a short space of time. His peculiar lack of appetite is a trait that also featured in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where he is portrayed as being in the habit of eating only after hearing a heroic tale narrated by his knights. In Malory the careers of each individual knight are simultaneously unfolded in a succession of foreseeable and realistic events; then, perhaps one fine day, there is a dramatic turn, an upsurge, some unannounced, clamorous variant. This has the effect of quickening the rhythm, heightening the tension, and breaking the monotony; for all that, everything can, and indeed will, revert to normal before long. From the opening dialogues, the narration is

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inundated with a never-ending string of names, and we are made to follow minor episodes branching off from the main story, which the readership of the times, nurtured on Arthurian legends, were able to understand and interpret, without any need for further specification of personal details or background events. The incipit is set within an already Christianized dispensation, but sexual instinct, as well as greed and avarice, has by no means been subdued. It is disquieting to witness how the Morte dispenses with the preliminaries and begins with a conspicuous infringement of religious and civil customs: an adultery perpetrated by deceit or by some kind of loophole, and which remains unpunished. Right from the start, there is no punishment on the part of the law, nor has any law been enforced, with regard to adultery. And whoever falls victim to this experience has no alternative but to make the best of a bad situation. All this stems from King Uther’s lustful desire for Igraine. In the meanwhile, Arthur grows up like a sort of Percival – the Wagnerian ‘reine Tor’, and it is no coincidence that Siegfried the Nibelung’s destiny depends on a sword that only he has the power to extract. Arthur is indeed a ‘noble fool’, because his gesture, far from being a ritual and highly solemn one, is performed spontaneously and almost absent-mindedly: given that his brother has forgotten his sword, Arthur sees another sword embedded in a stone and extracts it. Subsequently Arthur, who massacres his enemies and stains the sword with blood and brains, taints himself with the same crime as his father, which thus falls upon him: he desires a woman, being unconscious both of the fact that she is already married and also that she is his sister. And Mordred, their illegitimate son, having succeeded in escaping a kind of ‘slaughter of the innocents’, is destined, in the conclusion of the cycle and of the whole romance, to be the instrument of divine vengeance. This retribution is proof of the fact that Malory is not totally indifferent to religious symbolism. Yet Arthur’s task lies not only in fending off his enemies at home, pacifying the various factions and unifying the country but – with an explicit contemporary reference rooted in historical truth – also in closing the door to the envoys from Rome demanding ‘truage’, that is to say, a tribute. At this point, Sir Balin makes his appearance; he slays the Lady of the Lake, who was the cause of his mother’s execution, and will be doomed in future to kill – with a second sword taken from a damsel – his best friend.

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2. A reconstruction of Malory’s technique can be made starting from the violations of a fixed narrative pattern. His romances deal with the deeds of knights and damsels in distress, challenges, contests and duels, heroic exploits, encounters in the wilderness and woods, flashy armour in various heraldic colours, castles, spells and enchantments, including sudden, unexpected denouements. A knight is unaware of the fact that he is duelling with an ally, who is no other than another Knight of the Round Table, because he is clad in armour from head to foot, or even with a close relative, perhaps a brother. As Caxton had rightly perceived, this flux of events is segmentable, because each micro-episode is a narrative unit in its own right and occupies virtually the same number of pages (and, with the notable exception of the story of Tristram, has the same overall length). Similarly, we witness the alternation of leading actors and extras, or supporting characters. Malory does not exploit the reckless folly of the two brothers Balin and Balan, who mortally wound each other. He makes no distinctions, nor does he create hierarchies; he understates rather than emphasizing. The same narrative space is dedicated to the episode in which Merlin dies buried under a rock as to the one in which the two brothers Balin and Balan kill each other, without feeling troubled or perturbed in any way. Once Merlin, the embodiment of a diabolical or semi-diabolical nature, has been eliminated, then another character is ready to take his place in the likeness of Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s sister. Gawain also falls a prisoner to the senses with Ettard (and in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he was put to the test with Bertilak’s wife). Lancelot’s first book narrates his noble and glorious exploits but also the seduction he has to resist on the part of certain enchantresses. In his second book he frees the beautiful Elaine from pain, after having slain a dragon. With a cunning ruse, he is tricked into the lady’s bed, the result of which is the birth of Galahad. The justification for this incident is rather significant: Guinevere – who incidentally is a married woman – reprimands Launcelot, who is on tenterhooks; however, once she is informed of the guile, she considers her lover’s behaviour to be pardonable. The situation is an embarrassing one, because in the next scene – typical of a comedy or of a late twentieth-century farce – Launcelot’s concubine and his lover come face to face. Launcelot, now exposed, is a prey to madness.

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3. Palamedes, a noble and highly sensitive warrior, is a Saracen pagan knight: he storms through battles, disguises himself, is extremely adventurous and, above all, he loves Iseult, but in a gallant manner. One fine day, the hot-blooded knight finally stops wielding his sword to gaze at his image reflected in a well and, in despair, he raises a melodious song of lament, which is heard by the enraged Tristram. The two air their grievances, but Palamedes observes that ‘love is free for all men’, as is common knowledge: in other words, man’s passions are uncontrollable. Every time they meet, Palamedes and Tristram challenge each other, still having a score to settle, and the story of the Saracen ends with his christening. Tristram makes his appearance within the context of a perfectly feudal, or rather federative, system: all the rulers from the bordering regions are part of the federation headed by King Arthur. Tristram defends Cornwall, which has been ordered to pay a tribute, and is then sent to Ireland to heal his wound from a poisoned arrow. Also Mark and Tristram are free-and-easy adulterous lovers of the same woman. Later uncle and nephew are at loggerheads and Mark plots to murder his nephew. In exchange for a favour granted to the king, Iseult’s father, Tristram asks for her hand in marriage, not for himself, but for Mark. The climactic scene of the love potion is thus a highly concise one, and rather typical of Malory’s narrative technique: instead of availing himself of the element of suspense, he opens the episode with a metanarrative caption, ‘to make it short’. When Tristram’s prolonged adultery is exposed, he is about to be put to death, but he manages to flee to Brittany, where he is nursed by another Iseult (le Blaunche Maynes – of the white hands). The love between Tristram and the first Iseult would have been steadfast and invincible, had it not been for an affair between her and a squire of Tristram, who becomes mad with jealousy. The aftermath of the story, with Mark’s furious, though concealed, jealousy, is traced only discontinuously by Malory, until Tristram finally escapes for good with Iseult from Mark’s clutches. Malory suppresses the tragic end to the story; in fact, he terminates it before the heart-rending epilogue which was to be indispensable in every subsequent version. 4. In the story of the quest of the Holy Grail, we might go as far as to say that Malory sings decidedly off-key, insofar as this classical episode does not appear to have aroused the interest or kindled the sensitivity of

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the author. The end-product is thus a washed-out, perfunctory and unexceptional rendering. The symbolic, or decidedly allegorical, framework consists in the restraint imposed on the search and attainment of spiritual life and asceticism, constituted by the threat to chastity, and therefore by lust. Launcelot comes face to face with the Holy Chalice and lies at length in a state of trance, yet, ironically, once he returns to Camelot he resumes his courtship and love-affair with Guinevere. The quest is merely an interlude or a digression. If the composition of the eight books follows a chronological order, Malory is at his best in the last two, which are often extrapolated from the rest and included separately in anthologies. Tennyson was to fully exploit the episode of Elaine, the virgin of Astolat, who dies of unrequited love for Launcelot, as she explains in a letter, while a boat carries her dead body down the Thames to Camelot. The war between Arthur and Launcelot, whose disloyalty has now been unmasked, the death of the two lovers in the monastery, and the death of Arthur, who entrusts Excalibur to the reluctant Bedivere, are scenes that could only have been depicted by a master of synthesis such as Malory.

Part III 

The Sixteenth Century

§ 34. England under the Tudors England was ruled over by five monarchs during the 118 years of the Tudor dynasty. Two of them ruled for many years, one fairly lengthily, and two of them very briefly; none of them were weak or insignificant, as even Edward VI – the boy king – ruled through two iron-fisted regents. Each of these rulers undid what his or her predecessor had accomplished. There was therefore not much continuity and, in one case, a flagrant deviation from the course of action chosen by the earlier monarch. A process of consolidation of the English monarchy was however commenced and was concluded after Elizabeth’s death, endowing the institution with its most identifying marks.1 Under Tudor rule a noteworthy rationalization of national life was introduced, by establishing forms of meticulous control in the most remote areas and making use of local government and decentralized judicial administration.2 It became an absolute but also – paradoxically – a parliamentary monarchy, whereas the great states of France and Spain continued to lean for support on the old Church. The Parliament included an ever-decreasing number of prelates and an increasing number of lay members. From the reign of Henry VII, each county sent two knights to represent the landowners whose value was set at thirty-two shillings. Parliament, however, was summoned only if required and did not operate on a stable basis, inasmuch as current affairs were attended to by the Privy Council. Court life, moreover, returned to turbulence immediately after the presumptive dynastic settlement of 1485, and other, not much smaller

1 2

Henry VIII commissioned the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil to write Historia anglica, the first eulogy of the Tudor regime. Repeated uprisings within the country up to 1580 reveal the general internal instability: in 1486 and 1487 those of the Yorkists and in Cornwall as we shall see; in 1536 the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and in 1549 another anti-Protestant demonstration in Cornwall; in 1549 Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk, mainly caused by economic grievances; in 1553 in Northumberland, in 1554 the anti-Catholic movement headed by Wyatt, leading to the siege of London; in 1569 in the Northern counties against Mary Stuart. The 1549 uprisings led to a tragic result: 10,000 victims.

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Wars of the Roses erupted, in the shape of plots, counter-plots, conspiracies, overt or covert intrigues and fiery rivalries between the ambitious, highborn families of the court. The whole century was punctuated by summary trials against parties who had been more or less unjustly accused of high treason. Power was so frail that mere suspicion was enough for the suspect to be sentenced to death. Should an initial warning be insufficient, the second time a courtier was caught out going astray, he would lose his head. One of the symbols of the despotic power of the Tudors was the Tower of London, crammed with political prisoners. Numerous writers and other men of culture were beheaded as well, without much ado. Modern consciences wonder how death could be inflicted with such ease and so hastily. The invention of printing led to wider literacy and made the reading habit more democratic, but the boomerang effect of an instrument that could place the very stability of power at risk was perceived almost immediately, so it had to be subject to regulations and even placed under severe censorship. After the dissolution of the English monasteries, Henry VIII caused further damage by destroying vast quantities of manuscripts in their libraries and ipso facto of medieval Latin culture. He not only caused the mass dispersion of about 10,000 monks and nuns, but thereby reduced the recruitment of artists from the monastic or ecclesiastical ranks. On the other hand, he made the court the natural habitat for all artistic activity. Literature became far more secular and the typical sixteenth-century writer was, for 200 years, a member of the court. The despoiled or ruined monasteries became manors, that is, country residences modelled architecturally on Italian villas, as well as, albeit on a more reduced scale, cultural centres. The new living circumstances made educational travelling possible and easier and early style grand tours in both directions started being undertaken – of Europeans visiting England and of English people visiting Europe, transforming a formerly sedentary population into a travelling one, the most travel-prone ever. The suddenly increased literary output owes its existence to a correspondingly sudden need for pleasurable literature, both amusing and educational, by a burgher class and aristocracy that could benefit from Scottish universities such as those of St Andrews and Glasgow, created at the end of the fifteenth century, as well as from those of Oxford and Cambridge. Some classics of continental humanism, such as those by

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Pico della Mirandola, Castiglione, Machiavelli, were translated very shortly after publication.3 2. The Tudor dynasty starts with Owen Tudor, a Welsh gentleman, esquire or ‘steward of the wardrobe’, who had married the widow of Henry V. Proud of their nominal roots, the Tudors laid claim to the restoration of the ancient, legendary kingdom of Arthur.4 The watchful, taciturn, centralizing Henry VII first had to re-establish order in the kingdom, without even being sure that he was the most legitimate pretender to the throne. The country was therefore shaken by turbulence and raids, and the Crown’s officials were constantly being threatened. A lone contingent of bodyguards, in the absence of a regular army, managed to subdue an uprising lead by the Yorkists as early as 1487, and ten years later, in Cornwall, they perpetrated a bloody massacre – according to Thomas More in his Utopia – of the protesters against tax rises. Henry VII was aptly nicknamed the gendarme of England. The Privy Council was, from then on, the strong and indispensible link in the chain of power control. The nobles were excluded and their place was taken by members of the clergy, lawyers and professional diplomats, the younger sons of the newly enriched families. The Council acted as go-between with the Parliament. The Justice of Peace appointed for every shire was a member of an upper, controllable Court, the Star Chamber Court. Such forms of local government ensured a natural and regular close watch on daily life in the villages, enforcing the range of penalties inflicted. With Henry VII there arose a more up-to-date England. Throughout the twenty-four years of his reign reborn humanistic studies forged ahead and diplomats down from Oxford and Cambridge were summoned to court, where English was adopted as the only official language. The secret of the Tudor administrative system, after Henry VII, lay in containing individual taxation and increasing the duties of the local 3 Machiavelli’s Arte della Guerra in 1560–1562 and Istorie fiorentine in 1595. As C. Corti reminds us in RIN, 35, The Prince was translated into English in 1640 and English readers only knew it through the Contre-Machiavel published in 1602 by the French Huguenot Gentillet. This did not prevent the Prince’s theories from being known by reading it in Italian or from hearsay, deriving thereby even greater legendary status. 4 Henry VII’s firstborn son was christened Arthur.

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officials towards self-government. These officials (i.e. the Justices of Peace, the main Shire officials, whose duties were truly very wide) were always unpaid. Henry VIII favoured in turn the rise of landowners so as to levy more taxes from them, but also issued laws in favour of evicted families and forbade or regulated the ‘enclosures’. The pivot of the country’s economy continued to be wool and remained so until 1550, when the wool market slumped, the cultivation of cereals was resumed and the whole productive cycle was all carried out in England, thanks to the expertise of the immigrant Flemish weavers, who soon settled and became anglicized. Finished cloth was sold within the island or exported and exchanged on new markets. The wool hegemony was paid for by the farm labourers, who were evicted by the landowners, so as to create the ‘enclosures’, or land to be used exclusively as pasture for the wool-producing sheep. The ‘false consciousness’ of the well-to-do and of the traders found a curious reason for their course of action, and stated that land that had been cultivated for too long had to ‘rest’ for a few decades, before becoming super-productive again. On a social level, the situation generated a mass of unemployed, evicted farmlabourers who could become a dangerous, frightening, roving horde. This is one of the few shortcomings admitted by the Tudor eulogists. Moreover, after the suppression of the monasteries, the dole or alms distributed by these institutions were also discontinued. A tardy and badly inefficient Poor Law attempted to remedy this state of affairs. 3. Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s right hand man, was the last prelate to ‘rule’ over England and hold its reins in his clasp.5 He introduced the idea of the balance of powers, the only foreign policy capable of guaranteeing peace and stability for the then small and unarmed English nation. In actual fact, after 1521, Wolsey started getting it wrong and taking ever worse, wide-ranging decisions. He in fact forged an alliance with power5

The son of a cattle-dealer in Ipswich, he founded a college at Oxford as proof of his power. He never became Archbishop of Canterbury, but only of York. Officially he was deputy papal legate (legatus a latere). He died of natural causes, but already in disgrace with the king, or at least no longer on good terms with him – as he had failed to mediate successfully for the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon – while travelling from York to London, where Henry almost certainly would have had him killed. He wore a hair-shirt under his robes.

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ful Spain (the Spaniards were, at this point, disliked by the English), when instead it would have been statesmanlike and wise to support France. Under Henry VIII, England was discovering the sea and how to make it pay, or how to make use of the nation’s enviable geographical position, despite the still excessive proximity of the continental shores. Nonetheless, strangely enough, Henry did not take part in the general rush to acquire colonies, although his father had sent Cabot reconnoitering to North America in 1497. Henry’s princely intuition led to the creation of a navy, even without a supporting army; his dry docks produced ships designed according to modern and ingenious constructive principles, initially capable of replacing the oar-driven galleys for long, transoceanic trips and easily transformable into warships by fitting them with cannon. Wolsey short-sightedly did not, on the other hand, realize that England was ready to enter the lists for the dominion of the seas. When Henry changed the course of history and resolved to achieve his ends, notwithstanding the odds against him,6 many indulgent historians claim that at least he did so without unleashing a civil war. And although he shed blood it never amounted to the streams of it that coursed through France, Holland and Germany. In 1509 Henry VIII came to the throne aged eighteen, after the death of his elder brother Arthur. He was eclectic and excelled in the arts and in sports, was an archer, musician and man of letters, before becoming obese, grim and of bull-like heftiness. He was also a devout Catholic and attended more than one Mass daily. His conjugal decisions were taken after the failure of his plans to join England and Spain by marrying Mary, the daughter he had had from Catherine, to the Emperor, and because Catherine could no longer have any surviving sons. The pressure put on the Pope to obtain a ‘counter-edict’, dissolving his marriage to Catherine, was foiled, also thanks to Charles V’s efforts on behalf of his aunt and niece; moreover, the Pope was a hostage in the hands of the Spaniards. Henry therefore turned to Cranmer, to More and to eminent scholars at the continental universities to obtain justifications for his divorce from Catherine. His marriage with Anne Boleyn, which took place after he had been excommunicated, was celebrated in 1533, with Archbishop Cranmer officiating. Wolsey had been replaced by the

6

The Anglican Reformation is dealt with in greater detail in the next section.

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Iago-like Thomas Cromwell, a fervent adherent of Realpolitik. The gross domestic product, during Henry VIII’s reign, increased both because the confiscated abbeys were granted at subvalue prices to the new enriched burghers, as well as to the emerging yeomen and squires. This happened despite the rise of prices due to the currency being devalued to meet the expenses of the war against France. In 1536, Wales was unified and annexed and the shire system and the imposition of Common Law was extended to it; thereafter the Welsh sent their representatives to Parliament. The same policy was extended to Ireland, but much less successfully and bringing in its wake the unrest which has troubled that province to this day. Henry VII had sought to pacify Scotland by offering his daughter in marriage to the King of Scotland, a key event for the Chaucerian literature of that country. A further attempt at appeasement was made by negotiating a marriage between Edward, the son of Henry VIII, and Mary, Queen of Scots. It came to nothing due to the opposition of the Scottish Francophile party. Forced to contradict his previous convictions, above all as regards religious matters, Henry systematically adopted a policy of royal decrees. His reign is full of this kind of rulings, one of them being the establishment of a standard Latin grammar to be employed in schools. 4. When sickly Edward VI died, the royal candidature of Lady Jane Grey, as successor, suddenly came to the fore, inasmuch as she was the greatgranddaughter of Henry VII. However Mary, the daughter of Catherine, did not allow herself to be supplanted, and ruled promising tolerance and a return to order. It was one of the most notorious euphemisms of English history, as Mary, ‘bloody’ par excellence, was responsible for the execution of about 200 priests who refused to abjure. A Protestant list of martyrs, the Book of Martyrs, was compiled by the theologian John Foxe (1516–1587) in 1563. This work was widely acclaimed by the Protestants, as it proved that not only Catholics had suffered conspicuous death tolls.7 Both the Regent Warwick and Lady Jane, too slow to accept Mary’s new policies, were beheaded. Under Mary’s reign, there was a brief, but terri7

Elizabeth would outstrip Mary as regards the number of executions: it has been calculated that she sent four Catholic martyrs to the scaffold a year, as against fifty-six Protestants (or, according to Foxe, ninety) condemned by Mary.

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fying interregnum or Catholic status quo. She married Philip, the son of Emperor Charles V, but the anti-Spanish sentiment had spread so widely that the marriage was unpopular and aroused much ill feeling (the queen announced an imaginary pregnancy that proved to be inexistent). After the death of Mary, Elizabeth, Henry VIII’s and Anne Boleyn’s daughter, was backed by Spain to oppose the claims of Mary, Queen of Scots, purely because of Spain’s enmity against France. This was a fatally badly timed move on the part of Spain, as when Elizabeth first took the throne England was weak and vulnerable. For her part, Elizabeth initially and cleverly led Philip to believe that she would restore Catholicism, a promise she never kept. She also flirted with the Emperor, without ever granting her hand in marriage. In 1559, a new Act of Supremacy was voted by Parliament, ignoring the adverse opinions of the bishops appointed by Mary. In the space of only one year, in fact, England and Scotland became two Protestant monarchies no longer subject to Spain or France. The English succoured Scotland, in the grip of Mary of Guise’s forces, which were evacuated in 1560. The conflict on the seas with the Spaniards has often taken on the traits, as far as the English are concerned, of an allegory: the forces of progress, of modernity – embodied by the enterprising traders and the piratical English sea-captains who were made admirals, imposing the necessary discipline and democracy on their ships and adopting modern and murderously efficient boarding techniques – against the obscurantist and stagnant offshoots of absolutist, feudal, intolerant and persecuting Catholicism. Obviously, the defeat of the Invincible Armada in 1588 marked – to close the allegory – the passing of the sceptre of ‘Queen of the seas’ from Spain to England; even more significantly, it marked the conclusive success of the forces of Protestant Reform over Catholic might.8 The centre of gravity in Europe had irreversibly shifted north. In the mid-sixteenth century, it had seemed

8

The epic battle was fought in the Irish Sea by Medina Sidonia and the Duke of Parma, on one side, and the gasconading pirate Drake, who had circumnavigated the world, on the other. The Spanish defeat boosted national feeling and English identity, which, as from then, was characterized by hostility towards any foreigner, whether Jew, Irishman and above all dark-skinned races, who by then had set foot in England. Black characters started appearing in Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays, and

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that the Catholics – France and above all Spain and Portugal – could achieve supremacy and that England would be irremediably ousted from the colonial booty scramble, whereas North America, which had been underrated by the great Catholic nations, dazzled by the mirage of South American gold, was, in the long run, to become the real prize. 5. When Mary came to the throne she had opened up a dilemma of royal legitimacy. In theory, a woman could rule, but Elizabeth ranked – for English Protestants as well – as a bastard. However, as soon as she was proclaimed queen and during the procession to her coronation, the sovereign, kissing the English Bible that had been forbidden by her halfsister Mary, gave proof of her astounding ability at maintaining an equal distance from all conflicting parties. A precocious age of equipoise came into existence: thus it was during her reign, that the first phalanxes of Puritans were formed. The Elizabethan political system took shape when the queen called into her service trusted councillors, such as the son of a burgher family, William Cecil. The system was supported by the ideology of the Divine Right of Kings, albeit formally and concretely reined in by the forms of controls afforded by Parliament – at least in the matter of taxation. Elizabeth herself encouraged the growth of an adoring personality cult by means of spectacular rituals, and she showed appreciation for poets and artists paying tribute to her in eulogies and apotheoses. She rapidly became adept at juggling and pitting one faction against the other. Strict police surveillance on her favourites introduced a threatening climate that was sharpened by severe penalties, and even the block, for the smallest transgressions. Her courtiers and councillors, like the pamphleteer John Stubbs and the poet and statesman Ralegh, fallen suddenly out of favour, suffered terrible consequences. Private trade prospered, as the way had been opened towards hitherto unimagined markets, like the Americas and the East. It was during her reign that merchant companies were born, capable of outstripping both Flanders and Venice and of establishing a kind of monopoly on world trade. In 1563 the queen issued a Workers’ Statute and confronted the rising prices caused by Henry’s devaluation of the currency, actors with African heritage were on request as skilled performers of native dances or plays within the play, or in the guise of servants and slaves.

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which had brought the country almost to bankruptcy. The refugee Mary, Queen of Scots, was the most worrying threat, inasmuch as she harboured remote dynastic prerogatives over the English throne, as a descendant of Margaret, the daughter of Henry VII. As a widow of Francis II of France, she returned to Scotland and unfortunately married the Catholic Lord Darnley and had a son from him, James, who might, in fact – according to hearsay – have been the son of an Italian court musician called Rizzio. Rizzio, having been left by her, was found murdered, perhaps by the queen’s new lover, Bothwell. Mary was in the end deposed from the Scottish throne and after years of imprisonment was beheaded in 1587, as she was accused of being involved in a plot to kill Elizabeth. 6. Antiquated and chauvinistic historians of the Elizabethan age, like Trevelyan, praised, up to a very short time ago, the vision of natural harmony, ardent, complacent patriotism and admirable and unrepeatable concord amongst the social classes. Satisfaction was unanimous, all and everything was provided for and the nobles were unlike the degenerate French nobility of the Revolution. A marked spirit of mutual succour reigned supreme. Energy, vitality, entrepreneurship and the pleasure of indulging in new sports such as bear, bull or dog fights, were palpably everywhere to be encountered. It is sufficient to recall that a certain William Shakespeare came up from the provinces to London around 1590. The population was becoming more and more prosperous and was increasing.9 The national economic situation was booming and English international prestige was definitely mounting. In 1553, the first company was founded to trade with Russia; in 1580, Drake returned to England after a triumphant and wildly adventurous circumnavigation of the globe on his ship, the Golden Hind, which became a national treasure. In 1600, the East India Company was founded. At the beginning of his reign, Henry VIII’s navy consisted of a single ship whilst Elizabeth despatched 150 vessels against the Spaniards. New utensils and domestic comforts appeared. The first horse-drawn carriage started being used and the great long-sword was replaced by the 9

Over 4 million. London’s population when Elizabeth came to the throne was 100,000. It was 200,000 when she died. According to F. Ferrara (MAR, vol. I, 363), it was first 130,000 and then 300,000.

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rapier. Clothes presses were crammed with rich and unusual head-gear and gorgeous dresses made with the most varied cloths, embroidered and fashioned in the most diverse ways.10 In the heart of England, the Thames flowed to London and bore witness to the fact that the roads were not much to speak of, but river transport was preferred by all. The water in the Thames was clean and pure – as Spenser tells us, as William Morris will imagine and as T. S. Eliot will regretfully notice. And on the river paraded the royal pageants. The reverse of this fabled golden-age coin is slavery, the repression of the Irish, persecutions, unemployment and the discontent of the poor. English imperialism was fathered by the expeditions led by Drake (chiefly when he attacked the Spanish ports and fortified strongholds), Frobisher, Hawkins and Ralegh, who brought slaves back to England for the first time. Ireland was one of the rare victims of English callous and insensitive administration. What was garnered was not recompensed by what was restored, not even in cultural terms. Ireland became thereafter a recurrent source of discontent and the pivot for a possible Catholic revival. The Tudor model, as pointed out by C. S. Lewis, was based on a system of compensations and on the increasingly cultured new class of recently enriched people, whilst the youth and children of the smaller landowners, who had been formerly educated by the abbeys and convents, became progressively more ignorant. The unemployed and anyone wishing to make a career for themselves at court flooded into London. Sanitary provisions were scarce, the roads muddy and dirty, contagion and plague epidemics rife. As in Medicean Florence, some of the London districts were identified by the trade or profession that was practised in them, one of the latter being the prostitutes’ activity (Southwark). That there were five prisons in the town provides some inkling of the high level of metropolitan delinquency. A divide separated the densely populated city from the marshy, forested, peripheral areas, infested by bandits, minstrels and vagabonds. Elizabeth possibly knew she was sterile and her flirtations never led to any serious marriage plans. Another explanation for her determined nubile status was 10

Signs of the times, these, marvellously described by the chronicler and eccentrically humorous country parson William Harrison (Description of England, 1577, included in Holinshed’s Chronicles [§ 161.3]).

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that she did not want to marry a foreign monarch or an English nobleman, so as to guarantee the balance of the internal political factions. Towards the end of her reign, she still had power, but it had been undermined by palace intrigues, and one led by the Earl of Essex was foiled in 1601.11 On her deathbed, she is supposed to have indicated James VI of Scotland as her successor. § 35. The English Reformation For decades, if not for a full century, towards the end of the fifteenth century, the discontent of the laity with the deplorable state of religion was palpable all over Europe and thus also in England, both as regards its theory and its practice. Scholars and sages supported a widespread, age-old anticlerical feeling. Some historians opine that anti-clericalism was an independent, impartial ideological trend, shared by Protestants and Catholics alike. The English reforming vanguard are Wyclif and the Lollards – at the end of the fourteenth century – as well as the English translations of the Bible which preceded the Authorised Version, the fruit of the axiom that one could not require people to believe if the written foundation of their belief, based on the history of the people of God, was not comprehensible and needed intermediaries to be understood. All this notwithstanding, Wyclif, as we have seen, did not probably mean to shatter all ties with Rome, nor place himself at the head of a heretical sect, but he merely hoped for reform within the Church itself. Lollardism had held fast and the English Bible was read in secret, and Lollards were sent to the scaffold between 1490 and 1520.1 After 1517, Luther’s theses caused the Lollards to be incorporated and enrolled as Protestants, and Cambridge was the cradle of the new Protestant ideas. One should, at this point, stress once and for all that Protestant is a term that derives from Luther and his supporters’ formal protest at the chiefly Catholic Imperial Diet of Speyer in 1529, which had reiterated the 11

Another plot, led by the Duke of Norfolk and by the Italian banker Ridolfi to implement Pius V’s excommunication Bull and to re-establish Catholicism in England was also foiled. Ever increasing numbers of Catholics were fined by Elizabeth and emigrated to the Continent; and the Jesuits were persecuted.

1

On Pecock see § 29.2.

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ban against Luther; the Reformed were, on the other hand, the followers of Zwingli and Calvin, as opposed to Luther. It was only in the eighteenth century that the historical term Protestant Reform started being used, to signify the Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican confessions. Even during the early years of the reign of Henry VIII, independent, moderately reforming trends had come into being within the English Church, so that initially the Reformist Catholics were more numerous than the true Protestants. The English Reform is thus no sudden deflagration, but a gradual process that developed over successive stages and progressed through escalating phases interrupted by stagnations. For a short period, under the reign of Mary, the process even went into reverse. Luther, a priest, developed the political doctrine of a Church subject to the State, an idea to which he sought to convert the German princes. Henry VIII was an absolute monarch who placed himself at the head of State and Church. As always, the English simplify things. In Germany the reform commenced with the people, in England change was promoted from on high. 2. The fundamental dates of the English Reformation are the following: 1517, indirectly, by virtue of Luther’s theses at Wittenberg; 1521, when Henry was proclaimed Defensor Fidei by the Pope; 1532, the year of Calvin’s Institutes; 1533, when the English Reform was decreed; 1539, when the English Bible was adopted in the churches (but in the same year the Six Articles were published, in one of which transubstantiation in the Eucharist was solemnly reaffirmed); 1549, when the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer was published, containing the English text of all liturgical functions; 1558, when John Knox imposed a markedly Calvinist imprint on the Scottish Church. Wolsey had caused anti-Roman prejudice to increase, due to the corruption he introduced. After his fall, the clergy that had supported him were fined by Henry, who first reduced and then abolished all the annual dues to the Roman Church. The few prelates who refused to vow allegiance, like More and Fisher, were sent to the scaffold and France and Spain – in Europe – stayed put for sheer political profit. Under Henry VIII the Church system was subjected to a kind of conservative restructuring. The only radical measure was the suppression of the monasteries and the confiscation of all their appurtenances.2 2

The Pilgrimage of Grace (§ 34.2 n. 2) was a Catholic rebellion against the suppression of the monasteries that took place in 1536 and was rapidly quashed. It masked a

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The dreaded decline of knowledge was reflected in the annual number of degrees issuing from the two universities, where there had never before been so few new students enrolling. It was like a veritable annihilation of the scholarly population, due moreover to the fact that, after Henry VIII, the traditional final training of monks no longer took place at Oxford and Cambridge. After Henry’s death, in 1547, Archbishop Cranmer, a Cambridge scholar, and thus a priest, although he took orders after being widowed, cut through a liturgical contention that had been ongoing for decades, by establishing that Mass is not a sacrifice – and no transubstantiation takes place during the service – but is only a commemoration. In the meantime, the two regents of the boy-king Edward VI clamped down on the few Catholic diehards. The councillor behind Mary’s attempted restoration was Cardinal Reginald Pole, who had been one of the first to be persecuted by Henry VIII, because of his opposition to divorce. Under Elizabeth, on the other hand, the Acts of Supremacy were re-confirmed and recusants (those who refused to vow allegiance to the Crown) were hunted down by the pursuivants, or persecutors, led by Richard Topcliffe (and, in Shakespeare’s county, by the infamous Sir Thomas Lucy). Puritans and Jesuits (the latter in disguise or incognito) were like cat and dog or like Scylla and Charybdis. In 1563, the 39 Articles, synthesizing the Anglican Creed, were drafted. Elizabeth was excommunicated by Pope Pius V, who founded the French seminary in Douai, which was intended to foment Catholic resurgence. 3. The term used to define the English political system from Henry VIII onwards is Erastianism (from Thomas Erastus, a Swiss doctor and follower of Zwingli). The head of the State or Sovereign Monarch is also the head of the Church, with no disjunction between the two powers. According to Bertrand Russell,3 the root of theocracy was in St Augustine, who had observed that, due to the weakness of the western emperors, the Church and the Papacy had easily managed to overcome the political powers. In England, however, St Augustine was not totally, but only partly refused or refuted, as the Protestants felt at ease with the Augustinian doctrine foreshadowing predestination. There was strong confrontation as to whether the

3

rebuttal of the Crown’s supremacy, reaffirming feudal authority. Even the sanctuary of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury was sacked and robbed of its relics. HWP, 360.

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Bible should be in the common tongue or in Latin. Quite a few fragments of the liturgy had been translated into the common tongue and used for the benefit of the people. The actual production of a whole Bible in English was the idea of William Tyndale (date of birth uncertain-1536). Tyndale was an Oxford scholar, tutor to the nobility, and controversial preacher. Having aroused hostility at home, he emigrated to Germany to prepare and print his Bible, and smuggle copies of it into England. His New Testament was completed and published in 1525, but Henry VIII, at the time opposed to many of the actions that he would later support, had him arrested and burnt at the stake. Tyndale’s Bible was very clearly Lutheran in character, with regard, too, to the lexical choices, which were queried by Thomas More because of their suspect provenance. In 1535, Miles Coverdale (1488–1568), a bishop, forced into exile too as suspected of heresy, published a complete Bible, with both Testaments translated into English, in Zurich. Various editions were printed and re-edited over the next few years. Other English Bibles were produced up to the end of the century, translated by a variety of translators, paving the way for the classic milestone, James I’s Authorized Version. In such a short timespan there is a complete thumb-nail history of the Bible in English. 4. From the very first translations, the English Bible was to have an incalculable and widespread influence, contributing to the practice of daily reading and memory automatism effects, comparable to the litanies or silent prayers of the Catholic tradition. The reformed religion gradually idealized the home, the family and matrimony as the model status, together with daily practices such as prayers and reading from the Holy Scriptures. It was through the English Bible and the translation of the Psalms (1562) that Tyndale and Cranmer jointly brought about, from the mid-1550s, the birth of a language, English prose, a vehicle that could serve any purpose. A similar function was carried out by Murdoch Nisbet in Scotland, thanks to his separate and manuscript translation of the New Testament. Protestant and, a bit later, Puritan apologists endowed literature with three markedly serviceable formal tools: the treatise, the dialogue and the sermon.4 John 4

See § 157 on the Marprelate Tracts.

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Longland, Henry VIII’s confessor, bore a high-sounding surname that could have been taken for that of Langland; the fieriest preacher was Hugh Latimer (ca. 1485–1555), who hurled anathemas against superstition and lax priestly customs, adopting hammering reiteration, plodding, but sensational anecdotes and gruesomely ironic aphorisms. Refusing to recant, when Mary came to the throne he was burnt at the stake. Other preachers and martyrs died exhorting their tormentors to pile more wood on the fire. The Reform led to the emergence of compilers of the archives and records of the antiquities dismantled in the abbeys, like the so-called ‘John Leland’s Itinerary’,5 as well as the annals by Edward Hall (?-1547), John Stow (ca. 1525–1605), John Speed (1552–1629) and William Camden (1551–1623).6 § 36. English humanism and the Renaissance I: The continental trail The cradle and the scene of English humanism are the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; and its initiators were a small group of scholars and professors who travelled to Italy, bent on possessing themselves of the fruits of the Platonic Schools and of the circles of cultured classicists working in the various cities of the Italian peninsula, such as Florence, Padua, Bologna and Ferrara. Successful in their quest, they returned home to share their findings with their compatriots. The last decade of the fifteenth century is the starting point for this process, which can be said to have ended around 1520. A first group of scholars had formed before the above said proto-humanists travelled to Italy, as a number of Italian and a few French scholars had been summoned by the English courts and universities to teach the rudiments of the new continental philology. It should be stressed, right from the start, that this neoclassicism was by no means pure and secular, rather it was oriented towards theology and religion and thus unwittingly preparatory towards the great objective of translating the Bible into English, a translation that had to be made directly on the original

5 6

John Leland (1506–1552), Henry VIII’s librarian, devoted six years to the compilation of his Itinerary, which he left unfinished, as he went mad. Stow and Speed, who were tailors by trade, both wrote a history of England; Camden’s, written during Elizabeth’s reign, was originally in Latin.

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sources, philologically discriminative, and without aids or intermediation. Secondly, in contrast to the delay with which England was the recipient of the continental ferments, this English classicism was, all things considered, almost contemporaneous with that of the Continent. The passion for Greek manuscripts had erupted in Europe and in Italy when scholarly Greeks arrived en masse between the Council of Florence (1439) and the fall of Byzantium (1453). These emigrants became an integral part of the Italian communities of the mid- and late fifteenth century, where they were revered and esteemed. One cannot but recall, in this regard, that the imaginary, but plausible Tito Melema, the male protagonist of George Eliot’s Romola, enjoys just such a reputation as a cultured Greek scholar, enshrouded in an unjustifiable legendary halo. 2. In order to investigate the Gospels, Thomas Linacre (ca. 1460–1524) and William Grocyn (ca. 1446–1519) studied Greek. The former, as a guest at the Italian courts, was a pupil, auditor and disputer in juridical chambers, philological academies (Calcondila and Poliziano in Florence) and scientific colleges. He went on to teach Thomas More, was court tutor and a doctor, and translated Galen into English. One of the more eminent cultural mediators was John Colet (ca. 1467–1519), a distinguished Latinist and Oxford-based scholar, deeply read in the Church Fathers and the Pauline Epistles, subsequently dean of St Paul’s and founder of the eponymous school attached to the Cathedral, where Milton was later to study. Colet preached religious reform, but his objective was to reconstruct the Church. He may have been galvanized by Savonarola in Florence; at his own death he was much more inclined to accept Lutheran or anti-Catholic positions than More or other humanists. Hostile to Thomas Aquinas’ tenets, he introduced the historical method of interpreting the Scriptures, repudiating a coldly and strictly philological interpretation. The first headmaster of Colet’s school was John Lyly’s grandfather, William Lyly, whose name is related to the compilation of a Latin grammar which surpassed its rivals and became the classic text-book for countless generations of schoolchildren.1 At the same time, the history of English humanism is inextricably bound 1

A version of this grammar, by W. Bullokar, applied to the English language, was published in 1586.

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to Erasmus of Rotterdam’s scholarly sojourns and visiting professorships.2 Erasmus was to visit his English classical, scholarly friends at Oxford and Cambridge twice, in a spirit of reciprocal enrichment. He was invited a third time by Archbishop John Fisher to Cambridge and held a chair there, as professor, from 1511 to 1514. All the foremost protagonists of the English Reform movement, including Tyndale, Coverdale and Cranmer, considered him their guiding light. In turn, Erasmus praised his humanist friends to the skies, in a somewhat florid fashion. The friend closest to his heart, as we shall see, was Thomas More. In 1499, the thirty-year-old Erasmus had not written much. In 1505 he decided to prolong his stay in England, in order to cultivate the academic humanists he had previously become acquainted with and improve his knowledge of Greek. It was also thanks to these friends that he evolved into a Christian humanist, aware of the need to adopt a new philological approach to the Scriptures, so as to assist the illiterate. 3. Not everyone agrees, as we shall see, that humanism was simply the first step towards an English Renaissance; and it is true that the Elizabethan Renaissance appears, in many ways, to be discontinuous and is a sort of leap onwards after humanism. Philological debates, theological diatribes and political pamphlets are replaced suddenly, towards the last quarter of the century, by a wide and impressive spectrum of lay genres. In searching after the reasons and origins of this miracle, the English Renaissance, we should perhaps have recourse to the imponderable – the will of mother Nature, who allowed so many artistic geniuses to be born in that period, or to the wheel of Fortune.3 The golden centuries of literature normally coincide with political and social pre-conditions and are regulated by the deductive mechanism of cause and effect. In order for them to be founded and formed, the sine qua non is a stable political situation and solid, secure power, capable of benefiting and feeding a similar period of internal order, 2 3

His official name was Geert Geertsz (ca. 1466–1536), but he was known by his friends and admirers as Erasmus, which means ‘the beloved one’. Similarly, ‘an incomprehensible self-contradicting status, or aporia’ is the ‘minor tone’, if not the inexistent tradition, of figurative arts, in the Elizabethan Renaissance, according to C. Corti, in RIN, 402.

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of truce between factions and, above all, with external enemies, producing a widespread awareness of national peace and security. In the case of the Tudor sovereigns, this rule would appear, to say the least, to be somewhat dubious and contradictory, as it would be difficult to think of a more restless or precarious century, in which so many contradictory political and social upheavals took place. Over and above that of a cyclic, organic and most obvious awakening to new life, after a long hibernation, one of the metaphors used to describe the English Elizabethan Renaissance is drawn from mineralogy, used to define the great eras in primordial history; and the colouristic one. If the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages, the Renaissance is an era of dazzling light; a dead period, comparable to the Bronze Age, is followed by a Golden Age. Such metaphors are of relative value. Seventy-five of the 100 years of the sixteenth century belong in England to the Bronze Age and are devoid of any great art, whilst the last twenty-five years mark a definite upward surge. On the other hand, after 1590 English Literature will always be golden, without undergoing any substantial decline or downward slithering, right up to the present, providing a succession of more or less golden eras, except for brief interruptions, such as the Protectorate. 4. The delay with which the English Renaissance moved into action, compared with the continental Renaissances, is another accepted fact. Up to 1579, the sixteenth century, as I have just said, does not produce many fruits, merely offering philological and grammatical works, prose to be found in sermons, homilies or manuals, or science, education and biblical studies.4 The compactness and homogeneity of the English Renaissance is, in itself, a hitherto unsolved mystery, the unravelling of which depends on the point of view taken, once one has first agreed on the constellation of meanings of the term and on the choice of what unit of measurement to adopt. Like ‘Romanticism’ or ‘classicism’, the term ‘Renaissance’ is a category which is both timeless (eternal or cyclical) as well as specific. Many English historians date its commencement from the reign of Henry VII

4

Religion accounts, according to F. Ferrara (MAR, vol. I, 365) for about 40 per cent of the material published throughout the entire Tudor era. About 100 titles of this type were published each year.

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or from the inauguration of printing in England, prudently preferring to settle on 1585 as its conclusive year, although no recognizably outstanding literary event is associated with this date. Others prefer to extend its duration to a good century and a half, placing its conclusion in 1660 and the Restoration. The sixty years after the extinction of the Tudor dynasty, labelled as pre-Baroque or Baroque, have less to do with the early sixteenthcentury Renaissance (despite being an extension of it), but are more of a continuation of it than the Elizabethan Renaissance was of humanism and we shall see its characteristics when we get to it. The boundary dates of the sub-periods can be seen to coincide, with singular precision, with historical watersheds. 1603 closes the sixteenth century, 1714 closes the seventeenth, 1798 brings the eighteenth to an end. Only the third date does not coincide with a change of dynasty at the head of the English state, rather representing a cultural event. Naturally, and this is a customary caveat, some authors straddle two periods, as do certain currents, which herald new trends or continue to uphold past ones or both, in the course of time. 5. The epistemic data of the English Renaissance are common to those of continental Renaissances, though some of them are specifically generated in England. Their merging produces a cultural unity – a system. If one starts from very general considerations, Chaucer is already a Renaissance writer, if one of the identifying aspects of the various Renaissance movements is the idea of spiritual as well as bodily renewal – of a rediscovered pleasure in life. That the world is wider, that deeply embedded ideas or legends that had hitherto been held regarding the geography of the universe, had to be jettisoned, is revealed by new instruments of knowledge. A slow, but inexorable cultural revolution refutes Thomism and Scholasticism, substituting Plato, Cicero and Quintilian with Aristotle. Greek and Hebrew, while not replacing Latin, flank a Latin that is closer to its classical splendour than to medieval Latin, a more adroitly chiselled Latin like the one used in such works as Thomas More’s Utopia and Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (1620). The four main scientific figures of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei and Newton – and the research they carried out, taught the world of their time that the skies had to be remapped. The great explorers returned from the Americas, their ships groaning with minerals like gold, which in a very short time enriched the exploiters and

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the colonizers. Ingots of ‘New World’ gold were brought to England by Philip II when he sought the hand of the Catholic Mary Tudor. The English sixteenth-century literary system is automatically related – as regards its proportions – to the adoption of printing and the increase of literacy, followed by a growing demand for various types of literature from readers outside the limited court circles. Books were published in ever-growing numbers. All this is true, although poetry – reborn – was still mostly read from handwritten manuscripts in private circles. The very mechanisms of the fruition circuit were still, during Elizabeth’s reign, not those of today; neither, however, were they those of yesteryear. The lack of a regular book sales regime was compounded by the lack of author copyrights. Printing remained the monopoly of the Stationers’ Company until 1557, subjected to the approval either by an archbishop or by the Privy Council. Catholic or Protestant pamphlets could be only published clandestinely by fraudulent printers at great risk, as they were often beheaded. Depending on the importance or type of publication, printers produced quarto or folio formats. The categories of writers were many and as varied as the motivations that drove them, but all in all one cannot, as yet, speak of the literary professional, as all writers depended on patronage. Universities did not school and train only priests and clerical candidates, but also publicists and lay candidates for careers as public servants or bureaucrats. In Italy, the courts had been financing artistic production since the fourteenth century, as did the popes and the Papal curia. In 1341 Petrarch had delivered his oration when he was nominated Poet Laureate. If the identifying feature of English humanism was cosmopolitanism, Elizabethan Renaissance became in a way a separate and autonomous artistic civilization, in which mutual exchanges ceased, leading to the consolidation of insularity and isolationism. 6. Compared with the Middle Ages, the English Elizabethan Renaissance – as it is this, in fact, that we are discussing – was, without doubt and at the very least, an era of high literary density and specialization. Erudition is not subject to discrimination and women take part in the literary composition mania. Literary salons were born.5 Poetry matured 5

This extension of the Elizabethan canon chiefly concerns three female poets, promoted nowadays by feminist critical esteem to primary roles. Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645), née Bassano, whose Italian, musical, converted Jewish or exiled Protestant family

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first and then drama, but drama would come to be valued more highly. Only inventive prose languished and limped, crawling and suffocated. These are, however, returning cycles, and drama enjoyed its prolonged zenith for seventy years. Drama flourished disregarding the Aristotelian rules approved by Sidney, which demanded spatial and temporal coherence; it then branched out into differing types, such as revenge tragedies, comedies, domestic dramas, interludes with songs and colloquial banter. The aesthetic rules governing drama were affected by a pact between academic taste (and the objective of pleasing the good palates) and the needs of popular entertainment. The momentum given to poetry was provided by the new translations, as in the Middle Ages, but conducted now on a wider choice of classics: Ariosto, the Aeneid, Plutarch, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. One of the most important was the translation of Montaigne by Florio (1603), which instilled a meditative attitude to life and even mental quibbling in the pragmatic English readers.6 All the poetic genres were culti-

6

had settled in England during the reign of Henry VIII, after various amorous incidents was the first female poet to be published in English history. Her Salve Deus Rex Judeorum (1611) is a re-enactment of the Passion in a feminist key, to which one must add a significant ‘Apologia for Eve’. A little descriptive poem of hers, which portrays the countryhouse of Cookham where she had been a guest of the Countess of Cumberland, recalls Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and possibly preceded it. A niece of Sidney, revered by Jonson himself as his inspiring muse and dedicatee of his compositions, Mary Wroth (1587-ca. 1651) published a torrential version, with inverted gender roles, of Sidney’s Arcadias (Urania, in which the protagonist is the writer’s other self, known as Pamphilia), to which was added a collection of over 100 compositions (mostly sonnets), profoundly revisionist albeit not overly original, in the Petrarchan tradition. The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) by Elizabeth Cary (ca. 1585–1639) links up thematically with Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi because of the sacrificial protagonist. Cary was dazzlingly erudite and a savant, but her passionate life, as wife and mother of eleven children, is even more celebrated. Six of her children were directed by her towards Catholicism, to which she had been converted in 1626, paradoxically by reading that Bible of Anglicanism, Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The translation of the Cortegiano, by Sir Thomas Hoby, was published in 1561; that of Guazzo’s Civile Conversazione by George Pettie in 1586. George Fenton and William Painter translated Italian novellas, chiefly those by Bandello, and Guicciardini’s historical work, partly filtering them through French translations. Du Bartas’s Huguenot religious epic, translated freely by Joshua Sylvester (1563–1618), became very widely known, influencing Milton as well. As regards the classics, the three

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vated by the Elizabethans, from the serious to the comic, tragic, elegiac, lyrical, satirical, pastoral, heroic, and in the most varied prosodic forms. Extremisms also affected the great stylistic debates, for instance between the upholders of Euphuism and of the multiplication of tropes or figurative language, of academic and bombastic style on the one side and of the plain or aphoristic style associated with Seneca’s writings on the other. The Elizabethan Renaissance is the first English historical age to be culturally self-aware. Throughout the century, debates continued regarding the conventions and registers of spoken and written language, especially in metaliterary forms, and with protagonists who exemplify such positions on the stage. One branch of Elizabethan literature and drama elaborates on the awareness of the dominant role of the English language in its fluidity and in the range of its stylistic possibilities. Puttenham and Sidney are the first English literary critics. The theme of madness, and the carnivalesque, which also emerge, are a precocious consequence of an anticlassical trend, or the typical production of antibodies within the very body of classicism. The variety of Renaissance expression is reflected in popular and alternative art forms that appear beneath the disapproving gaze of the Puritans, and emerges in books and almanacs (as in The Cobbler of Canterbury produced in 1590), in folklore, in the May games, and in the ballads on the ever-recurring myths of Robin Hood, Sir Isumbras, or St George. Yuri Lotman’s typological theories have by now become indispensable to the study of every literary civilization or cultural type, in order to identify the centrifugal or centripetal thrusts in each separate case, as all cultural models are ultimately unstable and all, in varying degrees, contaminations of types. In Tudor times, medieval, ‘symbolic’ codes of harmony and hierarchic order7 coexist with successive thrusts that attempt to give value to

7

main Elizabethan undertakings were Chapman’s translations of Homer’s epics (§ 110.1), Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Both of the latter became inexhaustible sources of inspiration for the nascent drama. Or the ‘scale of being’, in E. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture, London 1943; this scale can for instance be seen in a famous diagram of the macrocosm and of the microcosm by Robert Fludd (1619).

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concrete, practical, material realities: a universe that – after 1603 – can be more efficiently described as a discordia concors. § 37. English humanism and the Renaissance II: Forms, reception and genetic and historical theories The fortunes of the Elizabethan age1 declined with late seventeenthcentury classicism and in the age of scientism, which chiefly assaulted its drama. Bacon adopted rigorous philosophical arguments to distance himself from an era that was obsessed by words, rather than things, and completely immersed in rhetoric. And, as we shall see, he had hit the nail on the head, at least in diagnosing the situation. His attitude blended in with the post1660 Frenchified neoclassical aesthetics, when the Elizabethan period began to be viewed as an essentially romantic-barbarian era, to use a somewhat later definition. The nadir of Elizabethanism straddles the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. But Shakespeare, the barbarian, is saved, as he is adapted and, for that very reason, preserved.2 Having explored the first stage of the reception of the Renaissance phenomenon, the scholar is able to observe that, as regards the fairly varied Elizabethan flowering, all critical appraisals lumped everything together and concentrated exclusively on drama. The ‘golden age’ epithet, which I have called proverbial, soon assumed ironic and slightly contemptuous undertones. During the eighteenth century, two factions confronted each other, the nostalgic Tory faction and the progressive Whig sympathizers. The latter continued, unlike their opponents, to define the typical Elizabethan man (or woman) of letters as a barbarian. Everything is relative as, in actual fact, these men and women of letters stood out in their times by virtue of the vast and refined culture they had amassed. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the balance was broken and taste started veering towards the romantic, Gothic, magical and arcane aspects of the sixteenth century. Scott reconstructed, as if in a ground-plan, Kenilworth, the manor house in which the gorgeous Elizabethan festivities took place, and mimicked the archaic language. The

1 2

Summarized for instance in a vigorous depiction by F. Marenco, in MAR, vol. I, 295–326. This is discussed in greater detail in my Shakespeare volume (§ 2.2).

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Romantic critics poured out praise for the fullness, sense of totality and complexity of the Renaissance. Schlegel lauded its ‘organic form’ while Coleridge dwelt on its ‘correct and natural language’; and Wordsworth stressed its purity and primitive qualities. Shakespeare was valued above any neoclassical author. Ironic dissent regarding the triumphant canonization of the Renaissance were only visible in Peacock’s bizarre essay on the ‘four ages of poetry’. The paean of praise was upheld, however, by De Quincey, Carlyle and Hazlitt. This period also witnessed Taine and Symonds (who both shared the law of artistic evolution, expressed by means of a vegetation metaphor), Matthew Arnold – who first discredited and then readmitted the Elizabethans – and Swinburne. 2. Pro-Renaissance triumphalism oozes from every line in Taine’s long exposé, written during the nineteenth-century positivist period.3 Art reflects factual reality, and imagination models itself on the state of society; so a wealthy society has, as its prerogative, a wealthy art-form. When an empty and sclerotized ideal declines, the old love for pagan values is normally revivified. Where unhappiness rules – said Taine, causing one to recall Marx’s dictums – one turns for comfort to another sphere. The Middle Ages ended at the same time the era of danger at sight, despatched thanks to greater physical safety and to the citizen’s increased personal security. Taine exaggerates and falsifies reality, however, when he evokes a sinful era devoted to the abstract cult of classicism, and most significantly postpones the Reformation to a later chapter, without providing or prefiguring connecting links between the two moments or poles of the sixteenth century. He unhesitatingly defends the Renaissance against the Middle Ages, but he is also a Lutheran and at heart a Puritan who describes Italian corruption and dissolute behaviour at the beginning of the sixteenth century with the same scandal as an Englishman. A moral and historical mechanism ordered that such a disgraceful state of affairs should be put a stop to or that the healthy cells be extracted and tempered by other, equally healthy ones. Taine’s comparison between Dürer and Raphael is too clear-cut, made as it is to underline medieval indifference to the beauty of the body.4 Taine 3 4

TAI, vol. 1, 230ff. A kind of fixation, in Praz, is the distinction between northern Renaissance, which reutilizes Gothic shapes, and continental and southern Renaissance. Northern

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ends by cutting off his nose to spite his face, as Lutheran Reform brought back medieval ideals into fashion, precisely those against which the English Renaissance had risen up. Burckhardt, for his part, called attention to a widespread absence of religious feeling in the Renaissance – which is not the case, at first sight, in the English Renaissance –5 and upheld his thesis of an era of growing individualism, finding that its cause was the overbearing despotism, which although it generated individualistic despots also engendered rebels and resistors who were just as individualistic. The risk was that the cause was being taken for the effect and vice versa, as well as not providing a satisfactory explanation as to why there were so many individualists. Walter Pater used this reasoning to produce his concept of the multi-faceted, versatile Renaissance man. 3. The praise heaped on the Renaissance by the Victorians, by the Decadent movement and by the Edwardians became threadbare and was, over the twentieth century, curtailed, from Modernism onwards. The Victorians did not base their judgements on reasoned and well-founded literary or aesthetic theories. Fairly summary criteria for judgements were originality, the centralization of the subject, a widespread obsession with history, the delusion that the protagonists were living people. An overall view that was very polemical, revisionist, provocative and challenging, and that pitted itself against all the cornerstones normally attributed to the Renaissance, was that of C. S. Lewis’s in about sixty closely printed pages which amount to a small monograph, or pamphlet setting forth a precise and well articulated interpretative proposal.6 It was a tremendous, Occam-like shaving away of repetitive commonplaces and traditional interpretations, and one that naturally, all too often, was too paradoxical not to be attacked. It plunged into the opposite kind of deformation to the

5

6

Renaissance revelled in horror, in putrefying, decaying bodies, which did not relate very well to the ideal of a beautiful, perfect and, above all, living body. Regarding the distorting view of certain scholars who stress the lack of religious feeling during the Renaissance, see the art historian E. Gombrich’s essay, ‘The Renaissance – Period or Movement?’, in Background to the English Renaissance: Introductory Lectures, London 1974, 9–30. Gombrich lays great emphasis, as a matter of fact, on ‘the importance of the religious ingredient’. ELS, 1–65. The whole volume had been compiled from a series of lectures delivered in 1944.

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one into which Taine had fallen, by being too pro-medieval and missing all necessary objectivity. Lewis’s revisionist scrutiny of the basic pivots of the Renaissance movement starts by refuting the fundamental bearing of the heliocentric astronomical theories of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, which Lewis states are not in most sixteenth-century writings as important, intrinsic and given for granted as is generally believed. Humanism, he adds, was hostile to science and the Florentine Platonists continued, in fact, to believe in magic and astrology.7 They were moreover superstitious and, in a certain sense, pagan, when they considered the atmosphere peopled by angelic or mildly diabolical presences. Lewis’s second shocking point was that the recent geographical discoveries (which are ‘a record of failures and second bests’) electrified merchants and politicians, but were placidly ignored by the literary world, wherefore references to travels in literature are both rare and haphazard. A lucid analysis is provided, however, for the two key terms, Puritan and humanist, which are nearly always misunderstood or distorted in common parlance. Puritan does not mean ascetic or rigorous, nor does humanist mean the opposite. It must be recalled, with Lewis, that the Puritans originally meant to abolish the institution of episcopacy and remodel the English Church according to Calvin’s instructions addressed to the Church of Geneva, which adhered theologically to justification by faith. The humanists were, on the other hand, the first classical scholars. According to Lewis, this kind of classicism was not the incubator of the great post-1590 literary age. It was the humanists who had dubbed medieval Latin as rude and barbaric. The Middle Ages can even claim first place, compared with the humanists, as regards intrinsic results in the philosophical field. Renaissance Latinists were scholastic and pedantic imitators of a hypothetic Ciceronian style. They posed as cultured men and sought sophistication. Lewis’s final verdict defies diplomacy: there is no expansion or freedom in humanism, which is a philistine and obscurantist movement. He is even more severe concerning the degeneration of classicism in Dryden at the end of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the eighteenth. Regarding the Puritans, he opines that one is grossly mistaken in thinking that they devoted themselves to mortifying the 7

Gombrich says this too in his essay mentioned in n. 5.

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flesh and embraced renunciation and asceticism: they were very sensual and commended sexually consummated matrimony as much as the Catholics praised virginity. And what about Machiavelli? His only importance was his involvement in the creation of the Machiavellian villain, who is not as statistically frequent as the everyday villain. On page 55, Lewis finally denies the plausibility of Renaissance as a term itself (which he, in fact, never uses), as excessively opaque and subject to distortion of meaning. It is of course true that we owe the coining of this term to the Renaissance men themselves and to their prejudiced historical vision. Thereafter, as if adopting a psychological mechanism that he would probably have detested, Lewis sounds suspicious of any reduction of the term Renaissance within a precise framework, capable of defining the global meaning of the word; and leaves his readers with a plethora of open-ended, irresolvable contradictions or aporias, mistrustful of a, or tout court of any, philosophy of history. 4. A form of resistance against the dualistic or Manichaean attitude which viewed the Renaissance as often taking precedence over the Middle Ages has been that of those who not so much place the beginning of the Renaissance earlier, as place the end of the Middle Ages later. Whereas Trevelyan situated the end of the Middle Ages around the Industrial Revolution, Curtius, with Teutonic thoroughness, identified its exclusively literary, figurative and iconic modes (renaming them ‘schemes’) that lead to the same conclusion from another viewpoint. Tillyard’s8 theses in his The Elizabethan World Picture are two: that Elizabethan literature works and signifies against the backdrop of the conflict between order and disorder, and that this order was conceived in a three-fold figurative manner, that is, as a chain, a series of correspondences and a dance.9 However, this view does not clash with that believed in in the Middle Ages: rather it is an elaboration of it, and Tillyard does not suggest any break but points out a continuum. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance are not for him two counterpoised cultural types, as Lotman would argue about thirty years later. Those components form an isotopy, in the sense that they are echoed 8 9

See § 36.6, n. 7. Orchestra by John Davies (§ 71.2) is considered by Tillyard ‘the perfect epitome of the universe seen as a dance’ (111).

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not only by the most eminent Elizabethan literary protagonists, but also by the less well-known and even by the most obscure. It is a continuum that extends, as Tillyard also holds, well beyond the strictly accepted temporal boundaries of the age, well up to the end of the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment started to rationalize what had been purely produced by the imagination and, finding it ridiculous, refuted it. In his Social History of Art (1951), Arnold Hauser disagreed with Burckhardt’s definition of the Renaissance as the expression of untrammelled, epicurean individualism, which was a definition coined by the Enlightenment and by liberal Romanticism (accompanied by criticisms levelled at Michelet and Pater). He too saw the Renaissance, from his viewpoint, as a continuation of the Middle Ages and stressed the cult of the organic form, of totality, of the refusal of consequentiality, together with a polarization of social motivations and the birth in Italy of a monetary civilization, as founding aspects of this view. Later Marxists, however, situated a watershed in the Renaissance, pointing to a transition from an organic to a fragmentary history, from faith to materialistic acquisitiveness, from man as fulfilled by his work to man alienated by it, or even from God to one’s inner self. In the last fifty or sixty years, the way the Elizabethan era has been received has got out of hand and it is impossible to even attempt some kind of synthesis, as the most varied ideologies and views clash into each other at ever increasing speed. Some other immediately pre- and post-war tendencies were the hyper-sophisticated linguistic and formalistic analysis of sixteenth-century texts heralded by Empson, the New Criticism, formalism, Marxism and structuralism. The postmodern in which we are living has applied all its correlated and well-known grids to the Elizabethan era as well. At present, the English Renaissance seems to be defined as the era of ‘self-awareness’ and of ‘self-fashioning’, as per a very authoritative book by S. Greenblatt.10 Its episteme is seen to be based on the interpenetration of pragmatism and idealism, or on the macrocosm being reflected by the microcosm and therefore on the principle of universal harmony – which is always somewhat precarious, and thus differs very little from the Baroque concept of discordia concors. 10

§ 56.3 n. 3.

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§ 38. English humanism and the Renaissance III: The arts It would be premature to introduce here a discussion of the interrelations, correlations and repercussions between Elizabethan literature, even in its widest temporal context, and the vicissitudes of European visual arts. England received and re-elaborated the classicist literary culture at almost the same time as the rest of continental Europe, but this did not occur in the pictorial or architectural fields. It was excluded from the immediate developments of the Renaissance and late Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerism, all of which evolved on the Continent but not in England, for the very simple reason that there was no English Counter-Reformation to generate such developments. Holbein, from Germany – the first painter, in actual fact the first and only great artist acquired and adopted by the English up to the Restoration – was thirty years old when he came to England in 1526, recommended by Erasmus; but he had to stop painting holy themes, like the family of the Burgermeister of Basle kneeling in front of the Madonna. Painting and sculpture were hit by an identity crisis after the advent of the Reformation and were the victims of a climate of dissuasion due to the stigma of Papist idolatry which was attributed to paintings of holy persons. What was left, however, was the second natural milieu for painting, the palaces of the nobles. Thus Holbein, who was also hired as a decorator and designer of furniture and jewellery, specialized in the kind of ‘analytical’, impassive, coldly observant portraits of prelates, diplomats, merchants and intellectuals (like Thomas More and Erasmus himself ) and members of the royal family, including Henry VIII and his queens, against single colour backgrounds, or crowded with the bric-à-brac associated with the subject’s role in life.1 At Holbein’s death, no English painting school had been born, so no remarkable painter had emerged, nor were any others invited to Elizabeth’s court. The only indigenous painter to emerge from an anonymous state during Elizabeth’s and James I’s reign was Nicholas Hilliard, whose colouristic traits differ markedly and are almost the opposite of Holbein’s because of their less unctuous consistency 1

If Holbein can boast some special pictorial gift, it is in the way he paints the look and eyes of his subject: sometimes the eyes are questioning, absorbed, lost in reflection, sardonic, disbelieving, glassy, spent, or deliberately torpid, astonished, resigned.

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and pigmentation.2 He handles a different palette. And his ovals, cameos and roundels remind one of sketches or drawings, charcoal or watercolour paintings. He too was a portrait painter and could not have been anything else; his human figures are elegant, thread-like silhouettes, dressed in floral or geometrical patterned clothes, like his Young Man among the Roses, a dainty, young, ‘Sydney-like’ dandy, with his right leg gracefully crossed over his left in close-fitting, beige hose, and whose curly head, nonchalantly leaning against the tree, is too small, compared with the rest of his body. Typical sixteenth-century English art is found rather in the surrogate form of friezes, miniatures, traceries in the battlements of university colleges, in the lesser forms of art in clothes design, dress-making and jewellery, fountains or gardens. During Elizabeth’s reign any major edification of new churches did not take place, as the centre of interest was the residence of the well-to-do, and it was there or in the family chapel of the dissenter that daily religious services or functions took place and the Bible read out. Inigo Jones, an inventive and effective director and scene manager for masques from 1615, became the architect and designer of Palladian-style buildings. A magnificent royal palace, modelled on the Escorial or the Louvre, designed in 1638 for Charles I, was, however, never built, as too expensive. 2. As for music, the situation was totally different, music being one of the most important aspects and metaphors of the Elizabethan philosophy of life. The idea of musical harmony applied both vertically – as an image of the relationship between the micro- and macrocosm (the music of the spheres) – as well as horizontally, as it stood for a peaceful order or hierarchy (the Shakespearean ‘degree’) amongst the various social components and institutions. Architecture, too, was inspired, in its own sense, by musical harmony. At Elizabeth’s death English music had rapidly achieved one of its unrepeatable and most absolute historical peaks, and composers and musicians emigrated to the Continent (like Byrd and Dowland) to teach, instead of merely learning and being tributaries.3 One must remember 2 3

The only sculptor we know much about, who specialized chiefly in funeral monuments, was Epiphanius Evesham. A sign of the times, pointing to a temporary decline, was the passing, over the space of two years, of Orlando Gibbons and Byrd, Gibbons dying in 1625, like James I.

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that there were no religious impediments operating for music, as the new reformed liturgy was in English and musicians could and had to set music to it. The profane use of music became a vital part of court entertainment and both Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth (who played the virginals very well) were more than just dilettante musicians. The Chapel Royal, which in Henry VIII’s time boasted a choir of more than fifty cantors plus the young boy singers, gave a decisive impulse to the musical life of the nation. With Anglicanism, sung masses were reduced and sung matins and evensong introduced, along with a new hymnal genre that was dubbed anthem, although the composers floundered around between Catholicism and Anglicanism, trusting in their royal patron’s indulgence, which was nearly always granted. A new series of English compositional genres were born, endowed with very diversified formal features: monodic, polyphonic, solos, accompanied and choral, played on instruments, some of which, in the space of a century, were no longer stable parts of orchestras or chamber groups, such as the recorder, the theorbo or the virginals – that is, the predecessor of the clavichord –4 together with the lute and the viola, the latter being the main instrument used in English Renaissance music. Music benefitted secular poetry and vice versa, due to the symbiosis that grew up between great poets and great musicians, which roles were sometimes played by the same person, as in the case of Thomas Campion. Byrd composed three books of profane songs based on Sidney’s texts, and Thomas Morley set a Shakespearean song to music. Madrigals to be sung unaccompanied by instruments spread throughout England while Monteverdi’s madrigal books became famous.5 English opera was to be born officially in 1656 or in 1683, but the music historian E. Blom says more than once that England

4

The cittern, a kind of lute, as small as a ukulele, was found in barbers’ shops, where clients would play it, while waiting to be served (E. Blom, Music in England, Harmondsworth 1942, 41). 5 Blom, op. cit., 47, mentions the publication, in 1588, of fifty-seven Italian madrigals in Musica transalpina by the English publisher Nicholas Yonge. On the diffusion of Monteverdian declamation and recitative towards the beginning of the seventeenth century (and thanks to the possible contribution of Monteverdi’s pupil, Walter Porter), see Blom, op. cit., 57–8.

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could have claimed the prize as the founding nation for opera, if only the theatres had not been monopolized by the playwrights. § 39. More* Humour is not normally the first saintly quality one thinks of, and it is hardly ever what characterizes a martyred saint who ends up on the scaffold, as Thomas More (1477 or 1478–1535 – a Catholic saint after 1935) did. The many biographies written about him by direct witnesses surprisingly depict him as a smiling, witty, somewhat vague, infinitely good-humoured and nonchalantly unconcerned person. More seems to have seen life as a divine joke, in which he knowingly played out his part. That his life had been a comedy or a tragicomedy, was immediately perceived by the anonymous playwright who was the author of Sir Thomas More, written, even if not produced, during the last ten years of the sixteenth century. This play, which is the object of hot debates between scholars and philologists (as one of the *

Complete Works, various editors, 15 vols, New Haven, CT 1963–1997, replaces all preceding editions, ancient and/or modern. Selected Writings, ed. J. Thornton and S. Varenne, New York 2003. The first biography, written by More’s son-in-law, W. Roper (Paris 1626), which started off the cult tribute to the saint’s relics, was judged by Chambers 1935, listed below, as ‘the most perfect little biography in the English language’ (BAUGH, vol. II, 338). It was followed by the Latin biography by T. Stapleton in 1558 (translated into English as The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, London 1928). R. W. Chambers, Thomas More, London 1935; J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, Princeton, NJ 1952, E. E. Reynolds, Sir Thomas More, London 1965, Thomas More and Erasmus, London 1965, and The Field is Won: The Life and Death of Saint Thomas More, London 1968; Twentieth Century Interpretations of Utopia, ed. W. Nelson, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; A. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence, New Haven, CT 1983; G. M. Logan, The Meaning of More’s Utopia, Princeton, NJ 1983; R. Marius, Thomas More: A Biography, New York 1984; L. Martz, Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man, New Haven, CT 1990; P. Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More, London 1998; J. Guy, Thomas More, London 2000. A large number of early twentieth-century Italian critics showed a foreseeably keen interest in More, such as A. Castelli with two books, Sugli scritti di San Tommaso Moro and San Tommaso Moro e l’umanesimo inglese, both published in Milano 1946. See also Lettere di Tommaso Moro, edited by Castelli and re-edited by F. Rognoni, Milano 2008, with a substantial introduction (9–49) on the most recent directions taken by More’s critics.

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scenes could have been written by Shakespeare)1 does nonetheless justice to the dramatic character, in its strictest dramaturgical sense, of the life of the saint. More could have effectively become a playwright. He had been, like Shakespeare, an actor for some time and a playwright, possessing the necessary talent for it, since, as is said, he had belonged in his boyhood to John Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s circle, where the pupils used to amuse each other by improvising plays. As his first biographer reports, More would join these companies and, without having studied the part, would take the stage and improvise, arousing the onlookers’ admiration. Reaching later adolescence, youth and his early manhood years, More had, perforce, to put this pastime aside. He was Linacre’s and Grocyn’s student at Oxford, then read law in London (he was the son of a lawyer), but also the author of ‘short plays’; and he weighed the possibility of taking orders as a Carthusian monk, but eventually accepted Colet’s advice and married. It is emblematic that – as it were, according to a Restoration comedy – he chose the elder of two sisters, although in love with the younger, so as not to hurt the elder sister’s feelings. He became a member of Parliament in 1504, encouraged Henry VII to adopt policies in favour of dispossessed farmers and overtaxed subjects, and objected to the payment of the dowry of the king’s daughter, who was to be married to the Scottish king, being made by the tax-payers. More’s father was briefly imprisoned at the Tower and Thomas prudently judged it best to withdraw from public life. Henry VIII, however, started to take a liking to him and called him to court, exhorting him to fight against Luther’s and Tyndale’s ‘pestilential sect’. Their friendship was dissolved by More’s intransigent views concerning the independence of the clergy from political power. He renounced his Chancellorship in 1532, and in 1534 was subjected to interrogation at Lambeth Palace regarding the Act of Supremacy, which he refused to sign although his wife begged him to give it his formal assent. He was imprisoned for fifteen months in the Tower of London and was beheaded a few days after the execution 1

Go also to TLS, 27 July 2012, 24–5, and see Volume 2, § 49.1, for Shakespeare’s collaboration as an author. Neither should one forget the play on More written in the twentieth century by Robert Bolt, A Man for all Seasons, an epithet used by one of More’s contemporaries to indicate what I have just said, his changing humours.

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of another martyr, John Fisher. During the last hours of his life he wrote messages to his daughter using pieces of coal on scraps of paper. His death could have been dramatized by a master of macabre humour, evoking the vigils preceding public executions, like Shakespeare. His bantering request, addressed to the executioner, Sir William Kingston, as he clambered onto the swaying scaffold, is legendary: ‘I pray you, I pray you, Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down I can shift for myself ’. 2. Most of More’s works, owing to his own high public offices, are of a theological, historical, polemical or controversial nature. A biography of Pico della Mirandola was translated by him into Latin and into English from the original Italian penned by the nephew of the (adoptive) Florentine. More also compiled a history of Richard III and Henry V, edited an anthology of Greek poets which he translated with William Lyly; above all, if we view things in perspective, he Englished with Erasmus some passages from Lucian’s dialogues. All of these are secondary literary labours, except for the fragmentary (and not unconditionally attributed to him) Richard III. The majority of More’s writings, including his Utopia, are in fact in Latin. This takes us back to our starting point, as More’s works always involve a polyglot, punning, etymologically sourced subtext. More, as well as Erasmus, was exhilarated by the novel possibilities afforded by ancient languages, those of playing with parts and fragments of words, which could be freely detached, separated, recomposed and above all joined together. Before his fortieth year More had already given proof of his eclectic interests and of his ventures into the spheres of eccentric or extravagant literature.2 His Utopia itself is a jest, a fantasy and a semidramatic text, in which More, or one might say one More, envisages another self and, as if he were not himself, watches him taking part in a learned discussion. Erasmus’ most famous work was written in More’s house and moria is the Greek and Latin word for Folly; but More is also Morus, that is, a ‘madman’. Utopia must earn its place in the canon of a History of English Literature, both because of its 2

Among More’s not very many poems there is a lament (in the first person, as if from the grave) of Elizabeth, Henry VII’s consort, and a verse tale ‘of the officer of the judiciary who wanted to become a friar’, the subject of which vaguely reminds one of one of Chaucer’s fabliaux, and, in the versification, closely recalls Skelton.

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literary significance in the immediately successive translation (1551) into English by the London goldsmith Ralph Robynson, as well as because it was an unavoidable step in the spiritual development of the nation; and because it is one of the first ‘banquets of languages’. More was bilingual in the same way that Beckett and James Joyce would be, and this is shown by the edition of Pico’s life, with the original text printed opposite his English translation; only a small detail prevented him, probably, from providing his opus maius with a translation printed opposite. 3 As it was translated by a contemporary, we can at least call it an Anglo-Latin work, in the same way as Beckett’s works are Anglo-French or Franco-English. The life of Richard III was translated by More himself, from Latin into English. I therefore disagree with the purists, who, in a strangely shortsighted fashion, severely dismiss Utopia in a few lines inasmuch as written in Latin, reserving some moderate praise for the history of Richard III – which however, they add, always loses ground when compared with Berners’s or Fisher’s historical works. 3. On More qua creative writer, therefore, literary critics are reticent, while historians decline to delve further into the subject – not only because his complete works are frightening and unmanageable in quantitative terms, and not only because they are weighed down by outdated controversies and mostly in Latin to boot. His English writings themselves fail by common consent – including his Catholic and Anglo-Catholic supporters – owing to intrinsic literary and stylistic defects. He was a multifaceted writer, but – in the words of C. S. Lewis – none of these facets approached perfect expression. Now, the idea of a More impersonating a variety of roles, an actor therefore, and one capable of showing the reader, by means of his written words, different sides and aspects of a polyhedron – and at the same time the alternation of seriousness and jocularity as if in a ‘composite’ or modular art – was put forward over half a century ago in the superb, passionate, very detailed treatment by C. S. Lewis himself in his history of sixteenth-century literature.4 Here Lewis examines More’s 3 4

I refer of course to his death: ELS, 170, holds, however, that he did not want it translated, as he had gradually changed his mind, especially regarding tolerance. ELS, 165–81.

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English works, plus Utopia and part of the Richard III biography, one of whose assets, despite several defects, is for him ‘a sense of tragedy and a sense of humour’. Lewis also observes that Utopia was already considered primarily as a comic text by Erasmus and other contemporaries. If it is an inventive text, if it is fiction, it is not a serious work, nor a serious philosophical treatise. Here we have the first instance of a composite art, as Utopia displays its comic and its serious elements, which, in turn, have to be scrutinized to ascertain their levels of seriousness. Lewis was the first to unearth this subterranean current in the text, the continual and imperceptible oscillations of register, swaying from extreme seriousness to broad facetiousness, and thus switching from the heuristic to the jesting mode. He rightly detects a contradiction in this type of literary statute. Tolerance as a rule of life and as ideological position would cease to be More’s main virtue after Utopia; however the work was written before events urged him to adjust his thought, instilling therein an unexpected turn towards authoritarianism. Utopia is More’s culminating literary achievement, but Lewis shows it to be so by delving punctiliously into the deficiencies of his other polemical and devotional works, in which the writer appears to change personality, so to speak, or, rather, to bring to the fore different aspects of his self – which, however, were not as developed as his humorous vein. One finds that it is always his humorous elements and infiltrations that act as yeast in a rather arid, dull text. It is his ‘merry tales’ and their comical anecdotal interpolations that win one over. Even pure controversy is organized in dramatically structured dialogue form, which includes humorous twists in order to achieve the kind of concrete representation that More was a past master at. He was, as I have already mentioned, an innately theatrical animal. Lewis accurately and punctiliously identifies and extracts the dramatic elements in More’s minor works that emerge, please and make an impression, as in the representation of purgatorial torments (in which he characteristically adopts a serious mien, albeit spiced with terrifying and grotesque comedy). However, Lewis ruthlessly demolishes More’s voluminous apologetic works,5 composed a few months before 5

More falls into the same argumentative trap that he criticized in the first book of Utopia regarding the debate between Hythlodaeus and the other contender: he always

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his death, except for the anecdotes, which are always fresh, as it was in the latter that the writer’s true talent lay. To conclude this premise, one can agree with Lewis that More is one of the many English humorists, even one of the most vulgar, one of those sometimes dubbed ‘cockney humorists’, who delighted in hurling streams of insults; and we are only surprised that Lewis makes no mention of Skelton and only should hint at the Marprelate Tracts and Nashe. 4. Utopia, edited by Erasmus (under the heading of De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia), was published in Latin in Louvain in 1516, seven years after Henry VIII came to the throne. By writing in such an elitist language More, then undersheriff or municipal court judge, was naturally addressing the intelligentsia and the courtly circles. The choice of language arose from desire to persuade and admonish, though the purport of the book was firmly critical towards certain national directives. By the time it was translated into English in 1551, its function had become somewhat bitterly nostalgic. In the meantime, German, French and Italian translations had been published. In 1516 Utopia was the latest in a series of European tutorial or advisory writings (two of the most recent were written by Francesco Patrizi and Giovanni Pontano), addressed to the ruler by his tutor or by his first councillor. It belonged to the category of manuals of manners, of duties, of commandments, compiled and offered to the sovereign since Chaucer’s times. The English name that first comes to mind is that of Hoccleve. Machiavelli’s Prince had added to the series, and provoked other treatises of impassioned dissuasion, two by Elyot and by Erasmus. In More’s case, however, the radical innovation was the use of a language ad usum delphini, or an oratio obliqua. In 1516, or shortly beforehand, the emergency had not yet arisen and More, who was still serene, could indulge in utile dulci miscere (or, as he writes in a note for the first edition, in ‘amusing while instructing’, or in the salutaris and festivus). The diatribe is enclosed in Utopia within a frame and masked by a game, a refined, ‘humanistic’ game, a game that is played with a language that had just been learnt and had been enriched by fanciful and macaronic sums up every single point put forward by the opposing side, so as to confute them more thoroughly.

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neologisms (which it lent itself to), with More as if inviting his learned friends to take pleasure in deciphering them. The Utopian language is supposed to derive from the Persian (the Utopians’ God is called Mithras), but the fact that the Utopians become Greek scholars and study Greek literature proves that the germ has ripened and is the sign of a profitable historical continuum. The inventor of science fiction and of travel accounts to imaginary dream worlds is Lucian of Samosata, and More is certainly familiar with his writings; he imitates Plato’s dialogue format in his discourses, but inserts echoes of the first explorers’ accounts and above all of Vespucci’s four reports. Utopia is obviously a key point, or alpha for all the successive, multifarious and very popular and polyglot literature on the inevitable degeneration of actual societies, despite the purity of the original design. 5. The argumentative contents is the result of a kind of dissimulated mimetic situation. More had been in Antwerp in 1515 on a diplomatic mission, when in the company of a local friend, as he says, he had spotted a wrinkled, bearded Portuguese navigator outside a church. He immediately seeks him out and becomes acquainted with him, and an exchange of opinions ensues. Pressed by More’s questions, the sailor proves to be a scholarly, balanced and provocative philosopher or student of politics. Such a structural device, of a text within a text, will function up to the end of the work, with an oscillation between exhibited mimetic episodes and formalization, that is, between quotations from the mariner in inverted commas and the comments by the initial narrator – More himself. More is reporting another person’s statements, opinions and yarns, inserting fairly non-committal, phatic comments, and rare signs of approval, and exploiting the same kind of play – play on the margins of the problematic reliability of the monologuer – that we shall find in Browning. He does not deliver unmistakable first-person messages, but makes them relative and disputable by means, for instance, of unsophisticated argumentations, or by distancing himself occasionally from a certain statement. The imprudence of sentences such as ‘More thinks that’, ‘More approves’ and others was habitual in critical literature on Utopia up to a short time ago. The work ends in an ‘open’ fashion, with More confessing that he is unable to share everything that Hythlodaeus has stated. Divided into two books, Utopia

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is in the first – which, as written later, was added as a preamble – a document of enormous importance, as historians use it to prove, thanks to a witness like More, the repercussions of the forced eviction of the farming population from the countryside, due to the conversion of arable land into pasture, and the consequent enrichment of the cattle and sheep owners, or producers and weavers of woollen cloth, and the expulsion from the land of farm labourers and hunger-struck farm-hands, who could find no way of procuring food save by stealing. These were harshly punished by penalties that could even include death. Hythlodaeus approves and recommends a first series of tolerant measures by applying a pre-Foucaultian kind of critique.6 Stealing must be prevented, not punished after the crime; and, in any case, penalties should be mild, as the thieving is caused by force majeure. What else are these farm labourers to do, if they are dying of hunger and nobody does anything about it? The first book closes with Hythlodaeus’s bitterly sceptical doubt as to whether any efficient improvements can be implemented, in view of the national monarchies’ policies, to which he adds a passionate plea to the king, begging him to favour and guarantee his subjects’ welfare, instead of behaving like a rapacious bird of prey, tearing the flesh from their bones. At this point, we are already induced to realize that Hythlodaeus is not merely voicing More’s own enlightened, balanced views.7 Those of Hythlodaeus are, in fact, only presented as one of the possible solutions to the problem. He is the detached, disenchanted, frankly 6

7

Some statements are reactionary and not much thought through, while others are prodigious intuitions, giving proof of a social awareness that was only to appear centuries later. More, sounding – here at least – as a morally non-dogmatic Catholic, has Hythlodaeus admit divorce in the case of incompatibility between spouses, suicide in the case of incurable diseases, and religious tolerance. Women are allowed to join the clergy. Not for nothing does Hythlodaeus etymologically mean ‘blusterer’ or ‘fibber’. More the parodist was probably parodied by Joyce in the sixteenth episode of Ulysses. More is like a Stephen to whom a Bloom (Peter Giles) introduces an exotic and eloquent narrator of nautical adventures; in that sixteenth episode Joyce’s Murphy is a fountain of boastful, inaccurate words, as Hythlodaeus’ partly are. The latter is purposely compared to Ulysses in the text, and he knows Greek. Scylla and the Laestrygonians are also mentioned.

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pessimistic outsider, and the object of an implied criticism because he abandons ship during a storm – and does not act, but merely complains and demolishes.8 6. In Utopia the argumentative core is, naturally, the second book, which, with a continuing semblance of diegesis (the post-prandial conversation in the garden), and now in the form not of a dialogue but of a Platonic monologue, recounts Hythlodaeus’ voyage to Utopia. The last words of the first book act as prelude to the second, when the need to abolish private property and bring about equality is blatantly proclaimed. The characteristics of Utopia are those of a restored, renovated, dream-like England. One must remember that nobody, in 1516, could have imagined that English economy would develop on an industrial level. Utopia has an agricultural economy, but the wearisome task of working the fields is not for a person’s whole life, but must be carried out by all citizens in rotation; after a certain time – two years – the farm labourers move to the towns to attend to intellectual activities. Power is in the hands of an elected governor, assisted by a council of wise men who can be deposed only if they are certifiably recognized as tyrants. All posts last for a year only. In all present or future utopias one of the basic principles is that an indestructible and perfect harmony prevails among all the subjects, and that what is described and experimented is Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds. In Utopia and in all future utopian writers this is possible because tasks and duties are harmoniously shared, profit-making and greed are eliminated and a welfare state has been created. One could however object: how far is the sharing of tasks a free and joyous personal choice and how far is it the result of coercion? Moreover, why should an intellectual caste be exempted from manual work? Utopia is a regime that is obliged to remedy the minor disadvantages of autarchy, ensuring demographic balance by colonization. All post-More utopias would agree in condemning the disastrous consequences of adopting a monetary economy, inasmuch as it is recognized as the starting point for the automatic separation of the haves from the have-nots. A key point, after More, was to return to a society 8

He thus masks the dilemma, between the contemplative and the active life, which haunted continental humanism.

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with no currency or circulating coinage. All the various goods, produced daily by families, are brought to the market, at the centre of each of the fifty-five Utopian towns, and are re-distributed, providing each family with their daily requirements without the exchange of monetary payments. By concentrating all the community’s efforts, communal mess-halls are set up and, as regards provisions for the public health, the sick are lovingly cared for in the hospitals. Nobody works for more than six hours a day, which is possible if everybody works and everyone struggles to eradicate idleness; the rest of the day is dedicated to rest and reading. 7. As Hythlodaeus continues to describe this perfect state, we learn more about how the whole organism functions. Justice? There is practically no need for a judicial apparatus, although the penalty for anyone breaking the law of one for all and all for one, is slavery, that is, the deprivation of one’s freedom.9 The criticism one could level at any future Utopia is the precautionary elimination of any possible dissent, as well as of the custom of ignoring the fact that projects elaborated on a theoretical basis are sometimes difficult to put into practice. All Utopias are basically similar and, if anything, strike us because of some of their more fantastical distortions, as in the case of the master of this kind of exploit, Samuel Butler, followed by H. G. Wells, almost four centuries later. One of the most curious and sardonically witty innovations, is the reversal in Utopia of the value of precious metals, such as silver and gold, in favour of iron: nature is supposed to have wisely concealed under the earth, at unreachable depths, what is unusable and of no value. Utopians have thus clearly understood that gold is trinket material or vile metal, and they have used it, as a countermeasure, to make urinals or the chains of slaves. The second, surprising, imaginative variant concerns marriage. More says, or gets Hythlodaeus to say, that all marriages are successful in Utopia, and that, if incompatibility is revealed or matures, divorce is permitted. Before marriage, the custom is for the two future spouses to show themselves to each other, naked, in order to check whether their bodies conceal some kind of malformation

9

The enlightened More cannot quite get to the point of reversing this remnant of a conservative ideology.

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or other trait displeasing to one or the other.10 The closing pages are dedicated to war and religion. Utopia is against war, as a system and offensive means of annexing colonies; war is only admissible for protective ends and as legitimate defence.11 More’s tolerance manages to get Hythlodaeus to say that all religions have a common origin, as they recognize a divine, provident creator, a moral law and some future prize for a virtuous life, in afterlife. The Utopians are not totally unaware of a revealed faith, of which Hythlodaeus has been the carrier and missionary. When he departs, Utopia is in the process of becoming Christian, like many of the colonies, in which Christianity merged with the native religions.12 As a true humanist, dissociating himself from the widespread polemic against the clergy, More imagines a fairly restricted caste of upright, honourable priests.13 At any rate, life’s objective, in Utopia, is ‘honest and decent pleasure’ (which does not exclude the frankly corporal and physiological pleasures, such as evacuating, copulating and scratching oneself ). Any unnecessary privation is ‘extreme folly’. § 40. Conduct books* Nowadays we would not define political treatises, handbooks of rhetoric, or the instructions for the use of any manual or mechanical instrument, 10 11

12 13

The island itself, in very ancient times, used to be part of a continent, but the founder of Utopia had a fifteen mile wide channel dug, to separate Utopia from the mainland forever. The Zapoletes are the Swiss mercenaries, whom Utopians charge with their bloody wars, also involving ethnic cleansing. Money and monetary economy are unknown in Utopia: money, accumulated in neighbouring countries, is set aside to pay mercenaries and to foment wars between evil populations. Utopian priests, therefore, wear copes made out of multi-coloured birds’ feathers. The lawyer’s profession is banned and everybody defends him/herself.

* Elyot’s The Governor, ed. H. H. S. Croft, 2 vols, London 1880, and, with modernized spelling, ed. S. E. Lehmberg, London 1907, 1962. S. E. Lehmberg, Sir Thomas Elyot, Tudor Humanist, Austin, TX 1960; J. M. Major, Sir Thomas Elyot and Renaissance Humanism, Lincoln, NE 1964. Works by Ascham, ed. J. A. Giles, 4 vols, London 1864–1865; English works only, ed. W. Aldis Wright, Cambridge 1904, 1970. Edition with modernized spelling of The Schoolmaster, ed. L. V. Ryan, Charlottesville, VA

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or even a guide to some kind of sport, as literary productions, save in a few isolated and indirect cases. We can and must do it when dealing with sixteenth-century English culture for reasons that are intrinsic to the development of the literary language. When we analyse the literature of this century, the traditional items pertaining to prose production, such as fiction, are absent. And we only find prose employed for instrumental ends. Sixteenth-century treatises, however, gradually build up the vernacular, thanks to which narrative prose itself will flow into action, when Lyly and Nashe will compose their first inventive plots, introducing the short story and the novel in prose (only Malory had previously used prose and not verse to compose his romances). Before 1570, having already considered More, there are four main prose-writers, who all agree as to the inferiority and shortcomings of the English language as an expressive medium, and are animated by the courage to deal unflinchingly with the problem. What they share is that they are all linguists, lexicographers, rhetoricians, educators and pedagogues who reflect in their works in English the search for a modern, flexible, refined means of expression. Elyot is the first to confront a situation that had faced Italian writers over two centuries earlier. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio also wrote their dissertations and erudite or theoretic treatises in Latin, sometimes using it to write to their learned colleagues, whilst they used the vulgar tongue for poetry and short stories. English writers had to choose between two main alternatives: whether to make English more or less Latinized. In the first case, one injects new words, inasmuch as English is recognized as being insufficient and one stuffs it with Latinisms. In the second, opposite, case, one adopts the basic historical and recurring dodge, dating back to Pecock and being adopted as late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Doughty, of Anglicizing most of the remaining Latin words that had managed to penetrate the English language. A certain confusion as to objectives, or

1967, 1974. L. V. Ryan, Roger Ascham, Stanford, CA 1963; G. Miglior, Roger Ascham. La dottrina umanistica inglese e la sperimentazione nella prosa letteraria intorno alla metà del Cinquecento, Bari 1975. On the fortunes of the literature of the English gentleman in this period, see R. Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, Urbana, IL 1929, 1956.

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simply because of real difficulties in achieving a balance, causes the language that describes these processes to be tortuous and contrary to the proclaimed premises, inasmuch as it was mostly either excessively Latinate or irritatingly artificial. Put simply, by fighting against Euphuism (a style that did not officially exist yet) they were the first to be trapped by it. Absolute purists challenged moderate purists. Sir John Cheke (1514–1557), the first Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge, was Ascham’s tutor at that university. He was preceptor and Secretary of State for an adamantly Protestant Edward VI, and thus suffered under Mary and, after various vicissitudes, was forced to abjure. He nonetheless possessed an unalterable sense of the state’s stability, which overrode all confessional partisan manoeuvring. One of his English works is a treatise in which he opposes any kind of political renewal, as well as a vibrant condemnation of Kett’s uprising in Kent. As a linguistic reformer, and as a grammarian, he achieved fame for having suggested a number of bizarre spellings, dictated by somewhat incomplete purism, and for having designed a new pronunciation system for the Greek language. A rhetorical manual by Sir Thomas Wilson (ca. 1525–1581), published in 1553 and in 1560 and reprinted several times, admits and utilizes certain Latinisms with one hand, whilst he condemns others with the other. He fled the country during Mary’s reign, and was captured in Rome by the Inquisition. 2. The assignment from which the above-mentioned treatises stemmed was that of the preceptor, tutor, counsellor, royal secretary or university professor. The composition of manuals was a habit that England had acquired since Alfred the Great’s time and was also a feature of European medieval literature, but the Elizabethan age was even more pedagogic and teacheroriented. Every sphere of human activity obeyed its own rules, which had to be drawn up and painstakingly explained. Every sphere fell within a hierarchy of diversely praiseworthy occupations. It often occurred that some unrecognized or despised activity would be defined absolutely indispensable, whilst another would be declared less important or even cancelled. In reality, the main objective – from More to Elyot to Ascham – did not change, it was only shifted. More thought that it was necessary to found a perfect community and he imagined it; Elyot and Ascham felt that it was vital to act on the cause and not on the effect and that one had to forge the kind of gentleman or class or caste of gentlemen who should constitute the

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human force of a healthy, regenerated, central or decentralized administration. It was still a Utopia. The axiom everybody shared was: tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are. The Elizabethan pedagogues were de-Romanizers, and Ascham delivered the final upper-cut to the knightly tradition (or at least attempted to do so) by basing the educational curriculum purely on classical Greek and Roman literature. Plato had overtaken Aristotle, but it was a wishy-washy kind of Platonism which was reflected in the favourite, maieutic style adopted for philosophical reasoning: a dialogue enabling a person to develop, explore a line of thought and conclude a debate. I have already observed that this kind of prose can be classed as midway between pedagogy and literature. It can, however, be classified as literature when the author expands into illustrative anecdotes, examples or personal memories. The impression of irremediable aridity one might gain from it proves untrue. At least the two main prose writers of this period are rather entertaining, due to certain lovable eccentricities or even for curious and not always innocuous fixations. They resemble each other by being afflicted by bees in their bonnets, and could be defined as Elizabethan eccentrics, much as we shall find Romantic writers with the same kind of idiosyncrasies. 3. The Book Named the Governor1 (1531) by Sir Thomas Elyot (ca. 1490–1546) returned to popularity many centuries later, when the critics of his descendant, T. S. Eliot, pounced on it in search of a quotation they had found in one of the Four Quartets.2 It is a sort of second Utopia, in that it portrays an ideal monarch, an impossible incarnation of the sum total of the most perfect and noble qualities to be encountered in the most enlightened rulers of the ancient past. This treatise thus cautiously

1

2

Or more precisely ‘administrator of the public weal’. An eclectic jurist, who also cultivated his extensive interest in medicine, Elyot was a friend of More’s (in whose dwelling Holbein carried out a number of pencil portrait drawings) and a protégé of Wolsey’s; his career in diplomacy and as an erudite scholar was first hindered and then brought to a grinding halt when the two influential statesmen fell from grace. As a Greek scholar, he was a disciple of Linacre. He translated various works from Greek, composed five Platonic dialogues and a medical treatise, as well as editing the first Latin-English Dictionary in 1538. See Volume 7, § 101.3.

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provided a kind of ‘mirror’ to the monarch Elyot dedicated it to, Henry VIII. It is therefore a strangely abstract manual, and except for the dedication, it never refers to the present, nor does it ever provide actual and contemporary examples, save when Elyot alludes to Henry V’s evolution to maturity from a scapegrace, violent and capricious youth.3 It bears an astonishing resemblance to a manual for spiritual exercises; it dwells in fact on the virtues and practices of self-denial, abstinence, self-control and moderation. St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, when one comes to think of it, was written only twenty years later and, on a national level, the explosion of guides to mysticism, which were everywhere to be found throughout the early seventeenth century, was soon to come. A similar ideal gentleman – a concept, shaped by ancient tenets, lay as well as scriptural – was to endure for many generations in English culture. Altogether, the Governor is analytical or, to be precise, repetitive, and therefore excessively lengthy and monotonous. The style is based on the most formal, sustained, Latin prose, stuffed with subordinate clauses, with long paragraphs containing several linked propositions, from which all colloquial traits are banished. It becomes an increasingly imposing heap of medium-long anecdotes, drawn from ancient history, which are supposed to shore up various theoretical axioms. Thus it turns into a kind of predecessor to the mosaic or mass of examples provided by Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, which was the result of a similar kind of minute, classical erudition, though inclusive of that of medieval Latin, totally lacking in Elyot’s work. The prose used in the anecdotes is not as rigid and is, indeed, looser, approaching the inventive or semi-inventive one. Its germ is found in a multitude of short anecdotes such as that of Titus and Gisippus, Plautus-like menaechmi4 who stage a small comedy of errors, included to prove the strength of true friendship. 4. The order of the cosmos, as Elyot states at the beginning of the first of his three books, was a divine ‘fiat’. To maintain and respect this order, an orderly state is necessary, which cannot be anything but an enlightened 3 4

It is thought that Shakespeare chiefly based his Henry V on this manual, and on the political considerations that preceded it for the famous speech by Ulysses on ‘degree’. Inspired, in reality, by Decameron, X, 8. Spenser was to echo this episode in the Faerie Queene (IV.10.27).

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monarchy. History is full of examples that teach that monarchy is the most efficient form of government and the most likely to ensure order. The automatic support of any reasoning, for Elyot, is history, and he quotes biblical as well as classical history. He goes on to analyse how a public servant, courtier or bureaucrat should be trained from childhood and adolescence onwards, stating that he must become a complete and perfect gentleman. To achieve this end, he must grow up in a harmonious environment, far from base influences, gradually assimilating the classical canon. As I mentioned, the marriage between Hebraism and Hellenism, which underlies Matthew Arnold’s thought, was already becoming apparent. Elyot advances a specific proposal for every phase of the evolutionary age, but he consistently adopts a didactic tone, as he repeatedly quotes ancient history and every affirmation he makes is supported by succinctly recounted classical instances. Instructions for the formation of a gentleman prescribe a knowledge of languages, of the Greek and Latin canon, and various accomplishments such as the capacity to play some musical instrument and practice the arts. Latin poetry is no more corrupting than a few nettle sprays would be in a grassy meadow. The future bureaucrat, however, must, above all, be well versed in rhetoric and oratory. The decline of history is implicit, for Elyot as for Eliot. The young were not what they had been, anxious to do well and to work for the public good; tutors and educators were mediocre, so Elyot draws up an idealistic prescription for the preparation not of a prince, but of a state bureaucrat, refuting, without any acrimony, Machiavelli’s pragmatic and cynical views. Matthew Arnold was to avoid all mention of the physical activities that were considered by him essential to the formation of a gentleman at Rugby, where his father was headmaster: Elyot advises running, swimming, riding, archery, dancing. The conclusion of the first part of the treatise provides a blatantly expanded report on one of the idiosyncrasies that recur most often in these sixteenth-century tutorial texts. Dancing is studied from the viewpoint of its primitive, anthropological, as well as its highly educational and even ritual values: every movement is analysed to plumb its fantastic and symbolic contents and perspectives. These are the most fascinating pages of the treatise. The second and third parts enumerate the range of requisites essential to a highly placed servant of the state, as well as listing the vices and weaknesses to be avoided.

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5. Toxophilus5 (1545) earned Roger Ascham6 (1515 or 1516–1568) a pension from Henry VIII. It is one of the earliest eccentric English artes. After Ascham, other manuals on typically British manias would be regularly produced. As I mentioned, there were heaps of manuals in Old and Middle English and English, but merely for having thought of this dialogue Ascham deserves applause. However, Toxophilus, which initially enchants the reader because of its ingenuous tone, becomes a bit irritating, repetitive and not sufficiently varied in contents, albeit always written in a lively, colloquial style which imitates the spoken word. One must emphasize, in fact, that it is not a treatise but a dialogue, although erudite, and somewhat pedantic. Which does not prevent Ascham from being much more frank and uninhibited than Elyot, never missing a chance to shoot off along some side-lane, only to converge ever and again upon his fixed target: the antiPapist controversy and the support of ecclesiastic reform, which was rampantly ongoing in England. During the course of the dialogue, Philologus is charged with a vitally strategic, instrumental and provocative role: he has to feign preconceived scepticism towards any remark advanced by Toxophilus, only admitting that he is convinced in order to advance yet another doubt, which will also be gradually dismantled. He thus loses ground, inch by agonizing inch. The objective of the dialogue is to convince the reader that archery is a relaxing activity for the scholar and has in fact been practised since the dawn of civilization, as proved by the list of great archers from Adam onward. Elyot had included archery amongst the pursuits that were to be taught to a trainee nobleman. For the same reason, Ascham provides 5 6

Literally, as if on the model of More’s linguistic tricks, it means The Enthusiastic Archer. Born in York, Ascham studied and later taught Greek at Cambridge and became Elizabeth’s private Greek tutor, after having been Queen Mary’s ‘Latin secretary’. This is a somewhat vague post, and constitutes an enigmatic aspect, as he never abjured his Protestant faith; the appointment was probably due to his conformist attitude. Culture was less strictly persecuted by the various Tudor monarchs, compared with the severity they adopted towards prelates and churchmen. As a court preceptor Ascham managed to pick his way through pitfalls and humiliations. He also suffered from recurring bouts of ague or malarial fever. It seems that he was finally ruined by his addiction to dicing and cock-fights, on which he is supposed to have written a work known only by its title.

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another analysis or utopian view of the Elizabethan gentleman, although his obsession causes him to forget or decidedly dismiss other pursuits, such as music or riding. The didactic objective is precisely what Elyot desired to pursue, by eliminating or being reductive about pernicious, unhealthy, nocturnal, asocial pastimes (such as cards and dice), and promoting healthy ones, such as archery. Archery, as opposed to other activities, is classed as a more desirable and gallant occupation. Further arguments praise the bow as a war weapon, with examples and cases drawn from history, followed by the demonstration that archery is a typically English pursuit, in which Englishmen excel above all other nations. As I said, a game is fun when it is short and one soon has to conclude that the discursive and argumentative range is extremely circumscribed and is soon at a stalemate. It is in fact somewhat arduous to write an encyclopaedia on this subject of 120 closely written pages, even if in dialogue form. Toxophilus, however, is somewhat redeemed by its second part, and becomes attractive again, containing a detailed inventory of materials and an exhaustive description of specific archery techniques. The minute analysis is almost microscopic and slightly maniacal. Historically, this part of Toxophilus is of incalculable value to the English language, not only because it extends and consolidates the sector’s terminology, but also because it channelled the language towards a specific and superior flexibility. Ascham, in other words, establishes the universality of English as the most suitable, economical, and precise language for all uses and the best in the world for classifications, catalogues, definitions, lists, and above all when the constituent parts of a utensil or an intellectual or manual activity have to be dismembered or scrutinized. 6. Ascham’s letters have survived, and the English ones compare favourably with the Paston collection, as they too are much more advanced as regards their linguistic flexibility, although this primacy does not take into account the rather interesting collection of letters by Thomas More. Following a three-year diplomatic mission to Germany, Ascham drew up, in 1553, a concise report on the political situation of Charles V’s empire, or, more precisely, a chronological, pleasantly descriptive calendar, introducing at the same time his fairly insular, viscerally sceptical viewpoint.7 7

Miglior 1975, 111.

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This was to become even more pronounced in his most famous treatise, The Schoolmaster, which was published posthumously, unfinished, by his widow in 1570. The fame and quintessential quality of this book are due to a precocious, vehement objection to the formative aspects of the grand tour in Italy, although Ascham never denied classical culture as essential from an educational viewpoint. The anti-Italian and anti-Papal sentiments that ooze from his writing were to be, from that time, exemplary for an ambivalent disgust towards the Italian and Catholic civilization, manifested while appreciating the Latin language from which Italian was derived and which had been adopted by the Catholic liturgy. Nonetheless, The Schoolmaster is a linguistically and procedurally mature text that does not seem to have been written a century before Dryden’s essays, containing as it does some of the latter’s techniques.8 The language is more accurate, rounded, and less sprightly than that used in Toxophilus, thus more cautious and watchful. The similes are incisive, so that one can rightly say that links to Euphuism9 are extremely rare. One also finds foreshadowings of Matthew Arnold’s educational and inspectoral writings, and many similarities with modern books or essays. Its avant-texte will become familiar. The Schoolmaster is, in fact, introduced by a dedicatory letter by Ascham’s wife as well as by a preface written by the author that frames the treatise by giving a satisfactory description of its genesis. The treatise was occasioned by a reception in the presence of the queen, when various opinions had been voiced as to educational methods and the programmes and objectives of scholastic education. While Elyot never mentions himself and supports his observations by recounting appropriate examples drawn from the classics, Ascham, by contrast, sprinkles little autobiographical cameos throughout his works, thereby initiating a further development, the memoirist and autobiographical genre. The kind of needs that originated The Schoolmaster is similar to those motivating Elyot. Ascham did not want to train a court diplomat or a civil servant, he was addressing the social and moral

8 9

He influenced the style of Dr Johnson (who wrote a life of Ascham), who freely admitted it. See Ryan 1974, xxxv-xxxvi. Miglior 1975, 260–5.

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rectitude of every adult citizen, who, in effect, was synonymous with Elyot’s governor. As in Elyot, the vital nub of any educational programme for a gentleman was to instil the comprehension, the reading, and above all, the speaking of Latin. The Schoolmaster’s initial pages concentrate on explaining the methods whereby this objective can be attained, even by the selftaught. Whoever reads Ascham so many years later, cannot but marvel at how many languages the English of his time could speak, and at the enormous importance they attached to being able to speak Latin. Thanks to a curious overturning of the tables that was to come, Latin for Elizabethan English people was what English is for Latins, or even Italians of today. One could go nowhere at that time without Latin, just as one cannot go anywhere nowadays without speaking English. The Elizabethans wanted to be first in the field in the knowledge of languages in general, which one cannot always say applies to English people today. The two main points in Ascham’s reasoning are that Latin is better carved into the student’s intellect by means of friendly persuasion, rather than by constrictive bombardment, and that the rudiments of a language accumulate better in reflective intelligences, rather than in intuitive ones. An initial glitch in the flow of his discourse occurs when a generally lucid and moderate Ascham starts to reveal some disquiet that steadily increases to a quasi-apocalyptic panic. He was a slightly illogical and, at times, pessimistic conservative, and historical time was flowing, for him too, down a relentless slope. The original stain of sin always threatened to re-emerge in history, and human personalities were psychologically fragile. The danger the nation faced was the ease whereby corruption could infect anyone, given that human infancy and adolescence contained the roots of this infection; enlightened educational practices were supposed to rescue and protect young natures. Ascham’s educational theories are basically, from a negative, as well as from a positive viewpoint, akin to Elyot’s, in that they list the dangers one should keep youth away from. When he dwells on the dangers of corruption, he tells young people to beware of life at court, as a pit of depravity. It is at this point that one finds the best-known and quintessential part of the book, where Ascham, who recalls having stayed only nine days in Italy, launches into a diatribe against the lapsed and excessively uninhibited morals of the nation which has, alas, lost the way to rectitude. Inglese italianato is the term he uses, in

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Italian, which is supposed to indicate the flux of cultural emigrants who travelled to Italy full of moral rectitude but returned morally corrupted. Ascham takes this opportunity to decree some expurgations from the literary canon, in particular poems of chivalry, which he saw as immoral and replete with anarchic eroticism and bloodshed. The second part of the treatise is, however, almost completely lacking in any literary interest whatsoever, as it delves into the most technical educational domain, based on language teaching theories and curricula, and on grading and evaluating the main classical authors. § 41. The ‘Miscellanies’ It is a well-known historical axiom that Petrarch basically exercised a negative influence on Italian poetry, inasmuch as he caused it to be boringly imitative up to the seventeenth century; but that he revitalized English poetry, after the Scottish Chaucerians and a few English poets had resisted continental innovations. This is the aspect to which, as we shall see, George Puttenham calls attention in the first, almost contemporary (1589) overview of sixteenth-century poetic revival. The two main English Petrarchan poets of the early sixteenth century, Wyatt and Surrey (whom one could dub Henrician because both died of natural or violent death before Elizabeth came to the throne), can be said to have Anglicized the sonnet form. Surrey was responsible for inventing and perfecting blank verse, also derived from the Italians. Before this development, Chaucerian verse was the norm, such as the heroic couplet or the rhyme royal, or Skeltonics with reduced syllabic lines and repeated or hammering rhyme. The prosodic variant of the sonnet which caught on in England entailed the abolition of the division between an eight verse stanza made up of two quatrains and a sestet of two tercets, with the introduction of a final rhyming couplet. The need to incisively compress the composition, was, in reality, only disguised in Italian sonnets, and the English realized this and re-adopted it.1 A minor tradition of the sonetto caudato, ending with a pair of hendecasyllable rhyming couplets, existed in Italy, as well, chiefly in burlesque verse produced, for instance, by Cino da Pistoia or Benedetto Varchi, as well as by the Pisan 1

See PMI, 256ff., to which I am indebted for the following observations.

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poets of the thirteenth century. What prevented and excluded the use of final distichs with rhyming couplets was the founding theoretical principle of an alternance between even (octave) and odd elements (tercet), in order to suit the verse form to its musical end-use. The mania for conceits commenced with Guittone d’Arezzo and was stemmed by the Stilnovo poets, only to burgeon once again amongst the Petrarchan poets, who gave rise to the flamboyant period of witty sonnets. This second wave was opposed by Bembo, who propounded a return to Petrarch’s authentic Petrarchism. The use of conceits, however, was rekindled by the Neapolitan Luigi Tansillo, followed by an even more confirmed adoption of this practice which was to last about a century, thanks to Marino’s irresistible influence. Praz thought that the English never knew or recognized Bembo’s reactions to the use of conceits, and were captivated by the flamboyant sonnet form. The ‘poulterer’s measure’,2 as the poet Gascoigne jokingly defined it referring to poulters’ custom of selling eggs by the dozen or in batches of fourteen – depending on their client’s rank or the seller’s mood – is however entirely English. 2. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, poetry prevalently continued to circulate in manuscript form, and was excluded from the printed book market, with the result that it spread more slowly, and in a less controllable manner, to a limited circle of readers. Towards the middle of the century we witness a change. The poetical works of the two most important Henrician poets, Wyatt and Surrey, were printed about twenty years after their death, when Tottel’s Miscellany was gathered together in 1557 (it took its name from the printer and collector of the manuscripts in circulation, Richard Tottel – nine editions were printed in all, some enriched, others curtailed, in the years leading up to 1587).3 Tottel’s, the most renowned, and other anthologies and miscellanies, published up to the end of the century, are proof of the poetical fervour of the twenty years that preceded it; they also made poetry available to parts of the population that had never been reached by it before. The third consideration to be made is that the importance of the minstrel and of oral poetry was on the wane, whilst court poets and court poetry were on the rise. A veritable craze for these

2 3

A metre consisting of lines of twelve and fourteen syllables alternately. Reprinted London 1870, 1921, and Cambridge, MA 1928–1929.

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anthological compilations (to which one might add a similar venture, the Mirror for Magistrates, of which more anon) was a response to the need to celebrate the entrepreneurship and high cultural status of the Elizabethan regime.4 It was a book fair in which England exhibited the variety and fine quality of its poetical merchandise. Ninety-six poems by Wyatt, plus forty by Surrey (although the order in which they were presented was the other way round) were included in Tottel’s, flanked by other works by lesser or less well-known poets, as well as a grand total of 130 ‘unknown authors’. Among the four named and identified poets, besides Wyatt and Surrey, one is the chaplain Nicholas Grimald or Grimoald (1519–1562), a very competent classicist and a Protestant who abjured during Mary’s reign and became a spy. Grimald most definitely hated poetic clichés and his style is knotty, grumpy and apparently clumsy, and could not possibly be taken for anyone else’s. He even seems to write English as if it were an acquired language and uses it with telegraphic, epigrammatic brevity, sometimes suppressing suffixes, endings, articles and even whole parts of discourse. His two Latinizing compositions included in Tottel’s, one of which is on Cicero’s death, are, in fact, translations from two obscure late medieval authors; other, briefer ones dispense moralizing maxims. Superannuated love allegories in Roman de la Rose style (like Cupid’s assault on the heart’s fortress) are provided by the courtier and dignitary Lord Thomas Vaux5 4

5

Beside Tottel’s one should remember A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573), edited by Gascoigne (§ 45); The Paradise of Dainty Devises (1576), compiled by Richard Edwards (1523–1566), who also composed a poem in octaves on lovers’ inconstancy which was possibly read by Shakespeare; A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1566), which included the very popular ballad, ‘Greensleaves’; The Phoenix Nest (1593) by R. S., addressed to nobles and gallants. The Sternhold and Hopkins collection, printed in 1547, consisting of translated excerpts from the Bible and from David’s psalms in the ‘poulterer’s measure’, consolidated the practice of devotional writing in verse. An analysis of the best-known compositions collected in these anthologies will be given in the discussion of their editors. On England’s Helicon (1600) see § 70. One of his funerary ditties was evidently very popular, as it was bowdlerized by one of the grave-diggers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This should suffice to perceive the kind of suggestions and stimuli provided by Tottel’s. Some of Lord Vaux’s lyrics were included in Paradise of Dainty Devises; some of them, being love verses, were inspired by Surrey, whilst the others are religious, penitential or voicing a hope in a serene demise. The dramatist Thomas Heywood (§§ 145–6) appears in Tottel’s with only one lyric which repeats one of Wyatt’s more commonplace dictums: that having

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(1510–1556). Other courtier poets were immediately named, or alleged to be authors of the anonymous lyrics in Tottel’s, but none with any absolute certainty: among them was the brilliant and ingenious Sir Francis Bryan and George, brother of Anne Boleyn, the object of much gossip and, like her, beheaded. 6 The genres range from the Petrarchan lyric to the elegy, from funerary tributes to sententious verses, from encomiums to proverbs, in ever varying metres. Alliteration was noticeably adopted, as has often been remarked, due to the recent, first publication of Piers Plowman. § 42. Wyatt* Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was the poet who brought to England the sonnet, a form that no English poet before him had ever thought of using,1

6

forged his lady, nature lost the cast. The only composition by Edward Somerset, of whom we lack secure dates of birth and death, is an acrostic. Experts do not pronounce judgement on ‘Phillida was a fair maid’, which was attributed to one or the other and can be said to rival the grace and ingenuous qualities of ‘Robene and Makyne’ by Henryson (§ 25.2).

*

The Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Elder, ed. G. F. Nott, 2 vols, London 1913, New York 1954; Collected Poems, ed. K. Muir, London 1949 and 1960, and, with P. Thomson, Liverpool 1969; Collected Poems, ed. J. Daalder, Oxford 1975 (this is the edition from which I shall quote; Roman numerals of the poems nearly always coincide with Muir’s 1949 edition). E. M. W. Tillyard, The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Selection and a Study, London 1929, 1949; E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies, London 1933, New York 1965; S. Baldi, La poesia di Sir Thomas Wyatt, il primo petrarchista inglese, Firenze 1953 (a learned study, focusing chiefly on metrics, still highly esteemed), and Sir Thomas Wyatt, Eng. trans., London 1961; K. Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Liverpool 1963; R. Southall, The Courtly Maker, Oxford 1964; P. Thompson, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and His Background, London 1964, also editor of CRHE, London 1974; M. Domenichelli, Il liuto infranto: formalismo, convenzione e poesia alla corte Tudor, Ravenna 1974; E. Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry, London 1998; N. Shulman, Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy, London 2011; S. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest, London 2012. Wyatt’s assimilation of Serafino Aquilano is examined in A. Cecchini, Serafino Aquilano e la lirica inglese del ’500, L’Aquila 1935, and above all, in its connections with English Petrarchism, by M. Praz in ‘Petrarca in Inghilterra’, in PMI, 253–76.

1

Except for a sonnet included by Chaucer in his Troilus.

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although it had been widely adopted in Italy and in many parts of the Continent for over three centuries. A conspicuous inverted parallelism seems to link Wyatt to Chaucer. Both were poets and diplomats, tortured by the flame of desire; and both travelled to Italy, one a century and a half after the other, and returned home with the most precious fruits of the season. Chaucer, however, oddly enough, had only brought back Petrarch’s Latin writings, without realizing that a very innovative Petrarch dwelt in his rhymes in Italian.2 However, this historical and ground-breaking merit of Wyatt’s has been dimmed and decidedly obscured, over time, by presumed defects in his art, which has repeatedly been dubbed ‘rugged’, albeit, at times, vigorous. It was alleged, moreover, that he was metrically something of a beginner and that about thirty of his sonnets are free translations from Petrarch (not to mention that another fairly large section of his work – the penitential psalms – were based on Italian models). Wyatt’s claims to originality are therefore considerably lessened. Emblematic conclusions were drawn by two illustrious historians: the sonnet would have been born half a century later even without Wyatt (Praz);3 for his part, C. S. Lewis4 continued to insist on the considerable medieval aspects as well as traces and remnants of the Roman de la Rose in Wyatt, adding that Wyatt had, in fact, damaged English poetry, by introducing the execrable ‘poulterer’s measure’,5 as well as the jangling rhythm of the popular ballad. In this regrettable hatchet job, Lewis plays the part of Benedetto Croce, and, distinguishing poetry from non poetry, finds most of Wyatt’s production belongs to the latter category. The English are notoriously fond of finicky prosodic dissertations, and other Wyatt critics make them the crux of their attacks. Praz – who also attributes a still medieval cast to Wyatt’s poetry, albeit provided with a few timid Renaissance ornamentations, 2 3 4 5

A twenty-five-year-old Wyatt made a seminal trip to Italy in 1527, accompanying a royal emissary. He was certainly in Rome and in Venice; captured by the Spanish troops he escaped, before the ransom was paid. ‘Petrarca in Inghilterra’, listed in the Bibliography. ELS, 223–30. This metre is actually used very sparingly by Wyatt. The cases in which he uses a metre longer than the decasyllable are really very rare. He rather chooses to contract his verses, compressing them into eight or even four syllables, in his songs.

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which make him one of the representatives of a not very well specified northern Renaissance – prefers the more polished, sophisticated Surrey to the tedious, immature Wyatt. Lewis sees him as the father of the early sixteenth-century period, which he pronounces ‘drab’, and concludes his chapter by stating enigmatically that Wyatt was ‘in the ascendant’; later critics have taken him seriously, rating his work higher than Surrey’s. Although I share the idea that Wyatt’s poetry is of very uneven quality,6 accusations of this type must be weighed and countered point by point. To start with, Wyatt’s poetry should not be judged en bloc, but rather in its chronological sequence. This is an arduous operation and can only be achieved by having recourse to internal data, which do in fact reveal a gradually increased refinement of style and expression. Moreover, most of the manuscripts on which we base our analysis were not finished, polished and revised by Wyatt for publication.7 The accusation of plagiarism remains – that is, was he and to what extent was he a simple translator or adapter or, worse still, a plunderer? The argument in his defence calls attention to his technique, as Wyatt did actually modify the prosodic scheme of the sonnet, introducing the English form with three quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet. This places him more in the position of an adapter who has stepped through the fine veil separating pure imitation from the act of re-creation. Wyatt follows his own translating policy, inasmuch as his art is suddenly catapulted into the sphere of refashioning or remaking.8 Whoever is shocked by imitation 6

7

8

Lewis, somewhat traitorously, quotes stanzas, single lines or refrains that are objectively poor or unpoetical, which, after all, one can do with any other great poet, as Lewis himself suggests could be done when reading through Sidney’s work (ELS, 329). Critics are still arguing whether and to what extent Wyatt wrote a kind of rough copy, to be revised, producing lyrics that show an inadequate sense for prosody and stress, especially when he creates discord between the natural accent of the words and the metrical pattern. For a long time it was thought that he still pronounced some words in the French manner, placing the stress on the last syllable. In his defence, critics have, on the other hand, praised his supposed ability in creating meanings and very modern rhythmic changes. The distance between the supposed original and the translation varies, and is greatest in the case of the sonnets drawn from Petrarch: ‘Una candida cerva’, for instance, is unrecognizable in Wyatt’s version (VII), which is more of a remake. The argument

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seems to forget that all literature has always been imitative and that the contents of any work are naturally limited, unlike the form. Summing up, we find in Wyatt the roots of Metaphysical poetry in Donne’s gaunt version, and whoever disparages Wyatt is also denigrating Donne – who, in fact, was not greatly admired by C. S. Lewis. 2. It would be hasty and simplistic to say that Wyatt lacked inventiveness; one could accuse him, perhaps, of being monotonous, but this is compensated for and counterbalanced, at least, by his variety in metre, genre and register. First of all, one has to recognize that he was the author of a considerable poetic output, considering that he was employed by Henry VIII as a diplomat charged with taxing duties. The almost 200 poetic compositions that have reached us are sonnets, or at times shorter and at others longer than the sonnet. They consist of quatrains or stanzas of six, seven or eight lines or of other prosodic forms of variable length: songs, epigrams, rondeaus, satirical verses in Dante’s ‘terza rima’, epistles in verse, paraphrased psalms. His songs were conceived and written to be set to music, and the refrains and other intervening, modulated verses reveal this intent. To use a musical metaphor, variety, one of the aspects that are decisive in judging poetry, was absent in Wyatt, who continues to harp on a single state of mind or dominant thought. His 200 poems are, in a truly musical sense, variations on a theme. Wyatt’s thematic monotony, however, is redeemed or can be redeemed, as in all those cases in which art is the ordered and structured expression of an obsession, or an ‘obsessive metaphor’. His obsession, the first to be recorded in English poetry, is amour fou, forbidden by reason and reined in but not tamed. Important, not to say dominating, in classical literature, this was to become one of the main themes for modern authors. Wyatt, it must be remembered, is a Petrarchan as well as a Petrarchist. Like Surrey, he too was attracted by those Petrarchan sonnets and songs – already so densely packed with conceits – and perhaps even more by the Petrarchists of the last quarter of the fifteenth century, is also very different. Critics have realized that Wyatt removes all mythological references from Petrarch-derived compositions, and always actualizes generic details (see MAR, vol. I, 462), We find a typical instance of this in sonnet XXVIII, where Petrarch’s words: ‘In fra Scilla e Cariddi’ becomes ‘’tween rock and rock’.

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amongst whom Serafino Aquilano emerges so prominently. He possessed an acrobatic and almost postmodern capacity to personalize variations on the basic scheme of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Inasmuch as the events in his life prompted him towards this, he managed to introduce various resonances into his production. Petrarch’s Laura is Anne Boleyn, an evasive object of the poet’s desire, who, in the end, marries another man, driving her earlier lover into a hopelessly tormented state of mind. This, however, could be exceptionally productive from a poetic point of view. The absolute novelty of Wyatt’s poetry is that it is concentrated on his own self to the exclusion of everything else, in a blazing conflagration of immense, devouring power. One should, however, stress that Wyatt’s poems are no documentation of his life, no confession nor baring of his soul, nor first-hand reaction to the most diverse states of mind. His verses are some of the first instances, in English poetry, of mimetic fiction and stylization: a formalized representation of experience. He never names himself or Anne Boleyn; we are presented with a totally abstract, cruel, duplicitous Lady and a desperate Lover, existing beyond time or space. The verbs used are in the present tense and effusions are almost first hand, but the emotions are re-evoked subsequently, when the poet is on his own and at peace. The mimesis acts by creating studied effects of immediacy, as Hopkins does in his poetry and in his ‘terrible’ sonnets in particular.9 3. It would be a waste of time to try to attribute each single lyric or groups of them to one of the three ladies known to have been loved by Wyatt, capturing his heart and rejecting his passion (his wife, Elizabeth Brooke, whom he left prematurely, as he suspected her of adultery; Anne Boleyn, until she became queen, after Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon; 9

See the colloquial and adversative ‘No, no’ he addresses to his inner self, with which he commences the second stanza of XCI, heralding Hopkins’s ‘No worst’ sonnet; the arrangement of the subject matter is the same, reinforced by involuntarily recurrent expressions. Hopkins sometimes names Wyatt in his letters, but only in connection with prosodic aspects. I shall draw other comparisons further on. Although Wyatt was ignored until the eighteenth century, his influence is proved by the repetition of certain terms or echoes in later poets in very famous lines, such as, to mention only a couple of instances, the ‘bitter taste’ used by Hopkins or ‘my head doth ache’ reprised in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

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and the lady in waiting, Elizabeth Darrell). Other ladies were named or were disguised by mythological names, such as Brunet or Phyllis. The key event of Wyatt’s life, his emotional peak, was his passionate infatuation with the future queen, although what is actually known about the affair is pretty slim. In Wyatt’s thoughts, however, other women, as yet unknown, were amalgamated, to form a single, hypostatic, poetic projection. Wyatt may have courted Anne Boleyn before 1520, as he had got married in that year; or else courted her even after his marriage; or perhaps he courted her after he left his wife in 1526, thus only for a few months. The second alternative – that it was an extra-marital affair – is the more probable. King Henry, moreover, could naturally not avoid being in suspense, as he had a former rival as his trusted councillor. Anne Boleyn came to court in 1522, was married to Henry in 1527, was crowned in 1533 and was executed in 1536. Wyatt’s overt courtship must have been over by 1527, but his covert skirmishes and, at any rate, his bitter regret survived, as well as his unrequited desire. The reason why Wyatt was pardoned, whilst five other suitors and lovers of Anne Boleyn were beheaded,10 was presumably that Henry was certain that no carnal exchanges had taken place between them, at least after Anne had become queen. Henry had formerly been attracted by Mary, Anne’s elder sister, and had had an illegitimate son from her; Anne, moreover, had gained the name, among Charles V’s diplomatic envoys, of ‘une grande putaine’, the kind of reputation that had been extended to her sister Mary as well.11 Handsome, fair and powerfully built as a young man – as witnesses assure us – Wyatt precociously lost most of his hair at an early age and grew a thick beard, which one can see in various contemporary paintings, including one by Holbein. He was born in Kent, the son of one of Henry VII’s followers, and had become wealthy by acquiring land confiscated from the monasteries. He was a student prodigy when up at Cambridge, where he graduated at seventeen. He achieved a rapid career as a man of action and trusted diplomatic envoy for the king, rather than as a humanist and academic. Translator for Catherine of Plutarch’s little 10 11

Released from prison, Wyatt wrote a mournful epicedium for the five beheaded men, whose execution, it was believed, Wyatt witnessed through the bars of his cell. Muir 1963, 27.

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treatise ‘On tranquillity of mind’ (almost prophetic, one could say: it was what he was to desperately seek in later life), and able to adapt his verses to imitate Horace’s satires and epistles, he lacked at least one of the gifts listed by Elyot as essential for a ‘governor’: self-control. He killed a man and got away unpunished; he was, however, consumed even more profoundly by his emotional and erotic impulses.12 Marshal and governor of Calais between 1529 and 1530, ambassador to Spain between 1537 and 1539 as well as in the Flanders, he died because of a ruinously instinctive and fatal gesture, after heroically riding through driving rain to meet Charles V’s ambassador in Dover, thereby contracting pneumonia.13 4. Wyatt’s lyrics are conventionally numbered (by their editors), but were never dated by their author and are mostly undatable. The collective editions were put together by assembling seven manuscript sources plus an eighth printed source (Tottel’s Wyatt selection), the latter having undergone considerable philological editing. They contain a kind of erotic romance, but only in the sense of an account of a journey through a succession of stylized humours or moods. This internal itinerary does not really reveal a story, rather the opposite. Wyatt is trapped in a stalemate and cannot get out, throughout quite a number of poems, and the chronology, as in most later sonnet collections, is unclear.14 An embittered and forsaken poet complains to the lady who has flattered him, accusing her of cunning and cynical duplicity: but she is absent, so cannot answer. He tries to persuade the lady to love him again or perhaps only to pity him. His indignation is either voiced in all its bitterness or disguised. At a certain point, the poet states he will cease to plead or utter provoking threats. This kind of swing is part of his undulating psychic state or its mimesis – indeed of the kind of unrest or disquiet that Surrey, too, would identify as the hallmark of the older poet. Such uneven states of mind are occasionally disregarded

12

‘Therefore I must / Restrain my lust’ (LI). It should however be recalled that his translation from Plutarch was not from the original Greek, but from a Latin version. 13 Baldi 1953, 10. 14 Wyatt’s first biographer tried to divide the lyrics into chapters of a story, with picturesque and romantic titles, connecting presumed internal phases to salient facts in Anne Boleyn’s life.

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to reflect a temporary mood upswing, when Wyatt aims his blows dispassionately or with heat, and jests, apostrophizes, or even brays, as in XXXV. The famous XXXIV strikes home because the diction is more packed, the conceptual margin is reduced and a Catullian song emerges. In LIX, the romance seems to have faded and been tamed and the poet is left gazing at a spent blaze, as he is forced into self-awareness. XIII is, or promises to be, a turning point between inescapable hopelessness and the end of suffering, when the lover discovers that faith in God has healed him and has restored him to light. This pious aspiration, however, does not take the poet’s undulating psyche into account and is retracted. Wyatt can also admonish others not to love and to be careful. The Egerton manuscript, which is semi-autographic, or ‘idiographic’, contains more than half of Wyatt’s corpus; the lyrics in the Devonshire manuscript, the second most extensive, are repetitions or re-editions, and are not a true second tempo of his poetry. They stand out not because of his defiance or indignation, but because of his heartfelt, querulous, impotent begging not to be forsaken. His tone soon becomes firmer, virile, lucid, and solemnly admonishing. It is easier to achieve repentance and the poet ascribes this to his being healed from love. CXVI is an unexpected analysis of the psychology of the lady, beloved but sadistic, as, while he delights in seeing her, she enjoys the pain she causes him. It is an irregular section, containing some absolute gems – such as CXXXV. 5. The essential aspect of Wyatt’s poetry can however be said to be his novel argumentative procedure. His poetry is never narrative, descriptive, depicting landscapes or anecdotal; it is captiously dianoetic. It is tropic, or woven and embroidered with rhetorical figures of speech, and above all, of thought. It is also the first English poetry to be in a way Mallarméan, made up of words placed above the content level, with an inevitable and variable margin of non-motivation. Wyatt bases his compositions on the conceits he has learnt in Italy, but he soon transfers to his own English kind of conceits, at least half a century earlier than any other poet. One can already hear something of Donne’s songs as well as of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Tropes are assembled with imperceptible, but unmistakable phonetic reinforcements that are by no means obstinate or heavy, but effective devices, such as alliterations, echoes, or rimalmezzo. Alliteration was long thought to be in Wyatt a remnant of ancient alliterating poetry and,

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therefore, yet another medieval indicator; whereas it is quite the contrary and is used in a functional, targeted fashion, aimed at reinforcing the meaning or even phonosymbolic, and far from mechanical. Wyatt’s corpus is thus a closed system, indeed a signic cluster, made up of sub-groupings, within which one finds a rigorous interrelationship and a collaboration between linguistic levels. XXXVI stands out, for instance, consisting as it does of enchained stanzas with the same device found in Pearl, the last line of a stanza repeated by the first of the next. The structure of the lyric is strengthened by refrains, anaphoras and epiphoras. Wyatt possesses his own vocabulary, or deceptively poor idiolect; and if one consults the concordance to the poems (which is available) one discovers a string of linked key-words making up the essential conceptual and metaphorical strand running through the collection: the ‘steadfast’, unchanging, yet ‘restless’ and disquieted poet, who addresses his supplications to the ‘double’ or duplicitous lady; anguished by reality’s, but even more, by love’s mutability, he yearns after ‘stability’ (the very word he uses in his penitential psalms). He is plagued by the demon of love’s impermanence. His imaginary universe reproduces this chain of events, by virtue of an extreme compression of his vocabulary and by alternating recurring synonyms in the literal and metaphorical spheres. He is often the drop (gutta) wearing away (cavat) the stone (lapidem) with his tears, sighs and lamentations; no fruit grows on arid stone (CXLVIII). The instruments of expression, charged with the writing and the uttering of the lament – only to cease, due to exhaustion – are the lute15 and the pen. The tropological domain of the lady is just as often that of poisonous, rapacious or fanged animals, like the tiger, the lion, the falcon or the serpent. Wyatt gradually adopts coldly lucid antitheses and

15

The famous ‘Lute song’, included in nearly all anthologies (which vaguely alludes to Diana being hunted by her suitors with bows, the prey being the sadistic goddess who refuses to be captured), is of course based on a contradiction, inasmuch as the lute must cease its lament and is entreated to do so, but disobeys this order, ensuring the continuation of the lyric. Both the lute and the poet are carrying out their last, Herculean task. Nonetheless, this peremptory order takes on a strategic function. The dialogue with the lute re-opens in LXXIV, where the poet again threatens that this will be his last song, which will be followed by death. The poet also proclaims himself close to death in LXX.

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contradictory terms, placed side by side (fire and ice, mounting and precipitating, being born or living and dying) or, conversely, he makes use of long, detailed comparisons (‘Always whetting my youthly desire / On the cruel whetstone, tempered with fire’, or using economic or nautical metaphors as in XXVIII; the two horns of the antitheses blend into the figure of an oxymoron).16 His rhetorical tools are exceptionally wide-ranging and he also utilizes the palindrome (in L, for instance: what is the word that does not change, whether read forwards or backwards? Anna, is the answer), the acrostic and the polyptoton. In the end, the hyperbole is what he uses most. In this vein, he emerges as the cosmic loser and the most inconsolable of all the afflicted. Which is why Wyatt’s lyrics are ideally nocturnal, pervaded by a terrifying sense of the night of the soul, resembling the kind of atmosphere prevailing in the slightly later theatrical works by Chapman and much later in nihilistic or prostrated poets of the nineteenth century, like Hopkins, Thompson and Thomson B. V. (their codes and metaphorical repertory are interchangeable). It is really astonishing that a poet who composed so many lyrics based on punning17 and on word play should have been dubbed uncouth. XVII is a masterly example of how Wyatt is anything but uncouth, primitive or inexpert: it is a delayed prolepsis, the explanation of which is provided in the penultimate line. XXIII revolves around a single strand, or the tongue-twisting, ‘spite of thy hap, hap hath well happed’. In LXII, fate has ‘happd’, but in the opposite sense, and has been transformed into bad luck. In XCII, ‘hap’ collides, as it were, with ‘happy’. In the eight lines of XLVIII, the opening is a pressing interrogation followed by an extended metaphor of the hunt and the hunter or thief. The twist is introduced in the final four lines. The poet has ‘despoiled’ his loved one’s hand and has robbed it of its glove, with a charade type of pun 16 17

In the two contrasted quatrains in LXXXII, the first states the truth, the second, with ‘And yet’, denies it. In XCI, the lucky in love on the May morning are compared to the unhappy poet, whose Zodiac signs have shed an evil influence on him. For instance: ‘But yet perchance some chance / May chance to change my tune’ (LII). In LXVIII, honey and poison spill from the lady’s kiss, thus providing an oxymoron, with almost epigrammatic brevity. The whole of the first stanza of LXXI brims over with word-plays based on ‘eternum’, ‘determed’, ‘affirmed’ and ‘confirmed’.

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played on ‘love’ and ‘glove’. The seventh line offers a superb chiasm in the metaphorical area of an exchange of thefts: ‘She took from me an heart, and I a glove from her’. CXII is a precociously serial lyric, within a frame that includes a beginning and a refrain, in four stanzas of six trimeters; as in CXXIX and CLIX, admirable examples of poetry chiefly based on monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon derivation, rather than Latin, with a few two-syllable and only one tri-syllable and one four-syllable word in a total of thirty lines. Both poems may be recited as a series of explosive emissions, as for instance in ‘Spit then their spit that list to spurn’, a line which provides an idea of Wyatt’s typical phonological creativity. 6. In an abrupt and diatonic mode, but only owing to textual decisions not Wyatt’s own – and as if devastating erotic emotion and the anchor of divine faith were poles apart – one finds the penitential psalms halfway through the corpus, formally translated into English from a prose version by Aretino, but with plenty of personal utterances. They are framed within a stage direction: a desperate David full of repentance because of his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, takes refuge in a cave, with his harp to expiate his sin, and sings the psalms that follow. The identification and superimposition of David as Wyatt is quite easy, as both are caught in the classical congenital act of lamenting and imploring. Wyatt, like David, had gone through the agony and remorse of an adultery and repents and poses as a penitent. The style of these compositions is different, and based on an opposite manner, being neither analytical nor synthetic, but diffuse, expansive and, at times, lacking poetic elevation. They are, in a sense, selfcontained dramas, as the prologues are repetitive and introduce phases of a story of sin, repentance and divine pardon. God is found to be – as for many future ascetics, and in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, for instance – the fixed point as opposed to human ‘mutation’, or an English God, the oxymoron of intransigent hardness and benevolent indulgence. The imagery and metaphors are the same as those in Wyatt’s profane poetry, like, for instance, the image of the navigator entering a port after a storm. It is a parable that also evokes Donne’s later production. The pattern seems indeed to have transferred directly to Donne, a poet and a carnal lover also becoming the author of penitential poetry. If furthermore David is a monarch and his kingdom is threatened by instability, we are redirected

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to Wyatt’s dominating opposition. The three satirical poems written when Wyatt had retired from public life are easier to date. With them Wyatt claims the birth-right of a genre that will be practised more systematically by Donne and, half a century later, by Joseph Hall. The first of these poems revolves around a condemnation of transience and praises ‘steadfastness’. The second reprises the fable of the two little mice told by Henryson,18 and is the only narrative instance in Wyatt’s oeuvre. The third is an increasingly ironic and sarcastic description directed against the cynical status-seekers infesting the court. All three of them imply a precarious, undulating concept of the psyche, whereby even at the height of enjoyment and inebriation of the senses, or spiritual peace, a kind of dissatisfaction may insinuatingly creep in. § 43. Surrey* Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547), has been, throughout the five centuries that divide us from him, fairly neglected, after a very brief period of notoriety and fame following his death; which is why there were, up to fairly recently, very few biographies, monographs or even critical essays dedicated to him. His indisputable claim to fame is that he perfected the English sonnet form and established blank verse in England, by using it, with excellent results, in a partial translation of the Aeneid. A number 18

§ 25.3.

*

The Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Elder, ed. G. F. Nott, 2 vols, London 1815–1816, New York 1965 (historical edition, in which the editor dismissed Geraldine’s romance, of which more below, in his introduction, but took it into account, when reordering the works and giving appropriate titles to the lyrics); Poems, ed. F. M Padelford, Seattle, WA 1928; a selection is edited by E. Jones, Oxford 1964. The edition of Surrey’s poetical works, together with others by his contemporaries, edited by D. Bell, London 1854, does not have much scholarly value, but is provided with an ample commentary in the footnotes, where the editor implacably challenges Nott and the outline provided on the said Geraldine’s romance. E. Casady, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, New York 1938, 1966, 1975; A. Cattaneo, L’ideale umanistico, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Bari 1991; E. Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry, London 1998; W. R. Sessions, Henry Howard, The Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life, Oxford 1999.

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of sonnets were written by him in the Petrarchan tradition, forming a canzoniere that is less conceptual, less vigorous and therefore more anonymous than Wyatt’s.1 The contemporaries of the two poets often referred to them as a pair, as if they were master and follower, and this gave rise to a number of other misapprehensions. Wyatt and Surrey could almost have been father and son, because one was fourteen years older than the other. Wyatt was not a follower of Surrey and probably never even knew him. If anything, it would have been the other way around. At any rate, Surrey was at once rated a better poet than Wyatt, and an indication of this is the fact that, although younger than Wyatt, he was mentioned in Tottel’s as the symbolic figure of his age, ahead of the older Wyatt. This judgement, as I stated à propos of Wyatt, continued to predominate up to the late nineteenth century, when it was overturned in Wyatt’s favour. Any critical appraisal of Surrey has almost exclusively concentrated on prosody. Cultured English readers chose to turn a blind eye to his evident immaturity as a poet proper, and having initiated the usual erudite academic discussion regarding his metre, blandly ignored all the poet’s defects, by virtue of his merits as a versifier and translator.2 Translation is or

1 2

Surrey uses puns very rarely; nor does he employ insistent or hammering alliteration, so he cannot really be considered a ‘linguistic’ poet. Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s second and fourth cantos is from many points of view sumptuous: fluid, harmonious, mainly thanks to a good quantity of enjambments; it partly follows, without slavishly imitating it, Gavin Douglas’s translation (§ 25.1; see the exhaustive discussion in Cattaneo 1991, 294–317), which Surrey was able to consult in manuscript. The battle fought by Surrey was the same, in scale, that Italian translators from the English have to confront: to respect the syllabic quantity of the original, without doubling or triplicating the number of lines or increasing the syllabic measure. Baldini therefore praises the translation’s concision and its respect for the Virgilian spirit, and compares Surrey’s translation favourably with the almost contemporary translation into Italian by Annibal Caro (BAL, 361–3). C. S. Lewis is more cautious and judges Surrey’s translation as second-rate, although provided with a scattering of good lines (ELS, 234). Blank verse, which obviously appeared to be the English prosodic form closest to the non-rhyming Latin hexameter, was perhaps suggested and imitated by Surrey from Italian forerunners, namely Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici’s and Liburnio’s 1534 translations of Virgil. Some occasional lexical choices seem to have been borrowed from them. Luigi Alamanni’s free verse works

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can be a refined art, not a simple instrument of service, and Surrey is still regarded today as an Edward FitzGerald of the sixteenth century, incapable of great original poetry but an excellent translator.3 Wyatt and Surrey’s names should also not be used together as they belong to two diverging evolutionary trends in English poetry. Surrey looks forward, not towards the Elizabethan and metaphysical use of conceits, but to Augustan sobriety. They resemble each other in that they transpose the real lady or ladies they loved into a romantic idealization, a simulacrum or icon of her or them. Wyatt is phatic and apostrophizing, passionately and obstinately besieging his lady-love, whereas Surrey meditates, remembers, reflects and sadly and calmly analyses. 2. Writers who came after Surrey, on the other hand, constructed, elaborated and re-proposed, contaminating it, a lesser myth of Surrey, which critics have struggled hard to repulse and discredit most unhesitatingly. A glamorous aura surrounded the undeniably and precociously talented, fascinating poet and courtier, a double definition based on reality, fancy and legend. Surrey’s life was certainly tumultuous, always in the thick of events. A violent death struck him most unfairly when he was only thirty years old and an even more radiant future seemed about to be his lot. Recalling his death one tends to forget his almost unique, or at least rare, precocious talents and that many of his exploits as a courtier, soldier or poet were performed before he came of age. Everything in him was at least ten years early, if one compares him with the norm. The scion of an influential family, of firmly established Catholic and conservative traditions, in 1524 he had received the title of Earl of Surrey from his father, when he was only seven years old. Suffice it to say, regarding the consideration

3

might also have been known and read by Surrey at the court of Francis I. Scholars are uncertain as to when Surrey’s Aeneid can be dated, as the poet could have worked on it when he was a prisoner (between the early 1530s and the mid-1540s), as James I of Scotland and Malory did in the case of their main works. Surrey’s translation was posthumously published in 1557. Surrey’s translation of the first five chapters of the Ecclesiastes in the ‘poulterer’s measure’ is midway between a literal translation and a reinterpretation. Surrey emulates Wyatt by translating a number of David’s psalms within a framework.

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in which Surrey was held by Henry VIII, that he was the intimate and inseparable friend of the king’s bastard son (from a nobleman’s daughter), Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, who married Surrey’s sister and thus became his brother in law, dying prematurely, however, of consumption in 1536. Well before his eighteenth birthday, Surrey had galloped through his diplomatic, and above all, military training, hotly following in his father’s footsteps, as one of Henry’s counsellors and plenipotentiaries. At the age of sixteen (after the pro-Spanish faction had vainly tried to get him married to Mary, Henry and Catherine’s daughter and future queen), he was already formally married to Lady Frances De Vere, who only lived with him as his wife after 1535. Surrey’s military career began in 1536, beside his father, during the repression of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and was to be tragically concluded ten years later, after a bewildering succession of events. Surrey was to pay for his direct and courageous behaviour several times by being imprisoned.4 He was slandered by the brother of the future queen, Jane Seymour, and accused of sympathizing with the rebels. Imprisoned for the first time in 1537, in 1543 he was tried for having eaten meat during Lent and having smashed house-windows in London with a crossbow or a sling. He had done it, as he claimed in a ‘satire’ composed in prison, because of a sudden mystical, prophetic visionary seizure, urged to wake and redeem the somnolent city from its sinful existence.5 After being released from prison, between 1543 and 1546 he was a Field Marshal and Lieutenant General of the English forces against the French during various phases of the invasion. Recalled home, after a minor mishap he fell into disgrace, as the king believed in the hearsay that the Howards, and therefore Surrey too personally, were planning a coup d’état, to take advantage of the future

4 5

At court, he was generally called a vain fool (Casady 1938, 3). It seems incomprehensible that the critics, except for rare exceptions, should take this satire, that commences thus: ‘London! Hast thou accused me’, as a parody, completely disregarding the fact that his supposed support for the Reform would have been in total contrast with the Catholic faith of Surrey’s family. One is inclined to suppose, in effect, that his heated visionary and penitential vein is a kind of reflection of the systolic/diastolic rhythm of blatant defiance, followed by heartfelt repentance, that is, as we shall see further on, the distinguishing mark of Surrey’s poetic output.

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king Edward VI’s fairly tenuous grip on power. One should also mention that his own sister witnessed against him during the trial that condemned him to be beheaded. 3. In the age of Henry VIII, chivalry was all the rage and Surrey repeatedly distinguished himself in the feigned warfare which aroused such enthusiasm, represented by jousting and court rites and festivals. He not only took part in tourneys for sport, but was also a daring, courageous captain in all the battlefields of Europe. During his less active moments, he managed to compose lyrically delicate or heartfelt nostalgic poetry. His fame as a courtier and many-sided soldier-poet was eclipsed only towards the end of the sixteenth century, when a new star, Sidney, possessing many of his special qualities, appeared on the scene. Nonetheless, Surrey’s renown never ceased to bewitch those who yearned after chivalry and the myth of the fabled, idealized, unattainable lady, unrequited passion and all the trappings of medieval chivalry. It is indisputable that Surrey’s poetry deals with the same central theme that one finds in Wyatt. There may have been an Anne Boleyn for Surrey too, as he actually (at least on one occasion, on others hypothetically, while some readers think that he did so in every case) composed all his love poetry for a lady named Geraldine. Whenever one tries to discover objectively convincing biographical facts, one is left with the impression that some kind of Geraldine – an alias, perhaps – really did exist in his life, but that, if so, the fact probably is that a twenty-year-old Surrey conceived an infatuation at first sight with a young girl who was only nine or ten years old at the time.6 Surrey was, at any rate, less practised than Wyatt, whose verse conveys the torments of an agonizing, ungovernable, erotic frustration, whereas Surrey’s reveals a superficial, conventional, youthful attraction. The connection between textual phenomenology and biographical events is less apparent in Surrey and, in effect, is basically irrelevant – and Nott’s edition, that gave so much credit to this theory, is mostly disregarded today. I have myself supported the thesis that there is, 6

The only sonnet by Surrey that is most simple and most easy, and almost totally paratactic – ‘From Tuscane came my lady’s worthy race’, in which the poet recounts explicitly how he fell in love – provides, as it were, genealogical and personal data about Geraldine. The young girl was later to be given in marriage to a nobleman, who was forty-five years older than herself.

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in fact, a special type of romance in Wyatt’s poetry, but this hypothesis does not work at all, or only in a very embryonic manner, for Surrey. Another matter altogether is the moderate suspension of disbelief that seduced poets and writers from time to time for some 300 years, and that made them give credit to the legend of the poet Surrey, who travelled to Europe in order to duel with anyone daring to doubt the peerless enchantment and the virtues of his lady (or invented lady). Was Geraldine an alias, like Wyatt’s Brunet or Phillys? In reality, her name was Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, whose Irish family might have had and actually boasted Tuscan and Florentine origins. She was one of Princess Mary’s ladies-in-waiting. Towards the end of the century, Thomas Nashe incorporated this titbit (which was later to be defined a colossal leg-pull and a great piece of bluster), in his Unfortunate Traveller. Nashe was closely followed by Drayton in his heroic epistles. Eighteenth-century distaste for chivalric romances smothered the whole story for a while, but the absolute proof of Surrey’s romantic resurrection lies in Nott’s 1815–1816 edition itself, in which Nott, if one disregards his philological aberrations, arranged and established the text linking the whole collection of Surrey’s poems to a secret guideline inspired by the romance of Geraldine. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Geraldine is the name, accompanied by an unmistakable wink, both of Coleridge’s ‘witch’ in Christabel and of the protagonist in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’. The Geraldine legend still had a follower in 1897: to wit, the influential critic William John Courthope; after which, disenchantment set in. 4. If one superimposes biographical events on the texts, one gets a surprise: the former are as rash and hasty as the latter were measured, coolly detached, never written spontaneously or in the heat of the moment. On the other hand, from now on the alternation between profane and sacred increasingly marks English poetry. Firmly established in Wyatt, further back in Chaucer and Gower, it will reappear in Donne; and it is synchronic, an oscillation between one mood or the other, or decidedly successive and alternative. At least three of these poets close their career in a sacred vein, writing penitential poetry, in one case from a prison, in another awaiting execution. If one attempts to analyse this accord, one concludes that mid- or late sixteenth-century poetry revolves around the impossibility of actually living up to the ideal of the gentleman or courtier, for whom self-control

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and abstinence are paramount. This is in other words the gentleman that the educational writings of the time, like Elyot’s and Ascham’s, were attempting to forge, with as much force as that employed by human waywardness in disregarding them. Surrey’s poetry, from one end to the other, vibrates to a similar, grieving, anguished penitential chord. Wyatt remonstrates, implores for his love to be reciprocated or remembered by his elusive ladylove, whilst Surrey begs Love to set him free, as if love were an illness he desires to be freed from.7 Petrarch is virtually rewritten and the sonnets derived from him become Surrey’s true offspring. ‘Love that doth reign and live within my thought’8 interprets this paradox on a very discriminating and self-analysing level: the poet has perceived on one side his conventional subjection to personified Love, who has taken possession of his inner self, but is also admonished by the lady in stern and angry terms to tame his ‘hot desire’ and embrace modesty, deposing all arrogance, which nonetheless causes him to recognize his unavoidable state of servitude to Love. Yet in Surrey’s connotations Love casts baleful, Lucifer-like flickerings (the first in a long series in English poetry), when he plants his banner in front of the lover as a symbol of his blatant victory, only to retire, defeated, ‘His purpose lost’.9 Surrey just as freely translates Petrarch’s ‘Or che ’l cielo e la terra e ’l vento tace’, proving his ability to formalize his idiolect by using recurring terms and syntagmas,10 though he readmits – symptomatically, and echoing the Petrarchan original – his ‘uncontrollable’ desire and his condition of ‘doubt’.11 Petrarch is always gentler, whereas Surrey exploits and underlines the latent dramatic contrasts, highlighting divergences. In his translation of Petrarch’s sonnet on Zephyr who ‘’l bel tempo rimena’ he keeps back until the last line the adversative that in Petrarch occurs at the

7 8 9 10 11

Regarding his much desired healing from the sickness of love, see especially the lament ‘When Summer took in hand the winter to assail’. Petrarch: ‘Amor che nel pensier mio vive e regna’. With an obvious pre-Miltonic ring. ‘doubtful hope’ recurs, for instance, both in the sonnet ‘Love that doth reign …’, and in the dramatic monologue ‘O happy dames’. Line 5, ‘Calm is the sea’, reappears as ‘The sea is calm’ in ‘Dover Beach’ by Arnold, a ‘seascape’ containing other terms from Surrey’s lyric.

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beginning of the sestet. This sonnet reveals and confirms another aspect of Surrey’s vein: his secret and then gradually more explicit pleasure in composing little word-paintings, his proclivity to enumeration, the frequency with which a fairly persistent and static frame of mind is reflected by or collides with some external, stylized or miniaturized scenario. This frame of mind may be also exemplified by an anecdote or by an objective correlative, without the aid either of simile or explicit antitheses.12 For this very reason Surrey often infringes the tight formal scheme of the sonnet, and several of his lyrics are in longer measures. Which, however, never makes him a wordy or confused poet, and never prevents him from foreshadowing that kind of elegance and equilibrium that make him, as I said, a forerunner of the Augustans. From one standpoint his word-pictures are imagistic and an end in themselves; from another, however, they tend to be superficial, pretty forgettable and far from inspiring. 5. Surrey’s classic love-lyric is really based on and consists of a succession of commonplaces without any vital sap. His imagery is also hackneyed, although he manages, every now and then, to pen a few, fine, isolated lines. The general trend is pretty flat and monotonous. It is thus with pleasurable surprise that one witnesses him abandoning this kind of conventional lyrical composition and embarking on stylistic innovations that, although unrecognized at the time, were to affect English poetry only a little less than the adoption of blank verse. In at least a couple of lyrics Surrey experimented with dramatic monologues, shifting his focus from his own anguish, as a grieving and rejected lover, to the heartache of a woman, yearning for her husband’s return from the wars. The dialogued eclogue ‘In winters’s just return’, albeit only an isolated example, could be ideally situated between

12

The remarkable chiaroscuro sonnet on the self-destructive misdeeds of King Sardanapalus, engulfed by sloth and vice, annihilated by paralysis, but capable of rescuing himself by committing suicide, has been read as an identikit of Henry VIII at the end of his life. In search of its probable genesis – that is, why Surrey wrote such a different and such a powerful sonnet, his darkest and most evocative – one could cautiously and innocuously pursue a kind of Freudian approach: Surrey’s theme is the containment of uncontrolled desire, or rather of ‘abject desire’, the dangers of incontinence and the descent into orgiastic bestiality.

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Barclay and Spenser. It is a tragic eclogue, as the rejected shepherd kills himself and is pathetically buried next to Troilus’ tomb. The three sonnets on Wyatt’s death seem to have been composed in sober Drydenish diction. The ode on Wyatt’s death is perhaps Surrey’s most well-known composition, but seems to be a rather cold, late example of that epideictic genre, governed by precise conventions, that had prospered in the Latin Middle Ages. It is true that Wyatt was ‘steadfast’, but educational objectives and strenuous patriotic devotion do not appear to be prominent in his poetry. That Surrey should emphasize this betrays, yet again, a Renaissance-like pursuit of self-control and harmony. That many, or at least, some of Surrey’s lyrics should be read e contrario, is confirmed by the epigram in octosyllabic quatrains translated from Martial, praising moderation and, most especially, chastity, or the control of one’s senses. The most admired of Surrey’s eclogues is the one he wrote when imprisoned in Windsor, where he compares the carefree diversions and radiant sensations of the past with his altered circumstances. But even this succession of (excessively) rapid flashes fails to make his verse memorable or enthralling. Without being entirely bad, it is only graced by very modest inventive gifts. This impassioned, fluid, rhapsodic, exuberantly ardent and memory-crowded eclogue reveals a youthful, urgent desire, both difficult to control, and at times complacent or timorous: some of these revealing traits, threaded together, convey the subterranean idea of the explosion of the senses. § 44. The ‘Mirror for Magistrates’ This voluminous anthology,1 to use a euphemism, which, in its last and most complete edition (1610) in three parts, after an unbelievably complicated editorial history, comprised some 1500 printed pages, was first compiled in 1563. It is yet another exploit of the Elizabethan cultural system and an editorial undertaking, the result of which, however, did not quite measure up to the effort required and the aspirations from which it sprang. The megalomaniac idea (the project commenced, at least formally,

1

The term ‘magistrate’ has the same meaning as Elyot’s ‘governor’, that is, someone endowed with great public responsibility, as BAUGH notices in vol. II, 398 n. 1. The standard complete edition is the one edited by J. Haslewood, 3 vols, London 1815.

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under Mary’s reign) was the brainchild of two learned antiquarians who became its coordinators, hiring a team of poets, none of the first water, and a number of dilettantes, in order to compile a series of ‘tragedies’ in the medieval and Chaucerian tradition, which were to demonstrate the influence of fortune, the transient nature of fame and earthly success and the inexorability of death. The glorious protagonists of history were supposed to be the narrators, lamenting their ultimate fall in exemplary fashion, in order to admonish a society that despite the advent of the Reformation was anything but chaste and was proving greedily acquisitive and powerhungry. Thus summarized, the Mirror seems dangerously belated, and it is difficult to share the frequent enthusiastic opinions that define it the first instance of modern literature, rather than one of the many surviving examples of medieval production. It was part of a long chain, the first link of which, in post-classical times, was Boccaccio’s De Casibus. Chaucer had concisely included a series of lightening sketches on historical disasters in one of his Canterbury Tales. Lydgate had composed The Fall of Princes drawing on a French intermediary. After the first edition, the scope of the investigation, which had only covered the last 150 years of English history, was immeasurably extended. 1085 BC was established as the terminus a quo, the present being the end point. No geographical limits were set. Which makes the Mirror the classic, unoriginal compilation of the Middle Ages, derived and based on a number of sources, pivoting on a well-oiled mechanism and motivated by blatantly educational and persuasive intentions. ‘Wooden’ is the adjective that springs to mind, as most suited to its metre. The somewhat uncouth purpose of the project can be discerned in the title: to teach the instability of fortunes and of fortune, to punish vice, to offer examples of virtue. No educational poetry is perforce destined to failure – of course not! – but out of the ninety-eight tragedies (linked to each other in the Mirror by prose passages, again in Chaucer’s wake), extremely few are worth reading and only a couple or so have been judged defensible by some historical readers, and rise above anonymity. One of the latter is the tale of Jane Shore – the incomparably beautiful mistress of Edward IV, who nearly managed to captivate the judge at her trial for conspiracy – composed by Thomas Churchyard (ca. 1520–1604), who was a pupil of Surrey’s at court, then soldier of fortune on various battlefields, after which he was an occasionally gifted hack writer. Another tale, on the

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death of Edward IV himself, claims to have been directly collected viva voce from Skelton. 2. The rehabilitation of the Mirror is due to four main reasons. It can be classified as a Renaissance work rather than medieval, as, despite its homiletic purposes, the knowledge of history as a master of life is required in the formation of a court dignitary. Secondly, its tragedies are embryonic dramatic monologues, uttered by the illustrious dead themselves, thus creating, for the first time, a kind of genre that was to be much used and, in a sense, patented by Browning’s much later work. Thirdly, in practically record time this immense collection was ransacked by much greater poets and playwrights, and Shakespeare himself delved into it, to find inspiration for some of his characters, such as Macbeth, Iago or King Lear. To end with a truly intrinsic merit, the Mirror does not only include the ‘Duke of Buckingham’s Complaint’,2 which, in itself, does not rate much above the average, but also a second poetic sample by its author, Thomas Sackville3 (ca. 1536–1608), an ‘Induction’ or introduction to the complaint itself in seventy-nine rhyme royal stanzas which is, albeit an isolated case, a miraculous pinnacle of English poetry of the time. It is a kind of dreamlike vision of how the poet, one blustery, lugubrious, winter night, meets Sorrow. Sorrow guides him to an infernal lake, so that he may see the transient nature of all human endeavour and add his own to the Mirror’s warnings. The prosodic ingredients and the allegorical backdrop are by no means novel, but Sackville deftly blends them together, transmitting a highly popular poetic genre to posterity. His verse is regular, classically solemn and measured, the iambic metre very marked, thanks to the hammering, ringing alliteration; both components mingle, with excessively 2 3

Condemned and beheaded for high treason in 1521. Son of the Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer, he obtained a degree at Oxford, was a Law scholar, and his prodigality and youthful love of luxury became legendary. As from the early 1560s he was one of the highest placed officials of the Crown, as well as being one of the most valued statesmen of his generation. He was Elizabeth’s ambassador in Europe, Lord Buckhurst in 1567, Earl of Dorset in 1604. He also enjoyed James I’s trust when the latter came to the throne. He died during a Council session. Having co-authored Gorboduc with Norton (§ 88), he was torn away from his purely literary pursuits by his political ambition.

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overcharged imagery. Sackville is obviously aware of Chaucer’s Hous of Fame and Langland’s Piers Plowman. Nonetheless, he introduces a novel element by imitating Dante. In an era of widespread, dominant Petrarchism, Petrarch is put aside and Sackville’s allegory, just as overtly, paraphrases the Divine Comedy’s initial lines: no more soft, extenuated, honeyed atmospheres as provided by the poet from Arezzo; all is powerful, spectacular hallucination, a visual and aural kaleidoscope. This is the starting point, or renewed starting point – after Hoccleve – for the precise variant of the over-used expedient of a sortie into a fresh, dewy May morning, that was so often adopted after the Roman de la Rose. It is an upside-down cliché, because Sackville transforms it into a nightmare. Up to Thomson’s mid-nineteenthcentury City of Dreadful Night, there will be an uninterrupted succession of poems organized around terrifying and spectral meetings in the course of sleepless nights, crowded with frightful, apocalyptic scenarios of monsters, ruins and deserted wastelands. Only thirty years later, Macbeth was to be based on a warrior leader’s encounter with three witches on a heath, in a work which will be an extension of the Mirror tragedy. Sorrow, who guides the pilgrim, makes her way with the poet through such an impenetrable, dark and desolate wood, that he is instinctively tempted to turn back (see Dante’s ‘fui più volte volto’ [‘that oft-times, / With purpose to retrace my steps, I turned’]). The contamination between the texts is proved by the way Sackville continually accentuates the visual aspects, with an abundance of plastic and sensory details, which he continues to pour into his verse. The cavern, through which one approaches the lake, stinks, and the allegorical statues around the banks of the lake (which is, however, called the Acheron) are Revenge, Remorse, Famine, etc., the whole amounting to a Dantesque exploit of plasticity and illusionism. Moreover, as the ghostly shades approach, he utters heart-rending, mournful lays in the Dantesque mode. Charon ferries the two pilgrims to the other shore and after Cerberus has been silenced, a summary, excessively rapid inventory of great war-leaders (Hannibal, Caesar, Xerxes) is offered, in which their most identifying deeds are presented, only to be swallowed up by oblivion. The inventory also lists whole kingdoms, razed to the ground after much splendour. A Protestant, Sackville hints at a virtuous life being rewarded by Paradise, but he does not believe in Purgatory.

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§ 45. Gascoigne* In order to place George Gascoigne (1534–1577) some critics have employed the ruse of calling him the greatest court poet of Queen Elizabeth’s youth. This is not a particularly flattering definition, as it does not even cover twenty years, a period in which there were not many great poets in activity. Aside from this not very complimentary classification, he was and is the object of a disconcertingly wide range of extreme and diverging opinions. His supporters praise, whilst his detractors execrate, his eclecticism, and no agreement exists as to the works that are supposed to prove his greatness. The first divergences emerge from his life. Son of a nobleman, he earned the reputation of a scamp, for his fairly thuggish behaviour at university; he contracted debts ending up in jail, after which his father disinherited him. He had nonetheless given proof of a somewhat erratic talent both as a poet and as a playwright. He was voted into Parliament very young by his county and married a widow, the mother of the poet Nicholas Breton. Having contracted further debts, he had to flee the country and fought as a captain in the Netherlands, where he was captured by the Spanish. After the payment of his ransom, he spent the last five intense years of his life organizing masques and plays in honour of the queen at her castles of Kenilworth and Woodstock. For snobbish reasons or because of some inner persuasion, he did not consider himself as a poet or literary personality, proclaiming himself a soldier in defence of divine truth. His coat of arms exhibited a pile of books paired with a blunderbuss. A contemporary print, however, portrays him kneeling devoutly and proudly before his Queen, offering her his services. His true character is somewhat of an enigma. From what has been stated above, one might be able to argue that he was a dreamer and an outdated idealist; or was he unthinkingly impetuous and so lacking in self-esteem and willpower as to risk being trapped by pathological fits of what could be defined as insanity? The latter hypotheses could be plausible, if one considers how many professions he undertook, only to abandon *

Works, ed. J. W. Cunliffe, 2 vols, Cambridge 1907–1910; A Hundred Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W Pigman III, Oxford 2000 (text of 1573). C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier and Poet, New York 1942, 1966; G. Austen, George Gascoigne, Woodbridge 2008.

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them when he found them unsatisfactory. Could one call him a maudit? He certainly recalls certain later human wrecks, or famous empty husks in literature. Like them, he followed a rhythm of highs and lows and, after having slithered into the abyss, would bitterly beat his breast. During the last years of his life his humour blackened, as witnessed even by the titles of the works he engaged upon. One of the latter was a translation, a ‘Drum of Judgement’. Other eccentrics dedicated funerary tributes to him after his death, but he was soon basically forgotten. He was nonetheless to be revaluated as a kind of meteoric outsider – one of the unclassifiable, titillating, slightly scandalous, out of the ordinary literary figures, the authors of unfashionable anecdotes,1 whose tastes were casual and extemporaneous (like Stephen Hawes’s were), and capable of attracting partial critics like Mario Praz. The latter did in fact recognize that Gascoigne possessed occasional flashes of genius, but then cut his appraisal short, by defining Gascoigne’s as the umpteenth case of Italian infatuation, however quenched by a strategic withdrawal. 2. It has been difficult, as I mentioned, to choose the right emphasis and to find the key work in such a rich and disordered bibliography as Gascoigne’s. Saintsbury predictably devoted three-quarters of his short discussion on him to a short treatise on the prosody of English verse.2 C. S. Lewis also considered it ‘very important’ for its emphasis on ‘invention’, an intuition very similar to that deviation from the common language that is specific to poetry in relation to any other form of communication – and a very surprising intuition, we may add, in an age like the early Elizabethan in which imitation was the undisputed practice. Critics less partial to prosody choose instead other fulcrums in the writer’s work. Roughly in order of appearance, Gascoigne was in fact a playwright or more precisely a remaker, a novelist, a translator (of a story by Bandello), an anthologizer, an erotic, allegorical and satirical poet, a pamphleteer

1

2

Philomene, from Ovid, was started by Gascoigne during a horseback ride in 1562; interrupted by a shower, the composition was completed fourteen years later, merging the Ovidian reminiscence with the medieval topos of the vision during a dream (BAUGH, vol. II, 406). Certain Notes of Instruction, also known as Certain Notes or Instructions (1576).

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and polemist, a war journalist. The bulk of such a multifaceted work is enclosed in A Hundred Sundry Flowers (1573), republished as the poems of Gascoigne alone in 1575 and divided into three picturesquely and bizarrely entitled sections (‘flowers’, ‘herbs’ and ‘weeds’).3 From the very subtitle, incidentally, the wordiness which Shakespeare would inexorably brand in his early comedies stands out. Indeed, if there is one thing in which Gascoigne really excels before the advent of the euphuists this is the art of the colourful title, always embroidered and reinforced with alliterations. There is no doubt that in all those competences listed above Gascoigne boasts a primogeniture which is a prominent title of merit; that is to say, he first planted the English flag in the territories of drama and narrative and critical prose. The actual results are uneven. At thirty, in 1566, he actually adapted in prose Ariosto’s I suppositi at Gray’s Inn.4 A Jocasta in blank verse was poorly drawn from an Italian version of the Aeschylean drama. Gascoigne’s major achievement, neither poetic nor dramatic, is the long prose novella The Adventures of Master F. J. (1573), the pioneering story, in part epistolary, of a liaison, and conducted, as in the libertine eighteenth century, without a pinch of moralism.5 A Hundred Sundry Flowers exuded scents of scandal, but I have already mentioned that the supposed authors were marked with acronyms or periphrases to avoid being recognized and to cover the identity of Gascoigne himself. In the anthology Gascoigne mimics Wyatt lamenting female inconstancy, but with a self-ironic vein; a resigned and sorrowful lullaby, with obvious

3 4

5

There is now a general consensus that, in the first edition, Gascoigne played the public the trick of inventing fake alias for the seventy-nine compositions he said were not his out of the 100 included; and that therefore all the anthology is his. The vicissitudes of Erostrato disguised as a servant to better woo Polimnestra (Polynesta in Gascoigne) resemble those in Sidney’s Arcadia. At the same time the denouement of Dulipo’s servant as the son of the lawyer Cleandro (stolen at the siege of Otranto by the Turks) is a precedent for The Comedy of Errors and other romances by Shakespeare. Ariosto’s first version of the play is from 1509, and in prose, and this is the basis of Gascoigne’s remake. Incorrigible, Gascoigne published the following year an expurgated version, presenting it as a translation from the Italian. C. S. Lewis, in 1954 (ELS, 269), was still searching for the elusive ‘Bartello’, the author from whom Gascoigne claimed to have taken it.

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sexual innuendos, remained popular, as well as a delicate, feminine poem, of evident Skeltonian memory, on a sparrow named Philip. The satire The Glass of Government (1575), a drama of the didactic genre of ‘the prodigal son’,6 and The Steel Glass (1576) in verse – the latter highly esteemed by many Gascoigne enthusiasts, but clumsy and heavy in its development – contain tones of repentance for the youthful past and attack the hypocrisy of the gallant world, of which Gascoigne had been a member. § 46. Other minor poets To Sackville and Gascoigne is generally attributed, therefore, a little merit, that of having filled a void in the void, the short time section between the 1540s and the 1570s and between Surrey and Sidney. Three or four are in that time span the independent poets working outside the anthologies or the miscellanies. Thomas Tusser (ca. 1525–1580) belongs to the timeless breed of British eccentrics without even an ounce of the Italianate. A bizarre, professional musician, and a country-producer of barley, in 1557 he published a handbook of domestic and rural economy that reached some ten editions by the end of the century and retained some popularity even after. The maxims therein collected are predictable and commonsensical, but often also whimsical, and complicated and idiosyncratic in their prosody of anapaestic quatrains, thus contradicting in practice the appearance of a pedestrian manual addressed to the uneducated. Barnaby Googe (1540–1594), having made a name as a translator of minor Latin works, took inspiration from Barclay and other pastoral poets for his collection of eight ‘Protestant’ eclogues (1563), to which was added an allegorical poem on Cupid ‘conquered’ (a kind of response to that of Lord Vaux in Tottel’s); both works herald Spenser while not failing to insist on the exhausting and alienating effects of love. George Turberville (ca. 1540–1610), he too a translator of Ovid and of Mantuan’s eclogues, published in 1567 a collection of epitaphs and epigrams in a faded Wyattian vein, though striking a new and imaginative note with a further series of stories about ‘speaking animals’ and of medieval ballads. Thomas Howell (personal details unknown) is almost the last sixteenth-century poet to verify the bad reputation of the 6

§ 87.2.

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‘poulterer’s measure’ (or rather the misuse of it by mediocre poets), and, at that date, a tired repetition of platitudes. § 47. Elizabethan Catholic poets Educated at Oxford, Edmund Campion (1541–1581) took Anglican orders but, soon wavering, he fled to Douai; he then became a Jesuit in Rome in 1573, returned home as a missionary to evangelize the central counties, and wrote the ‘ten reasons’ against Anglicanism, a pamphlet that intensified the manhunt for Catholics by royal officials. Caught by a spy, he was brought to London where he was interrogated by the queen in person, to whom he proclaimed himself a loyal subject, resisting temptations and blackmail. After a summary trial he was beheaded at Tyburn with two other Catholic martyrs, Sherwin and Bryant. Campion had previously left Oxford for Dublin on a mission similar to that of Hopkins 300 years later, which was to teach in a Catholic University in Ireland, set up in 1570 with identical, that is, slim, tangible results. A judgement of Campion given by Hopkins himself applies to him a paradigm that corresponded to one of his own, frequently stated autobiographical hankerings: Campion had been a brilliant and promising intellectual, a ‘star’ whose radiant light – for various environmental and personal circumstances – dimmed and was finally extinguished. With the same metaphor Hopkins described the parable of another Oxonian, Duns Scotus. At the same time, Hopkins vicariously idealized in Campion, and yearned for himself, the mystical and ecstatic experience of martyrdom, which he openly cherished in the nun of the ‘Deutschland’, or in St Winefred and other figures of saintly men and women. On Campion Hopkins intended in fact to write an ode of which no fragment is extant. In a letter to Dixon dated 18811 he mentions Campion’s History of Ireland, written ‘in hiding’, just like his heart in ‘The Windhover’. He added that he was the most vigorous mind, the most eloquent linguist, and the most combative theologian, not only of England but of the whole of Europe: ‘But his eloquence died on the air, his genius was quenched in his blood after one year’s employment in his 1

The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, London 1970, 94.

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country’. These words echo, again, Hopkins’s well-known epitaph on Duns Scotus.2 That History by Campion, written in 1571 and incorporated in 1587 by Holinshed,3 constructs a parallel but antithetical vision to Spenser’s Veue of which it is contemporary; and like it, it builds on the observation of the uses and customs of the Irish. 2. In the same letter quoted above, Hopkins also mentions Robert Southwell (1561–1595), another Jesuit priest and martyr, however calling him ‘a minor poet but still a poet’, a limiting judgement that lets us guess that his preference, and explicitly as a poet tout court, went to Campion, although no one can guess on what evidence. Hopkins’s coldness, the only line he devotes to Southwell compared to the two enthusiastic pages on Campion, and his further silence in his correspondence about the former, can be hardly explained straightaway. Southwell, like Hopkins, hungered for martyrdom, and, like Hopkins, he published no poetry in his lifetime, and he foreshadows a good thirty years earlier the flamboyant, continental Baroque of a Catholic stamp, as well as its only English representative poet, Crashaw. In his poetry Southwell comes therefore very close to the amazing, reckless and, at certain stages, intoxicated rhetoric of the author of the ‘Deutschland’. Hopkins, in short, could well find in him a kindred soul and someone, like him, ‘disanchor’d from a blissful shore’.4 Born into a Norfolk family of ancient Catholic traditions, Southwell, therefore not a convert, was sent to study in France in the Douai seminary, while a royal edict of 1584 forbade Catholic priests to extend their residence on English soil for over forty days, thus condemning Southwell to a clandestine life. He then held the post of prefect of studies at the English College in Rome, where he easily became acquainted with the Italian poetry of the Counter-Reformation. In 1586 he returned home to assist in apostolic works and to administer the sacraments, protected by families of aristocrats of the old faith. Sentenced to detention in a fetid cell, he was hanged, beheaded and quartered. His homiletic works already circulated in 2 3 4

See Volume 6, § 202.4. § 161.3. This is the first line of ‘The Prodigal Chyld’s Soule Wracke’, one of Southwell’s finest dramatic monologues.

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manuscript and were so widespread that one, Mary Magdalen’s Tears,5 in prose, was parodied by Nashe. His countrymen sought later to make amends for the barbaric and unspeakable shame of his martyrdom with long-time admiration,6 and preserving at least in anthologies the phantasmagoric ‘The Burning Babe’.7 Southwell’s major poetic work is, however, Saint Peter’s Complaint (1595, in 132 six-line stanzas), a free paraphrase of a poem by Luigi Tansillo, ‘Lagrime di San Pietro’, who offset with that work earlier licentious poems that had been placed on the Index. Southwell wrote this in prison in a veiled polemic against the very latest mythological poems, their vogue and their pagan aesthetics, such as Venus and Adonis by Shakespeare, which was challenged on its own ground and adopted the same metre and decorative forms. The Complaint sings the mercy of God, who forgave Peter who had denied Jesus, and thus Peter himself who, repenting and rehabilitated, became the founder of the Church of Christ. The autobiographical and personal resonance is pretty subtle. Peter exemplifies sinful human weakness only redeemed by Grace, but Southwell was not only, or not at all looking for an example, but precisely overtaking Peter with

5

6

7

The tears of the penitent or redeemed man are ubiquitous in Southwell: those of repenting Peter, those of Magdalene, those of Jesus himself in the vision described in ‘The Burning Babe’ (see below, n. 7). The latter poem closes a series of sacred lyrics of a prevailing gnomic or hymnal nature, where the pun between the death that is life and the life that is death crops up almost at every turn. Moeoniae, a collection of 1595, just posthumous, splits into single lyrics the scenes of the birth, marriage and motherhood of the Virgin and of other Gospel episodes. A modern recent edition is Collected Poems, ed. P. Davidson and A. Sweeney, Manchester 2007. The state of Southwell’s studies and editions is discussed in a review in TLS, 2 March 2007, 28. Southwell and Hopkins share the same scholar and biographer, Christopher Devlin. Jonson, like others after him, expressed his admiration for this poem, although composed in sixteen lines in the proverbially irritating ‘poulterer’s measure’. The polyvalent fire in which the ‘Babe’ is wrapped is a metaphor for the Passion which is also evoked by the tears that try to put out the fire; it is the flame of divine love and Christ incarnate for the benefit of Man, who refuses him; it is that of the furnace where the sins of mankind will burn. But, with a sudden twist, the fire will make room for the bloodshed, and for the blood that will wash away the stains of the sinners. Birth, Passion and Redemption already overlap in this Christmas hallucination.

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his own imminent martyrdom, and happily overcoming tortures which recalled those of Christ; he was aware of proceeding in the footsteps of the first martyr, Christ Himself. Here is perhaps the reason why Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’, which resembles the Complaint in its figurative technique and its formal stamp, reverses Southwell’s argumentative plan. In Hopkins the heroic nun is the image of Peter, but of that Peter who was the rock on which the Church was to be founded, not the disciple who had denied Jesus. Southwell’s decasyllabic iambic regularity contrasts of course with Hopkins’s eight-line stanza of varied and ‘sprung’ prosody;8 but within the litanic and synonymic strings the same daring and hidden metaphors find room, the same insistent questions, the same antitheses and the same contrasts, including that foundational one in Hopkins, that death is life, and that Peter denying Jesus chose death believing he was saving his life. And yet the Catholic God forgives, and God’s forgiveness is, in Southwell and in Hopkins, a meeting between extremes, the extremes of maximum purity and maximum impurity. Hopkins too will not miss the opportunity to lament the religious division triggered by the Reformation. Southwell was in fact in jail because of the secession provoked by Luther – born, as Hopkins would remember, in the same village as Sister Gertrude, the nun exiled for the same reasons for which Southwell was convicted (‘Banned by the land of their birth’). Hopkins’s variant is explicit: ‘The Simon Peter of a soul’. In Hopkins’s ode this is inevitably followed by a reference to the Tarpeian rock, alluding to the name of Peter and to the stone.9 3. Henry Constable (1562–1613) lacks some marks of the identikit heading this section. His family was from Yorkshire and of ancient Catholic traditions, but Henry probably kept secret or ambiguous his Catholic leanings and became a favourite of Queen Elizabeth, who employed him, as a courtier, in military expeditions in France; but he made no mystery of his faith in the early 1590s and had to live in exile in France. On the death of the queen, back in England he acted as an intermediary between the Pope and the new monarch James I to convince him to return to the Roman fold and use greater tolerance towards Catholics. Arrested as a Catholic recusant 8 9

For all references to Hopkins’s poem see Volume 6, §§ 197–9. Peter’s plight is then, ultimately, that of the ‘terrible’ sonnets, of the night of the soul.

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and sent to the Tower, he escaped martyrdom and died a natural death in Belgium, where he had gone from Paris to dispute with a Protestant. Three pastoral rondos and a version of the story of Venus and Adonis in rhyming couplets, included in Helicon, were attributed to Constable since they were signed H. C. But Constable’s contemporary fame as a profane poet is due to the songbook Diana, in itself yet another, although elegant and professional, embroidery on worn-out imagery and a series of well-known and obvious conceits (fire and ice, life and death, the darting eyes). Nevertheless the title is not only that of the fortunate romance by Montemayor that had inspired Sidney, but indicates and points, in the guise of a paronomasia, to the divine nature of the woman who is sung and to the religious worship that is bestowed on her. The most continuous image that depicts her is that of the sun, not yet with the inevitable pun with the ‘Sun’. Except that in a sonnet Constable rhapsodizes on the seven deadly sins of the lover, which are the evidence of his unyielding loyalty, which results in the oxymoron of the heart ‘damn’d in love’s sweet fire’. The nineteenth sonnet eventually brings to light sacred allusions, hints at a free state and anticipates the reconversion of the sacred metaphor to its literal value. In this unusual sonnet the heart, like that of the Virgin, is pierced by five arrows shot by the woman; however, the wounds become the wounds of St Francis, making the poet a martyr of love. As a Catholic, Constable wrote seventeen explicitly ‘holy’ sonnets that are meditations on the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Compared to Southwell, he celebrates the repentance of St Peter and St Paul, expressly remembering that the former ‘at a mayden’s voyce amazed stoode’. The last sonnets in this ‘corona’ hinge on figures of repentant sinners, therefore also on Mary Magdalene. § 48. Sidney* I: The diagnostician and healer of infected man Many biographies of Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) have been written since the earliest in 1610 (but published in 1652), the work of his 1

*

Complete Works, ed. A. Feuillerat, 4 vols, Cambridge 1912–1926; separate edns: Arcadia (Old), ed. J. Robertson, Oxford 1973, ed. K. Duncan-Jones, Oxford 1985; (New) ed. V. Skretkowicz, Oxford 1987; (1593 version) ed. M. Evans, Harmondsworth 1977. The Poems, ed. W. A. Ringler, Oxford 1962; Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. K. Duncan-Jones and J. Van Dorsten, Oxford 1973; The Correspondence of Sir

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contemporary, Fulke Greville,1 a devoted friend from the time they were both pupils at Shrewsbury college. The demand for accounts of his life was Philip Sidney, ed. R. Kuin, 2 vols, Oxford 2012. An excellent anthology with notes is Sir Philip Sidney, ed. K. Duncan-Jones, Oxford 1990. Astrophil and Stella, with book-length introduction, text and commentary, ed. V. Gentili, Bari 1965. Life. F. Greville, Life of Sidney, London 1652, and, ed. N. Smith, Oxford 1907; M. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, Cambridge 1915; M. Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, London 1931, 1950; J. Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, London 1954; J. M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 1572–1577, New Haven, CT and London 1972; K. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, New Haven, CT and London 1991; A. Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life, London 2000. Criticism. J. A. Symonds, Sir Philip Sidney, New York 1886; R. W. Zandvoort, Sidney’s Arcadia: A Comparison of the Two Versions, Amsterdam 1929; K. O. Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman, Cambridge, MA 1935, Lincoln, NE 1965; M. Praz, ‘Sidney’s Original Arcadia’ in Ricerche anglo-italiane, Roma 1944, 63–78 (1st edn 1927); A. Biagi, Sir Philip Sidney, Napoli 1958; K. Muir, Sir Philip Sidney, London 1960; R. L. Montgomery, Symmetry and Sense; The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, Austin, TX 1961; W. T. Davis and R. Lanham, Sidney’s Arcadia, New Haven, CT 1965; D. Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations, Cambridge, MA 1965; N. L. Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development, Cambridge, MA 1967; R. Howell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight, London 1968; F. Marenco, Arcadia puritana. L’uso della tradizione nella prima ‘Arcadia’ di Sir Philip Sidney, Bari 1968 (an interpretation of Arcadia as an ‘allegory of man’s life after the Fall’ [218]); R. Kimbrough, Sir Philip Sidney, New York 1971; J. G. Nichols, The Poetry of Philip Sidney: An Interpretation in the Context of His Life and Times, Liverpool 1974; D. Connell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Maker’s Mind, Oxford 1977; A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Work, Cambridge 1977 (an excellent general introduction); A. D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts, Minneapolis, MN 1978; R. C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia, Brighton 1979; Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. D. Kay, Oxford 1987; S. K. Heninger, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker, University Park, PA 1989; Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements, ed. M. J. B. Allen et al., New York 1990; A. Hager, Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney, Newark, DE and London 1991; J. Rees, Sir Philip Sidney and Arcadia, London 1991; CRHE, ed. M. Garrett, London 1996; B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics, New Haven, CT 1996; E. Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, Toronto 1998; G. Alexander, Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586–1640, Oxford 2007. 1

§ 55.

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fed by the spectacular evangelizing utopias and the amazing deeds in which he had been involved during his brief lifetime. As Thomas More had been the saint of old, papist England, and the scapegoat of Henry VIII’s monarchy, Sidney was the martyr of the Elizabethan one. In 1586 England proudly presented to the world this prodigious son of hers. Sidney was the most complete personification, in the eyes of his contemporaries, of the perfect courtier as described in the conduct books, and of a Messianic ideal moulded and invoked for more than half a century: a polyhedral man, cultivating art with feigned, deliberate snobbery – not with a full-time involvement2 to be sure, but, to an equally certain extent, with a flaunted amateurism which in fact hid a deeply embedded professionalism. At the same time, as a child Sidney had started to pluck the choicest flowers of Renaissance culture, especially Reformation culture, preparing himself in the best way possible to serve queen and Crown, and to form the most perfect synthesis between the man of thought and the man of action. It is true that, when he had ended this preparation, in 1575 Sidney was eventually under-used (we will have to seek the reasons for this); but death left him only a scant decade to wait and try himself.3 In 1586 his funeral in London, attended by huge crowds, sumptuous and solemn as never before, nearly made his father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham bankrupt. They were a response to what had been – or seemed to be – a romantic, heroic example of contempt for danger. He died in fact hardly thirty-two years old, in a military action which was insignificant in itself but had for him great symbolic value.4 Made governor of Vlissingen, a bulwark the Orange had granted the English in exchange for their military help against the Spanish, he was wounded during a skirmish by a musket shot in his thigh, for he had taken off his greaves to emulate another warrior; the legend is that he

2 3 4

None of Sidney’s three main works (five, including the Arcadias) was printed during his life. His knighthood, awarded in 1583, was largely motivated by political expediency. Obviously Sidney is one of the first poets ‘killed in action’ in their prime, fighting for a just human cause, and subsequently made myths of, especially by England’s national conscience, until the ‘war poets’ generation of World War I (Volume 7, §§ 61–8).

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had given his water allowance to a soldier ‘who needed it more’. He died repenting of his vanities and asking that his Arcadia be burnt: two more facts that require explanation. Spenser was one of those who soon after wrote elegies and dirges (nearly 200 of them) for the dead poet. 2. One passage from the Defence of Poesy can be said to enclose the key to the life and work of Sidney: creation is still troubled, he says, by ‘that first accursed fall of Adam, since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it’. The concordance of Sidney’s writings testifies to an obsessive recurrence of the terms ‘infected’ and ‘infection’, especially in the way they surface in harmless metaphors and even idioms. Tirelessly, one could say, from his first to last page, Sidney’s aim is to stage, and possibly show the victory in the strife between the original infections inherited from the post-lapsarian condition, and the will power that should, indeed can, heal them. At the same time aseptic gnosis must give room to praxis, as in all forms of voluntarism. For Sidney, Man’s genuine reform and his regeneration stem from an enlightened, non-dogmatic Protestantism, which therefore tries to get rid of the many oppressive hypostases and of the demands of an ineluctable quietism; he therefore proposes feasible, concrete measures, the fruits of a missionary utopia. He was forced to hide his enormous talents, as I said, under a bushel: queen and court either were unaware of them, or deliberately pushed him aside. This is symptomatic, since Sidney was anything but a Machiavellian, despised political opportunism, and was, instead, rather naïve. He committed indeed at least one diplomatic blunder at the time of the marriage proposal made to the queen by a Catholic French duke, and he had to leave the court, not before having challenged Lord de Vere,5 the 5

The lyrics of the turbulent Edward de Vere (1550–1604), seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Cecil’s son-in-law and very dear to the queen despite his Catholic leanings, were mainly printed in the 1576 Paradise of Dainty Devises (§ 41.2 n. 4). Obvious ideological reasons made Sidney arbitrarily brand him, though without naming him, in his Defence of Poesy. Being also a playwright and impresario, in more recent times (1920) de Vere was preposterously deemed to be the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Like Dyer (see below n. 8), de Vere, whose surviving lyrics are no more than twenty-two (see the edition by W. M. Looney, London 1921), owes his fame to one which was particularly catchy (hence set to music by Byrd), entitled ‘Woman’s Changeableness’,

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leader of the English Catholics, to a duel, and written a bold letter of dissent. Exile from public life was the fortunate pre-condition to his writing. Sidney dreamed of a cosmos brought back to its first promises, lawfully enjoying the prerogatives lavished on man by the original act of Creation. The prominent stages of his life tie in with these objectives, as well as with these dissensions. At Shrewsbury school Sidney’s teacher was, pour cause, a great Calvinist pedagogue, and he was thus brought up on the catechism of the Geneva reformer. His life was an adjustment, though not a rebuttal, of such early experience. Departing in 1572 at the age of seventeen for a European grand tour, in Paris he witnessed the night of St Bartholomew, and his anti-Catholicism was further intensified by his acquaintance with the Burgundian Huguenot Hubert Languet. This humanist was one of the many putative fathers6 that, having sensed his dazzling talents, prophesied a splendid future for him and reminded him daily of his ‘great expectations’.7 Sidney, however, wished to be the master of his own life. Back home, he did actually yearn to engage in public life; in particular he began to think of founding (and being himself its leader?) a Protestant league against Spanish Catholicism, with the queen’s moderate support. He sought to quench his frustration in plans to colonize and explore the universe, populated and unpopulated. But Elizabeth forbade him, one year before he died, to leave with Drake for Virginia. The circumstances of his death may appear at this point to have been seconded and wilfully planned. Sidney died, indeed, of gangrene, that is, of infection, persuaded he had not sufficiently pleaded the reasons for Man to be cured of the real gangrene, the soul’s moral infection; even, perhaps, that he had been unable to cure himself.

6

7

in itself commenting a commonplace, female appeal that bamboozles unresisting men. Others also reveal however a vein of pleasant, witty introspection. Sidney’s father, Lord Henry, for three terms the Viceroy of Ireland, ended his career as ‘president of the Welsh marches’. On his mother’s side Sidney was the nephew of two of the queen’s most influential counsellors and statesmen, one of them the Earl of Leicester. Sonnet 21 in Certain Sonnets. As Duncan-Jones 1990, xvii, notices, Dickens cleverly adopted this expression for the title of his Great Expectations, centring on the passion of one Philip (nicknamed Pip) for one [E]stella.

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3. Debunking biographers have corrected and revised, but not demolished, the portrait of the fabulously upright and immaculate Renaissance gentleman, and of his tragic heroism. We must not mistake Sidney for a pious, ascetic bigot forever occupied with his ideals. His wholly pure and heroic detachment is the reverse side of the force with which the world and its passions impinge on Sidney the man and on his alter egos in his works. Sidney was anything but an angel or a stigmatized saint; he felt in himself man’s weakness and his yielding to passions, vices, even turpitudes, and accepted them with equanimity, or scourged and urged himself to conquer them. He was daily prone to spasms of melancholy, depression and distrust that Languet exhorted him to subdue. He was touchy, and also foppish, overly smart in dressing, and therefore ‘vain’. In a way no character was wittier, shrewder and more malicious than he, as the Arcadias show, especially the first, which is an apotheosis of caprice and mischievous fancy, as well as the sonnets and his very candid letters, where he can use and measure out seriousness, humour, parody, comedy and farce – but also send to the devil, curse and insult the addressee. The fictionality of literature finds its first adept in Sidney. In the Arcadias the unrequited lover’s complaint and his pain – the frustrated pathos of the sonnets to Stella – undergo the action of a controlled objectivity and a humour that relativizes them; estrangement always lurks between the lines. Sidney did not objectify himself only as Astrophel. Philisides in the Arcadia is also a Greek anagram of Sidney, who at the end of the eclogues of Book IV formulates a coherent anamnesis, thus a short masked autobiography. At the same time the effusive, and almost subjective and unchecked poet of Astrophel and Stella is the one writing as a critic of poetry, hence a critical judge of his own too. The Defence extends the motif of regeneration to English poetry, which Spenser in founding the Areopagus had tried to set in motion.8 Indeed, English

8

Of the coterie also Edward Dyer (ca. 1543–1607), knighted in 1596, had been part. An Oxonian, rumoured to be a Rosicrucian and an adept in alchemy, he came to court with Leicester’s recommendation and was instantly employed by the queen in European diplomatic missions. Sidney showed his esteem by leaving half of his books to him and half to Fulke Greville, and Dyer helped carry his bier at the funeral. As a poet Dyer was praised by Puttenham for his ‘sweet’, perhaps even sugary elegies,

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poetry was not infected: it simply had never been born. Practically, Sidney is the first poet after Chaucer whose work can be divided into single individual items and single genres. It is also an exceptionally coherent oeuvre where everything is interrelated, rich in cross-references surfacing at a linguistic, lexical, symbolic, figurative, logical and argumentative level. He invites us to think of what his future career might have been, like other authors prematurely dead, great not for what they promised but for what they had already done: Shelley, Keats, Rimbaud, Leopardi, all of whom older than he when they died, save Keats. We may wonder, in other words, what Sidney would have become had he not died so young, and having written already two masterpieces at an age when most writers are usually busy attending to their apprenticeship. Everything leads us to assert that Sidney is a Surrey on a higher, far higher scale: of noble lineage, precocious, with a literary and heroic calling, dying a young, tragic death, the main fountain of his poetry springing from the romance of this life. But Surrey is no theoretician, nor does he produce a really organic poetic collection or even an Arcadia: he is a timid Protestant, perhaps deep in his heart an old Catholic, as much as Sidney is a confirmed enemy to the Pope and to Spain. Vice versa, an abyss has been seen between Sidney and Spenser. This contrast was partly agreed upon on the basis of the ‘new’ Arcadia, over the nearly four centuries when the lost, ‘old’ one was unknown; but it was also the fruit of a superficial, obtuse reading of that text, only intent on discovering, as if through Croce’s alembic, traces of the old codes of the graceless poets of the previous generation, and the first signs of a new stylistic revival. Sidney’s little, symbolic dishonour until lately was that of not deserving a chapter for himself in the handbooks, and that, just like other minor authors, of being discussed in surveys dealing with the history of the sonnet, Elizabethan prose and treatises on poetry. These were the kind of handbooks that surprisingly devoted a whole chapter to Gascoigne.9

9

largely now lost, singing his love for Phyllis and Amaryllis; one of those certainly by him is the lyric, foreshadowing Browning’s optimism, beginning with the line ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’. Since his glorification after death, Sidney’s only nineteenth-century supporter, symptomatically criticized (especially by Hazlitt) or overlooked, had been Charles Lamb.

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§ 49. Sidney II: ‘The Lady of May’ and other youthful lyrics Sidney’s beginnings all belong to the pastoral genre; they are eclogues in various metres behind the mask of a Philisides, an alter ego that, besides being an anagram of his name, also alludes to him as a ‘star-lover’; Sidney is therefore from the first an Astrophel. The woman he loves and sings of is one Mira, whose Latin etymon points to the fact that she ‘looks’, and dazzles, but also blinds and destroys by means of Sidney’s erogenous source par excellence, the eyes, black eyes already. Mira is a name that does not only, or perhaps not at all, mean ‘wonderful’10 but also secretly alludes, as I shall suppose without quite believing it, to Mary, of which it is an umpteenth anagram: his sister Mary, that is, as though the poet were incestuously in love with her.11 The few lyrics he wrote as a teenager display another camouflage: he has in mind and gives a reading of the present, contemporary scene, of the historical-political calendar and of his own person, in terms and along the lines of a parallel action, and calls England Samothea, a Greek region – and this parallelism will be exploited in the Arcadias. 2. The Lady of May is a masque in verse and prose offered to Queen Elizabeth in 1578 or 1579, and structured as a contest, which the queen in the fiction is asked to decide, between a shepherd Espilus and a hunter Therion for the hand of a little rustic queen. It is the precocious foreshadowing of a simple, somewhat confused and artless show put on for an aristocratic clique, and it openly looks ahead to the artisans’ recital in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. The two suitors sing their worth to win the contest, before their partisans’ choruses are heard. It is a very brief and schematic text, only remarkable because it contains the unnecessary interventions of a Master Rombus, the first appearance of the pedant who along with the

10 11

Apparently the censures eventually elicited by the second and third Arcadia were long passively echoed cliché-like in the twentieth century, critics being unable to verify them ex novo on the old Arcadia. Twenty years after its publication in 1926, T. S. Eliot, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1944), said its reading was an experience of ‘monumental monotony’. With this judgement, which in a blander form could also be applied to Malory, Virginia Woolf did not agree. This suggestion can be found in Duncan-Jones 1990, 333. The suspicion was put forward in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, as mentioned in Gentili 1965, 66 n. 51.

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related satire and farce will occupy so much space in the first, middle and late plays by Shakespeare. Sidney exceeds in fact the measure with cloying tirades crammed with macaronic Latin names, logical and rhetorical medieval clauses, extravagant coinages and jests reinforced by insistent alliterations. It is a minor tour de force, a pastiche; at the same time Sidney works in the area of stylistic and linguistic experiment, showing from the start that he was at least a dramatist in nuce. His sensibility to idiolects and spoken varieties will demand curbing after this sparkling beginning. Since the times of Skelton and Dunbar no such peppery repartees, verbal shots and recklessly lively argy-bargy had been heard. 3. Certain Sonnets is not Sidney’s title, but one given later to a collection he really or presumably compiled between 1577 and 1581 to gather together poems excluded from Astrophel and Stella. Thus it lacks the latter’s compactness, and is an exercise-book – here and there a hotchpotch – containing a majority of sonnets, not all of them love-sonnets, together with some other that are descriptive, and some light and occasional, with lyrics, ballads, lullabies, songs and compositions in different prosodies, besides adaptations and mere translations. Yet the poet will not throw them all away, but re-use some lines or ideas or even whole lyrics in the Arcadias. Sidney still echoes the Petrarchan cliché of the hard and cruel lady, also sung by Wyatt, with his old and trite conceits harking back to Serafino Aquilano. But the lady’s eyes shoot deadly arrows, being thus set within the poet’s imaginary universe. Sidney’s classic oppositions and dilemmas between senses and reason, the motif of love as an ‘infection’,12 and certain rhyming automatisms, are also announced. Sonnet 21 is the closest Sidney comes to the exasperated atmospheres of Astrophel and Stella, for the poet turns his own eyes from the dazzling and blinding ones of the woman and chooses to shut himself in darkness like the mole; then he thinks it over and imitates the fly, ‘Pleased with the light that his small corse doth burn’, and ponders whether it is better to live and die like a blind mole or a burnt fly. What is most remarkable is the criss-crossing of voices,

12

Sonnet 18 is pre-Romantic, as it sees ‘engraved’ in nature – rocks, woods, hills, caves, vales, fields, brooks – symbols and mirrorings of pain, and in fact ends with the line ‘Infected minds infect each thing they see’.

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and also of registers reflecting different moods. Four sonnets, decidedly anti-lyrical and bathetic, deplore the toothache that disfigures the lady’s lovely face. Others are too discursive, argumentative or prosaic, neither swift nor dense in their developments, nor imaginative. The final chord is stagnant frustration, conquered only in some apostrophes to himself, where he reacts to his entanglement and abandons love.13 § 50. Sidney III: ‘Astrophel and Stella’ Written around 1582, without question after 1581 although incorporating and adapting already existing compositions, the sonnets constituting Astrophel (or Astrophil) and Stella14 (108 together with eleven songs) were printed as a collection in 1591 in an unauthorized edition, followed in 1598 by an authorised one. For the third time in rapid succession an English poet pours into his poems an autobiographical, sentimental romance, where real events are grafted onto the Petrarchist tradition, acquiring stylized nuances and metamorphoses typical of so-called poetic license.15 Sidney had known Penelope Devereux from a very tender age, like Surrey his Geraldine; she had been promised to him but had married another man, and Sidney himself had married another woman, loved less, a second best. The collection was prompted by regret for a love he had considered lukewarm and superficial, and whose depth had been revealed to him only after he had lost it, so that sonnet 33 confesses it would have been better for Sidney to have loved Penelope from the start, or to have never seen her. Stella in real life was no saint, and indeed she eventually separated from her husband; during her marriage she had a lover – further evidence of 13

14 15

Sonnet 32, the last but one poem of the collection, forecasts in its imagery and afflatus the pained but trusting farewell to the world of future Victorians like Christina Rossetti and Hopkins (the latter especially in ‘Heaven-Haven’ and ‘The Habit of Perfection’). On the alternative Astrophel/Astrophil see Hamilton 1977, 181 n. 36, recalling that the ‘phil’ suffix functions if taken alone, as it contains the first syllable of Philip, whereas Astrophel is to be preferred owing to the assonance with Stella. Hints and flashes of Sidney’s biography are in sonnet 27 (he is proud and disdainful of the chattering courtiers); in 51 and especially in 53 Sidney is the knight valiant in tournaments, incited by Stella’s light-sparking eyes. At the end of the songbook Sidney once more confesses his revengeful, harsh temper.

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how biography is transfigured in Astrophel and Stella. This plot, anything but original, was subjected, thanks to Sidney’s ability to look at experience in perspective, to an ingenious formalization. Onomastics, etymology, puns and even charades had already timidly emerged in him; here too he resorted to the astrological wordplay of a ‘star’ loved by ‘the man loving a star’ and all stars, fusing Greek and Latin etymons. Penelope Devereux had married a Lord Rich, whose name lent itself to further embroidery in the semantic field of economics. The fact that Sidney assembled in a collection about 100 sonnets somewhat defines his very poetics. Thomas Watson (1555–1592) represents an intermediate stage in the history of the English sonnet, having published in 1582 one Hecatompathia or ‘passionate century of love’ giving a new voice to the Petrarchist vein. But, with one exception, these were rather pseudo-sonnets, bearing the strange name of ‘quatorzines’. Sidney therefore swept aside Watson as a pioneer of the string of sonnets linked in a collection. Other sonneteers will be treated apart in this work: in Sidney’s wake, before the end of the century there are minor poets like Constable, Lodge, Barnes and Giles Fletcher. Outwardly, in this decade de oro, Petrarch’s sonnet blended with the influence of the two Frenchmen Du Bellay and Ronsard, who began to question Petrarchism. The component parts remained the same, however, like the repertory of situations, themes, tropes and conceits. There was thus the risk of belated imitation. Invention was the asymptotic objective, as it would inevitably play with the stereotype of impossible love. In short, Sidney wondered why he should write the umpteenth collection of this kind, which meant and implied – supposing one should write coolly and reject the lie of wishing to seem to write on the spur of the moment – a vain, idle, useless enterprise, at least for monogamous social conventions. From Dante and Petrarch on, rather, the rule, not the exception, had been to sing of courtly love or ‘the allegory of love’, necessarily dreaming of robbing a husband of his lawful wife, having being struck with love for her at a fleeting casual encounter. Sidney had no way, or one in a thousand, of achieving the physical-spiritual love of a now-married Penelope. All his poetic expense is an imaginary reconstruction of a vain courtship, but as though it were still possible, even lawfully possible, to achieve the enjoyment of that love – as though all his supplications might gain cumulative strength, whereas the more he addresses her, the more he realizes that his hypothetical, re-imagined love

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will not be rewarded. In the first sonnet Sidney seems to wonder how a verbal enunciation can help him not only to be listened to, not only to please and interest the deaf or indifferent woman (and climax immediately looms as one of his favourite tropes); not only – this was Wyatt’s single aim – to obtain ‘pity’, but also ‘grace’: to be loved in return, whether spiritually or physically he does not specify. So this songbook, like others, conceals its purpose, and wishes or would wish for the woman to yield to the lover’s embrace; or to have yielded. On the other hand, very soon Sidney tackles the problem of all great poetry: he seems aware of the exhaustion of a poetic genre which for decades had repeated the same concepts, or rather the same conceits issuing from the brain, not the heart. So he admits he is seeking the ‘right’ words – in rhetorical terms, ‘invention’. The poet must not ‘invent’ in Giambattista Marino’s sense of the term, but find new, fresh, spring-water words fit to surprise the listener and catch the attention (‘fine’ inventions, that is). The ‘feet’ of other poets are a witty synecdoche for their verses, from whose pages the now dry intellect of the poet might perhaps draw a fresh trickle of water. Therefore the first sonnet describes a poet trying to learn poetry, seeking it fresh in the poems of others; but that freshness is already squeezed dry. The sonnet’s ending establishes a rule or a utopian aim: the poet would like to get rid of his earlier, stale poetry and find a new source of inspiration, so as to sing that his own love is unique; and the muse suggests to the poet, fretting and gnawing his pen, that he seek invention within his own heart, not outside, in imitation. In metadiscursive terms this first sonnet intimates the rejection of imitation; the poet proudly claims he has mastered invention just as he is writing, and is aware of having composed an example of inventive poetry.16 2. Astrophel and Stella’s poetry is therefore, by definition and intent, metadiscursive. Its sonnets in every single instance should impress one as new and genuine rather than repetitive. But this is more easily said than done. Sidney’s rhetoric tries to be anti-rhetorical and declares this loudly in sonnet 3, where Stella is beauty and, above all, nature, which can only be copied; other poets ennoble ‘new-found tropes with problems old’. Sonnet

16

PMI, 264, gives a list of Sidney’s Petrarchan borrowings, but generously concludes (265) that ‘Sidney is not a servile imitator’.

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6 voices his rejection of conventional tropism, conceits, mythological and pastoral imagery, but uses, if only to name them, the linguistic materials he wants to get rid of. Yet even this sonnet turns upon his poetry excelling that of others as to sincerity and truthfulness. Sonnet 15 again criticizes mechanical expressions derived from handbooks and dictionaries: whoever finds himself in Stella’s presence coins a new language. Here Sidney more explicitly repels the tradition of ‘poor Petrarch’. The next sonnet expresses boundless hubris at the ‘others’ who have talked of their loves’ flame. Sonnet 54’s incipit, which echoes that of Cavalcanti’s famous ballatetta, confirms that Astrophel does not love like others, vaunting their love with false but rich emphasis: the sonnet praises instead the deep heart-felt loves of the dumb (‘Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove’). A paradox lies at the heart of sonnet 55, where the poet states his decision to quit all rhetorical embellishments and adopt a figureless language; only Stella’s name, by just being uttered, produces higher eloquence. 3. In its only partly linear and progressive organization Astrophel and Stella follows certain leitmotifs. It subsists and propagates itself by the illusion and contradiction of amour fou, asserted and analysed as early as sonnet 2. In retrospect, tyrannical love has prevailed, with a touch of regret for lost liberty. In the sextet the poet admits as best he can that controlled fiction in which one lives in loving without hope, when one ‘makes [one] self believe’ that one lives in a never-so-blessed state, rather than in a hell. The unredeemed dilemma between reason and sense is one of those motifs; being in love is cyclically revisited, in the form of Cupid’s rather careful and clever operations. Stella’s apotheosis as starry model of virtue is celebrated, as well as the unequalled power of Astrophel’s passion, coming not from the mouth but from a far deeper source, the heart. As in Petrarch, the eleven songs in prosodies different from the sonnet – interpolated according to another, independent numerical progression – contribute to give the sense of a differing texture. Some of them are wonderful, other passable, but most are conventional, sugary, too long, a true violation of the commandment of freshness. Astrophel’s discreet, veiled image as a shepherd is a forecast of the atmosphere of the Arcadias. The finest of these songs is the tenth, brimming with Sehnsucht, and showing that absence has not changed but enhanced Astrophel and Stella’s unison. Here Stella is like a deceased Laura, although Stella was very much alive when Sidney was writing; but she had become a Lady whom her lover could not attain. If we look at the tenses,

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and at the prevalence of the present tense, Sidney’s sonnets are mimetic and dramatic; some of them strike us with the exasperated theatricality of their inner debate and conflict. In 47 the poet asks himself fervid questions and urges himself to his freedom; he even prays that the enchantment blinding and enthralling him will explode in a thousand pieces. In the sonnets where the poet spurs himself to conquer torpidity and overcome apathy we seem to hear Hopkins, who will significantly revive the use of climax. But Stella’s mere presence is sufficient to dispel every hope and aspiration: the chains are drawn even tighter. The romance is such because SidneyAstrophel, through the classic suspension of disbelief, manages to imagine and fancy that the stalemate might end, that Stella’s stony immobility might crack and be reversed. 67, staging an excited interior debate, quivers with the feeling that something real may soon happen. 69 seems to imply some satisfaction, even consummation of love, but it is only conditional. The sonnets that follow retain this sense of triumphant intoxication, though veiled by a very subtle regret: for desire has lessened and submitted to spiritualization; and indeed the last line of 71 relentlessly demands: ‘Give me some food’. The same hymn to spiritual love next echoes in 72, but desire balks and protests – indeed, overflows into sleep and dream, scarcely checked on awakening, in the song inserted between 72 and 73. In this brief sub-romance, therefore, Stella comes back angry and sullen. The thread abruptly breaks with the poet again extolling the sweetness inspired in him not by the muses, but by her lips. The climactic moment of the envisaged rape dissolves in some cloying conventional digressions on jealousy or the intoxicating kisses, with a touch of avant lettre Marinism and a hint of the metaphysical Herbert in the list of defining epithets (79). But the narrative does not end, and the lover becomes wittier, less obscure, happier, renewing the attack to obtain at least a kiss. 82 is perhaps Sidney’s most piquant sonnet: the loved one’s lips are like cherries, but cherries being bitten and thereby perhaps alluding to woman’s nipples; the cherry tree also evokes Adam’s sexual sin, as a nymph actually guards the tree in an orchard.17 The poet is at the same time Satan stealing into the orchard and

17

The metaphor of lips like cherries appears in Campion’s song (§ 67) known as ‘Cherry Ripe’, with the same sexual ambiguity, especially alluding, in Campion, not so much to the nipples as the vagina, whose entrance is guarded by threatening angels.

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Satan chased away. The coda of the collection, read according to the biographical romance, is rather vague and non-committal. The ensuing sonnets are more and more temporizing (such as those on Stella’s street and home), and the series of inserted songs looking forward to an imagined embrace is extended. This promising moment turns into grave disappointment, hinting that the lover is once more repelled by the woman, who, angry and sullen, invites him to be chaste (86); this disagreement becomes the refrain of a number of songs which, one after another, invoke a cosmic revenge on the ungrateful, hard-hearted woman. The closing note is on the pain of final separation (87 and following). In the time of absence, however, the lover keeps his immutable faith and inner sense of Stella’s presence. Yet it is a rather troubled, indeed a perturbed vigil, producing Sidney’s own ‘terrible’ sonnets, obscure, anguished, scarcely relieved by others more evocative, hymnal, proclaiming that only love urges him to write; or by phenomenological ones in a lower key, witty like 92, where the poet wants to hear news of the woman and know her minute daily occupations. 4. Throughout Astrophel and Stella Sidney beseeches his lady to grant him ‘grace’. This may mean compassion, or it may be a euphemism for more material results. When Astrophel is pessimistic and low-spirited, grace means a swifter annihilation (48). Sidney’s most celebrated sonnet, 31, is a passionate address to the moon concerning the laws of love up in the sky, a way of speaking of Stella’s ungratefulness, and his unreciprocated love. The semantic gamut of the term ‘grace’ is broad and variable. Grace is invoked once again in 56, a far more explicit sonnet expressing impatience, quivering impatience for her visit to him, if only to feel his ardent desire. But the outcome might be worse, for Stella, once present, will be obliged to implode her burning desire. A kind of grace is achieved in 57: transfixed with her lover’s pain, Stella sweetens it by singing.18 Even more clearly, in 63 the poet says he has asked ‘that thing, which ever she denies’; 18

Probably the worst, most bathetic sonnet is 59, where the poet envies the dog Stella loves more than he, although he serves her far more diligently; so that he would like to become a ‘witless thing’ like the dog. Similar, but quite successfully expressing his exasperated wit, is 83 on Philip the sparrow (named after Skelton’s), envied because he is always so close to the lady, and therefore threatened with death.

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although the ending wittily minimizes this request: ‘in one speech two negatives affirm’ (Stella has formulated her denial with a ‘No, no’). The insoluble opposition at the base of Astrophel and Stella lies in the fact that Astrophel is a sensual male and Stella a chaste, spiritual woman; it is the conflict between reason recommending to check or even despise carnal love and the senses feeling its keen pangs. Before Stella even personified Virtue must bow (4). But immediately after, she becomes (5) a body that lures and prevents the pursuit of heavenly realities. Intermittently the idea arises that in the last analysis Astrophel’s love is impure, although protected by the lie of courtly love. Sonnets 8 and 9 exalt Stella’s virtue and chastity for chasing away mischievous, malicious Cupid. And yet the poet indulges in making small, very similar sketches of the petulant deeds of Cupid, love’s intermediary, a true go-between for the two of them. In 12 Cupid supposes he has conquered Stella, but that is impossible. Her house (9) is described in sexually allusive terms, its door having a ‘lock of pearl’. The allegorical personification of Reason (10), as in one of the Certain Sonnets, argues that reason must admit love is good, but only on condition it is faithful, enduring and chaste, which is no sin. This is a syllogism that suddenly (18) antagonizes Astrophel, making him declare: I shall be ruined, and also damned, but I love and will love. In 19, mimetic and therefore in the present tense, Astrophel admits he is not capable of a spiritual, Platonic love, because he looks at the heavens but stumbles, falling into a symbolic ditch. Cupid, or sensual love, has pricked and wounded him; witness his seeming to have read Plato ‘for nought’ (21). Other men’s hearty advice does not find the right soil, and all intentions crumble before his infatuation with Stella. No. 34 is a confession of being in a muddle owing to Stella’s great powers. It is a dialogue between mental and inner entities, a monologue or soliloquy. Will it help to disburden oneself by speaking? Is there any catharsis? Sonnet 42 shows a process of purification, whereby Love or Cupid, so to speak, enters Stella and re-emerges purified. Line 3 affirms that Stella’s eyes offer themselves to love’s conquest, but love is conquered by them, and in those eyes Venus (l. 4) learns chastity.19 This unfinished diatribe is 19

Stella’s beauty and overpowering charm centre on her eyes, which in homage to the symbolic nature of her name flash beams of light. There are therefore countless

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completed in 52, where love and virtue compete for Stella, whose looks arouse the senses, but whose inner life is synonymous with virtue. In 61 to love means to worship a saint, that is to say, to learn how to tame desires. Here the final remonstrance is meaningful: oh no, Cupid, do your part, for one cannot love by ceasing to love – again playing on the ambivalence of ‘love’, both sensual and spiritual desire. The idea is clarified in the next sonnet 62: Stella is the locus of ‘true love’, to be distinguished from ‘vain love’, sensual love. The sonnet hopes for and authorizes a love which is not blind but sedate, mastered, lucid; but even in this case the poet sings a hymn to the other, carnal, love. As we have seen, Astrophel at times accepts and checks himself, and at others reacts and cries out. In the first case there is the fluent language of apotheosis. In 35 even the hypostases of moderation sin by excess before the unlimited that is Stella. Reason itself (mentioned in sonnet 10, cited above) goes mad by being compelled to blow on the burning coals of passion for Stella. Cupid is forced to become the sworn page of chastity. § 51. Sidney IV: The ‘Old Arcadia’ I. The neoclassical polish and the oblivion of reality In comparison to Sidney’s other works, the most exacting and representative one, and the richest in implications and suggestions, is not the sonnet collection Astrophel and Stella, but the Arcadia, despite the fact that its author, partly out of coquetry, partly for a more obscure reason I shall try to explain, called it a ‘delightful book’, a ‘trifle’, and ‘triflingly handled’; and indeed on his death-bed he demanded it be burnt. Behind this screen was a need to forget, to distance himself from a reality which had now become distressing and had to be exorcised by yielding to enchantment. The idea of a pastoral romance came to Sidney from the sources and achievements of a century-old genre introduced in Europe by Jacopo Sannazaro, from sonnets celebrating Stella’s eyes. Penelope’s and Stella’s eyes were and are black, but Sidney explains how they can radiate light with the ‘conceit’ that her eyes are black because if their splendour were entire and not diminished and veiled it would dazzle instead of pleasing. But black has also another effect, demonstrating that ethereal beauty is fully alive and does not fade against a black background.

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which Sidney copied (patently) the title, and the verse-prose alternation, but – in this early version – little else that can be clearly defined. Guarini’s Pastor fido is really too late to have deeply influenced or inspired it, for it was drafted in 1581, published in 1589 and staged in 1590. From both predecessors Sidney took suggestions but never obsequiously followed them, for the many adventures in the plot are all or mostly his own inventions. Even Tasso’s Aminta, which Sidney may have known,20 did not exert any influence on him.21 Sidney’s area is therefore that of the fantastic variation, a subdivision of genre used here in the precise meaning the term will acquire much later. He rejects the tragic-pathetic pastoral fulcrum of the coy shepherdess finally conquered and of the yearning shepherd, though he keeps it as a marginal element; and the play of imagination is as free as ever. In other words, Sidney distilled and transfused into the Arcadian pastoral canvas – indeed finding it an ideal vehicle – the cultural arch-system of his time and its episteme, a mix of moral, political, and also personal autobiographical issues, just as the chivalric genre had done, and was still shortly to do again with Spenser. Sidney’s supposed delay, and his lingering on an obsolete subgenre, is brought into question by the fact that the pastoral tradition was still cultivated, not to say dominant, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, Guarini being set to music by Monteverdi in his books of madrigals. 2. Written in his Wilton retirement between 1577 and 1580, in five books dedicated to his sister and other friends, the first or ‘old’ Arcadia I shall deal with in this section remained in manuscript form until 1926, and was printed in Feuillerat’s edition of Sidney’s complete works. For centuries this romance had been read instead, ipso facto, in the form it had taken in 1593, revised and edited by the poet’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke. For Sidney had begun to write an entirely new version of the first one, but by his death he had only reached the first stages of Book 20 Buxton 1954, 48. 21 From classical, and especially Plautine and Terentian comedy, Sidney derived the foolish and braggart slave, the old king in love, the two protagonists who are almost menaechmi, the two chaste sisters, and the youths’ tricks and devices to circumvent their segregation.

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III; it was his sister who threaded together the three re-written books with the pre-existing two and made the necessary adjustments. Thus textual critics and philologists are faced with three drafts and three texts: the first and ‘old’ Arcadia, the first two and a half books of the second 1590 edition, and the third, grafting the first two books and half of the third, re-written, onto the remnant of the previous work, slightly revised. The two drafts, old and new, must therefore be considered two distinct, autonomous texts. Altogether they number nearly 1,000 closely printed pages. A true demon of digression and reinvention seized Sidney in the transition from first to second draft, since the two and a half books of the second are already longer than the five of the first. Neither one nor the other version, however, have been highly esteemed over time, and are frequently considered archaeological finds for specialists, less and less fit for the wider public; so that Astrophel and Stella is constantly Sidney’s most accessible and mentioned work. The Arcadia, seen as a three-headed (and macrotextual) whole, makes indeed arduous and very tiresome reading today, not only owing to the Elizabethan spelling of the original edition (not reproduced in modern ones), but due to its excessively formal and artificial diction and its dilatory narrative rhythm, although occasionally relieved by witty quirks and unforeseen pleasantries, including, at times, improbable and unlikely effects and even elements of the fairy-tale. The detail may not mean much, but the Arcadia was written for and dedicated to a group of ‘gentle ladies’, one in particular, Sidney’s sister, to whose loving instigation it owed its existence. In being meant to please this little gynaecium, it reminds us of the framework of Boccaccio’s masterpiece, and was probably intended to be read aloud in instalments. Sidney sent his sister page after page as he was writing them. 3. The raison d’être of the Arcadia lies, as I mentioned, in the adaptation of the pastoral romance model and its capacity to impel English literature forward, from that moment on. In itself it is a pastoral fable in the Renaissance mode, but already impregnated with neoclassical composure, dignity and polish. Natural descriptions, from the very first chapter-heading, represent an apotheosis of ekphrasis, evoking, even verbally depicting, those clear, noble, solemn, occasionally faded, never dynamic, highly conventional landscapes which we see in slightly later paintings, antithetical to

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the quivering, pre-Romantic picturesque – the paintings of a Poussin and a Lorrain. This landscape, made of common and conventional pictorial components, is moulded by Sidney into a homologous ordered prose, sedate and cadenced, never romantically ruffled or dishevelled. The super partes narrator speaks in supremely elegant, polished paragraphs; his tightly controlled characters express themselves in careful speeches, so self-conscious that they can compose spotless sonnets, madrigals, or long compositions in rhyming verse, in which they stylize and objectify their own emotional states. Hence the occasional impression that this is a pre-Metastasian opera libretto, especially when prose eloquence brims over and melts into fluent repetitive lines, as common as Sidney’s diction is dense and synthetic in the sonnets. It is, I think, not too much to assert that Arcadia is a linguistic and, above all, a stylistic work. Sidney is a supreme prose-writer who, in 1,000 pages, hardly ever composes a period less than impeccable in style, syntax, and choice of words. It is a florid, convoluted, markedly hypotactic prose, rich in parentheses and asides, quite unlike Lyly’s balanced economy, and above all devoid of excessive alliteration.22 Arcadia is, more precisely, a polyphonic whole where every social class finds its idiolect: nobles, burghers, illiterates and shepherds. These groups alternate prose and verse; but the most patent difference, in each of the five parts, is between the narration of the main plot, and the appended eclogues, partly inserted with a mimetic aim, in the form of the shepherds’ games and pastimes offered to the Duke of Arcadia and his guests. Another difference is between the epos of conflicts in the basin of the lower Mediterranean, the pathos of the loves of young and middle-aged characters, and the humour, often pleasantly farcical, of the clown Dametas and his family’s doings. In the final book we hear the registers of legal rhetoric, with the usual, classical diatribes. The eclogues given in mimetic form, and the revealing division of the whole into five ‘acts’, therefore make the Arcadia not just a semi-poetic, but also a semi-dramatic 22

Ben Jonson judged him a master of language (quoted in ELS, 341), and Crashaw daily read his ‘showers of sweet speeches’ (quoted in Praz 1944, 65). Much later Virginia Woolf, ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’ (TCR, Second Series, 40–50) again praised a linguistic, self-pleasing delight even able to daze the reader. But for her Sidney’s book was one to be taken from the shelf and put back after reading a single passage.

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work. Owing to the ample and overwrought endings of these ‘acts’, or kinds of interludes and games, the reader who may at first have classified Sidney as the second sonneteer of late sixteenth-century England would be gradually and inexorably obliged to change his opinion. The charge of lack of variety addressed to end-of-century poets who used only rhyme royal and the poulterer’s measure is meaningless if applied to one of the finest metricians in the whole of English literature. The four interludes as such do not offer many examples of sublime poetry, but Sidney experiments with an astonishing variety of classical, therefore quantitative, and syllabic metres, and consequently of stanzaic forms (like octave and tercet); with him English prosody takes so many steps forward as to equal, if not exceed, continental metrics. 4. Chronologically Arcadia comes at the beginning of the highest phase of the Elizabethan literary period, offering a model which at first was not imitated, but was subsequently adopted with excellent results. It appeared when drama was about to blossom and soon to address the same issues as Arcadia. Elizabethan drama from 1590 onwards – the dates of the Arcadias – is in fact a re-visitation of English history with persuasive and dissuasive indications concerning the system and exercise of power, as well as a symbolic view of the universe and of Man. The same could be said of Sidney. Shakespeare appears to draw on Arcadia in his last phase when, in his discourse on power and the phenomenology of passions, he reconsiders the conventions and situations of pastoral romance through the medium of drama. There are myriad anticipations of this in Sidney, some of which I shall try to point out in my analysis. The Arcadia, therefore, can be seen as the point of arrival of a literature that is both utopian and militant, both direct and indirect, beginning with More and moving on to Elyot, Ascham and the other conduct-book writers: the analysis, that is, of court-power and the example the court can give the nation, and of the courtier’s prerogatives and perils; the examination of the present situation and at the same time the vision of a different, ideal state.23 There is no real, clear-cut divergence

23

In almost all such cases the humanist writer plays with onomastics: as in More and Ascham, so also in Sidney we must inquire into and always keep in mind the GreekLatin etymology of all characters’ names.

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between Sidney’s Arcadia and More’s Utopia. Arcadia in Sidney and in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tradition is far from the actual geographical and historical reality: it is as fabulous and imaginary a country as Utopia. Faint-hearted Basilius, like Prospero, leaves his power in the hands of a substitute, fleeing from its constraints to the heart of the country and to a guilty or necessary retirement. The atemporal utopian regimen is less conspicuous but is still there. How do the Arcadians really live? Why has time stopped, if only in the sense that no seasonal change seems to exist, it never rains, and the two youths never grow a beard?24 Sidney does something very like More in the earliest phases of his tale, that is he idealizes England as an Arcadian, peaceful, well-ruled country. But rather than describing it meticulously, he chooses to embark on a fable-like romance. In practice his Mediterranean basin contains weak, envious kings in a coalition against Macedonia. Metaphorically, Europe wanted wise kings and ‘regents’ such as Euarchus, able to ensure a justice made of rigour and forgiveness. At the same time Sidney’s anthropology does not change: in Arcadia there is an opposition between within and without, intimacy and exteriority, but there is also a vertical division between a lower region, savage or natural, and a higher one, celestial and divine. Man, here as in Vico, must think and then act, action being the unavoidable conclusion of thought; man is a social animal, and when overwhelming passion alienates him from social life, that passion becomes unwholesome. Significantly, Sidney was obsessed, even when near death, by the fact that man could achieve faith by reason, without revelation, as is proved by his interest in specific works he meant to translate. All these are indeed firm principles, but they are suspended, because Sidney likes most of all to play, and playing is pretending; he dismisses his philosophy and behaves as if it did not exist. The speech in which Musidorus tries to dissuade Pyrocles from the passion he has just conceived for Philoclea suggests that poets, and poetry itself, favour solitude and Sehnsucht, and exalt love and its ‘infection’. The metaphors, conceits and rhetorical emphases to be found in Astrophel apply to Pyrocles, but are ironically inverted, and shown up as stridently empty. Critics have there-

24 Some evidence that a beard begins sprouting on Pyrocles’ chin is noticed on the morning of his trial.

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fore tried from the start to discover whether Arcadia is an Apollonian and totally hypothetical experiment on the grounds and the combined materials of pastoral romance, or a series of astute transpositions. Sidney puts on the mask of the shepherd Philisides, making a patent anagram of his name, but there appear to be no further clues. Does he divide himself into all or many of his main characters, embodying in them one part of himself but not the others? The psychogenesis of Arcadia has often been based on abstruse and acrobatic inferences, some of which I shall consider below. Such a web of conducting threads, and of political, anthropological and biographical discourses, during the course of the sixteenth century moves from the genre of the heuristic prose treatise to the fantastic and utopian tale, to pastoral romance and especially to romantic drama. § 52. Sidney V: The ‘Old Arcadia’ II. Malice, humour and political allegory in the pastoral canvas In Arcadia the narrative voice often adopts Ariosto’s habit of quitting a certain event in the story at the crucial point to switch to another; once the new one is finished, Sidney warns he is going back to the previous character to continue the tale. The structuring principle is binary: two sisters, daughters to the Duke of Arcadia, love two cousins, but with complications and misunderstandings since one of the princes, disguised as an Amazon, is coveted by the duke who takes him for a female, and by the duchess who suspects he is male, while their daughter feels some unknown emotion grow and reverberate in herself. The romance consists of five books or so-called acts, in other words as a kind of dramatic action, a not inapt metaphor as I said: a drama sui generis, with a perfectly omniscient external narrator, but where the characters enjoy total freedom to speak and even more to embroider and trill, especially when this verbal freedom takes the form of a finished verse composition; or when, mimetically, games and little shows take place, making the text resemble a kind of musical. Sidney maliciously dedicates the romance to his sister by an evident denegation (‘this child which I am loath to father’); and this sort of shame will be protected by the fact of being addressed to a single, indulgent woman reader. Besides his sister, Sidney often apostrophizes a bevy of ‘fair ladies’. Owing to the adoption of such a fancied, delightful artifice he can afford to roam

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where angels fear to tread, and enjoy trespassing on hypothetical borders. The feeling exuding from the dedication to the sister, seven years younger and seventeen years old at the time, is excessive and slightly ambiguous, and the constant apostrophizing of only women emanates a somewhat wearily feminine delicacy. Such ambiguity is enhanced by Prince Pyrocles’ disguise in female garb. Sidney’s biography could have been translated in the Arcadia in the form of an unrecognizable re-elaboration of the quartet made of Penelope-Stella and Frances Walsingham on the one hand, and Sidney and his rival Lord Rich on the other; but in the romance the two women are sisters and the two lovers are in no way rivals. The narrative, however, is not sparing of prurient and titillating details, only possible in the area of a restricted society game: such are the nakedness, hinted at or glimpsed, of the dishevelled beauties and the sensual and sexual thrills of the lovers. Except for the two princes, all characters ignore Pyrocles’ disguise, and women kiss women and husbands mistresses. At least on one occasion Sidney cuts short an event about to become ticklish and delicate – for instance when Gynecia in the cave presses as if in a vice Philoclea, who chooses to submit with good grace. Book III presents two scenes interrupted at the acme of suspense: Gynecia and Pyrocles are alone in the cave, and Gynecia yearns for sexual satisfaction, but the tale deviates towards Musidorus and Pamela, fugitives and attacked in the wood.25 Pyrocles has devised his disguise as an Amazon in order to approach Philoclea, feeling that a man yielding to love is transformed into a woman, following the example of Hercules spinning by Omphales’ side. In this case Sidney wavers between empathy and disapproval. The hero overcome by love becomes a weak, sentimental girl, though to make up for it Pyrocles adopts the most masculine of feminine disguises, that of an Amazon; but Sidney does not conceal the paradigm of irresponsible emasculation against the preservation of active virility. It is also meaningful – like a sort of gender chiasmus, or even an index, at the level of the signifier, of a fatal exchange of values – that Pyrocles is given a name, Cleophila, which is like a metathesis or charade of Philoclea’s. The 25

The concluding lyric of Book III sings one after another Philoclea’s body-parts, maliciously omitting, however, the pubic area. Sidney’s taking such liberties reflects the bland morality of a still pagan society.

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Amazon’s disguise tickles the fancy of today’s critics of gender and transvestism, who may find in Sidney a pioneer. Pyrocles is always mentioned by Sidney, explicitly, with the female pronoun ‘she’, and Philoclea feels a somewhat suspect attraction towards the person she believes a woman, with a very slight hint at lesbianism. 2. Basilius seeks refuge in the pastoral heart of Arcadia to escape a curse, but active conspirators steal into his refuge. It might be the allegory of Renaissance harmony threatened by chaos as well as a prelude to the Shakespearean kings quitting their duties, and of the re-creation of a fairer utopian society in a forest, in preparation for a triumphal reintegration. But Sidney seems to respond that the sovereign must keep his place, be up to his responsibilities and courageously face his destiny. The crucial point is right from the start the timidity of Basilius, who in his eagerness to know the future mistakes the oracle’s response or fears it too much. A prolepsis warns us that his wife Gynecia too will succumb to the fury of her urges. The Shakespearean play that most interacts with this canvas of Sidney’s is, surprisingly, Macbeth. Basilius listens to the oracle like Macbeth to the witches; and he believes a danger is prophesied to him, rather than a great prize and a future solemn advancement; but, like Macbeth, he creates the circumstances through which the oracle’s sentence can be fulfilled.26 Hence he leaves the reins of political power in the hands of a deputy, asking that the latter defend the frontiers. It is a political retirement dictated by fear. His deputy Philanax defines this as an absurd and irrational gesture, and exhorts the duke to trust that human virtues can defeat destiny, it being foolish to prevent what may never happen. Pyrocles suddenly falls in love with Philoclea on seeing her portrait during his return to Thessaly after various adventures in Asia Minor. At first one is immediately reminded of Palamon and Arcite in Chaucer’s tale. The dissension between the ‘two noble kinsmen’, however, does not come from being possible rivals in love for the same woman.27 Musidorus is simply trying to cure his totally unwilling cousin of his infatuation; but he himself becomes a prey to the same

26 Hamilton 1977, 57 (but the comparison with Macbeth is mine). 27 Two shepherds, Strephon and Klaius, fight over the same woman but without clashing, being aware she is not attainable (in the eclogues of Book IV).

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infatuation, falling in love with Pamela at first sight. With the arrival of Dametas the comic vein seems to take over. The theme is again fear, but this time wrapped in braggadocio and boasts. This easily angered clown is thought a wise man by the equally stupid duke who, making him head of the shepherds, gives indirect proof of the foolishness Sidney imputes to him. An irresistible foretaste of the quid-pro-quos of Shakespeare’s early plays lies in the sketch of the sighing lovers and the practical but obtuse constables. And indeed a ‘comedy of errors’ slowly forms, with expressionist, exaggerated and grotesque comic effects. Soon after Musidorus re-enters the scene, mawkishly sweet and dressed as a shepherd, and admits he has ‘recanted’. 3. While the courtship slowly goes on, by dint of misunderstandings and stratagems (mother and daughter harshly competing for the same ‘man’, and the duke asking his daughter to act as go-between for him), a popular uprising is easily quashed. Games and pastoral songs testify, if only under the veil of a fairy-tale, to the civilizing and pacifying action of the two cousins. With Book III, denouements come nearer. Musidorus, now under the name Dorus, makes a dupe of Calandrinesque Dametas, to clear the way for eloping with Pamela. A successful sketch is that of the preparations of the middle-aged couple, each ignorant of the other’s aim, stealing out to their love meetings, with Pyrocles or Cleophila as the case may be. After luring them out of the lodge, Pyrocles-Cleophila goes there prepared to enjoy Philoclea. Book IV seems an enactment of a biblical paradigm: sexual transgressions and unchecked impulses provoke chaos, in Gynecia and in Pyrocles. And the fugitives Musidorus and Pamela are sent back to Arcadia. The sinner’s conscience is his first means to repent. Actually the first phases provide the usual effect of caricature, being centred on the coarse mistakes of Dametas, bludgeoned by his wife who believes him an adulterer, whereas Mopsa, their daughter, deliriously laments ‘husbands all kings’. Basilius apparently is the only one who does not know that Cleophila is really a male, and having drunk a love-potion is believed to be dead. As for Pyrocles, to save Philoclea’s honour he wants to kill himself, but his beloved prevents him. The final Book shows how an assembly is organized to name a successor for the deceased monarch, with the object of restoring order and keeping away whoever is ambitious, violent and an enemy to peace. All have already confessed and repented in the tribunal of their consciences, but

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law cannot help but condemn the guilty ones to be beheaded. The defendants’ pleas are a variant in the polyphonic spectrum of the romance. When Euarchus, the Macedonian king, with a coup de théâtre, is informed that he has condemned his own son and nephew, Sidney prophetically stages the son’s supplication to his father that he spare the nephew, thus asking to die for another. But Basilius wakes up, with the umpteenth forecast of what will not happen in Romeo and Juliet. And all ends well. 4. The eclogues concluding each book gradually make up a distinct subtext, suspending the leading thread and introducing a separate world. The narrator hopes this is not a ‘tedious digression’, for he sees the risk and the criticism likely to arise. This once more takes for granted the application of Ariosto’s aesthetics of parallel plots, allowing the transition from one to the other cousin, from the facts of Dametas to those of the duke and of the shepherds, on the principle that insisting too long on the same thread may cause delight to diminish, while shifting to a different one can renew it. In the eclogues readers must adopt the same suspension of disbelief as in the Astrophel collection. Songs are sung in the same sighing, lamenting, decorative language, in the knowledge that even if it is partly true it is still a game, and a projection into conventions and mythologies. After the first competition in the eclogues, a shepherd tells the story of Erona, another slanders Cupid, and an old shepherd persuades a lover to stop loving. In their turn the eclogues contain inset stories, tales within tales, so as to satisfy an unending thirst for storytelling. § 53. Sidney VI: The ‘New Arcadia’. The toning down of the pastoral and the emphasis on the heroic Of English famous works re-made in triple versions, only Joyce’s Portrait will be remembered, for even Hamlet was probably re-written by Shakespeare only once. Incidentally, Sidney is the only great prose writer, and author in general, that Joyce (and the critics with him) never cites, nor recognizably parodies in the pastiche of the fourteenth episode of Ulysses.28

28 And yet Sidney, like Joyce, doubles, triples and multiplies the same real character in various imaginary hypostases, as we shall see. Pre-Joycean is also, in passing from the first to the second draft, the capacity to adapt and expand quite naturally the

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Other great English works (or not English, like Faust) were continued (like the Roman de la Rose) more than radically revised, and in order to find analogies with the three Arcadias one has to move away from literature and make a comparison with certain of Bruckner’s symphonies. In the year 1926, when the first and old Arcadia came to light, a clamorous reversal in critical views took place (one of the most impressive in the century, maybe), posing the quaestio of which was, at least of the two almost completed, the version having more importance and greater beauty. The critics that suffered most were those who had formed their ideas on the new Arcadia, and some put them quickly into question. At any rate, it became obligatory, and philologically a necessity, after 1926 to go back to the old and then on to the new. But this was not for everyone. C. S. Lewis, for example, indifferent to ‘textual criticism’, in 1954 symptomatically defined the first Arcadia as suppressed and repudiated,29 and took the new as his reference text, stressing how greatly it had matured; in his case the ‘old’ Arcadia was literally such. After him, and together with him, for some time only the second or third Arcadia were taken into consideration, and the first confined to an appendix. Today, on the contrary, the autonomy of the two versions is re-established, and the first is no longer subsidiary. One thing is certain, however. The new Arcadia did enjoy an enormous fortune,30 but this very success bored and even irked later generations so much as to render it a proverbial archaeological exhibit, or the famous book that everyone speaks of but no one has wholly read. 2. Fulke Greville and Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, took care to send to the press a work that in 1593 fitted the role that Sidney

deeds, previously just sketched, of one or more characters. Joyce’s silence on Sidney (his name does not appear in the letters) is all the more surprising if one thinks they share the acquaintance – personal for Sidney, purely literary for Joyce – with Giordano Bruno. What is more, Sidney’s father, from 1556 to 1578 ably administered Ireland on behalf of the queen, dourly repressing every spark of disorder or rebellion against English power. Sidney defended his father’s government of Ireland with an open letter to the queen in 1577. 29 Between the two versions stands chronologically Astrophel and Stella. Strangely, Lewis does not confute Praz 1944, whose ideas on the two Arcadias contrast with his. 30 Documented by Gentili 1965, 88–91 n. 6.

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was assuming, that of an upright and heroic state-servant. In re-writing it Sidney toned down strong scenes, limited or suppressed malicious and prurient allusions,31 and made the political metaphor or allegory more explicit by enhancing the figure of Euarchus as the ideal prince. The two young men, Pyrocles (re-named Zelmane) and Musidorus, were changed tout court into heroes, and the princesses into wise, mature and pious women, an evolution promoted through the new character of the duke’s evil sister-in-law Cecropia, who keeps the two girls prisoners and shuts up Pyrocles in a castle.32 Not only was the core of the plot thus enriched and complicated, but the narrative thread is continuously suspended by the introduction of collateral subplots, bringing the number of characters to about 100, and, compared to the exasperatingly static first Arcadia, making the work extremely dynamic. The new Arcadia’s aesthetics modified the balance of the old one, stressing, rather than the pursuit of delight, the didactic aim. The danger or dread that delight might lead to evil is the reason, or one reason, why the dying Sidney asked for Arcadia to be burnt.33 The abundant, overflowing interpolated vicissitudes describe a corrupt, degenerate, morally weakened but perfectible cosmos. Book I opens now with the story of Argalus and Parthenia, an instance of constancy taken to extreme limits, and victorious after various and nearly insuperable challenges and trials; the story of Amphialus and Helen, constant but not one for the other, exemplifies cases of discordant infatuations, of love as a tragic, maddening, rather than uniting passion. At first Sidney seems to be inspired by the overpowering but flat, factual and adventurous plots of a Chrétien, as well as to imitate Malory as if he had just read him. The new narrative structure is based on a division no longer into acts but 31 32

33

Not quite systematically: see for instance the scene of Philoclea bathing, spied on by Zelmane, in chapter 11 of Book II. ‘in the midst of a great lake, upon a high rock, where partly by Art, but principally by Nature, it was by all men esteemed impregnable’. The imprisonment of the beloved, who rejects the repeated assaults of her suitor (or of aunt Cecropia in her stead) creates a hot-house atmosphere that Richardson will echo. Sidney’s Pamela already disdains to oppose ‘humility to offence’. Richardson’s choice of the same name for his protagonist is deemed deliberate by both Sidney’s and Richardson’s critics. See Hamilton 1977, 171 and 202–3 n. 28.

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books, these too divided into numbered chapters preceded by synthetic résumés. Book II goes back to adventures and feats of the two princes before their arrival in Arcadia, showing them ready to enter the field in defence of justice, honesty and virtue, in a compressed sequel of events. The inset story of the blind King Leonatus of Paphlagonia (the name too is Shakespearean) bears glimpses of the Gloucester plot in Shakespeare’s King Lear. The two maidens imprisoned by the hag, their aunt, victoriously resist in various periods of labour. The style is uniformly faster, drier, less sinuous and exaggerated, and is so in any case compared to the first version, perhaps owing to the acquired awareness of the so-called anti-Ciceronian diatribe, tending to render prose language less ornate and more natural.34 § 54. Sidney VII: ‘The Defence of Poesy’ The opening paragraph of The Defence of Poesy, also known as An Apology for Poetry, is famous for being the most misplaced and unexpected in even a brief orthodox treatise of poetics. But it is symptomatic. Sidney surprises his reader by starting with his personal recollection of one John Pietro Pugliano, superintendent to the imperial stables in Italy, a passionate admirer of equestrian prowess and of knightly ideals. Such had been his interlocutor’s emphasis, Sidney confesses, ‘that if I had not been a piece of a logician […] he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse’. Nearly all of Sidney’s writings, as we have seen, have, like this, a witty, humorous, onomastic genesis, and in this way he justified the nomen omen (‘phil’-‘ip’) of his Christian name. The Pugliano anecdote, however, is introduced to demonstrate how much people tend to plead the goodness of their professions with ‘weak arguments’, but support them by ‘strong affection’. It is an understatement or a sprezzatura, since Sidney is warning us that he is about to start a committed apology as an amateur: he is ‘a piece of a logician’, not a logician according to the rules, and he has not chosen the poet’s calling, but, as he admits, ‘slipped’ into that role. The extemporaneous work, in fact, was not published immediately, nor was 34 Praz 1944, on the contrary, compares several passages of the two versions to document, in the new Arcadia, a decided increase in euphuistic, manneristic and even purple conceits.

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it destined to be. It is hard to date it exactly. It is later than 1579 and was probably drafted between 1581 and 1583, and first printed in 1595; the title was not clearly indicated by its author, and so the treatise was always cited in both ways. Had Sidney revised it for an official publication he would have produced a more ordered and concise, less repetitive work. It is instead one of the first in English where improvisation and the lack of a plan have an important, deliberate role. It bears the marks of informality and immediacy, it is drafted in the language of friendly conversation, with sudden interjections, asides, bold and candid images and metaphors like those we have seen above. It follows the rules of argumentative discourse but never too faithfully, indeed varies and transgresses them. There is no difference in tone with what Sidney argues in his other works; indeed it bears witness to the unity of his inspiration (images and figures of thought and words blending with one another),35 and, once more, to the interdependence of his three main works and of his abilities. 2. Possibly prompted by Puritan-minded Stephen Gosson’s attack (1579) against poetry, or better against theatre and players – and, ironically, dedicated to Sidney himself – Sidney saw in this precedent only an opportunity and a pretext. He invents or exaggerates his contemporaries’ hostility to poetry, non-existent at least in the iconoclastic force he evokes it with, so as to justify his apology. The supposed enemies of poetry are not identified or named, and his target are the Platonists who after all have historically misunderstood the real meaning of the Greek philosopher’s excommunication of poets, lumping together all he said. Plato himself had learned from the poets and had discredited them; but in his time the poets’ fame was greater than the philosophers’, everywhere chased or banished. Applying the motto corruptio optimi pessima, Sidney finds that Plato did attack the over-use, not the use of poetry, that is, the bad poetry produced in his time, which led the young especially to despise the idea of the god-figure. For Plato poetry is the skin or the crust, philosophy the flesh beneath. Its enchantment softens savagery in all ancient primitive societies, when bards and oracles communicated divine knowledge by means of 35

The beautiful image of sonnet 19 in Astrophel and Stella, of the poet who looking up at the stars falls into a ditch, is repeated verbatim.

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verse. Sidney’s Defence is therefore considered by many a very precocious anticipation of the Romantic aesthetics of poetry as a form of imaginative knowledge, a calling coming from above (orator fit, poeta nascitur), and a holy fury. Echoes of Aristotle, Minturnus and Scaliger are regularly stressed by critics, without realizing that similar ideas almost literally coincide with Longinus’ Peri hypsous and with the doctrine of ‘divine fury’ of Sidney’s friend and admirer Giordano Bruno.36 If Elizabeth’s reign also marks the incubatory period of experimental philosophy, it is possible that by an acute premonition Sidney foresaw in 1581 a lurking scientism about to discredit poetry and undermine its power to advance knowledge. We cannot help being reminded that three and a half centuries later Macaulay was to begin a famous essay on Milton with the assumption, condensed in a splendid antithesis, that ‘as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines’.37 Matthew Arnold would also echo Sidney in considering poetry as the joint parturition of, and vehicle for, expression both by Hellenism and Hebraism. These two great synchronic civilizations agreed in dispensing knowledge in poetic form, the Greek indeed with ‘charming sweetness’. Then it was Roman civilization that took upon itself to stress the etymological equivalence between the poet as vates and prophecy as vaticinium. But it is the root of the term ‘poet’, Greek poiein, that leads Sidney to make the poet-creator a homologue and counterpart of the Creator: he is a poet who has the gift of invention, and recreates nature, improving or renewing it. But in so doing, does he falsify? Quite the contrary, because he has a strong idea of Man’s at least potential excellence, and expresses it 36 Such genesis is indeed ascribed to other theoreticians, but it is paraphrased with synonyms, and confirmed, throughout the Defence. Sidney openly believes the poet to be a divine deputy, although he doubts it in sonnet 74 of Astrophel and Stella. Longinus’ treatise, circulated among the humanists thirty years before Sidney wrote (first edition Robortello, Padua 1554, followed the year after by Manutius’, Venice: Sidney might then have come across it during his Italian tour), has not been discussed as a possible source or similar treatise by any of the poet’s critics. Gentili 1965, 25–6 and 114, just comes close to it; Heninger 1989, 530 n. 150, excludes it. Praz in PMI equally sees very scant traces of Bruno in Sidney. On the possible intermediary function played by the Greek scholar Henry Estienne, Manutius’ collaborator, see Buxton 1954, 56ff. 37 Volume 4, § 37.2 for a discussion of the essay.

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in so life-like a way as to persuade its receiver to follow the example. It is in this very arduous passage that, as anticipated, a synthetic, theological no less than anthropological explanation, is given of the way the poet violates the law of original sin, or is miraculously immune to it. This happens by virtue of a conscious creative capacity, of a wakeful intellect able to conceive ideas and to create by semi-divine or supernatural powers, unlike those stained by sin. Poetry therefore prompts and urges unattainable perfection, which is to say it helps us to rise from the dark underworld of the body to the enjoyment of the divine essence. 3. There are ancillary sciences, but they must converge towards a practice and succeed in proposing it, not remain abstract and far from reality: and in this poetry is superior to historiography and philosophy. Moral philosophers know, and tell us, what is virtue and what is vice; historians narrate the experiences of previous ages. The jurist in turn only tries to prevent some from harming others, without sowing good seeds in the soul. Now philosophy is too hard and severe in its proceedings, and requires the whole life of those who try to possess its truths. And historiography is too bound to the particular, and unable to make it part of a general design. Poetry alone unites the particular and the universal, example and law. Being a ‘speaking picture’ it gives the vicarious experience of a thing, whereas philosophy only uses abstract words; it does so by insight and hence instantaneously. The two foreseeable objections to this assertion are thus answered: the philosopher’s circle is confined to the learned, while mankind at large turns to poetry, popular and universal. Sidney’s most romantic foresight lies in postulating not a history moving ever forward to stages of intellectual growth, but one that can and must regress to still childlike ages and habits of mind. Poetry founds its primacy above all other sciences and arts on its discourse to men, who need fables, fine myths and instructive delights – which is also the secret aesthetics of the Arcadias.38 The second objection is that poetry conceals foul and evil deeds, while history is photographic 38

Hence the frequent equation of the reader and the child at play, who can easily forget what he is doing if he hears a fine fairy-tale, or swallow a bitter medicine if coated with sugar.

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and objective. The historian does not distinguish one fact from another, and the reader imagines they can be repeated without a guide; the poet proposes a reasonable example, and chooses or invents others, magnanimous and probable. History in short is too objective and does not help to distinguish good from evil! When Sidney, to be consistent, must assert that poetry unfailingly applies poetic justice, his demonstrative edifice is about to collapse out of manifest untruth, poetry being incapable of reflecting life in all its complexity. He then appeals to the principle of selection, and finds a way out by stating that poetry does not lie: the poet affirms nothing but only invents, or better imagines, and offers a virtual reality, favouring the suspension of disbelief and speaking by allegory or figuratively; art is good, but the artist is not necessarily good, for he can also be immoral. 4. In its most intrinsic and documentary value as a discourse on the historical techniques of poetry, and as a militant survey of the national scene, the Defence combines a generous democratic stance with a series of firm preclusions. It does not enunciate a hierarchy of genres, provided they operate towards a joint purpose; with judgement worthy of Solomon himself, it approves both prosodic systems, the quantitative unrhymed (classical) and the syllabic rhymed (medieval). For Sidney art is always intentional, it communicates a message and persuades. The comic genre is justified in that it constitutes and provides a foil to the virtuous man. Heroic poetry spurs us to virtuous acts even when unpolished. To lament the recent scarcity of great poets in England (a mother of excellent minds, but a step-mother to poets) and the necessity for a reaction, Sidney traces a brief history of poetry from Chaucer on, allotting sober, occasional praise to Surrey and Spenser by using Goethe’s future parameter: let one translate poetry into prose and see what remains. Sidney’s contemporaries, as the poet proudly stresses, had already a wonderfully flexible and pliant linguistic medium at their disposal. On the subject of drama, already in full swing in his time, Sidney grants a famous, but by many deplored, approval of the Aristotelian unities, by means of a parodic passage on the supposed absurdities deriving from their transgression on the stage. He had in hand the recipe for a good theatre, provided a nuntius gave a compact version of antecedents and the hero began his action in medias res. Shakespeare, for instance, will treasure it, apart from his transgression of the unities.

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§ 55. Greville Sidney’s biography by Fulke Greville, also known as Lord Brooke (1554–1628),1 is the literary work immediately associated with his name, although it does not answer today’s requirements for the genre. It says little specifically or deeply relating to its subject, and dwells longer on the political and cultural context and atmosphere of Elizabethan England. Written in a non-euphuistic, Latinate prose, in ample and meandering periods, it was originally meant as a dedication to Sidney of his own works, in order to underscore the vital importance of his acquaintance for him. But this biography is only one of the writings of an independent author, not prolific as his long life might suggest, but slow, cautious, demure in publishing, who managed – as not many others do – to free himself from his friend’s paralysing shadow.2 Aside from the play Mustapha, printed in a kind of pirated edition, and from occasional appearances in anthologies, nothing by him was published or meant to be in his life; and even that biography, as I mentioned, appeared after he died – a tragic death, for he was stabbed by a servant who killed himself soon after, apparently because he thought himself slighted in his master’s last will. As I shall repeat when introducing Ralegh, the Elizabethan courtier wrote with professional seriousness and commitment, but as a hobby; and Greville, after taking part in some skirmishes, gradually rose to an enviable position as diplomat and statesman. He unfailingly served the queen, was one of the many pups their mistress held by the leash, who now and then barked for more attention, and were punished for some time. She forbade him to travel to the Continent and on the seas more than he actually did. A member of Parliament, then treasurer to the navy, then Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1614 to 1622,

1 2

Complete Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 4 vols, London 1870; Poems and Dramas, ed. G. Bullough, 2 vols, London 1939; Caelica, ed. U. Ellis-Fermor, Newtown 1936 (very hard to find). In his native Warwickshire castle Greville treasured Sidney’s poetic manuscripts, and together with his sister edited the new Arcadia. The implications, always hinted at, of a homoerotic relationship between Sidney and Greville (who never married, so the apostrophes to various women in Caelica must be intended as merely conventional), have been dealt with by the biographers of our time.

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he was made a baronet in 1614 and a lord in 1621 by James I. Able to cope in every circumstance, he never was, as far as we know, a prisoner in the Tower. Genial and sociable as a young man, age made him something of a misanthrope. 2. There is no agreement on the order of merit of Greville’s tripartite production. Some put Caelica at the top, some the philosophical poems, some even his Senecan dramas (besides Mustapha an Alaham), on the strength of choruses echoing Greek tragedy in their motionless liturgy. Doubt surrounding Greville grew after Lamb coolly ruled that intellectualism and lack of dynamism were his vices. In Caelica (posthumous, 1633) Greville addresses three or four feminine hypostases, among whom a Cynthia possibly suggested to him by Ralegh, hence Queen Elizabeth. It can therefore be inferred that the others too were faces of the same fiction.3 It is a discontinuous songbook, containing youthful lyrics later revised and brought up to the taste and idiolect of the age; were it not so, they would be surprisingly before their time. Formally only one third of the 109 lyrics are sonnets, sui generis ones too; the prosodic variety is remarkable, and there are lyrics of eight as well as others of more than 100 lines. Love, by definition not reciprocated, is the centre of a reflection on the mutability of human things. Gradually the collection becomes more sententious, even sombre, darkened by the thought of Doomsday and God’s frowning face. In other words, never was love poetry less erotic. Each single poem freezes the mimesis and turns into elaborated, captious, and therefore intricate and tasteless argument – an early, faraway hint of an age of obscurity and hermeticism, even of symbolism. That is why Caelica’s typical poem is not narrative, but neither is it superficially and obstinately conceited, and its melody is broken and rugged, and the rhythm itself is anything but smooth. The rhymes themselves are contrived, by no means facile, as for instance in Spenser. Greville devotes particular care to the making of unexpected final couplets, already affecting the elliptical mode of Augustan wit. One has to wade through one fourth of the whole (until no. 22) before coming across some kind of anecdote (a rustic laments his betrayal), and a transition from 3

Myra’s and Caelica’s lover becomes, towards the end of the songbook (see no. 76), a Philocell, somehow an etymological equivalent of Astrophil.

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convoluted hypotaxis to paratactical lines without enjambments. A sudden surprise is for example the trespass into the fabliau type (nos 23, 37, 50, the last even risqué, imitating Chaucer). The last third contains meditations that more and more silence love and passion, coldly stating the nightmare of a cosmos in the grip of the devil.4 3. Greville’s philosophical verse treatises, bitterly sceptical (on knowledge, fame, honour, wars, monarchy, in a between-the-lines dialogue with Bacon’s speculations) revive, behind a mask, the old genre of the conduct books from Elyot’s time. They teach how a functioning monarchy is formed and supported. Their theme is statecraft, the doctrine of the state and the art of governing.5 They have been thought to be the choruses of too abstract and lengthy dramas, extrapolated from those and made independent. The recurring criticism made of them is that such an arid subject matter would have fitted prose better. The priests’ chorus at the end of Mustapha deplores the Fall, or rather mankind going adrift, in so lucid and impassive terms that Aldous Huxley derived from it the epigraph of his novel Point Counter Point: ‘Oh wearisome condition of Humanity! Born under one law, to another bound, / Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity, / Created sick, commanded to be sound: / What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws? / Passion and reason self-division cause’. All well-read English people know by heart these lines which gather all of Greville in a nutshell. The gamut of references to sources that are not only Bacon but also pantheistic philosophies6 and vaguely proto-existentialist ones have made Greville a cult author, prized by mid-twentieth-century writers on alienation or on the incurable split between reason and instinct (the very theme of Huxley’s novel),7 but never really popular.8 Often from his emblem the 4 5 6 7 8

No. 44 contrasts the golden age with that of brass, which is above all ‘beauty grown sick, nature corrupt and nought’. Praz (PSL, 78 n. 1, and especially PMI, 104) compiles the very long list of Greville’s borrowings from Machiavelli, referring us to N. Orsini, Fulke Greville fra il mondo e Dio, Milano-Messina 1941. In 1584 Greville entertained as his guest Giordano Bruno, who Italianized him as Folco Grivello (PMI, 9). Volume 8, § 33.8–10. Relatively recent poetic anthologies have been edited by J. Rees, N. Powell and, especially, by the poet Thom Gunn (Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, London 1968).

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last Latin line has been erased, the most symptomatic in qualifying him: Greville was there defined as ‘trophaeum peccati’. § 56. Spenser* I: The most poetic of English poets This heading, in itself an insipid tautology, corresponds nevertheless to the definition William Hazlitt gave in 1818 of Edmund Spenser (1551–1599), 1

*

Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt, 3 vols, Oxford 1909–1910, and, in one vol., 1912, 1979; Works: A Variorum Edition, ed. E. A. Greenlaw et al., 11 vols, Baltimore, MD 1932–1957; Poetical Works, ed. A. C. Hamilton, London 1977. The Faerie Queene, ed. T. P. Roche, Jr, and C. P. O’Donnell, Jr, Harmondsworth 1978, 1987, with a useful commentary. Anthologies edited by F. Kermode, London 1965; by D. Brooks-Davies, London 1995. Selected Letters and Other Papers, ed. C. Burlinson and A. Zurcher, Oxford 2009 (the first vol. of a projected new, complete, six-volume edition). Life. A. C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser, Baltimore, MD 1945; G. F. Waller, Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1994; A. Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life, Oxford 2012. Criticism. W. L. Renwick, Edmund Spenser: An Essay on Renaissance Poetry, London 1925; E. Legouis, Edmund Spenser, New York 1927; V. Jones, A Spenser Handbook, New York 1930; E. Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory, London 1932; C. B. Millican, Spenser and the Table Round, Cambridge, MA 1932; B. E. C. Davis, Edmund Spenser: A Critical Study, Cambridge 1933; J. Spens, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’: An Interpretation, London 1934; I. E. Rathbone, The Meaning of Spenser’s Fairyland, New York 1937; J. W. Bennett, The Evolution of the ‘Faerie Queene’, Chicago 1942 and 1960; L. Bradner, Edmund Spenser and the Faerie Queene, Chicago 1948; W. K. Whitaker, The Religious Basis of Edmund Spenser’s Thought, Palo Alto, CA 1950; R. Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser, Genève 1960; M. P. Parker, The Allegory of the ‘Faerie Queene’, Oxford 1960; A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in the ‘Faerie Queene’, Oxford 1961, and, as editor, The Spenser Encyclopedia, London 1990; G. Hough, A Preface to the ‘Faerie Queene’, London 1962; W. Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, New York and London 1963; A. Fowler, Spenser and the Number of Times, London 1964, and Edmund Spenser, ed. I. Scott-Kilvert, London 1977; K. Williams, Spenser’s World of Glass, London 1965; D. S. Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature, New Haven, CT and London 1966; P. J. Alpers, The Poetry of ‘The Faerie Queene’, Princeton, NJ 1967; C. S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. A. Fowler, Cambridge 1967; Spenser: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. H. Berger, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; M. Evans, Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism: A Commentary on the ‘Faerie Queene’, Cambridge 1970; CRHE, ed. R. M. Cummings, London 1971, 1995;

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a definition not only quite exact for the tradition preceding Hazlitt, but also true and prophetic for a long time afterwards. Spenser was a master for a certain category of English poets, to whom he was guardian angel, inspirer and reference point: by and large that timeless family of ‘romantic’ poets, endlessly driven to escape from the everyday, from social responsibilities, from the consideration of material things, and to envision, from a state of entranced, nostalgic yearning, ancient worlds made of fictional, but always noisy and furious fights for reasons of honour, in defence of courtly love and of the chivalric spirit itself. This family of Spenserians also includes all imaginative poets, lovers of fables and linguistic archaisms, anxious to re-live ancient mythology and its wonderful, metamorphic tapestry, full of improbable and unbelievable vicissitudes. It includes all Arcadian minds aspiring to take refuge in pastoral peace. Such a large family of great poets is composed not only, or even not at all, of the so-called ‘Spenserians’ who clearly emulate Spenser himself. Unexpectedly, Milton will follow in his footsteps after a few generations; and, not by chance passing over the

F. Kermode, Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, London 1971, 1973, 1–83 and passim; J. B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, Princeton, NJ 1972; A. B. Giamatti, Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1975; I. G. MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination, Princeton, NJ 1976; J. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’, Princeton, NJ 1976; D. R. Shore, Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral, Kingston and Montreal 1985; Edmund Spenser, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986; J. D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, Cambridge 1989; K. Heninger, Jr, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker, University Park, PA 1989; R. Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career, Cambridge 1993; P. J. Cook, Spenser and the Epic Tradition, Aldershot 1996; A. Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl, Oxford 1997; W. A. Oram, Edmund Spenser, New York 1997; The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. A. Hadfield, Cambridge 2001; B. Van Es, Spenser’s Form of History, Oxford 2002, and, as editor, A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, London 2005; The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. A. McCabe, Oxford 2001 (this last, colossal contribution to Spenser criticism, of about 1,000 pages, is coordinated by an Irish scholar, and is a prelude to the new Oxford University Press edition of Spenser’s works, mentioned above). After 1980 the present bibliography is quite desultory and incomplete, due both to the exceeding increase of titles and to the high number of rather repetitive studies on the topics indicated at the end of this § 56.

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whole, unimaginative eighteenth century, the pre-Romantic and Romantic poets, adepts of ancient folk traditions, and the post-Romantics like the Victorians and the Decadents, would look back to him: a James Thomson with his ‘castle of indolence’, Coleridge and Keats, the early Hopkins,1 the Pre-Raphaelites and above all Morris, and chiefly and deeply Tennyson. But his penetration does not end here, and after a few decades Spenser is again the cynosure of English philologists turned into creative writers at the beginning of the twentieth century, who prize his dream-like fantasies, the great visionary and fabulous contests between Good and Evil, and the obsolete, dusty varnish of his poetical language. So it is not strange if Spenser’s greatest twentieth-century specialist is C. S. Lewis, the creator of the Chronicles of Narnia. It was therefore upon these critics, friends to Spenser, and poets or creative authors on their own, that it was incumbent to point out that Spenser’s poetry was no mere voluptuous indulging in the contemplations of an endless, various, many-coloured bi-dimensional tapestry, and that behind it there was a system of values: that Spenser did have a message, did expound an articulate allegory or even a philosophy. This philosophy was invoked and recalled at a moment when England saw its century-old political, cultural, and most of all linguistic prestige threatened or actually diminished: for Spenser, they remembered as if disorientated, called Chaucer a ‘source of uncorrupted English’, voicing again either the or a primordial myth, and the dream of a last survival of national values avowed for eternity, immune to any ‘mutabilitie’, a ghost that Spenser himself exorcised. 1

As will be said infra it is rather instructive to make a parallel between Spenser and Hopkins (who debuted with a Keatsian ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’), especially in view of the exile to which the Victorian poet was also ‘condemned’, and of the ideas, or ‘racist’ prejudices, of both. The editor of Hadfield 2001, who announces and summarizes (1–12) one of the essays included in his book, and specifically on the influence of Spenser (by P. Alpers, 252–71), only refers in a footnote (10 n. 5) to Hopkins’s biographer B. Begonzi (sic for Bergonzi); there are however no other mentions of the Victorian poet in the volume. Another English exile in Ireland, a contemporary of Spenser, and antithetical to him, because a co-religionist of Hopkins (in fact a fellow Jesuit), was Edmund Campion (on whom and on his ideas on Ireland, see. § 47.1).

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2. Lamb sided with Hazlitt, calling Spenser, with another famous apothegm, a ‘poets’ poet’; yet in both cases it was implied that in English literature there was and had been a second and antithetical family of poets and men of letters who had been insensitive, deaf or even hostile to Spenser. The first historical objection was epitomized in Ben Jonson’s frank, universally known boutade: ‘Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language’. His current London language was mixed with borrowings from the linguistic communities he had lived in, especially in the North and in Ireland; but on this basic vernacular he grafted earlier, exquisitely literary idioms, and he openly defines himself an imitator of Chaucer. Jonson, aware of the failures of the Scottish and especially of the English Chaucerians, saw in this linguistic experiment an artificial and unrealistic element. But the dramatic drop of interest in Spenser, in terms of the general readership and even with the common, cultured reader, was in the end the result of the mammoth size of his work (monotonous and sleep-inducing, as was said), and of a type of imagination that might please and attract today, were it less based on a fabric too heavily woven with medieval and allegorical implications. Indeed, the dimensions of his oeuvre make Spenser one of the most inexhaustible verse machines in English literature. The nearly 37,000 lines of The Faerie Queene, the greatest and longest single chivalric major poem in English, can hardly fit the size of a standard volume; nevertheless, they are only a half of the poem Spenser had in pectore, a poem therefore incomplete, although carefully revised and perfectly finished in the state in which it has come down to us. Spenser died at the age of fortyseven, but left, not only his magnum opus but also a rich corpus of shorter works. In contrast, academic studies of Spenser have never known any signs of flagging and are at present more and more flourishing. Spenser’s work contains seeds destined to later discovery and fortune. In Italy Praz was one of the first to enter the field and relocate Spenser not so much in the history of European poetic allegory as, by a mix of anticipation and insight, in its changes of taste and artistic sensibilities. Spenser belongs to that form of Baroque that still believes in mythology, which he does not yet quite reject but clings to as if confident it can discipline faith and paganism. He represents the subspecies of Baroque called Mannerism; more precisely he tends towards the ‘picturesque’, that art form which

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associates pure beauty with discordant, even cacophonic elements, or to ugliness itself. He is also a father of the neo-Gothic with his persecuted maidens imprisoned in a castle or dungeon, always an object of lust and of a perennially delayed aggression at the hands of an impotent man. At the end of the nineteenth century Yeats had seen Spenser pre-eminently as the greatest enemy of the Irish, and lamented the poet’s absolute inability to understand Ireland and its ethnicity. This might have been a modernist view, or a new opening for Spenser criticism: the discovery in Spenser, that is, of an early displaced and uprooted writer, an exiled forefather long separated from his natural humus, who could constitute a precedent and a correlative for Joyce and Eliot, or more closely for Hopkins. In his sonnet ‘To seem the stranger’ Hopkins seems literally to quote Spenser, this Spenser as a citizen of nowhere, when in the second quatrain he appeals to faraway England, ‘whose honour O all my heart woos / Wife to my creating thought’ (which echoes Spenser’s salutation to London in ‘Prothalamion’, ‘my most kindly Nurse / That to me gaue this Lifes natiue sourse’). Spenser reacts to the exile’s sense of alienation not by incommunicability, schizophrenia, or the modernist’s elephantine psyche, but by the sadistic imagination sated and placated in its thirst for blood and the senses, and in the deformed figures of dwarfs, monsters or dragons. In my opinion the map of Spenser’s psyche as a patient has still to be defined, possibly starting from his obsessive metaphors. 3. Spenser’s Irish exile after 1580 (even if biographers still wonder whether, to Spenser who accepted it and the authorities who imposed it, it was meant as a punishment or a reward) has been at the centre of Spenser criticism in the last half-century. To a certain extent, every author acknowledged as great has recently been re-read with the instruments of poststructuralism, with the haste, if not the chaotic frenzy, of one suddenly leaving behind naïve impressionistic criticism in favour of new methodologies, but without having first assimilated and digested linguistics, formalism and structuralism. With regard to Spenser, gender criticism has explored his ‘sexual politics’ starting from the piquant detail of his possible homosexuality, sleeping as he did at Westminster in the same bed as Harvey. Feminism has tried to ascertain if Spenser was misogynous or sympathized with women, especially if warriors and Amazon-like. Postcolonial criticism

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has dominated the field with close re-readings of the Veue of the Present State of Ireland,2 a text far more benign, democratic and open to possibilities than Yeats and his followers had supposed. The next step was claiming that all of Spenser is political and that the Veue is more or less the central, basic axis of the poet’s corpus. So a new identity, that of a colonial poet, has been forged for Spenser.3 In my opinion this poststructuralist Spenser constitutes a particularly arbitrary and falsifying operation, presupposing, or taking for granted, that in any poet under examination questions are traceable that have become central and dominant only many centuries later.4 To shift the centre of gravity onto Ireland is perhaps for the English an obligatory, politically correct choice, which is to say a form of historical compensation: but to anyone who is not English this move is far less acceptable, and seems exaggerated and forced. The Cambridge Companion to Spenser of 2001 is a case in point. It is authored by a well-knit working team sharing the same ideas on what counts in literary events and using the

2

3

4

Written in 1595, but published in 1633, this pamphlet, in dialogue form, takes a pre-Cromwellian position, suggesting, as a measure to ensure internal order, a stern repression of the recurrent uprisings that, at the end of the century, harassed the Elizabethan government. Spenser dons the mask of Irenius answering Eudoxus’ questions: few remember that this could therefore be a parody of Ascham’s Toxophilus. Praz repeatedly saw Machiavelli’s principles and directions applied here (see for instance PMI, 162 n. 1); therefore D. J. Baker, ‘Historical Contexts: Britain and Europe’, in Hadfield 2001, 51–2, pushes on an open door. At the back of this book, and of the re-reading of Spenser I am now discussing, is S. Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago 1980, 157–92, containing the provocative thesis that Spenser was basically a ‘poet of imperial expansion’, and that The Faerie Queene is a colonialist epic. Spenser is therefore a kind of revelatory testing ground for the recent trends of Anglo-American criticism. Ideological scaffoldings and last-minute theoretical constructions are applied from the outside to this and that writer in the belief that this author, though remote in time, should, even better if unconsciously, have shared or announced them. The writer thus becomes the support for a series of ‘discourses’ in most cases quite alien to him, and the repository of never-intended allusions or innuendos. This new practice can be seen as a form of compensation or historical nemesis, since great pre-war British critics (also of Spenser, like C. S. Lewis) had given fascinating, authoritative and judicial readings, but quite by instinct, and from critically unequipped and even merrily jejune positions.

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same critical jargon: its authors quote one another, having tacitly got rid of the early twentieth-century tutelary gods of Spenser’s criticism (Lewis, Kermode), and totally changed all reference points. The crucial essays of this Companion either ignore or relegate to the background questions once thought general, preliminary, or decidedly foundational, such as that of allegory or of the relationship of Spenser’s poem with its sources or with the visual arts. Significantly the first essay in this book, after the two introductory ones, deals with the Veue, favouring relevance over chronology and elevating this to the rank of keynote work.5 The main outcome and discovery of poststructuralist and postcolonial Spenser is the existence of a really ‘continuous’ political allegory, beneath and inside the kaleidoscope of The Faerie Queene and of Spenser’s other works, written by an author who was conscious that the real decider in Elizabethan politics was Ireland, rather than the role of England in the European theatre, as had always been thought. This quite modifies the perspective evinced by the works and the dates of their publications, and by the relative moods they illustrate: Spenser publishes, if he does not write, as his last or penultimate work, the four ‘hymns’, offering a positive, optimistic, finalistic view of the cosmos, offsetting the possible pessimism of the second triad (with appendix) of the Faerie Queene books. § 57. Spenser II: ‘The Shepheardes Calender’. 1579: The fateful year Born in London, the son of a tailor related to a great and well-to-do northern family, Spenser attended as a needy student the school newly founded by Richard Mulcaster (ca. 1530–1611), an exceptionally learned humanist, known for his support of the scholarly study of English.6 At the age of seventeen he was able, thanks to a scholarship, to attend Pembroke College, Cambridge, as a sizar (that is, entitled to his board in exchange for small services); there he studied Greek, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy. Before going to university he had already pub5 6

It is worth remembering that C. S. Lewis (LEW, 321) could lightly ‘neglect entirely [the] political allegory’ of The Faerie Queene, that is, not consider what has become the fulcrum of present-day readings. On this figure see the portrait in ELS, 348–50, cursorily describing his euphuistic style, eccentric ideas and literary tastes.

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lished translations from Petrarch and Joachim Du Bellay in a pamphlet of anti-Catholic propaganda by a Flemish expatriate. At Cambridge he became friends with Gabriel Harvey, a learned Puritan with whom he discussed ways to graft quantitative Latin metre onto English verse, a recurring dream of sixteenth-century poets.7 His aim was to model his career, consciously, on that of Virgil: from pastoral to heroic poet, chivalric-Arthurian in his case; and thence, or at the same time, in The Faerie Queene, to an encomiastic poet of the Elizabethan monarchy, after an interlude of Aesopian poetic fables, and with a coda of nuptial poetry. Spenser’s brimming poetic gift was able to flourish owing to a social role that was slightly different from his predecessors’. The Faerie Queene and Spenser’s other works were published during his lifetime, not left to their fate, and Spenser is one of the first English poets who, aware of the publishing market, made a shrewd choice as to suitable times, subjects and genres, and personally edited his works for publication. The modern literary profession had been born, even if, soon after, the Elizabethan dramatic age seemed to belie this, with authors falling back for the moment on almost total carelessness or indifference with regard to the destiny, preservation and even marketability of their works. Spenser was free to carry on the profession of the poet because, while he was a civil servant and a Crown official, his tasks were less conspicuous and more sedentary, and left him much more leisure than his predecessors. He was no clergyman, no university professor, no soldier, especially not a full-time courtier. He was not made a knight. Unlike Wyatt, Surrey or Sidney, he did not go to the Continent on a classical grand tour of his own, also because Italian masterpieces were already easy to come by in England. 2. In 1579, having set aside the idea to take holy orders, Spenser shared with Harvey (and with another man of whom only his initials E. K. are known, perhaps an Edward Kirke) a room in Westminster; in the same year The Shepheardes Calender was published. Thanks to this work, 1579 7

See § 48.3 and n. 8 on his friendship with Sidney and his later participation in the Areopagus. At Cambridge Abraham Fraunce (1587–1633) was among those who attended the debates on classicist prosody. Fraunce was to translate Tasso’s Aminta and is the author of English poems in hexameters, though not quite unrhymed (on him as critic see § 84.1).

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has come to represent something of a zero hour for English poetry. This is confirmed and reinforced by the fact that Spenser openly declared himself a pupil and follower of Chaucer, but Chaucer grafted onto the literary and intellectual culture of the following two centuries. This culture had absorbed, and digested with prodigious haste, Petrarch’s poetry which Chaucer barely knew, Italian humanism and the Renaissance, and above all the sudden breakthrough represented by the Reformation. The unprecedented novelty of this little work can be immediately perceived because it is a conscious form of parody. English poetical language attains and achieves, and demonstrates, its coming of age, and every term is weighed, and can be used, from the viewpoint of the history of the English language: a layer and a stage of Middle English could now be imitated, alternated or mixed with contemporary literary English, with the assurance that the cognoscenti would automatically recognize the experiment, although the larger public of even well-read readers could not. E. K.’s preface already shows and emphasizes that the common English language, deviating from its ancient purity, was becoming a receptacle, if not a crucible, of French and Italian borrowings. Significantly, the Calender, already in 1579, needed a philologist and a lexicographer to comment on and explain its obsolete, old-fashioned terms. Here is one more aspect of its novelty. Formally, the Calender has an editor, the author of a preface, and an annotator, all in a single person, although he signs himself E. K., and we do not know if he is the above-mentioned Kirke, or the poet himself feigning to split into two distinct persons. We moderns can but favour this second, pre-Borgesian hypothesis, of the editor being the author himself who becomes ex post his own critic, able to speak in an unrecognizable falsetto and an antithetic register.8 Moreover, the Calender is a text that today we would call a multimedial manufacture, being indeed structured as a calendar, a new genre which, according to its metaphor (since then incorporated into literary terminol8

A few notes that explain mythological facts or past historical events, like those of the Wars of the Roses (fourth eclogue) show that exemplary clarity, coexisting with swiftness, which is typical of the author of the Faerie Queene. E. K. is very well-read in mythology, anthropology, history, geography and naturally linguistics, foreshadowing Robert Graves’s The White Goddess.

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ogy), is a verbal para-text, to be leafed through, consulted, kept at hand, not strictly to be read. The fore-texts, too, give it this hybrid character. Each eclogue is preceded by a xylography (unsigned), of which the verbal text is the commentary (plus, in a corner at the top, the month’s zodiacal sign); at the end a couplet or a single line is the shepherd-speaker’s motto. The last part of the polymorphous text is composed of glosses and philological notes. Yet, to take a step back, a preliminary letter by E. K. represents what is perhaps the first preface to a literary work in English, a habit engendered ex novo. Here is the foundation of the aesthetics of archaism, even of the pleasing cacophony of the new and the old, not unlike that of the later picturesque genre that set contemporary scenes against a background of ruins. The editorship extends to providing short introductions for every eclogue, thus beginning to create at least the idea of a novel, or the embryo of an autobiographical, self-controlled and stylized romance: the story of Colin, the author’s personification, and of coy Rosalind, alternating with digressions concerning other shepherds. 3. The pastoral, as we already saw with Sidney, is a genre that, along with the Arthurian poem by Spenser himself, offered itself as the main vehicle for diatribes and disputes that were prevalent at the end of the sixteenth century. It was, in short, a vogue that could be used for non-literary purposes. Spenser’s primary device lies in writing texts à clef, with obvious correspondences between the character of the invented plot and a real one. Archaisms apart, he composes within the same gamut of prosodic forms as those of the interludes of the Arcadia, relying on the same traditional sources, from Theocritus to Virgil to the recently revived Mantuan, even if he organizes his work in a much firmer and more exacting way than Sidney. However, both offer their eclogues in a mode of estrangement: one, Spenser, by means of glosses; the other, Sidney, declaring their reasons and circumstances, and that they are not lyrical outpourings but sympathetic impersonations. Without quite forgetting this experience, Spenser was subsequently to leave the pastoral genre totally to Sidney.9 The Elizabethan calendar began in 9

Spenser had written a treatise now lost on poetry, containing assumptions tallying with Sidney’s, for its pivot was enthusiasm, or ‘celestial inspiration’. Cuddie is in the Calender the shepherd that hymns poetry and complains of its decadence, like Sidney

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March, and the review of the months, a commonplace, started from that month, as can also be seen from the heraldic set piece in the ‘mutability’ cantos in the Faerie Queene. It is therefore no cavil to notice that here, instead, Spenser follows the later norm of the beginning of the year with January. This must be said, for the conventional correlation between the month of the year and the human state of mind is obvious. Thus an eclogue on old age is ideally to be assigned to February; one on youthful vigour and the awakening senses to March. Spenser’s eclogues all end with the twilight falling, as if they were always spoken late in the afternoon. 4. The Calender’s original frontispiece bears a dedication to Sidney, and at the bottom a detailed London address of the printer-publisher, in characters partly Gothic and with a queer variety of graphic types; and inside the cover an envoy is signed with the pseudonym Immerito. Spenser’s true name is nowhere to be found. Here begins a game of masks, which one could also interpret in a further literal meaning, as texts or canvases for student costume theatricals, or a pastoral masque in twelve pictures or scenes. One comes thus to suppose that the Calender was the mise en abyme of the very academic milieu where Spenser’s ‘star’ was beginning to shine, for his poems were already proverbial, and his fellow-students learned by heart and recited them just as the shepherds recite Colin’s. As always happens, the members of this academic circle, professors included, knew one another by a variety of pastoral nicknames, derived from the classics or from English tradition (Skelton for Colin, Langland for Piers) and also by allusions, so covert and esoteric that even E. K. pretends not to know the key. The history of English literature abounds with such academic pranks and divertissements, and Spenser of the Calender reminds us of Tennyson who in 1830, again at Cambridge, was the spearhead of a community of young admiring students of whom Hallam, the foremost, announced him to the world. Even more astonishing, thanks to a real congeries of texts, genres, and inner registers, is the analogy of this first work who reflected himself in the shepherd Phisilides. Akin to the Defence is his lament on the poet’s scant fame. At the same time we find here a list of poetic genres and subspecies, like the heroic, the encomium and didactic poetry, from which a debuting poet could make his choice.

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by Spenser with The Orators by Auden, who was to be the object of the same collective worship in the Oxford of the early 1920s. Spenser tested in the Shepheardes Calender an early philtre, the pastoral, for teaching by delighting. In the fifth eclogue the fable of the fox and the kid attacks the cunning and duplicity of the Catholics. The same are represented in the seventh eclogue as the shepherds that let their sheep go rotten while they grab all they can. In the ninth a shepherd has even travelled to Rome and seen its corruption. § 58. Spenser III: Aesopian and pastoral fables and elegies Up to 1591, the date of Complaints,10 Spenser published no works, but only because The Faerie Queene was already in progress. In their sad, elegiac, bleak, even despairing, prostrated and lucidly dark tone, the various and mixed compositions of Complaints exude a bitterness contradicting the warm optimism of the poem already being composed at that time – but Spenser is always a man of moods, never making linear, one-way progress. On the basis of this work The Faerie Queene may well appear to be not only an extended allegory but an extended utopia; the more so because Spenser is already looking for a terrestrial axis and fulcrum – and at the same time for an antidote and for a barrier against history going adrift – in the royal court and in the person of the queen. But the court too is ambivalent, as the point of reference wavers and Spenser ends by losing his trust. Some of the lyrics of Complaints are turgid encomia having a definite addressee or dedicatee, such as Sidney’s sister; others insist on covering names or weaving dark allegories, basing their meaning on a system of correspondences that Spenser’s coevals could decode, but not we today. In ‘The Ruins of Time’ he imagines he meets on the banks of the Thames a desperate woman, the personification of the ancient, wasted town of Verulamium, once rising on the Thames which had altered its course out of grief. It is the first example of Spenser’s great theme of tout passe or more specifically of ubi sunt. The composition turns into a dirge for Sidney and other famous figures recently deceased, and closes on visions of the world’s short-lived

10

It also included translations from Du Bellay and revisions of Petrarch’s poems.

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glory.11 ‘The Teares of the Muses’ reveals the nightmare Spenser often has to dispel and the anguish of evolutionary regression: the idea, that is, that man could revert to the bestial state, ‘Through fleshes frailtie and deceipt of sin’. 2. Spenser probably undertook the translation of Virgil’s Culex having been struck by the scene of the monstrous snake trying to envelop in its spires the unconscious shepherd sleeping under the oak. Virgil unconsciously prefigured the anthropomorphic dimension of satanic temptation or an objective correlative of the precariousness of human will. Spenser was also inspired by the mosquito’s description of hell. ‘Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie’ (1590), in brilliant stanzas of eight iambic decasyllables, first describes the dressing of Clarion, son of Muscaroll, a butterfly heir to the throne and brimming with desire to know the world and its beauties. It is a metaphor of the original thirst for experience and shining goods freely offered by nature, still in the unawareness that everything changes and through changing ends (‘for all change is sweete’), the seed of a theme basic to The Faerie Queene; at the same time it portends the wandering of a pure soul in a realm not yet overshadowed by the devil.12 Aragnol is the spider diabolically weaving the web where the butterfly finds death, an allegory of the ignorant that believe the world progresses towards goodness, and of the satanic challenge occurring in a ‘garden’ where the spider is indeed ‘th’author of confusion’, preventing a meeting and a fusion between two pure beings, like the Edenic couple. In the ‘Swiftian’ tale in iambic decasyllables, ‘Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale’13 the fox and ape go, disguised, in search of fortune, alluding to one of the problems of the age, how to get advancement at court and in the intricacies of life. The picaresque career ouverte aux talents of the two animals is based on deceiv11

12 13

‘Astrophel’, a mythological variation on Sidney’s death, is surrounded by other minor dirges in his honour. Spenser’s most formless composition, published outside Complaints but still in 1591, is ‘Daphnaïda’, an elegy on the dead wife of a nobleman, in itself an uninspired imitation of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchesse. Spenser’s adjective ‘greedy’ applies to the butterfly here in its most innocent meaning, yet maybe already betraying a strain of danger, or of moral weakness. It is even too easy to recall that the emissary of the Duke of Alençon, a candidate for Elizabeth’s hand, was named Simier. But the allegory might be double or multiple, with the fox symbolizing Cecil, Lord Burghley, Spenser’s personal enemy.

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ing and exploiting their neighbour; the grand finale is the couple’s arrival at court, with the pitiless exposure of the corruption reigning there. After quarrelling about who is to be king in the forest (each, like an evolutionist, claims to be most like man, which, given the internal allegory, is anything but a virtue),14 they make a pact and reproduce in their government the corruption of the court. At the end the world has become such a mess that Jupiter sends Mercury to set things, and hierarchies, right. The sleepy lion, awakening when recalled to his duties, is a warning to monarchs to govern, lest the courtiers deprive them of their crowns. 3. Like Sidney identifying himself with Phisilides, a figure-head present throughout his poetic career, Colin Clout is Spenser’s recurring pastoral identity. Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, written in 1590 after the first three cantos of The Faerie Queene had been published, but printed in 1595, makes us aware of this doubly recursive nature. It might well appear as a thirteenth Calender eclogue, given its successful mimetic and dramatic framework. Shepherd Colin Clout, back home from his voyage, while telling his tale is badgered by shepherds and shepherdesses, the latter resentful because he says nothing about the nymphs but only about the singers of that Queen Cynthia he has been staying with. His listeners also interrupt him and especially urge him to come to the point, without digressions and delays, thereby criticizing the poem’s supposedly deliberate defect; but at any rate those very digressions full of lists contain witty hints regarding Sidney, the countess his sister and Stella. Cynthia is a queen of the shepherds in a fabulous kingdom that is reached by sea, and Spenser, with a magnificent use of estrangement, describes his voyage to England with Ralegh (re-named the ‘ocean shepherd’) in terms of a fantasy copied from English tales of mariners sailing along the coasts of the New World. Colin lands in a utopia, or a future Prospero’s isle, where everything is fresh and new. The peevish question from a girl – why then, if it was such, has Colin come back? – creates a sudden split in the poem’s allegorical plan, turning its argument upside down. Cynthia had appeared to be an umpteenth alias of Queen Elizabeth; but her court too is found out to be rotten, and chaste 14 When the lion, awakened by Mercury, resumes power, he pursues and catches the ape, cuts his ears off and crops his tail ‘(which then he had)’.

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love spurned there. Spenser makes Colin enunciate, in one of his most beautiful and passionate speeches, a Christianized Platonic evolutionism where mysteriously love is procreative and therefore sexual, but chaste, for in it reason tames passion. Men must second this flame, freeing themselves from the senses that render them like beasts. § 59. Spenser IV: ‘The Faerie Queene’ I. The poem’s ‘dark conceit’ Conceived and written from 1579, The Faerie Queene was published in instalments. A first triad of books was issued in 1590, followed by three more in 1596, and then by a fragment of the seventh, out of the envisaged twelve, perhaps even twenty-four.15 The poem’s aim was encomiastic, and it is based on the fantasy of an imagined Gloriana, Queen of the Fairies, who sends her knights into the world. Each of them is the champion of a virtue and hence the inexorable enemy of the corresponding vice’s forces and hypostases, which he pursues, discovers and suppresses. The idea of this new Round Table fulfils the need to give a mythical foundation to the new English monarchy born of the Reformation, and now aspiring to appear in the European theatre as a solid, enlightened reign, both young and of ancient lineage, pulsing with the new lymph of anti-Catholic Puritan Protestantism that saw itself as the ideal heir of early Christianity. Local support to the idea of this continuity was thus discovered in the legendaryhistorical Arthur, who in a dream or vision saw the image of his fairy queen and went out to seek her.16 In Elizabeth, physical and spiritual beauty join 15

16

Almost the whole of the poem was then written in Ireland, at Kilcolman Castle. In 1579 Spenser had entered the service of the Earl of Leicester, Sidney’s uncle and Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, as well as the patron of a most influential literary and political circle. But in 1580 Leicester lost the queen’s favour and Spenser followed Lord Grey of Wilton to Ireland as his private secretary; after the lord was called back home Spenser fulfilled administrative charges of various kinds (he was also sheriff of Cork). He died early in 1599 in London, having fled after the Irish rebels had burned down Kilcolman castle. According to some the remaining manuscripts of the poem were destroyed in the fire; it is more likely that a perfectionist like Spenser would have destroyed them himself. The poem is thus a belated variation of the medieval module of the ‘dream’, a dream Arthur himself dreams and experiences. In his introductory letter Spenser confirms

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with public virtue. The very linguistic policy of the poem lies in making language seem old and ancient so as to ennoble it. For Spenser ‘ancient’ meant above all Chaucer (a well of still pure and untainted English, as in IV.2.32) and after him Malory. The letter to Ralegh preceding the poem stems from an aesthetics extremely close, almost consanguineous to, that in Sidney’s Defence. Literary art recognizes its rivals in conceptual rhetoric, elocution and historiography, but it excels them as Xenophon excels Plato in that it teaches by delighting. Above all, poems rich in figures and exemplary stories act upon the reader’s imagination, and their lessons by example are more effective than bare, undressed truth. Especially in the final part, when this letter gives a prose narrative of the antecedents, and recalls the queen’s assignments of the various missions to her knights, the language used, with its archaisms, circumlocutions and old-fashioned sheen, looks like (at least compared with Sidney’s polished coeval prose) that of Malory, written no less than 120 years before. Such is the optical illusion. The choice of the chivalric poem centring on Arthur cyclically recurs in English literature, providing very flexible containers and frameworks to deal with cultural and epistemic issues. Arthur’s epos, starting with Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English historical and poetic examples of the alliterative and stanzaic types, experiences four later salient moments in six or seven centuries: Malory, Spenser, the Romantics and Tennyson. Each of these remakes illustrates a cultural system and foundation. Why Malory wrote his cycle has already been explained. Tennyson, on the contrary, will use the Arthurian saga for anti-celebration purposes, even as a sort of grand elegy and a leave-taking of spiritual and moral values soon to be lost. The Faerie Queene, a project from which his friend Harvey initially dissuaded Spenser, was nevertheless read aloud to Queen Elizabeth, who appreciated it and rewarded the poet with a lavish pension of fifty pounds. She clearly found it an instrument for consensus and she understood that it was a controlled game to be played with the readers, while presupposing that they accepted, as in every fairy-tale, the rules of the game. This kind that he begins his narrative in medias res, and that he will postpone to Canto XII, which he did not live to write, the scene of the Queen of the Fairies being feasted, and entrusting her knights with their various missions.

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of play was in her time current, indeed very popular. Subsequently The Faerie Queene became a specific and obvious testing ground for discussing the obsolescence of art, and allegory became its own stumbling block. Its impossible, unmanageable length meant that it was read largely in the form of selections. Spenser himself did not, perhaps, compose it sequentially, but wrote first those beautiful gems which later taste extracted from their settings, discarding the links and much or all of the rest. Influential readers and critics, from the early twentieth century, have confirmed that the poem was alien to modern sensibility and demonstrated that no one but academics read it any longer. So they seemed to imply that it was fortune in disguise if Spenser had not written the other six projected books.17 2. The academics of yore seemed to exhaust the discussion of the poem by going deep into its links with the sources; and even Spenser in his preface declared himself indebted and heir to Ariosto and Tasso.18 Behind the poem one glimpses even more often Dante’s Commedia.19 Spenser contrasts, on the level of actual or imaginary experience, heaven and hell – two realms that are not remote, separate or polarized, but inter-communicating – of course with the abolition of purgatory. Thus he sees all in chiaroscuro. What is ever The Faerie Queene but a survey of authentically Christian virtues, whose lesson is made sharper by the representation of exactly opposite vices? Every book, like Dante’s canti, is thematic, as it develops around a sin or vice with the contrary virtue attacking it. In the didactic opening of Book III, Canto IX, Spenser admits that evil can be described with the aim of exalting good, which prevails and wins, although trespasses occur now and again; just as the honesty of the female sex is not invalidated by the fact that a woman was guilty of losing Eden. Spenser’s knights are the 17 18 19

LEW, 337, on the contrary, regrets its incompleteness. Hough 1962, 59, convincingly demonstrates the freshness of Tasso’s influence, since in 1580 the Gerusalemme liberata had just been published. Hamilton 1961, 29–43, is one of the few to call attention to analogies with Dante. Nevertheless, whereas we know nearly everything about how familiar the English were with Petrarch and Boccaccio, information on when they really became acquainted with Dante’s poem is vague and nebulous. Hamilton identifies the quintessence of the analogy in the insistence on the ‘literal level’, that is on concreteness; so for him Dante and Spenser are realist poets.

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facets of a single pilgrim wandering in surreal unworldly kingdoms, ever meeting with monstrous, terrific, loathsome beings; no names of living or dead people are given, as happens in Dante, but the contemporaries would easily have recognized them. Also, like Dante, Spenser uses an imaginative, deliberate, allusive onomastics, and outdoes Sidney in creating a variety of allegorical names, on the one hand parodying Ariosto and on the other freely coining pseudo-Italian words. If this analogy works, what really distinguishes Spenser from Ariosto and Tasso is just allegory. This is why Spenser repeatedly lost in the comparison made with the two chief chivalric poets as far as variety and lack of monotony are concerned.20 Significantly, those who look down on Spenser emphasize that in Ariosto allegory was added later, and not even by the poet, but by his commentators, such as Fornari and Toscanella.21 These objections imply a double misunderstanding, that allegory is an alien component to be used warily and rarely, and with a very neat and univocal scheme of correspondences between tenor and vehicle. These critics, being no theoreticians, are unable to perceive that Spenser goes beyond the frontiers of allegory and touches or trespasses upon the grounds of symbol. Few Spenser critics in the 1960s were competent enough to investigate the nature and statute of Spenser’s allegory; most of them tried rather to streamline it, going the opposite way from the symbolist critics and pursuing the mirage of a univocal meaning, whereas a symbol is endowed with unlimited suggestions. Basically, we need to delve into all the implications of Spenser’s formula, ‘continued allegory or darke conceit’, by which the poet defines his proceedings in the letter to Ralegh prefaced to the poem. The term ‘continued’ may be an intensifier, and by ‘dark conceit’ Spenser seems to imply the shadowy zone from

20 That of the English has been a more Solomon-like verdict: why from Arnold’s viewpoint, still valid with them, Ariosto may not be really great, and even prove inferior to Spenser, is well explained by LEW, 303. In the following pages, 305–7, Lewis makes cogent remarks on the evaluations of both. From his part Spenser wished ‘to overgo’ the Furioso, and keeps his promise if only because he doubles the internal unit of measure, dividing the poem into books, each of them subdivided into twelve cantos. 21 PSL, 75.

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which suggestions spring.22 As a consequence, until the late 1970s the drive towards an allegorical decoding of the poem has imprisoned Spenser criticism. Earlier criticism had worked by dividing the poem into areas and sections: allegory, diction, style, prosody and philosophy; subsequent monographs were organized as flat and schematized commentaries, book after book, coming after an introduction on the obligatory issues, such as sources,23 mythology and cultural context. Whoever tries to make the poem answer the intentions set out in the letter finds discrepancies to be ascribed only partly to the fact that Spenser had not yet written the whole poem.24 Hence The Faerie Queene appeared to be organized at first on the basis of theme,25 then dream, then atmosphere.26 Fowler’s27 precocious explorations discovered and illustrated an organization following the sequence of the planet gods of the seven days of the week. But already Hough, observing the poet’s subtle, barely suppressed enjoyment before ‘The Bower of Bliss’, pointed to a representation ‘that partly contradicts the theme’.28 As I hinted in my introductory section, after 1970 Spenser’s allegory has become a dead end in the research on this poet, a research totally occupied with other problems. 3. My idea of this allegory is that it is far more open, dynamic and changeable. The Faerie Queene regresses to the evolutionary phase of an 22

Hough 1962, 102, comes close to realizing this difference when he poses as two possible extremes a literature where theme prevails and one where image prevails: his formula for The Faerie Queene is, therefore, ‘intermittent allegory’ (115). But this does not mean that the poem is not symbolist, for if it is ‘dream’, as Hough deems, it is so. To name only one critic, N. Frye (Anatomy of Criticism, Harmondsworth 1990, 90) asserts what is self-evident: if an allegory cannot be understood it is not an allegory. 23 Every critic of Spenser before 1970 was necessarily a comparatist. The discussion of the Italian models occupies a good half of Hough 1962. 24 For instance: not all the virtues illustrated in the poem are those of the Nichomachean Ethics, and the figure of Arthur has not a unifying function, and his magnanimity is rather perseverance. 25 Nelson 1963. 26 Hough 1962 27 Fowler 1964 and 1977. 28 Hough 1962, 165–6. But Hough does not deconstruct Spenser’s attitude to Ireland: any humanitarian tone would have been alien to his historical situation (192).

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elementary epos much less sophisticated than Sidney’s, and Spenser’s knight at times rejects his very allegorical role, as a copy of a Beowulf dealing with superhuman, almost fabulous feats. But at other times, like Sidney’s hero, he feels acutely the temptation of sense, listens to seductive fancies and eludes the control of reason.29 At least once in every book the pure knights face such an ordeal, which Spenser describes with Apollonian detachment, but yet unusually lingers on it. Doubtless now and again Spenser, to fulfil his didactic plan, will and must narrate a most bitter, bloody clash between good and evil and its representatives. One has the feeling that each time he wants evil to rise up so he can crush it again. He cannot have enough of these duels to the bitter end, and indeed he never fails to notice how abundantly the duellers bleed. The irrepressible sexual urge appears in the manic care with which, in the ‘Bower of Bliss’, he waits until the very last moment before destroying a seductive fantasy. Not only this, but in every book he no less punctually stages the rite of attempted rape on the part of a devilish enchanter or a subhuman being. He feels until the end an unsatisfied longing to represent and see the accomplishment of a great heroic feat, that of delivering a woman kept prisoner by sadistic torturers. Even the eulogium of chastity can turn into the admission of the compelling strength of carnal desire. Canto VIII in Book VI depicts the slow, growing foretaste of orgiastic sex in a man gazing at a beautiful naked woman, whose appetizing anatomy is described in detail, as in a passage by Sidney.30 The most apt definition of Spenser’s allegory, in short, comes near to the semiotic concept of the plurisign. As always happens, insightful critics have found and exemplified a phenomenology beforehand, without theorizing its name. The elements poured into the characters and the single narrative phases of the imaginative game which is The Faerie Queene form the largest possible gamut of high and low material,

29 Spenser’s concordance would document the very high incidence of ‘greedy’, the adjective continually applied to the upright knight’s boldness, but also pointing to its opposite, the false and base knight’s lust and rut, and the satanic monster’s or giant’s hunger and thirst for human flesh. An equally recurring contrasting adjective is ‘glistering’. 30 § 51. 1.

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going from history to chronicle, prejudice, gossip, even to occult codes. Allegory feeds and crams itself with this choice of options, from Old to New Testament, with the Gospels and Satan’s temptations and the visions of Revelation, Aristotelian ethics and neo-Platonism, Alexandrianism and Augustinianism up to Boethius; and thence down to pseudo-culture and contingent controversies, even to rumours and historical fictions – until the allegory bursts. If one wishes to explore a tentative, fatally incomplete map of the references (only contemporary ones) in The Faerie Queene, let him or her read at least the long, dense list appended to a footnote in the preface of the Oxford edition of the poem.31 For this reason every reading and exegesis of it – not least mine below – is the victim of the excess of suggestions, and is doomed to reduce the poem’s complexity. 4. Leaving aside Milton, who was to compose in blank verse, two centuries will elapse before one finds one or a series of great long English poems in rhyme, or in prosodic forms akin to that of The Faerie Queene. A similar ability to thread stanzas that seem to flow with simple, even banal ease, but neat and fine like cameos, and with acrobatic and at times macaronic rhymes, recalls one single later poet, Byron. Byron is the poet that comes to mind when we think of verse narratives of quite concrete and yet imaginary, visionary and tragicomic actions, where very prosaic daily operations are described and above all summarized – though it is agreed that Spenser is hardly ever satirical, and never as much as Byron. Like Byron, Spenser is endowed to the highest degree with naturalness, while illustrating the English saying that ‘easy reading is damn hard writing’.32 The poem’s mechanism is extremely simple, for every canto of every book is self-enclosed and describes a single adventure or mission of its knight – sometimes more than one, his progress being an approach towards an objective between which and himself stand obstacles or hinderers. Monographic books alternate with stereophonic ones, rich in plots and adventures relating to several figures. The cosmos of the realm of fairies is ipso facto a network of relationships, and the books of the poem are not watertight compart31 32

De Selincourt 1979, lii–liii. BAL, 414, asserting that Spenser is ‘unable’ to narrate, incautiously says the contrary of ELS, 389.

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ments; instead, some characters exit one book and enter another. Every canto begins with one or more gnomic, didactic stanzas or with a proem, recalling or anticipating the lessons to be drawn from them. The range of situations is fixed: from the path, to the dark forest with the fountain, and from there to a castle, whose owner is often a sadistic enchanter, but powerless to win the imprisoned woman loved by a chaste man. A furious duel is often fought between two knights, or between one and a demonic figure whose somatic peculiarity is the sub-humanity of the dwarf, or, and more often, of the giant, or of a monstrous bestial creature, usually a dragon. The poem’s organizing aesthetics is iterative and cyclical, and there are no other materials than the quest aimed to defeat, unhorse, punish and kill, or convert, evil individuals, or to free, for one’s own sake or for others’, virgins and damsels kept prisoners in caves or dungeons. Repeatedly, too, we wander from altogether probable episodes on heaths, paths or in forests, to others verging on dream, vision and hallucination in sensual alcoves, bowers and palaces, castles or hovels, or equivocal and sinister workshops. Spenser, amongst other skills, is a masterly creator of atmospheres, some different from others, though still alike. His descriptive and narrative art is first of all one of arrangement. He copies almost nothing from his sources but combines them, with allusions the reader can grasp. His special virtue lies in giving a swift, comprehensible summing-up of things that have already happened, and then going ahead rapidly and smoothly. At the same time he ignores mimesis, and objectively describes even frantic motions and cataclysmic events with the dispassionate eye of a dramatic author. Conscious of sensual perils, he does not disdain a sober kind of humour, and now and then inserts a detail to induce a smile. Book III surprises us with funny, grotesque, even uproariously comic jokes at the expense of the chivalric system. But Spenser’s supreme achievement in The Faerie Queene is the portrayal of figures that are still, or depicted from a still point of view – he sculpts, rather than paints, his characters. The poem is a sequence of theatrical ‘entries’ of a series of extremely varied individuals, fixed on the page with astonishing clarity and unequalled vividness. The word-painter or word-sculptor Spenser creates Despair, Mammon and Maleger, but also the porters of the ill-famed houses and castles, the little old women and the dwarfs, or even that very strange automaton that is the human arm of

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justice, Talus, with his iron scourge; all of these are marginal characters, often brought to life by a stroke of the brush or scalpel. Spenser reduces internal characters to ignorant, or at the most, doubting, suspicious actants; the reader knows immediately if a character is good or evil, but the other internal characters must guess this laboriously or by insight. He can be, and in the course of time does actually become, a metapoetic author who realizes how many digressions he introduces, points them out and apologizes for them; at the end of every canto he duly informs us of its conclusion, and puts off the sequel to the next. The fictional illusion is broken every time he directly apostrophizes the queen. 5. Spenser’s stanza it the least common denominator of The Faerie Queene. A prosodic invention of Spenser’s, it counts nine iambic decasyllables closed by an alexandrine.33 It usually contains a self-enclosed ‘miniaction’, although at times the fifth line ends the period, so that the stanza encloses two of these ‘mini-actions’; the separation is frequently signalled by semi-colons. Seldom does the stanza continue into the next with a sort of stanzaic enjambment. In order to make a kind of film out of these single freeze-frames linked in a continuum, where each frame coincides with a single stanza, Spenser must either use the parenthesis opened by a relative clause, or paratactic additions, or go on by dint of coordinates. At any rate he cannot help repeating, amplifying, and using circumlocutions. The narrative is also suspended or varied by Virgilian and Homeric similes of meteorological events, animals fighting or ships in the storm, usually occupying a whole stanza, as well as by compositiones loci, especially evening and morning or weather descriptions. Vocabulary is varied and accurate, in some cases coined ex novo; but all things considered Spenser is not a ‘linguistic poet’, devoted to neologisms or rarely used words.34 The 33

Obviously most evocative, if Praz could repeatedly define it with the rare Italian adjective ‘piangevole’ [‘tearful’], while for De Selincourt 1979, lxii, it is ‘triumphant’ or ‘quiet’. Undoubtedly, to avoid monotony, Spenser also tends to break or vary the decasyllabic scheme of the first eight lines. 34 Such is Spenser deemed, however, by W. Maley in his essay on Spenser’s languages in Hadfield 2001, 162–79. I think this critic overstates the case in affirming that in his inclination for puns Spenser is second only to Joyce; but on the other hand I

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compactness of every single stanza comes also from the careful choice of words prevalently of one, sometimes of two, seldom of three, practically never of four, syllables; the first two kinds abound in English more that in any other language, which makes the poet’s work easier. § 60. Spenser V: ‘The Faerie Queene’ II. Upright knights against felons, monsters and enchantresses In Book I, centred on holiness and hence on its opposite, sin, the knight of Red Cross finally frees Una’s parents, that is to say Adam and Eve, and kills the dragon. He is an image both of Christ and of St George, the patron saint of England. At the end he weds, or rather is promised to Una, the Anglican Church. Duessa is the scarlet woman, that is, Catholicism, from whom he keeps distant although he is tempted and enchanted by her; Archimago is the Pope or Antichrist or any other demonic hypostasis. The main and compelling model, but certainly not it alone, is the biblical book of Revelation. All abridged editions of Spenser’s poem usually start from an integral reproduction of this book, thus easily the best known of The Faerie Queene although certainly not the best. This popularity is mainly due to the fact that many elements of the imaginary narration tend to repeat themselves in the following ones, with an identical, splendid capacity for changes of scene and fronts. The poem’s first satanic dragon has brought desolation on the world, and his cavern is the expression of the aberrations and heresies whose coils constrict the faithful. Defeated by Red Cross, he spits out books and pamphlets, naturally propagating Catholic heresy. Soon after, the necromancer Archimago tries to corrupt the knight by seducing him sensually; not only that, but he dazzles and confuses Una, disguising himself as the knight that accompanies her. Numberless times Spenser will from then on interrupt the straight course of the knight’s mission with unexpected turns aside, useful, however, to strike at other targets, increase the range of allusions and provoke bloody duels. Spenser imitates at length Ariosto and follows the two couples alternately, the disguised Archimago with Una, and Red Cross with only partly agree with Heninger’s brief, stern judgement, that deems Spenser’s ‘an impoverished vocabulary’ (Heninger 1989, 390–5).

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Duessa, also disguised as a pure virgin. This double piétiner sur place slows down, and is interrupted by the first pageant at the House of Pride, where Lucifera reigns, and where a heraldic procession of personifications of the seven deadly sins parades by. In the palace’s dungeons, as dark as Virgil’s and Dante’s hells, great kings of history lie prisoners, mixed with others according to the synchronic time of fairy-tale or allegory.35 A similar compression of time, possible only under the fairy-tale dispensation, occurs when Una tells Arthur, who has just arrived, how her parents were expelled from Eden by a monstrous giant that only one of Gloriana’s knights can defeat. It is not yet the monster that Red Cross has gone to seek, but his double or a foreshadowing, again the monster of Pride, defeated by Arthur symbolizing Christ. With Duessa sent off to her destiny, despoiled of her scarlet mantle, and Una re-united to Red Cross, the existential crisis undergone by the knight seems definitively over. Ironically, the comfort the knight has received from Arthur is temporary and ephemeral, and he is caught into the coils of another crisis. The sumptuous eloquence of Despair exhorting him to suicide pierces Red Cross, and he is offered means to kill himself. Only Una saves him from yielding, taking the dagger from his hand. Red Cross is then brought to the house of holiness, where he meets the three theological virtues and, elevated to the heights of contemplation, has a dreamy vision of heavenly Jerusalem. His has been a long spell of retreat and spiritual regeneration. There is one last dragon Red Cross must duel with, the one that ruined the Eden of Una’s parents. Red Cross keeps faith to his second name, or his true identity as St George, killing the dragon. At the end he is also the ‘type’ of Christ, and taking Una for his bride founds the Anglican Church. Now Adam, who – with the same naïve anachronism – is about to promise his daughter to Red Cross, hears from a messenger that the former is already promised to Duessa, but the slander, devised by perfidious Duessa herself, is rejected. Spenser, indeed, will always be ingenious in avoiding a definite end of the primeval agon, thus making it possible to re-open it in subsequent books. 35

The opening of Book II admits exactly this: that the poet ‘vaunts’ the ‘happy land of Faery […] yet no where show[s]’, with a witty allusion to the newly discovered American colonies.

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2. Red Cross is a saint; Guyon,36 the hero of Book II, resembles instead Aeneas. So the motor for an agonic contrast is started up, but progress is hindered by a few prolepses: two victims on the path of the witch Acrasia, the embodiment of incontinence; a momentary glimpse of Belphoebe, the very beautiful but chaste huntress ogled by sensual Braggadocchio. Quick intermezzos exemplify cases of sudden murderous jealousy that might have been prevented by eschewing impulsiveness. Guyon victoriously confronts formidable Pyrocles and also the latter’s brother; but the stubbornness of madmen given to ire is excessive, and Guyon gives up interfering further.37 Something livelier happens in Canto VI with the apparition of Phaedria, the beautiful siren of an island. In other words, we have gradually come from the exhibition of temperance to a discourse on concupiscence. Phaedria, who is of course a prolepsis of Acrasia, puts Cymocles to sleep and turns to vainly tempt Guyon. It is Phaedria’s task to sprinkle a little irony on the fury of the two knights rushing to fight. Indeed, this is largely a book concerned with the almost absurd way many unreasoning, senseless fools toss and writhe: at the end of Canto VI, wrathful Pyrocles is about to drown himself, uttering a pompous but risible speech. A higher moment occurs instead in Canto VII, among the most effective and dramatic in the poem, with Guyon’s meeting with Mammon by whom he is tempted. The principal memory behind this is the Gospel episode of Christ tempted by Satan in the desert. Guyon has no woman to save or to wed, but soon after overcoming carnal seductions he must confront those of worldly power. The taut dialogue between him and Mammon turns at last to historical and cultural matters: greed has led man to disembowel the soil in seeking for gold underneath, but without real profit; yet time passes, and primordial codes can no longer be applied. Spenser calls his readers’ attention to the advent of an era of incipient capitalism and money exchanges, in lieu of an economy in kind. Not for nothing does Mammon speak of ‘surplusage’ (st. 18), the capitalist’s unearned profit resulting from exploitation. Guyon finds himself having to respond with the language of Marx! Yet also the descent into hell occurs again, repeated from Book I. During his third temptation,

36 37

The name derives from one of the four rivers in Eden. Cymocles is the womanish knight that in Sidney is Pyrocles disguised as Amazon.

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Guyon is taken where courtiers jostle with one another, climbing up a chain they cling to, a tussle recalling Dante in its visual power. Then he is led to feel the seductions of knowledge in Proserpine’s garden, and in the river he sees and hears Tantalus yelping. Virgil is behind this, but no less perceptible is the influence of Dante and of all his damned punished in rotten lakes, rivers and pits. Guyon, weakened by this ordeal, spends some time entranced, during which Arthur replaces him and defeats other enemies. In Alma’s house, a pendant to Mammon’s hideous cave, we are mainly struck by the description of the kitchen, a mise en abyme of the informing idea of this book, temperance: the heat is lessened by bellows, and, while cooking, the refuse is thrown away. Canto X, a parenthesis on legendary English kings, includes some remarkable stanzas telling the story of King Lear, and one summing up the tragedy Gorboduc; others narrate how the Grail was brought to England – ‘(they say)’ – by Joseph of Arimathea. Canto XI is a psychomachia translated into allegory, for Alma’s castle is besieged by a company of satanic monsters headed by Maleger, whose name joins male (evil) and aeger (sick), and who is, visually portrayed as a Caravaggesque or neo-Gothic rapacious figure in st. 22. After Guyon’s departure it is Arthur’s task to disperse the battalion of subhuman creatures that seem to be loathsome copies of the devils in Malebolge (the root ‘mal’ is present in both cases). That of Arthur with Maleger (who seems to have seven lives) is the umpteenth contest among primordial elemental forces. The final goal, Acrasia’s bower – a labyrinth of ornate rooms opening one onto another – is reached after numberless adventures on the way, during which Guyon, like Homer’s Ulysses, is diverted by voluptuous and fearful apparitions rejected only thanks to a palmer. Guyon takes the cup of wine offered by a beauty and throws it to the ground, breaking it. But he enters the garden of delights where art and nature compete with each other, and naked maidens slosh about in the pond. And here the knight is on the point of yielding to the charm of their snow-white breasts and tempting evolutions. At this precise moment Spenser is no less malicious than Marino would have been; actually the poet most emulated is Tasso in the episode of Armida’s garden. With the palmer’s providential interference the palace is destroyed, and the many men seduced by Acrasia’s witcheries are transformed again – as later in Wells’s evolutionary novels – from beasts into human beings, save one who prefers to remain a beast.

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3. Book III takes as its obsessive theme sexual desire, analysed and exemplified more in the form of sheer lust than in that of a noble, procreative flame. Chastity (Spenser declares) can be of two kinds, either imposition of order – and order to procreate in chaste nuptial life – and purest spiritual fire; or foul sensual flame. In both senses the fundamental theme is creative evolution, which in the latter case verges on metempsychosis and metamorphosis. Hence this is, par excellence, Spenser’s Metamorphoses: a Lucretian or Ovidian book whose ideological heart is the episode in the garden of Adonis. Thus we watch constant counterpoints of form and memories of sex changes (until the appearance of the snow-puppet Florimell, for her lover who cannot be without her), and transformations to higher and (more often) baser states. In most cases, that is, lust renders men animal-like and transforms them into animals. But for this underlying theme, this book would prove formally disordered and discontinuous. The uniform tone is also comic or pathetic, for a long time without feats, or crammed with examples of cowardice and boastfulness. Thanks to this it can be enjoyed without the complications and implications of allegory, as if written – particularly in the intermediate cantos and towards the end – in the light, secular spirit of Chaucer’s fabliaux. Cantos VI and XII provide, as they are expected to do, the book’s climaxes. The former presents the garden of Adonis, where a Platonic discussion on the eternal idea and the archetypal form through their changing embodiments is held; in the twelfth the solemn, rhythmic ‘triumph’ of Cupid’s parade precedes the defeat of one of the many tormentors of chastity. The lady of the joyful castle is deceived like Sidney’s Gynecia, that is, she believes Britomart (a British Mars, although a female) a handsome boy, and falls in love. At night she even enters Britomart’s room, but the latter shouts, arousing the house. Britomart is slightly wounded, and blood drops from her breast pierced by a knight. This scene is just a pale variation compared to all the assaults of other sorceresses against chaste knights, and verges on prurience, showing a woman disguised as a man. Britomart has fallen in love, like indeed Pyrocles in Sidney, by looking at a portrait seen in Merlin’s magic mirror; but this is a Platonic idea – to love from a mirror is not bad if one is guided by reason. Merlin declaims a visionary prophecy of admirable legendary patriotic kings, inducing Britomart to leave for fairyland. The first knight

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in armour that she meets is Marinell, in search of his beloved Florimell who does not reciprocate his love. His desolate mother weeps over the destiny of the son she sees menaced by passion. But Britomart is temporarily left aside to bring back Belphoebe, who cures an unhorsed knight, and while healing him wounds his heart. 4. In the garden of Adonis, as I mentioned above, a new kind if evolutionism is explored, showing that corruptible matter, informed by love, engenders imperishable forms. Adonis himself is an example. This Canto VII is not narrative but necessarily digressive: it is more of an argument, philosophical or rather deliciously fairy-tale-like, a big achievement of perfect simplicity as it translates into images, with sober comments, a vision or phantasmagoria of creation. Closely observed, this is a new mythical narration, somewhat forcibly inserted into the story of Belphoebe’s birth. The pagan world timelessly fuses with that of fairies and of reality, for Belphoebe is upright and chaste although she does not belong to either court or city. She and Amoret, sisters conceived in their mother’s womb without sexual union, exemplify a mythical insemination like that of Danae by Jupiter. It is to be expected that soon the forest will see the confrontation of two opposed principles, sensual love, Venus, and chaste love, Diana. The latter proudly denies that Cupid may have taken refuge among her nymphs. And so the two roaming goddesses come to the mother, still entranced after the birth of her two baby girls, and take them from her and bring them up. In that garden, or ‘seminarie’, forms await to be dressed up in flesh. Spenser postulates an unchanging substance, formed in a body that perishes, but ever remaining substance reforming itself. It is the principle of metempsychosis. The famous oxymoron, or paradox, or sibylline apothegm, of st. 47, is that Adonis is subject to mortality, but eternal, by the very fact of being changeable. With Canto VII, tone and horizon are clearly lowered. Florimell arrives at a witch’s house and eludes the erotic attentions of her rustic son; Satyrane, a ‘good savage’, meets a utopian Lord of Ladies vainly seeking chaste women. As in a drama, a kind of subplot takes shape with the entry of Braggadocchio, who steals the snow-woman (a mannequin of Florimell, as said above) from the rustic, and boasts of it. Jealous Malbecco (‘mal’ + ‘becco’, the latter term meaning cuckold in Italian) suspect the knights he receives, one of whom ogles his

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splendid wife Ellenora. The sequel is rocambolesque: Paridell flees with Ellenora, then deserts her and she becomes the queen of a throng of rather promiscuous satyrs. Malbecco regresses to the level of Caliban, slowly and sadly drifting towards animal status. When the canto returns to the heroic register, it is Britomart’s role to confront the enchanter Busyrane, passing through the fire barring the entrance to his castle, where he keeps hostage Scudamour’s beloved, Amoret. Britomart is calm and wise as much as Scudamour is desperately, exasperatingly furious. Like other pure knights, trembling before the storm of bestial sensuality, she watches the metamorphoses of the seducer Jupiter woven into an arras, and Cupid’s masque, an endless parade of personifications. After a short tussle with the heroine, the necromancer is blocked.38 § 61. Spenser VI: ‘The Faerie Queene’ III. Man vs beast In Book IV Spenser chooses a point of convergence, a place or castle where the seductive forces of evil and the senses concentrate and reign, and where the classic conflict, evil against good, is rampant once more; and he duplicates this, closing the book with the analogous liberation of a segregated virgin. So this book too is fragmentary, full of complex and abstruse stories inserted one into another. One may quietly skip some cantos that tell just of stormy, harsh duels and tournaments for quite valueless stakes, or concern secondary figures. One canto is a mere catalogue of English and Irish rivers, though its function is to reinforce the theme of the book itself, concord. Thus little by little the unifying centre emerges, not as a single character but as the mutual coordination of the various actions. The friendship of virtuous men is exemplified above all by the number of cases of discord instigated by Ate, a dea ex machina portrayed with a visionary potency worthy of Dante; friendship, however, is only one of the three degrees of love (9.1ff.), together with the spiritual and fecund, yet chaste one; so concord is a term equivalent to human love, and fuels the ever-continuing creation in the cosmos. The evidence that all ends well

38

In the 1596 version Scudamour fears that Britomart may have been successful, and departs in despair before embracing Amoret, instead of uniting with her as in the 1590 version. This was done to re-open the story in a subsequent book.

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on all fronts emerges when the last conflicts are happily resolved through agents and ministers of goodness, like Britomart and Belphoebe. Owing to its a priori assumption, this book is among the most optimistic in the poem for, starting from a number of contrasts, it gradually transforms these into identities and concords. Scholars of the Renaissance and its episteme cannot but recognize its clear debt to the Renaissance paradigm of discordia becoming concors. But, at its core, it contains as many and serious cases where man reveals his weakness, his beastly nature and his foulness, and most of all his selfish stupidity. It is also the book where mistakes, misunderstandings, mirages and spells are most frequent; suffice it to say that knights often scuffle, making their armours rattle and clack, and stanza after stanza, for the sake of  ‘false Florimell’, a snow puppet who, for all she moves and talks and dresses like her namesake, no one realizes is simply a statue. It is therefore a canto of denouements, of true identities suddenly revealed, of fictions proving truths and vice versa. 2. One of the narrative threads is Scudamour’s pursuit of Amoret, to whom Britomart finally reveals her sex, thus ridding Amoret of her anguish; but Scudamour does not know this and keeps suspecting her. There is a brief apparition of Duessa, changed chameleon-like just in order to announce and reinforce the theme of mirage and ambiguous reality. Another thread concerns the quarrels of some knights bent on stealing from their fiancés the desirable ladies they meet in their company. But in the midst of all, more room is taken up by the phases of a duel involving Cambel and Triamond with their brides. In the first of two long flashbacks we are told how Canace has been promised by her brother Cambel, the owner of a magic ring that heals wounds, to the one of three brothers who shall win him in duel. The ending is no less magical because the sister of the three brothers enters the field and, with her offer of peace, brings about two weddings. At a tournament the stakes are a girdle of the true Florimell, and Britomart wins it, since, being a protective symbol and talisman against lust, it fits only the waist of a chaste woman, and the false Florimell is unworthy of it. Canto V ends with Scudamour and the nurse wandering and reaching the House of Care. Here Spenser, in an isolated episode without sequel, proves himself again to be an excellent sculptor with the ghostly figure of a blacksmith forever hammering, perhaps the symbol of a chaotic world which is senselessly adrift. Canto VI stresses the mistake surrounding Britomart,

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a true knight who yet engenders a mysterious seduction (she is a woman), and is hunted by true knights that want to fight her, ignoring that she is an ally. Also in this canto her heavenly beauty is revealed to two knights, and Britomart recognizes in Artegall the face she had seen, and straightaway loved, in the magic mirror. The many descriptive stanzas on the lustful ‘savage man’, who soon after ogles Amoret, comprise one of those analytical portraits Spenser loves to dwell upon. This character is a euphemistic cannibal, a woman-eater, that is, in an umpteenth disguised episode of a tormentor frantically pursuing a helpless virgin. It is a masterly tale, cool, neat and pregnant with calm suspense. And what shall we say of Belphoebe, the archer nymph, who kills this satyr and then lingers to admire his hairy corpse? A squire reproached by Belphoebe retires to a cave and to the life of a hermit; not recognized by Arthur, he will return among men reconciled – an exquisite episode that makes one suspect Spenser was telling, in key, a story of reconciliation between Queen Elizabeth and a man actually fallen from favour. Arthur again sets on horse the two virgins he has delivered from the ogre, but the wandering trio ends in the hovel of Scandal, a filthy loathsome beldame, who spits nocturnal slanders at them.39 Giant Corflambo, an ingenious onomastic invention joining flame and desire, is beheaded, and the episode turns to the Chaucerian story of the two young men in love with the same woman, Emilia. Through Arthur’s intervention Corflambo’s castle is laid waste; but with an umpteenth quid pro quo Emilia cannot say which of her two wooers, identical twins, is her fiancé. The canto gathers up Arthur and Amoret as in a whirlpool, who in their wandering meet four knights embodying forms of mistaken love, too cool or too hot, and forever foolishly duelling to win snowy Florimell. The second flashback concerns Scudamour’s tale of his love affair with Amoret. He found her in Venus’ temple at the end of a path much like the lover’s in the Roman de la Rose, after meeting with obstacles that are personified passions and vices, blocking the way towards the reign of innocence and chaste pleasures. The temple of Venus is again a very elaborate set piece, crammed with visions and sculptures, and a luxuriant Baroque plenty of ornate details. Spenser

39

This is an evident prolepsis of the Blatant Beast in Book VI.

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once more emphasizes the traditional double-faceted nature of Venus and Cupid, divested of their malignant and sensual nature, and thus perfectly purified. A series of acts of reconciliation concludes the book, a collection, hence, of extremes meeting: Florimell, the true Florimell, sequestered in a dungeon by a new figure of the tormentor, is reunited with Marinell, not before the latter has watched an umpteenth pageant, the wedding of two rivers, the Thames and the Medway. All English rivers take part in the nuptial feast.40 This imagination fits in fully, as I said, with the evolutionary idea of a Heraclitean cosmos Spenser believed in: a cosmos in which everything moves, changes and renews itself, for rivers ‘do nourish’ mankind. Sickly and apathetic Marinell, who has heard Florimell’s laments in an inaccessible sea cavern, is healed and heartened by his mother, and he liberates the woman. 3. Book V is very readable, smooth and clear in outlining facts and characters, thanks also to a less heroic and allegorical afflatus, and a string of events recorded with even a touch of realism. Comic aspects, already tested, are here insisted on (as in the dispute on Guyon’s horse), and the general atmosphere recalls that of a fabliau. But we are also on the threshold of Elizabethan and Shakespearean romantic dramas – with the two brothers quarrelling over islands, spouses, and treasure chests emerging from the sea. Such interrelated stories make very pleasant and very fluid reading. Spenser’s cosmos is ordered and harmonious, and he pulls its strings with a nearly infallible memory, letting old acquaintances turn up again. Along with Artegall, the titular knight, there is his archetype, Arthur, who on most occasions eclipses his emulator. The set theme, the ideal mark of the book, is justice, and the opening says that Astrea is gone from the world, but she can come back: indeed she is alive again in Queen Elizabeth. Spenser expatiates on the meaning and prerogatives of justice in an allegorical passage alluding to actual practices. What is justice? An abstract conception of it does not suffice; justice has to be exercised, and for this ‘power’ is necessary. But Spenser always inclines to a specific extreme, 40 This long fluvial fantasy, a very remarkable case of anthropomorphic description of English and Irish rivers, may be suggested as a precedent for Joyce and the ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ episode in Finnegans Wake.

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and prizes justice as an instrument to muzzle ‘licentious lust’. Vengeance against Radigund, who has subjected Terpin, is dictated not so much by love of justice as by the wish to quieten and uproot the desire that shakes her so much. Spenser devotes more than one canto to the relationship between Artegall and Radigund to demonstrate an indisputable fact: no man has yet been found able to withstand feminine seduction (Canto VI). There is a pointed reference, in st. 27, to the cock that ‘warned Peter of his fall’, both because it admits human frailty even in the founder of Christian faith, and because it is inserted when Britomart is seething with rage over Artegall’s supposed betrayal. The book offers two brilliant portraits à pendant of women beside themselves with anguish, obviously the victims of a turbulent repression that is at once sexual lust and unsatisfied lust for power; one of them is Radigund, the other the sultan’s wife. Once again this surreal world appears to be laid waste by the incontinence and the inborn weakness of the flesh, which engender political tyranny, and disorder in the government of a nation or a community. This is why tyrants become more and more hideous monsters. Malegin is a revived necromancer with changing characterization (he is metamorphosed into various loathsome animals); the classic figure of the giant, a ferocious eater of human flesh, is repeated in Gerioneo, a name patently descended from Dante. Politically the two princes, Artegall and Arthur, fight for freedom against tyrannies, not only victoriously taming interior rebellions, but running eagerly to defend the freedom of others, to signify the protection that Protestant England offered to oppressed nations, above all against Catholic Spain. Throughout the book an often comic and as often grotesque figure appears, Artegall’s right-hand man, Talus, going straight on his way, an ‘iron scourge’ in his hand. He is a sort of automaton, a careless stooge, the material executor of justice in its necessary punishing effects. 4. In the proem the world of human relationships is seen, with the eyes of Hamlet, as ‘out of joint’. In itself this is also a Dantesque complaint, nostalgic of the good and just old times: it is a commonplace of late medieval literature, but Spenser repeats it on the basis of notions of astronomical sciences and speculations akin to those of Donne. It is the voice of a moody, apocalyptic pessimist dreading that the sun may cease to radiate its heat on the earth. Artegall will set several things ‘in joint’,

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but in the end dragons and monsters will seem immortal. The book has its imaginary inception after Astrea’s departure, when Hercules and Bacchus administer justice, and along with them Artegall, the Englishman whose name means literally ‘equal with Arthur’. Married to Britomart, he founds a dynasty whose descendants are the Tudors. Artegall is given the task to free Irena from Grantorto, but his mission will be delayed by innumerable hindrances giving him opportunities along the way for accomplishing many deliverances. He deposes a local Saracen tyrant, as well as a giant intent on establishing a kind of communism, and utters a sceptical final comment on every species of social reform, endorsing the status quo and at the same time pre-announcing the ‘mutability cantos’: ‘All change is perilous, and all chaunce vnsound’. Then we come to the promised nuptials of Marinell and Florimell, when snowy Florimell has to confront the real one, and her infatuated Braggadocchio is exposed and uncrowned with a last, exhilarating denouement worthy of a Shakespearean comedy. Radigund, as we saw, is a man-eater that reacts to a disappointment in love by taking revenge on the ‘knights of virginity’. In the duel Artegall abstains from wielding the final blow, suddenly falling into a trance before his adversary’s beauty; so he ends up like Hercules, doomed to spin, until Britomart comes to his aid (after an interpolated story with a wicked castellan who mistakes her for Artegall). 5. Canto VII contains one of Spenser’s many allegories that try to express in imaginative terms specific ideas relating to the concept of justice. Justice descends from God, and the Egyptians saw justice tout court embodied in Osyris and equity in Isis. Spenser meant thus to distinguish Chancery and Star Chamber, the two juridical systems of his time which operated according to two different modes, the first for general justice, the second and more powerful as a higher jurisdiction.41 Equity tempers justice in the form of a crocodile wrapped around the statue of the queen in the temple. Here perhaps we are visibly witnessing a case where allegory is ambiguous and verges on symbol. This goddess who puts her foot on the crocodile is a vague evocation of the Virgin in Revelation, who disarms

41 See Kermode 1973, 4–6, where he quotes and discusses other critics who have written on this distinction, and 50–9.

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the devil by crushing him under her heel. And the abstinent priests of the temple seem to lend the passage such a connotation, for they have taken vows of chastity. Under Isis’ statue, Britomart, then, dreams of her future career, rife with honours. But in the dream a fiery storm is unleashed and wakens the reptile. In other words even this seems an erotic or demonic fantasy on the satanic reptile that threatens aggression but is tamed; for Man rises from conquered temptation as strong as a lion. Others, on the contrary, see in the crocodile English law, suppressing the rebellions rising against the icon of the virgin queen that Britomart feels she is. Undoubtedly the Egyptian priest provides the univocal, official interpretation that the crocodile is equity, or clemency, mitigating law’s rigour. It is indeed true that victorious Britomart arrests the hand of Talus ready for a massacre, but also that Britomart performs an act of justice when she frees Radigund’s community from a tyrant’s yoke. 6. Canto VIII narrates other adventures reflecting mainly contemporary events such as, first of all, the victorious sea-battle against the Spaniards in 1588. The Saracen threat colours other adventures of knight Artegall. This opens the mini-cycle of Mercilla, a further image of Elizabeth as the upright virgin queen, menaced in her realm by a powerful man who tries to sow rebellion with his wife’s support. But Arthur will defeat the sultan travelling on a coach from whose wheels protrude sharp knives, and whose horses are fed with human flesh. At Mercilla’s, besides, the trial against revived Duessa, that is, Mary Stuart, is celebrated, for whose condemnation pitiful Mercilla sincerely weeps, although in justice she can only approve the sentence. Arthur leaves for Holland to reap other victories over tyrants. There a three-bodied monster (recalling Dante’s Lucifer) afflicts the realm of a queen bearing the meaningful name of Belge. This is one of the neatest, clearest and quickest episodes in the whole poem. But of course the pattern does not contain anything new in itself, and is still that of English forces rising for the freedom of nations oppressed by tyrannical Catholicism. The last canto but one sees the destruction of the tyrant’s Catholic idol, as well as of the monster crouching under the altar, in the course of a typically neo-Gothic operation, perhaps the richest of the whole poem in its repellent Grandguignol effects. Finally Artegall accomplishes his mission by putting Irena back on her throne and making away with Grantorto:

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that is to say, allegorically, restoring order in Ireland, with the image of a queen bringing peace, having defeated Catholic dissidents. But on principle the struggle for goodness never ends, but starts again with two hideous allegorical figures awaiting the returning hero, and with a ‘blatant’ Beast. 7. The Blatant Beast, the embodiment of slander,42 is the link between the previous book and Book VI, and the sixth knight’s aim is to tame it. It will make him the protagonist of the same adventures within adventures as his predecessors, even though he draws apart at a certain moment for a pastoral pause, an episode that promptly responds to Sidney’s Arcadia, being based, like it, on Alexandrian romances.43 Thus both episodes add to the number of suggestions that will impinge on Shakespeare’s romantic plays. Here, too, the first step is the semantic definition of courtesy, to which Calidore is dedicated and whose mouthpiece he is. Courtesy includes not formal but substantial gifts, deriving from the old category of Castiglione’s ‘cortegiano’, the gentleman ready for the office of ‘governor’. The proem affirms that contemporary courtesy is only a pale copy of an ancient virtue now in decline, left a prerogative of the queen alone. In extremis Spenser corrects himself by describing the court as a circle, or a rose from which the queen’s courtesy radiates, according to the medieval relationship between the universal and the copy. The court should therefore be celebrated as the classic and institutional site where courtesy is learned and practised, as Spenser openly declares. But he contradicts himself by introducing two symbolic milieus where not only have people learned courtesy naturally, away from court life, but where also some have fled out of disgust with it. The second milieu is the abode of shepherds – a classical locus, but with the proviso that it is a happy oasis especially as a refuge ‘From all the tempests of these worldly seas’. Not for nothing does the book introduce two good savages, though good by virtue of their royal blood, but having grown up in the wild, although for the sake of balance there are also two gangs, one of bandits, one of concupiscent, cannibalistic satyrs. Two episodes lend 42 ‘blatant’ has today a slightly different meaning. Spenser derived it from Latin blatīre, equivalent to Middle-High-German pladderen. 43 Both Sidney’s Cleophila and Spenser’s Calidore kill a wild beast attacking their beloved.

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the tone of the book: in one a hermit, formerly a courtier, now living in prayer and having conquered all carnal instinct, foreshadowing famous Shakespearean characters, undermines and shatters the assurance that one can learn nobility only at court. In the other episode Calidore, having turned shepherd, experiences a kind of epiphany on seeing the Graces dance, in an allegory or pageant of perfectly chaste love. Not only does Calidore utter his little lesson at the end of every event, but Spenser also adds his own maxims, teaching and admonishing with persuasive tones. The whole narrative fabric consists of new clashes between the champion of courtesy, Calidore, and opposite examples and phenomena. He solves difficult cases, reconciles enemies, leads others onto the right path so that the Blatant Beast is often forgotten. As a whole, Book VI could erroneously appear to develop in a reckless, if not casual way. In the middle section Calidore disappears and is replaced by Arthur, yet the two parallel courses continue to alternate until they converge. Their different grading becomes apparent along the way, through double apparitions of ever-colossal monsters and of foundlings. 8. The Blatant Beast is one of the innumerable metempsychoses or metamorphoses of the Catholic-tyrant archetype, impotent and therefore sexually and carnally voracious. But it is also another concentration of the symbolic components of Evil as Spenser conceives it. We are by now familiar with the sensory data of this icon, its main rhetorical figure being multiplication: initially three bodies, here 100 tongues, by which slander spreads all over the world. And like a dog, the Beast barks and spits venom. But the Beast is also a King Kong that takes away in his mouth the beautiful maiden gathering flowers, Serena by name. Calidore’s first foray has for its object Briana, an umpteenth repressed man-eater like Radigund. She has loved a man who rejects her, and vents her resentment in barbarous summary reprisals.44 Hers is also a violation of the rules of any civilized dispensation; but Calidore’s mission is from the first that of giving man44 This is one of the moments where the punctuality always reigning in fairyland is unfailing: Calidore arrives just after Terpin has told him he has been tied to a tree by Maleffort; the latter pursues his fiancée whose hair he wants to cut, and her cries are heard just when Terpin has finished his tale. Soon after pursued and pursuer enter

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kind less barbarous mores. Tristram might be one of the few, or the only allusion, besides Arthur, to the classical Arthurian myth that Spenser leaves aside or turns upside down. Tristram is a savage, revealing inborn good manners and an innate sense of justice, like a copy of Robin Hood, for he has instinctively unhorsed a knight discourteous to his lady. Any kind of individual, it is proved here, can act against a knight, if justice demands it. But it is to the rebellion of carnal senses that discourtesy is due here, for the knight had lusted after another woman.45 The forest’s education was better than the court’s! But it is a denegation. All ends well, and Tristram is entrusted with the lady without a knight, his widow. 9. Within every adventure another is born, and a second good savage closely recalls Caliban in his growls and sneaky snake-like movements, but also King Lear’s Edgar. A bear taking a baby between its fangs is an imaginary offspring of the Beast that had bitten Serena; but this baby recovered from the bear is donated to a childless couple, and this adventure too shows that nobleness fit, non nascitur. Before completing his enterprise, Calidore ends up among the shepherds and falls in love with lovely Pastorella, a foundling acting as a pendant to the baby given to the childless couple a few cantos before; and patriarch Melibeus, like the hermit, sings the praises of pastoral life, having experienced the vanity of worldly life, and refuses to take money for his hospitality. Corydon and Calidore are rivals in love, but courteous to one another.46 The sight of the dancing Graces causes the usual, shortlived wavering in the iron will of Spenser’s knight, on a mission on behalf of the queen, when his frail humanity claims its right in the face of rigour. Here is heard the author’s voice, that of his second self, his repressed ego or Id confessing that those of the court are ‘vain shadows’.47 The site of the

the scene. Briana’s pendant appears later in haughty and churlish Mirabella, whose punishment is provided by Cupid in the form of a retaliation. 45 It sounds rather fabulous that Tristram should reveal that he is the son of a king, and even, like Hamlet, the nephew of a usurping uncle. 46 The whole episode is a reprise, or a somewhat prolix and mawkish remake, of the 1579 Calender. 47 It is the exact expression that recurs in various places: l. 912 of ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’, referring to court life; ‘shadows’ are also the ‘vain’ world’s ‘shows’ of

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epiphany is Acidale, the valley of absent cares, just as there had been the House of Care; indeed, here is a new pageant of spiritualized Venus and Cupid. The circular dance is the symbol of purified harmony. But it vanishes, and the Graces disappear, leaving the revived shepherd Colin Clout to explain things to Calidore. The identity of the damsel at the centre of the circle is left vague, and she might even be the bride of the poet Spenser himself. The bandits’ sudden invasion of the idyllic pastoral community is a well-tested solution in romance, parallel to the band of savages rushing on sleeping Serena. The last action but one is the restoration of Pastorella to her parents (she is thus a kind of Perdita but also, due to the mole on her breast, an Imogen), with the capture and immobilization of the Beast. But with a flick of its tail the beast frees itself again, and the end of the canto leaves all questions open. § 62. Spenser VII: ‘The Faerie Queene’ IV. The ‘Mutability Cantos’ The heart of Book VII was probably a couple of surviving cantos that Spenser intended to enrich with more narratives referring to the titular knight of the book; they were its speculative clou, again translated into and reinvented with new allegorical figures and mythological fantasies. The cardinal virtue of the book was to be constancy: Spenser’s celebration is however enacted in a dialectic, pragmatic way, for he leaves it undecided until the last stanzas he wrote, discussing it along with its antithesis, ‘Mutability’. In Spenser’s rather static view, Mutability is a consequence of Man’s condition after the Fall. It is also an example of appropriation and assumption of power, and therefore the germ of rebellion to legitimate authority. But here Spenser is far more flexible and open to more circumspect opinions. Never very good in pure philosophy, in these two cantos he is more intertextual than usual and draws many hints from Boethius and Giordano Bruno as well as from classical sources. His mental framework remains medieval, and Mutability is after all a kind of slack rope, firmly held however by the hand of a demiurge that can yank it straight if necessary. Yet Mutability ensures the existence of that same varied, mottled and sonnet 35 in Amoretti; ‘vain shadows’ are again expectations of court life in ‘Prothalamion’, l. 9.

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thus pleasant cosmos, whose existence Hopkins was to trace back to the Creator, the arbiter of its game and its motionless axis.48 At the end of the trial Mutability is absolved, in order to reinforce the idea that it is a function of eternity; so, in other ways, the Renaissance archetype of discordia concors is confirmed. 2. Canto VI of this incomplete Book VII describes only the hubris of the goddess Mutability bent on usurping the rights of the anthropomorphic Moon, and a lively exchange of speeches ensues. Then Mutability climbs as high as Jupiter’s throne, complaining she has been deprived of her right and made a victim of usurpation. Jupiter would scourge her, but seeing her so beautiful he abstains, and invites her to negotiate her claims and acknowledge that she is subject to the power decreed by fate. On close inspection, in the poem’s economy this is another rebellion to a central authority, and the dreaded subversion of the status quo; it suggests that secession which is, and has always been, a bogey for the English. Hence, Jupiter talks to Mutability like a good monarch, a kind of Hamlet’s King Claudius, during the counsel when it must be decided how to proceed, namely, by negotiation or by bloody punitive raid. This contrasting dialogue results in a brilliant and compact dramatic scene. In Canto VII (after the story is told of another chastised god, the faun who wanted to see Diana naked) a trial is held, presided over by the God of Nature on the Irish hill of Arlo, close to the castle where Spenser was living and composing his poem. Spenser assumes that, before the Revelation, Nature could be deemed, as is also surmised in the Roman de la Rose, the arch-demiurge of creation. Nature is a female figure surrounded by an aura of mystery, the same of the transfiguration scene in the Gospels. A hypostasis of the reconciliation of opposites, and the mother of all that exists, Nature warrants objectivity and impartiality. Stanza 18 says all existence is subject to a whirlpool of mutation, and that it must be determined whether this is a movement aiming at absolute chaos or to the re-establishment of order. In Mutability’s words we feel the fear of apocalypse quivering with satanic joy. Panta rei, that is, the Heraclitean fire, whose blaze Hopkins was later to

48 This is quite clear in ‘Muiopotmos’, l. 178: ‘for all change is sweete’.

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name and to see; and indeed the last entity or quintessence of mutation is devouring and self-devouring fire. Mutability claims to be acknowledged as having power over all things, a power to urge them on to annihilation, or maybe also to a cyclical return. She says to Nature: is not all that exists subject to mutation, that is, in my power? And Jupiter: It is I that decree mutation, discipline and govern it. This is the key point: is there no superior entity, governing even Jupiter and his delusion to control mutation? Also, who has created God? What does Nature answer? That everything changes, so as to fulfil itself, increase and be perfected. This is, distinctly, the chord of optimistic evolutionism that runs through all of Spenser’s works. But this goal is located at the messianic end of times. The second half of the Faerie Queene was merely to confirm this anticipated, perhaps even studied, epilogue. § 63. Spenser VIII: ‘Amoretti’ Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets are intellectual, full of conceits, and compact. Spenser’s Amoretti are much less so; even in the matter of prosody his new formula is three quatrains linked by rhymes, ending with a couplet. His norm is expansion, occasionally becoming prolixity. The songbook proves often pleasant, readily accessible, and anecdotal as a result. Hence in every ten sonnets an average of one is even too simple and prosaic, like no. 26 which lists bittersweet fruits and flowers to exemplify the pains of love by means of trite variations; or another merely spelt out, like no. 62. Others in turn suggest how easily and almost automatically an Elizabethan could write a sonnet, and illustrate a possible use of the formula, like those making lists of bodily parts, or of extended similes occupying all fourteen lines; others are redundant, purely repetitive, or made only of exclamations. Imitation is an unavoidable toll, so we find the umpteenth translationadaptation of Petrarch’s sonnet on the ship, or the hunter. In Spenser’s version they end happily, though. We find confirmation that his innate genius was for the long poem: he was ill at ease within the metrical confines of the sonnet, and could not cope with the relationship, in his times rather fixed, between prosodic measure, matter and traditional discursive codes. No. 33 reveals that he was writing both works at the same time and that Amoretti paralysed or delayed the poem’s composition, implicitly admitting a certain inability to write dianoetic poetry, instead of merely describing

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and narrating in a continuum through still frames. Hence we have many sonnets that deal with situations and occasions, or based on extended narrative similes. The anecdotes may be of many types: candid, romantic, fantastic or even Biedermeier. No. 75 says the name of the beloved, written by the poet, is soon erased on the sea-shore, although the sonnet redeems itself by appealing to the Platonic concept that ideas are eternal. The sonnets comparing and referring to mythological figures, like nos 28 and 38 (Penelope, Narcissus, Arion) are double-edged, and either solemnize love or humble and debase the hero as an insignificant individual. There are of course also sonnets full of conceits, but they are inferior, and the worst of them is no. 30, a long catalogue of oxymora and paradoxes based on the trite opposition between ice and fire. No. 42 is a tour de force where the poet reviews his psychological contortions and his nearly masochistic love. The impassioned celebration of the couple’s spiritual-bodily unison shows Spenser’s kinship with Donne; and there is a precocious hint of outlandish, naïve metaphysical argument in the surprising and even rather shocking image, in no. 47, of the eyes as golden hooks, which lure and hang up fishes soon to be cruelly murdered. 2. Spenser manufactures a little book – ‘amoretti’, rather than ‘amori’ – or a monthly diary to be offered to his beloved, who, less ‘coy’, will read it; but it becomes a little miscellany through the insertion of some anomalous and extraneous sonnets, like the one announcing that the second triad of books of The Faerie Queene has been completed. Widower Spenser courted Elizabeth Boyle in 1590, was married to her in Ireland in 1594, and the next year he sent to print this collection where his courtship is stylized. In no. 74 he stresses the coincidence that his mother, his wife and his queen bore the same Christian name. It comes natural, after Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney, to wonder if Amoretti, too, is, or encompasses, a detailed novel or romance. It is actually part of the vague cycle of a courtship at first repulsed, then accepted, and happily ending in an engagement to marry, against the background of a seasonal and liturgical calendar.49 There is thus an obvious discontinuity with the convention, obligatory and prevalent, and as it

49 Often forced equivalences have been pointed out in detail and analysed by the ‘numerological’ critics.

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were ontological, of a rejected lover’s songbook. As with Shakespeare, love makes the beloved eternal, that is, love will survive and renew life; but in no. 17 art cannot aspire to express all the beloved’s beauty and spirituality. The first half of the collection does not distance itself from the theme of the beloved’s harsh repulse of the lover’s proposals, by him alternately lamented and justified because, as in no. 6, what is hard to obtain will last longer. This stubborn repulse comes close to the sadism of Wyatt’s proud lady. Again and again Spenser qualifies it with the negative attribute ‘greedy’, semantic evidence of his idiolect as I have noted, which here indicates an unmistakable pathology. The most frequent metaphor used is that of an attack on an armed enemy, or even an impregnable fortress, along with the exhortation not to desist (no. 14). No. 21 tries to pick out a piteous spot in the hard armour, to discover in it a strategy to neutralize lust. A moment later Pandora is evoked, punishing the world’s sin with her scourge (no. 24). No. 31 wonders if it is the devil’s plan to make her face beautiful and her heart hard, the better to lure her wooers and murder them in a ‘bloody bath’. Amoretti seems to approve of or rather to reconsider the iconography of woman, or better of female ‘fury’, in The Faerie Queene, where pride is a vice, and where it has also a symbolic seat, a mother-house, fighting against which knights die. In no. 5, however, we find with wonder that ‘portly pride’ is a gift, even an admirable virtue in the beloved, provided it is meant as ‘scorn of base things’, or, as no. 59 emphasizes, self-assurance, command, authority and impassiveness, thus another synonym of that scorn. In fact, the main common content and trait d’union between Spenser’s two main works is the stylized figure of woman as the thirsty, repressed, self-divided and wounded ‘tyrant’, who under various mutable forms appears again and again in every book of The Faerie Queene, and in the sonnet sequence for the first time in no. 10. Certain actions and gestures are almost exact reproductions: in no. 20 the woman puts her foot on her lover’s neck, as if to crush it as in the Temple of Isis in The Faerie Queene. The arrogant beloved lacks the lion’s noble mercy. From this point a chain is formed of hypostases of female pride reaching its peak in no. 31 or no. 47.50 Is 50 In no. 44 the pride is that of Jason’s Greeks, causing civil war and discord.

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there a turning point? Even minimal tokens of incipient benevolence are given the lie for more than half the length of the collection. In no. 45 the poet is glad that her image, though misty, stands out and is printed in his heart as a spiritual idea. And with no. 51 he starts finding justifications: her hardness, the poet finds, can be affected by complaints; indeed hardness must be praised as giving proof of her nature and divine origin – as well as perhaps, one begins to surmise, a necessary training for the lover’s purification of all sensual dross. From no. 61 onward it is justifiable that so divine a person should reject so base and unworthy a being. No. 63 warns that he will soon come to harbour, having been granted the grace of a kiss. The last twenty sonnets express the repose and gratification in a love that elevates and raises the lover who has attained it. 3. Spenser’s Amoretti suggest a firmer and more deliberate control over the overwhelming frenzy of the senses, and the whole collection is a celebration of spiritual wedded love, or at least of the discipline that carnal love finds and accepts in it. Spenser’s beloved is therefore, or more fully becomes after the turning point indicated above, the icon of the woman physically alluring but emanating an ideal, spiritual, intellectual beauty (no. 79). The latter sonnet is a brief grammar of ‘heavenly love’, the subject of one of Spenser’s almost contemporary hymns. There are thus very few moments when the poets forgets, so to speak, the urgency and necessity of this assumption. The woman’s eyes indeed repeatedly shoot Cupid’s deadly arrow, but its power to pierce and wound sensually is blunted, and it is an arrow purified of its poison (nos 7 and 16). In no. 77 thoughts are gathered in the cleavage of the breasts of the beloved, which look like two big apples, lying on an ivory table laid for a divine banquet. § 64. Spenser IX: ‘Epithalamion’ and ‘Prothalamion’ These two compositions are the first lyrical or rhapsodic, and thus also Pindaric, English odes. They exhibit Spenser as an eminently nuptial poet, whose ideal fulcrum is the celebration, or rather the blessing, of a rite no less absolute and archetypal than circumstantial, repeating the primordial union out of which creation was born. This incessantly ensures, through love, the continuation of the human species. The urge to examine them together is immediate, for their titles echo one another, their themes are

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complementary and the occasions for their compositions identical; they are also alike in prosody, and in the Baroque form of a pagan-Christian pageant. ‘Epithalamion’ was published together with Amoretti, and represents its ideal continuation although in a totally different form, prosody and spirit. As prosody it is unprecedented, being structured in twenty-three stanzas plus a coda, and if each of these may symbolize one of the twentyfour hours of the day, and of the 365 days of the year, each has eighteen lines with alternate rhymes, a number for which no plausible reason can be immediately suggested. Precisely because of this, while the sonnet implied for Spenser, along with its prosodic measure, the acceptance of the courtly and Petrarchist conventions of the ‘grammar of love’ with its own imagery, ‘Epithalamion’ follows a freer, more creative inspiration, better suited to Spenser’s always expansive vein. The imagined ceremony is sumptuous, the event is hyperbolically magnified, with a sustained narrative suspense and a rich, sweeping mythological scheme naturally associated with it. The nuptials are solemnized with the invoked or spontaneous cooperation and participation of the whole cosmos, transfigured into a procession accompanied by universal music; this is done by means of a stylistic trait dear also to the Latin Middle Ages, the contamination of Christian with pagan elements. In this way the event acquires a timeless and solemnizing depth. ‘Prothalamion’ is in turn composed of ten stanzas with the same number of lines. In ‘Epithalamion’ Spenser celebrates his own wedding with Elizabeth Boyle; in ‘Prothalamion’ he hails as a well-wisher the nuptials of the Earl of Worcester’s daughters. 2. In the proem to ‘Epithalamion’ the first pagan figures to be accepted in the new, later dispensation, are the muses, as collaborators in a rite even then requiring some form of cooperation from the reader. The hymnal poet and bridegroom has stipulated with them, earlier on, a pact of succour, often begging their help in order to sing the glory or the passing of other people; now he asks them for a different sort of collaboration, an aid in singing his own epithalamion. The diction is that of yearning, exhortation and plea. No one can or must nourish envy, for the rite to be celebrated is not personal but involves the community, symbolically the whole planet itself. Orpheus is the first mythical character evoked, pour cause since he sang passionately of a bride, or for a bride, and accompanied words with

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music. This is obviously a musical rite but at the same time a dance step and a dance. The symbolic synonym of Spenser’s epithalamion is a concert in the literal sense of the word, where every component of creation plays an instrument or executes a part, emitting a sound in the score, so that a concert becomes indeed a ‘consent’.51 Inanimate nature participates, echoing the music, and an echo is the refrain that concludes every stanza, and that will necessarily vary when night comes. The muses are exhorted to sing to the still sleeping bride this very song now being composed. It is a magic moment, and every smallest entity and figure of the cosmos is responsibly engaged in preparing every operation diligently, so that it may appear spotlessly pure: ‘So goodly all agree with sweet consent’,52 and all nature agrees and sings in communal participation. Yet, as early as in the first lines of the ode, hints of menace can be heard here and there: such seemingly eternal joyous moments as this will inevitably undergo intermissions. The day itself will inexorably be concluded by night: stones can hinder the progress of the bride or wolves bite the deer. The whole cosmos is invited to join in the feast, but malignant, alien, uncooperative forces are in fact lying in ambush. Nevertheless Spenser, in the last analysis, is willing to believe that the cosmos is involved in a dynamic cycle, that Jupiter ‘al that ever in this world is fayre / Do make and still repayre’.53 The marriage ceremony is the most conspicuous manifestation of pagan mythology overlapping Christian liturgy: the bride is the moon or a mythical queen; but the next moment she is angel and saint, and the temple is a Christian church where the priest celebrates the nuptials against a background of organ music. The happiest and merriest day and even the longest in the year is being experienced, but amidst the ringing of bells twilight descends. At the opening the bridegroom had waited, quivering, for dawn and sunrise; now he must complain of night’s long delay. In the nuptial bed he compares himself twice to Jupiter, Jupiter who took weary Maya lying half asleep on 51 52 53

Such is heavenly love at l. 198 of ‘An Hymne in Honour of Beautie’. The accompanying parade is naturally well-tuned music, and it is all ‘a voice’, and all the firmament is one music. Dylan Thomas will maybe recall such an inspired and trusting spirit, bent on exorcising Evil in ‘In Country Sleep’.

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a meadow after her bath, and Jupiter the lover of Alcmena. Spenser’s beloved, indeed now his bride, has shed the garments of the tyrant in Amoretti, and she is a chaste, modest, even sleepy virgin; it is the lover, the bridegroom, who with a modicum of self-irony poses as the factotum. He wishes night, Spenser’s negative principle par excellence, to cooperate, to chase away threats and fears, to create a protecting halo around the two lovers going to make love, repelling inimical and opposing forces, these alone excluded from the universal mirth. So now the only threat is that of day, which rising again will end the embrace. Other pagan deities are summoned as favouring the union of bodies, but the ode closes on a Christian note, in wishing the couple may beget an offspring of saints. 3. The first seven stanzas of ‘Prothalamion’ range over a diapason of intensity and lyrical afflatus seldom attained in English poetry; they are also the variation of a locus in English and European medieval poetry. On closer inspection, the incipit is typically that of dream poetry, such as had been defined and framed since Chaucer’s imitations of the Roman de la Rose and since Hoccleve.54 After Spenser this will become a recurring type of opening in Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry: nothing more endemic, in short, than the night and morning malaise of the poet who, unable to sleep, leaves his home to regain his poise. With Romanticism, nature will be restorative by definition, and the poet, still by definition, will be a neurotic recluse, afflicted and frustrated. In English literature, specifically, walking along the banks of the Thames will be a very frequent remedy. At the beginning of the ode the poetic ‘I’ stands out in strong relief, already romantically drooping and disenchanted, also on account of the scant credit granted him at court; but he will find a way to become resilient, indeed to dream – though he does not use the word – in the course of his walk, and therefore of his poem. Two other rhapsodic meditations on the banks of sea and river deserve to be remembered as echoing this, and they are two twentieth-century masterpieces, one by T. S. Eliot (who rather stridently quotes Spenser’s incipit and refrain in The Waste Land), and one by Joyce, the author, with a no less desecrating parody, of the episode

54 § 21.2.

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of Stephen’s walk on the beach in the third episode of Ulysses. In the first stanza of ‘Prothalamion’ the poet’s sterile life contrasts with the promise symbolized by flowers and gems, fresh enough to be worthy of adorning the bridegrooms to whom their brides will offer them, at the imminent wedding. The symbolic core of the ode is the astonishing apparition of two incredibly snow-white swans, of celestial nature and origin, flying down like the incarnations of the idea of purity. Two mermaids, leaving their companions, crown them with garlands and sing a hymn to them. All these phases are embroidered and made precious by mythological echoes that expand the sacredness of nuptial union figured by the swans, as far back as the origins of human history. The swans’ meteoric apparition is a prolepsis and an interpretation of the conjugal union. The glorifying song is accompanied, as in ‘Epithalamion’, by the chorus of nymphs and by a planetary echo. And even the voiceless river Lee ‘did by signs his glad affection show’. The last three stanzas fatally break this moment of exceptional, ecstatic visionary trance.55 At another point of the Thames, lapping the perilous area of political power near the ancient seat of the Templar knights – an order now ‘decayed through pride’, that ever-pernicious vice – Spenser finds it hard to interrupt this association of ideas. The very refrain says ‘Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song’. Concrete, circumstantial and contingent needs acquire more relief. With heraldic solemnity, with rhythmically cadenced steps, in strongly ceremonial manner, the two betrothed couples meet and move on to their wedding, which is not described. § 65. Spenser X: The four hymns to heavenly love Four compositions related to one another, published as his last work (1595) – although two of them were written much earlier – crown Spenser’s calling to bless, celebrate, magnify and extol in loud tones the goodness of creation, a creation presented as still pervaded with the primordial creative afflatus, and just issuing forth young and fresh from the Creator’s hands. They are also a challenge for the poetry of Spenser, who from the start, as 55

Stanza 8 opens with the seemingly useless reminder of the poet’s ancient and remote origin, of his expressing the continuity of generation and of the cosmos, and the evolution ensured by nuptial love.

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a narrative poet, had privileged the telling of connected events, or at most the translation of concepts into sensuous imagery and allegorical fables. These argumentative poems are therefore laboured and circuitous, and conducted as if through a medium that, unlike Dante, Spenser cannot feel as his own. The four hymns paint a neo-Platonic picture of creation as emanating from God, of the world as a collection of copies of incarnate ideas, and of the individual as a body moulded by the soul that has entered it. Creation is the realm of beauty, and human beauty shows the harmony between the beautiful soul and a body that cannot but be beautiful too. Spenser the Puritan is here anti-Puritan: Christ’s Incarnation has truly redeemed man and creation, restoring them to freedom, freedom above all to love and reciprocate the Redeemer’s love, and to love men as brothers in Christ, mirroring, thus copying, Christ himself. The cosmos throbs with the light emanating from heavenly beauty which is a token of eternity and which, emanated to the world, returns to its source when the corruptible body has perished. Spenser strives to exorcise death and decay, and is thus acutely sensitive to the temporary; he knows that everything ends, but is consoled by the permanence of eternity, with the melancholy and aspiring élan that can be felt for instance in Hopkins’s choral or antiphonal poem ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’. Spenser’s cosmos is wholly geometric, as if drawn by an architect with rule and square: a functional picture without residues, each single point of which is linked to the others with precise correspondences. Ordered exposition, formal clarity and neat drawing, with every stanza marking one phase of the argument and of the whole frame, are impeccable in two of the hymns. The later ones are damaged by a certain opulence and excess of circumlocutions. 2. The two hymns on heavenly beauty and love are normally considered a delayed answer to (or, more exactly, an integration of ) the two on human beauty and love written in youth, when Spenser knew less about Marsilio Ficino, who had made Plato a Christian.56 The assimilation of Ficino’s ideas softened Spenser’s Puritanism, bringing him closer to a Catholic evolutionism, as I said above, if only because original sin is washed away by 56

Praz (PMI, 5) however affirms that they drew on the less-known Platonist Benivieni.

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Christ’s sacrifice, and mankind is freed from the satanic curse preached by Calvinism.57 ‘A Hymne in Honour of Beavtie’ is once more based on the delusion or fancy of an accord between paganism and Christianity. It is addressed to Venus as an idea, or goddess, of spiritual beauty. Neo-Platonists had chosen the acrobatic enterprise to neutralize Venus’ pagan sensuality and make her an icon of erotic chastity. God, in creating, wrought a pattern of beauty that he lavished on creation, where it was surrounded by bodily dross, but this can be got rid of and can evaporate thanks to Venus’ heavenly light. Human beauty so conceived is not exterior and ephemeral, but interior;58 nor must it be equated with accidents. Heavenly beauty does not perish when perishable beauty ends, for, while the soul takes on a body by virtue of the Holy Spirit, it receives light from Venus. Beauty is a collaborator of the Spirit, a parallel entity. Hence it is the soul that brings beauty to the house she goes to inhabit, and adorns it. Such as the soul so is the body, and vice versa. But Spenser replies to the objection: sometimes it is not so, for the substance resists it; likewise it is possible for heavenly beauty to become, unwillingly, the ‘bait of sinne’. From the hymn Spenser moves on to an apostrophe to beautiful ladies that should be chaste and not alluring; however, heavenly beauty must be exhibited, for it has to fulfill a necessary function. In the epilogue Spenser formulates a new set of precepts, no longer for the ‘governor’ but for the fair sex: let ladies choose men resembling them, capable of seeing the source of their beauty and, beyond that, its origin; otherwise love becomes, from a ‘concord’ of stars, 57

58

See LEW, 321–32, who, after conceding, denies this, although hardly convincingly; or ELS, 386, on the same issue. Actually almost all critics agree that Spenser is not a theological poet, and is balanced in his religious attitude (see Nelson 1963, 23). Whoever thinks of him instead as a virtual Puritan Protestant must needs overlook the Platonism bordering on Catholicism in the four hymns. Even the authors of the Cambridge Companion (i.e. Hadfield 2001) find many signs and hints of a flaw in the optimism and pure joyfulness emanating from ‘Epithalamion’ (also ‘Prothalamion’ would have been written with a second intent). Spenser’s crypto-Catholicism is also studied by Hadfield 2012, on which see the review in TLS, 7 September 2012, 3–4. Nor is it beauty according to the future twentieth-century structuralists, that is, the simple, pleasing symmetric disposition of the parts of a whole; even merely mechanic art is not beauty.

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a warring disharmony. The souls destined to a chaste love were then already sympathetic to each other before being embodied, and their moulds are alike or complementary. Whoever can see like this isolates the soul, draws it out of body and flesh, and contemplates it mentally as in a mirror where the lover’s soul sees itself equal with the beloved’s. Such perception is due to the lovers’ sharp eyesight, able to penetrate the body’s shell. 3. ‘A Hymne of Heavenly Love’, containing the history of Creation, Lucifer’s fall, the Banishment from Eden, and Incarnation and Crucifixion, is Spenser’s Paradise Lost compressed into 300 lines. One marvels at this hymn because Christ’s name is never pronounced, and the biblical and Gospel fresco is sketched, so to speak, in translation, that is to say in purely philosophical neo-Platonic terms. The starting point is a ‘god of Love’, with a significant inversion of capitals. But moving forward Spenser adopts another view and accuses himself of the errors of his youth, when he sang of love in a ‘mad fit’, arousing a ‘loose affection’. Creation is an act of repetition, the proliferation of moulds resembling the patterns out of which come the Trinity and the angelic hosts, ‘though not of powre so great’. Spenser posits a divine Entity whose procreativity is fixed ab aeterno. And the cosmos is a circle, or a sphere of dazzling light, whose ruin is proverbially pride, ambition to be greater, more powerful – a double example of how desire for power is a force contrary to love, and of how weak the flesh is, if even angels have sinned and fallen. After they are banished, God is the ‘colonizer’ of a vacant desolate zone, and moulds in clay, adapting it to a previous pattern, the flesh of man, as an act of love and compensation. The first man too is his copy, made in the same mould. In confirmation of his optimistic humanism, Spenser relegates the Fall from Eden to a single stanza, but dedicates many more to the Incarnation, dictated by an umpteenth gesture of love, and a mirror to the Fall, because sin has been committed in flesh and in flesh it must be expiated. The last ten stanzas are like a bird’s eye view of Jesus’ life; and the last plea, somewhat forced and grandiloquent, is a forecast of the final stanza of Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’ (which perhaps echoes it), inciting man to revive his love for Christ. 4. The four hymns form a true quartet, a symmetric and organic structure, and are linked in answering pairs according to a human-supernatural scale. The hymn to human love tout court is in itself a prolix résumé of Cupid’s

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history and deeds, except that a genesis alternative to the Bible’s is repeated and re-imagined, since mother and son emanate a sort of creative fiat. The narrative of the exemplary pains of a lover pierced by arrows is a sympathetic study of the lover’s psychology. In ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie’ we hear Spenser’s frequent appeal for mankind to agree in a unanimous, enthusiastic, even dithyrambic upward motion. With upturned eyes, and accompanying this urge for purification, heaven’s vault is revisited in its Ptolemaic mystery as a sphere whose crystal shell encloses earth and air. The heavens themselves, as they rise closer to the prime mover, are more rarefied; still further up, the souls of the saved are in the presence of God, and Plato’s ideas are in the upper heaven. All this motion aims at the focus that is God; but, as in Hopkins, God reflects himself, and makes his mark, in the ‘book of nature’. At the end of the vision God, just and formidable, makes the Dragon crumble to dust. However, in this fresco of the created universe recalling Michelangelo’s, there is no Virgin; close to God Spenser only puts Wisdom, and as if in compensation he gives an admiring, astonished description of it. § 66. Ralegh,* Wotton Essentially, Sir Walter Ralegh (or Raleigh, 1554–1618) is important for his patronage of Spenser, having presented him to court and queen as the author of the first three books of The Faerie Queene. In his own right he is the author of a handful of famous, melancholy but also stoical lyrics, along with others of doubtful and contested authorship, making up at any rate a very scant corpus. He is also, however, the author of a vast poem surviving only in 1

*

Works, 8 vols, Oxford 1829, New York 1962; Poems, ed. A Latham, London 1951, now replaced by The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition, ed. M. Rudick, Tempe, AR 1999. E. A. Strathmann, Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism, Oxford and New York 1951; W. M. Wallace, Sir Walter Ralegh, Princeton, NJ 1959; M. Praz, ‘Un machiavellico inglese: sir Walter Ralegh’, PMI, 153–65 (one of his most enjoyable features, originally from 1929); A. Latham, Sir Walter Ralegh, London 1964; S. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, New Haven, CT 1973; S. W. May, Sir Walter Ralegh, Boston, MA 1989; S. Coote, A Play of Passion: The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, London 1993; C. Bajetta, Sir Walter Ralegh poeta di corte elisabettiano, Milano 1998 (an excellent, most accurate philological, ecdotic and codicological study).

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fragments (a single canto out of twelve or even more), dedicated to Queen Elizabeth mythologized as Cynthia, that is to say the chaste moon, and of a few polemical and political treatises and pamphlets. A prose history of the world was conceived on a colossal scale but is extant, or perhaps was written, only from the time of Genesis to the first century AD. Ralegh wrote few poems because he was primarily a man of action – a courtier, statesman, soldier, pirate, explorer – though of the eclectic, multi-faceted type typical of the Renaissance. Castiglione’s sprezzatura led him even to paste labels on the manuscript copies of his poems, to conceal his authorship of compositions circulating exclusively among groups of friends. On the other hand, his historical work profited from the more than one decade of forced inactivity when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Daring, ambition and an unquenchable thirst for exploits that resulted in failure are Ralegh’s indelible characteristics. 2. Twenty-six-year-old Ralegh, shooting ahead of many rivals, had already been received at court, and was among the most flattered and adulated courtiers of the extremely jealous Queen Elizabeth. He was thought to be second only to the Earl of Leicester in the queen’s sympathies, although he did not belong to the Privy Council. The Platonic, and at the same time spasmodically possessive relationship between the courtier and the queen turned on the glaring yet incomprehensibly imperious gestures of the latter and the absurd symbolic acts of submission of the former. Ralegh, it was long believed, once spread out his cloak on a puddle to prevent her shoe being soiled with mud. His upbringing had been directed to this goal. The son of a Devon landowner, he had studied at Oxford without taking a degree, and then at the Middle Temple in London. But already at the age of fifteen he had been in France with an English force sent in aid of the Huguenots, and in 1578 and 1579 he had taken part in acts of piracy at sea against the Spaniards. Quarrelsome and rash, given from the start to ambiguous connections,1 1

A rumour had him as the founder, as we shall see below, of the so-called School of Night, a gathering of atheistic writers and scientists, to whom Shakespeare was thought to allude in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The fact that in the early 1580s Ralegh was close to the Catholic faction is accounted for in various ways; perhaps it was in order to spy on them on behalf of the anti-popery party.

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and also sent to prison for excesses, he was nevertheless made a captain in a regiment sent to quell an Irish rebellion in 1580, under Lord Grey, the same Spenser was to serve later. In the massacre at Smervick, Ralegh stood out as the protagonist in forays no less cunning than rash. From 1582 he had gained favour with the queen, who lavished on him rents, patents, life tenancies, monopolies, real estate and land properties well beyond his real deserts, and made him a knight. In 1584 he fell under the lure of that American gold that blinded him for the rest of his life, and financed the expedition of two ships which, coasting up along Florida, were to colonize Virginia, named but still uninhabited, and exploit the mines it was believed were there. But in 1589 he resigned himself to yielding his rights in the possible extraction of minerals to a merchant company. That same year a period of alternating fortunes began for him. His secret marriage to a court damsel – a common practice for courtiers from Chaucer onwards – angered the queen, who had not authorized it and consigned him to house arrest. Political and economic reasons, that is, the tense relationships with Spain, and personal affection, led Elizabeth to have Ralegh released in order to put him personally in charge of a second American expedition. In Guyana, today Venezuela, Ralegh vainly tried to find the gold of the legendary city of Manoa. The Cadiz raid in 1596 was to remain his only completed victorious action. Even in 1597 he came back empty-handed from an ambush of the Spanish fleet near the Azores. Young John Donne, too, took part in both enterprises, and recalled them in two early poems. Even before 1603 Ralegh had become the arbiter of English politics as a member of a triumvirate formed together with Cecil and Essex, and he presided over the beheading of the latter when his conspiracy was discovered. After the ascent to the throne of James I, who dreaded his influence, Ralegh was ironically accused of collusion with those very Spaniards whose first and fiercest enemy he had always been. Suspected of conspiracy, tried and condemned, his capital sentence was suspended or commuted into life imprisonment, and he was shut in the Tower with his family. It was a luxury imprisonment, for he had his own apartment and also a chemical laboratory and a small botanical garden. In 1617 King James decided to release him, wishing perhaps to have a pretext for sending him to death in the very likely eventuality that he did something to disturb the Spaniards. In fact he allowed him to leave on a second expedition to Guyana, where

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his crew was decimated, his son Wat died and one commander committed suicide. Returning home, Ralegh went to the scaffold pronouncing a stoical and rather ironical phrase resembling the one attributed to Thomas More (‘this is sharp medicine [a pun referring to the blade of the axe]; but it is a certain cure for all diseases’). 3. Credibility is another paradigm marking and surrounding Ralegh’s person. His charm is legendary, but the motivations behind his actions are elusive. His many biographies create an unresolved halo of legend, telling of alliances made and broken, of espionage and ambiguous ploys, of diabolically perfidious cunning and unbounded greed, along with the purest and most selfless romantic gestures, blatant gallantry and chivalrous magnanimity. His trials, striving to ascertain the truth, failed to prove the charges against him, and at his last trial Ralegh received an unjust sentence while deserving absolution. Hated and loved, he was the daily object of slander and lies. Credibility also concerns the content and self-portrayal in his poetry. We cannot yet say what is genuine and what is alien to him, how much he poses as penitent, or as disappointed and disenchanted lover; how far his words are conventional phrases copied from models, rather than a genuine, heartfelt cry. The authorship and dates of his poetical corpus are insoluble questions for scholars still labouring at them, and a blank to the puzzled common reader. The thirty-nine ‘authentic’ poems of the Latham edition (including a mosaic of fragments of translations from Latin classics, mixed in with the prose works, as well as of sixteen conjectural poems included in The Phoenix Nest of 1593) have recently been reduced to the twenty-three ‘certain’ poems in the Rudick edition.2 Whether written before or after 1600, they herald a vein of Jacobean, seventeenth-century ‘Metaphysical’ poetry already affecting extravagant, roguish imagery. After all, Ralegh does not write a collection of sonnets addressed to a coy mistress, nor does he employ honeyed images or conceits. This might be seen as a mark of progress, modernity and innovation. But C. S. Lewis strangely said that this was typical of latecomers, of the ‘drab’ period which Ralegh could not help belonging to, being, in Lewis’s opinion, a ‘dilettante’. The most frequently anthologized poems, or some of them, were long ascribed to Ralegh because it was too quickly assumed that all those signed ‘Unknown’ 2

Bajetta 1998, 39.

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in contemporary anthologies were by him; present-day philology distrusts this. ‘A Poesie to Prove Affection Is Not Love’ is undoubtedly fresh, fanciful and witty in describing an over-exploited theme of Ralegh’s, the impermanence of human things and the capriciousness and riskiness of love, ephemeral like so many human experiences. More exactly it simply describes the paradoxes and oxymora of love, without cold or exasperated conceits. Ralegh, indeed, wittily responds with a wink – showing the narrow, elitist circulation of his verse – to Marlowe, whose ‘passionate shepherd’ he turns upside down (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’). Such a riposte confirms the continuity of a melancholy, resigned, somewhat dispirited vein, with a sad, engaging melody, different, or rather quite another, from the icon of Ralegh as a fearless explorer and cold Machiavellian thinker. His stoicism surfaces in the ten testamentary lines of ‘On the Life of Man’, a series of bitter epigrams that might sound like a second Macbeth’s monologue, because they employ an extended theatrical metaphor (‘life’s short comedy’, with God like an invisible stage director from on high, who ‘sits and views who’er does act [but also ‘recites’] amiss’. These lyrics develop the classical theme of the seasons of human lives, succeeding one another blindly and aimlessly, and of Spenser’s ‘mutability’. In ‘The Lie’ Ralegh seems to denounce the courtier’s amorality and fictive superiority to all men as if he were bitterly judging him from outside, and so splitting himself into his own double. A bitter vein of disillusionment and resentment spreads through the whole narrow corpus: it underscores the message that the world is a series of deceptions, and therefore of disenchantments. The ballad ‘Nature, that washed her hands in milk’ moulds a perfect statue of the beloved woman, contrasting this with time that ‘dims, discolours, and destroys’. Only in ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’ or in some few other isolated poems does Ralegh trustfully imagine the arrival at an other-worldly dimension. ‘The Eleventh: and Last Book of the Ocean to Scinthia’ has not been definitively dated, and seems to be the only one written, together with some fragments, of the planned twelve. To have ascribed this myth to himself is symptomatic of Ralegh’s hubris.3 3

Outside the lyrical area is a sonnet to Spenser, hailed as a poet higher than Petrarch and Homer, who weep and lament in contemplating their rival and with him the fairy queen. As a result Laura’s grave is left waste, unguarded by allegorical figures.

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4. An idée fixe of Mario Praz’s, shared, though less strongly, by English critics, is that almost all writers and intellectuals of the Elizabethan Renaissance were debtors to and pupils of Machiavelli; yet Ralegh, from being a scientific politologist, probably went on to be a religious preacher, representing the link with seventeenth-century Puritan Protestantism. If it truly existed, the School of Night was a Machiavellian, as well as an atheistic, cell. Ralegh had recourse to divine providence for an explanation of history; but when it came to analysing single events he firmly kept to Machiavelli’s ‘effective truth’.4 This wavering between two poles can be seen after all both in his historical work and in his poetry. In the preface to the History of the World, history is the revelation of the divine, and God judges the wicked (more or less as in Shakespeare, and in Ralegh’s own last-will poem). Ralegh in fact applied the theatrical metaphor of a show, in which all men, powerful and humble, act out the role assigned to them. History as a literary genre did not yet exist except for More, and Ralegh’s History is even freer of Latinate terms and bombastic eloquence; unlike poetry, it addresses the common reader in plain and sapid language, drawing characters in strong relief with lively anecdotes. Orwell,5 taking this hint from God knows where (or inventing it), maintained that Ralegh interrupted the History at the Romans’ conquest of Macedonia because he heard some artisans quarrelling at the foot of the Tower for a reason he was not able to ascertain, and so became sceptical of the possibility to write a history not conjectural but based on facts. This observation is less strange than it seems, for the Guyana expedition of 1595 was not given credit and even questioned at his return, and this required his report. Even in 1591 4

5

It has been demonstrated that short treatises, dialogues and pamphlets by Ralegh are indebted to a number of contemporary political writers, Machiavelli being only one of them. Ralegh was Machiavellian and anti-Machiavellian too in order to gain the king’s favour. According to Praz, the moralizing tone of the History could be ascribed to self-serving motives or to a possible repentance while in prison. Hence the History is an uninterrupted sermon imitating not only the sermons of Donne, but also historical works written by Jesuits and in particular by Daniello Bartoli. Subsequent critics, however, have radically revised and reappraised previous ‘Machiavellian’ interpretations (Bajetta 1998, 41). OCE, vol. III, 109.

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Ralegh had written a ‘true report’ on the battle at the Azores against the Spaniards.6 Was it an obsession? What are Ralegh’s views as a historian? He applies ante litteram Gibbon’s pattern of the rise and fall of empires. This is also Spencer’s concept of mutability. There is no redeeming handhold, no ultimate reality able to conquer such inexorable fate. This blindness, or delusion, or obtuseness, can be broken only by rare miracles. 5. Two single poems by the diplomat Henry Wotton7 (1568–1639), which have never fallen out of favour, have imprinted themselves on the English imagination despite attempts to exclude them from anthologies at least until after Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. However, they are not sufficient to make him an ‘established’, canonical poet. ‘You meaner beauties of the night’8 is a nuga, an exquisite verse compliment to Elizabeth of Bohemia, James I’s daughter; ‘How happy is he born or taught’, the second, contains six sententious quatrains setting out the statesman’s impeccable ethical code and proclaiming the intellectual freedom of the simple citizen. The rest of his poetical vein is scant and negligible. For all that, Wotton is still a writer, although not exactly a man of letters. Of his play Tancred, written when he was a student at Oxford, we know only the title; but a large number of his letters, on exclusively diplomatic subjects, bear witness that he was an excellent letter- and prose-writer; and other writings of various kinds show him to have been an eclectic author, even a versatile one. These are De oculo, obviously a scientific essay, and a treatise on architecture. His potential literary competence, too little exploited, lies in his famed ability to use language, or the tongue, in the two senses of the term: in the freezing aphorism, in his presence of mind and his prompt wit that allowed him to cope with difficult moments in the life of the nation. At the same time Wotton, who

6 7 8

The battle was lost, but the Revenge, whose commander was Ralegh’s cousin Grenville, withstood for the whole night the attack of fifteen Spanish ships. This heroic act was to be celebrated also by Tennyson. The son of a Kentish landowner, Wotton was the only son of his second marriage. His stepbrother was probably the John Wotton author of ‘Damaetas’ Jig in Praise of His Love’, in England’s Helicon. These are the stars that, together with the singing birds and the violets, are eclipsed by the splendour of the eponymous lady.

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spent nearly twenty years in Italy, is probably the one figure among British authors that rivals Joyce in his nearly bilingual familiarity with and use of the Italian language. Therefore we are now able to label him in the correct way: like Ralegh, his senior by about a decade, he was a courtier, naturally expert also in arts, sciences and letters, with a full range of human interests, practical and philosophical. 9 The lack of that utopian aspiration that was fatal to Sidney and Ralegh was what enabled him to survive. Wotton knew the young Milton and at Oxford was a friend of Donne’s; invited to write his biography, he passed on that task to Izaak Walton, who, besides writing the most famous one on Donne, also wrote the biography of Wotton himself, whose romance-like plot might have furnished Shakespeare with matter, or already read like a typical script for a spy thriller. 10 § 67. Thomas Campion There was no kinship, nor, as far as we know, any personal acquaintance between Edmund Campion and Thomas Campion (1567–1620). The first Campion had been a Jesuit martyr and therefore a Catholic, and primarily a historian. Hopkins deemed him only little less of a genius than Shakespeare and, ‘if he had chosen’, someone who could know and knew

9 10

Hence the joint editions of the lyrics of both, like one ed. J. Hannah, London 1892. After receiving a yearly inheritance of 100 marks, Wotton lived for eight years in various cities of central Europe and in Rome. Back home, he served the Earl of Essex, but with a very timely decision he left for France a few hours before the failure of the earl’s conspiracy, and thence repaired to Venice, Rome and Medicean Florence. On the rumour of a new conspiracy against the future King James I, Wotton was sent home by the Grand Duke of Florence in order to prevent it. After a long journey, passing through Norway, Wotton presented himself to the king in his Sterling abode as the Florentine emissary Ottavio Baldi. After he came to the throne, James I, the only one to know of the stratagem, rewarded him by making him ambassador to Venice, where Wotton settled in 1604. A formerly Protestant German polemicist accused him of having cynically written that an ambassador was ‘an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’. But his linguistic and rhetorical competence was once more favourable to Wotton, and the king accepted his defence. In 1624, on his final return home, he was made provost at Eton. All of Wotton’s biographers are indebted to Izaak Walton, who included his biography in his Lives.

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how to do anything, and thus also how to become ‘a great poet’.1 The other Campion was a Protestant,2 but above all a layman and nearly a pagan, but equally eclectic and versatile, and indeed a poet and musician as well as a physician and a scientist. The son of a legal clerk, linked to the court on his mother’s side, Campion was a student at Cambridge where he took no degree but acquired a strong interest in the classics, and then studied for the law in London. In France, where he fought in 1591 in support of Henry IV, he probably took a degree in medicine, and was a medical practitioner in London from the beginning of the next century to his death.3 Lyrical poems by him had appeared in various publications since 1591, followed by a collection of panegyrics and Latin epigrams. From 1601 to 1617 his four books of English airs he himself had set to music, were issued. Thanks to the growing vogue for masques under James I, he was requested to provide four shows of that kind for various court anniversaries and celebrations. As a prose-writer he compiled a much appreciated and indeed oft reprinted handbook on counterpoint, and Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), where he attacked ‘the vulgar and inartistic custom of rhyme’, the only false step in his career, since he himself regularly transgressed such a precept. With an urbane but pointed retort by Samuel Daniel, a controversy begun in the context of Sidney’s and Spenser’s Areopagus, and continued in Spenser’s and Harvey’s discussions from which the Calender arose, could be said to be concluded. 2. Famous in his time for his texts for music, after his death the genres he had cultivated – masque and lay music – were banished by the Puritans. He was practically re-born to a new life three centuries later, with editions collected at the end of the nineteenth century.4 From then on he has been a 1 2 3 4

§ 47.1. Non-dogmatic, tending to agnosticism, but also the friend of several people with a Catholic bent (CHI, vol. IV, 144). BEL, 101 n. 1, is almost the only one to affirm that Campion ‘seems to have converted to Catholicism’ between 1595 and 1619. He had some trouble in between, however, for he was summoned to trial, and then absolved, being suspected of furnishing poison to the woman who murdered Thomas Overbury in 1613. Respectively in 1879, 1889 and 1909. One may be tempted to relate this revival to Joyce’s Chamber Music, published in 1907 but planned and begun years before. The

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minor literary figure, certainly the poet of an élite; many hardly know him even by name and several handbooks deal with him in a few lines, whereas others place him as the apex of a civilization that ipso facto saw disappear with him the choicest art it had succeeded in expressing.5 It is difficult to find in his admirers a judgement differing or distant from a huge, hyperbolic admiration for his songs’ grace, freshness, brilliancy and vividness. It is also true that these songs resist analysis, and arouse ecstatic judgements expressed at times in tautological attributes; or lend themselves to those technical, pedantic metrical and rhythmic disquisitions ever dear to the English. To a certain extent, in every text for music, music enters the text and informs it by a kind of symbiosis; no less obviously, Campion’s poetry for music, like that of any other songwriter, must be not only read but also played and heard.6 Undoubtedly Campion transfuses the Elizabethan spirit into song rather than in the rival form of the sonnet; for the rest he is a clever although rather anonymous adapter of common enough poetical lexicons (like Spenser),7 especially able in varying metres, where he is second only to the Sidney of the Arcadia interludes at the end of the sixteenth century. Campion’s antithesis is Greville, since Campion is easy and accessible whereas Greville is the member of a precocious and thick-skinned Hermetic school, just like one contemporary that Campion does not seem to know, John Donne. Campion also presents a wide gamut of modulations: he can write a heart-felt intense lyric on the Jews resisting deportation to Babylon, and yearn for the world beyond and heaven, and then immediately after extol the healthy sensual lust of peasants with allusive double-entendres, like the wish to eat cherries,8 or the suggestive refrain ‘But when we come

5 6 7 8

diction of that collection is equally sober, immaculate and precise, and individual songs work on the same fabric of images and musical metaphors, such as for instance in Campion’s ‘When to her lute Corinna sings’. ELS, 557; the volume closes precisely with Campion’s strong eulogium. See also above, § 38.2. ELS, 553, observes instead that the songs’ melody is already in the written text, independently of its musical garb. Also a translator and a​ dapter, above all, of Catullus and Propertius. The opening air of book one is ‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus’, cast in English. It is fit to compare him with Herrick in this lyric, normally known as ‘Cherry-Ripe’.

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where comfort is’.9 At the end of the sixteenth century the monodic song with lute accompaniment is the musical form rivalling the Italian madrigal sung by many voices, usually without accompaniment. Campion took the easy or the easier way, with monodic melodies easy to memorize, while his contemporary Monteverdi, who composed on texts by Tasso, Guarini and Striggio, would be exported or generally assimilated only later, with the masque of Jonson, Inigo Jones and Ferrabosco.10 However, even as a pure musician Campion does not rank with the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury English Olympians, Dowland, Byrd and Morley. § 68. Drayton At the age of sixty-four Michael Drayton (1563–1631), in a verse epistle to a patron, recalled the birth of his vocation as a poet when he was still a ten-year-old boy: ‘And pleased with the name, / To my milde Tutor merrily I came […] / Clasping my slender arm about his thigh. / O my deare master! Cannot you (quoth I) / Make me a Poet, doe it if you can’. Such a rapturous aspiration might have been felt and remembered by a Romantic poet. From that day Drayton employed all his strength to fulfil that promise and climb to the peaks reserved for the Muses’ favourites. His career was marked by the notorious consequences of artistic hubris: emulation, megalomania, thirst for grandeur and the mirage of perfection; and, such aspiration not being fulfilled, inner anguish, the lasting ill-humour of disappointment and an inferiority complex. Not for nothing was Drayton almost Shakespeare’s fellow-citizen, above all nearly his contemporary, and he survived him for fifteen years after seeing himself paired with him and then inexorably surpassed in the ascent to Parnassus. His only legendary boast relating to Shakespeare was to have been present at the tavern, when after a bout of drinking, Shakespeare – if it was truly he – got the fever that was to cause his death. Drayton replied blow for blow, pursuing Shakespeare and any other rival, Daniel above all. Thus he published with tireless activity a huge number of works, or, rather, various works of

9 10

From Book II onward the songs, written during James I’s age, are wrapped in darker meditative atmospheres. PGU, vol. II, and § 38.2.

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unequalled bulk in his age. A great many of them were left ‘open’, to be revised in a process of never-ending improvement.1 Wishing to carve a monument more lasting than bronze, he began very early to publish collections of his poems, and frantically looked to all markets, keeping his finger in many pies. James I’s rise to the throne caused a reversal with a deep impact on his career: he made the mistake of celebrating the new king without adding a touch of regret for Elizabeth, and fell out of favour. From then on he felt misunderstood and undervalued. Today Drayton is considered an able versifier with occasional flashes, and remembered for single poems or even single lines in a scarcely significant mare magnum.2 This opinion requires two corrections: Drayton worked in the area of the variations of established genres at the end of the century in order to gain renown, but at the same time pursued innovation; and he must be credited with inventing the geographic or topographic poem, the heroic narrative poem and the verse epistle. Aging did not damage but improved him, and from his jars there poured rich wine, richer than the old one, as at the wedding in Cana. The sonnet sequence Idea, especially in the 1619 version, has always enchanted even the coldest and severest critics, admittedly because of a single sonnet, perfect from beginning to end. Nymphidia and some pastoral lyrics of his late years are no less so. 2. The son of well-to-do merchants, a page in the home of a local patron of the arts3 who financed his studies, probably never completed at college, the tutor beseeched when Drayton was a boy put into his hands 1 2

3

Every separate presentation of the poet has demanded of the critics a very complex and laborious examination of the variants in the different editions. I will abstain from this type of investigation and indicate the editions I follow. Drayton has been then known for centuries only through anthologies, as witness his being coupled with Daniel in A Selection from the Poetry of Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, ed. H. C. Beeching, London 1899; his complete works were collected only rather late (ed. J. W. Hebel et al., 5 vols, Oxford 1931–1941), though the last score of years have seen a revival of interest attested by biographies and monographs. Until a short time ago, O. Elton’s book, Michel Drayton: A Critical Study, London 1905, 1966, was quoted as authoritative. Whose property lay on the banks of the river Ancor: as I say, Drayton is by definition the rivers’ poet.

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the Bucolics of Virgil and their remakes by Mantuan, an influence that after 1579 fused with that, far more magnetic, of Spenser. Having debuted in 1591 with a rather unpromising biblical paraphrase, Drayton came to the fore with Idea, The Shepheardes Garland,4 nine eclogues inspired by Spenser’s Calender but without its archaisms, and revised, enlarged and for once improved in 1606. The pure lyrical song soars upwards especially in the ninth,5 where shepherd Batte gently objects to dense Gorbo that Daffadil (sic) is not a flower, punning on the name, homonymous with that of the narcissus. Drayton here identifies himself, like Spenser with Colin Clout, with a Rowland singing in praise of Beta, or Elizabeth, trying to move hard Idea, the same woman implored in the sonnets (nobleman Goodere’s daughter Anna, in 1606 already married to another). The collection Ideas Mirror, first issued in 1594, was revised, pruned, and the number of sonnets increased, its prosody and its very linguistic and structural form modified, in the course of twenty-five years and eight reprints; and in 1619 it was republished simply as Idea.6 This is the only work in Drayton’s canon that still can and must be read in its entirety. Its rank is confirmed by the assonances still readily perceptible between its poems and preceding, contemporary and even later ones, in which comparisons Drayton is not necessarily the loser, quite the contrary. Boasts, rodomontade and brusqueness show Drayton akin to Marlowe, had the latter ever written sonnets, or to Wyatt. Many hypotheses have been made, without any final conclusion, regarding loans and borrowings between Drayton and Shakespeare. No. 61 of the 1619 edition – ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’, judged by an infatuated Rossetti the most beautiful ever written in English – has been compared with those of a number

4 5 6

The pastoral motif is continued in Endimion and Phoebe of 1595, parts of which were incorporated in 1606 into a short satirical poem fraught with astrological references. In the first edition. A French collection (by Claude de Pontoux), on which it was modelled, has an identical title. The Platonic allusion is explained in sonnet 17 on Time, who must tell posterity the poet has seen, reflected in Idea, Spenser’s whole ‘heavenly beauty’. Also a sonnet on ‘miracles’ refers to the purifying influence that frees Man from all dross. I shall use the numeration appearing in the 1619 edition.

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of poets, but especially echoes the diction of Donne7 and foreshadows his follower Browning,8 thanks to the quivering dramatic pulse and the compact, dialectic, dialogic and rhetorical structure. Here the first twelve lines boldly, and in the grand manner of drama, notify the poet’s farewell to his beloved, and the final couplet questions it, the poet giving the lie to his own words. In the wild wilderness of late seventeenth-century sonnet sequences, Idea stands out for its emphasis on the human dignity of a lover that does not humbly kneel nor flatters, and also for its linguistic mimesis and its graphic, often shocking boldness. The internal rhetoric must necessarily be based on Sidney’s eminent convention of the literal truth of whatever may seem exaggerated, since all the poet says, oxymora and hyperboles included, is true.9 In his introductory sonnet Drayton clearly warns that this is not the songbook of a weeping man, but of the challenging male: he will write dry-eyed, with no diaphragms and screens between his mind and his words. This results on the page in frequent sudden lapses of the orderly syntactic chain, and also in climax, aposiopesis, verbal ellipses and anacoluthon. Sonnet 6 breaks into a discursive mode that seems to ape verbatim a famous opening in Hamlet (‘How many paltry, foolish, painted things […] shall be forgotten’), converging then on the recurrent note of Shakespeare’s sonnets, art making eternal the beauty doomed to fade. Drayton is the arch-anti-Petrarch in his horrid vision of the beloved one’s body wasted after death, her skeleton, skull and empty eye-sockets in full view (sonnet 8); or even in sonnet 2 on the murdered heart’s blood still wetting like a vampire’s the lips of the mistress, who will be tried and found guilty. With exasperated frankness the poet curses unhelpful Cupid

7 8 9

C. S. Lewis is right, as he often is, in stressing the most apt echo (ELS, 496). On the next page he enthuses over a couplet which, however, encloses a concept already enunciated by Sidney. Especially, for its conceptual dynamism, the ballad ‘The Last Ride Together’. Sonnet 14, with a verbal ellipsis in l. 13, turns on the superiority of Idea (having robbed heaven of virtue and beauty, and brought them to earth without being punished) over Prometheus, a poor, punished thief in comparison. Sonnet 34 is an example of Drayton’s partiality to anaphora.

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(sonnet 36). It is no less true that several sonnets addressed to the beloved are tame, mannered and insipid, like many short imaginary dialogues and skirmishes, or others based on trite extended metaphors, thus confirming Drayton’s poetic discontinuity.10 3. Very soon after, Drayton chose to turn to historical poetry with a memorial and celebratory intent, and four legends were dedicated to ‘tragedies’ (in the well-established sense the term had acquired from Chaucer to the Mirror for Magistrates) of victims of upheavals and disasters. Mortimeriados (1596), in seven-line-stanzas turned into octaves like The Barons’ War (1603), analyses the times of Edward II and the war of the barons headed by Mortimer, redeeming itself with some brilliant pictures of voluptuous alcove scenes (in the ‘Mortimer’s tower’, where Drayton’s ekphrastic art can shine, rather than in the awkwardness of the tale proper). England’s Heroicall Epistles, verse letters modelled on Ovid’s Heroides, but exchanged between living or contemporary people,11 in rhymed iambic lines that have seemed to many a foreshadowing of Pope, are rather passages of dramatic monologues, at times dreamy, at times bitter and solemn. In the one by King Henry to Rosemond – a sort of address by a desdichado – whole lines are dotted with alliterating anaphoras, and the periods are structured in asyndetic staccato. A collection of odes (1619) in the classic mode of Horace and Catullus, or mythological, includes, besides delicious ‘canzonets’, his best-known ballad, the patriotic ‘The Ballad of Agincourt’. Poly-Olbion (that is, ‘rich with many gifts’), in eighteen cantos in 1612, with the addition of twelve more in 1622, in couplets of alexandrines, is an erudite and topographic poem of quite a novel kind. Despite the energy Drayton lavished on it, the work was a failure and very soon gained the

10

11

Idea was often associated with Fidessa (a vaguely Spenserian name), a collection by Bartholomew Griffin (died in 1602), where the exquisite sonnet 37 stands out, and with Chloris by William Swift (ca. 1560-ca. 1601). It cannot be wondered that Drayton tried the card of drama as one of Henslowe’s hack-writers. He collaborated in more than twenty plays, prevalently with Dekker. He wrote no kind of prose, or none survives, apart from prefaces to collective editions, concerned with prosody. Among them there is one of Surrey to Geraldine.

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reputation, not contested even in our time, of the most prolix and boring poem ever written in English. Spenser, too, devoted some of his cantos to personified English rivers, but their reading is more optional. Such matter was to be successfully vitalized much later by Edward Thomas12 or Joyce in ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’. Poly-Olbion is a precocious verse handbook collecting shows, scenery, stories, legends, digressions and curios, during a walk through England as far as the Scottish border, although the poet may not have wandered in all places and along all the rivers he describes (he had used instead William Camden’s Latin compilation, Britannia [1586]). The desire for novelty by then was quenched and extinct, and in his last decade Drayton retraced his steps, and wrote Mosaic paraphrases and pastoral odes.13 Mythological fables, the yearningly imagined golden age14 with the loves of shepherds for nymphs, could, however, disguise themselves as an antidote and an exorcism of misfortunes and lack of favour. Three or four of these last works nearly reach the peaks of a poetry purified of all dross, and the mere play of imagination. The fairy poem Nymphidia (1627), in octaves of lines of eight syllables, and a contest between Oberon and Queen Mab for the bold but helpless Pigwiggen, is a delightful parody of Chaucer, Spenser, and above all Shakespeare.15 § 69. Daniel There is a similarity between Samuel Daniel (1562–1619) and Michael Drayton, but it is vague, and not such as to justify their appearing in handbooks and aide-mémoires always as a pair, one next to the other, mentioned in the same breath so as to form a proverbial duo. They were the same age and both worked before and after 1603, starting as Elizabethans and ending up as Jacobeans. With mixed fortune they were part of the court

12 Volume 7, § 65.4. 13 The Agincourt ballad became an epic battle, significantly deteriorating. 14 In Muses’ Elizium (1630), an introductory hymn with ‘nimphalls’ where shepherds contend for a nymph’s hand, in various metres, as in the interludes in Sidney’s Arcadia. 15 Drayton is one of the first to name in an English poem Cervantes, ironically comparing King Oberon’s fury to that of the hidalgo.

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entourage as professional writers,1 and left a mark, though not indelible, almost throughout the whole range of poetic, dramatic and prose genres.2 Above all they composed, by chance or intent, not only a collection of sonnets dedicated to the umpteenth conventional name like Stella, Cynthia, Diana, Caelica and others,3 but also a very large verse epic on events of recent English history.4 The analogy ends here, and if there is someone resembling Daniel more it is Fulke Greville: not by chance did both issue from the Wilton creative smithy, whose tutelary goddess was Countess Mary Pembroke, Sidney’s sister. For all that, neither the one nor the other succeed in rivalling the Mozart-like impishness of Sidney’s first Arcadia. The son of a musician and the brother of an excellent composer, Daniel, like Sidney, had travelled to France and Italy (in Padua he visited Guarini),5 as an aristocrat’s companion. His grand tour (a practice which by then was obsolete) did not take him, however, as far as central Europe; from there he went back home in 1592. Daniel is an example of the bivalent attitude prevailing among the last Elizabethans towards the continental influence of France and Italy; he absorbs it cum grano salis, fusing it with a patriotic, chauvinist feeling ‘coloured with biblical reflexes’,6 and imposing the stereotype of an English-born ‘living God’. The single, controlled fanaticism of Daniel is a similar Messianic design. The historical compilation, which had already fascinated Ralegh, unites Daniel and Drayton. The huge poem

1 2

3 4 5 6

Daniel’s collected works were edited by his brother quite soon after his death, in 1623. A veiled panegyric of James I’s power – England as the country of peace thanks to the wise king – is Daniel’s The Vision of Twelve Goddesses (1604). Wordsworth and Coleridge exceedingly admired Hymen’s Triumph (1615) for the simplicity and naturalness of its style. For an almost complete list of sonnet collections until Greville see CHI, vol. III, 256–7. The splendid ‘pastoral’ on the golden age is at once a translation (from Guarini’s Pastor Fido, IV.9.1394–1461) and a re-creation. As a confirmation, the masque The Queen’s Arcadia drew inspiration from Guarini, but much later, in 1606. PSL, 70.

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in octaves on the War of the Roses, The Civil Wars7 (in eight books, published between 1595 and 1609), which inspired Shakespeare’s Richard II, was continued in prose as a true historic work on England. Daniel – mild, reserved, unpretending, something of a gaffeur, at least spiritually a Puritan – comes across as an antithesis, a contrast and a blatant disproof, apart from the pale exception of Greville, of the typical Elizabethan author. For years he worked as a tutor, a figure that was to become the target of satire in the opera buffa and the picaresque novel. With time he also became a somewhat servile court-poet, the censor of entertainments, submissive to the whims of James’s queen, Anne of Denmark, for whom he composed a masked ball where she danced, for which he was rewarded with rich stipends and estates, and even a farm. 2. Bloodless, timid, fearful Daniel had found credit with Spenser, who hailed him as the new shepherd born to eclipse all other poets; but after only a few years Daniel fell to the anathema always cast on all pedants. He knew how to handle language (Browne);8 but he was the shadow of a poet, indeed not a poet ( Jonson); perhaps he should rather have written his epic on the civil war in prose (Drayton). Nevertheless it was Wordsworth himself, the sedate Romantic Wordsworth, who, when Daniel had long been forgotten, turned to him and his moralizing epistles, particularly one to the Countess of Cumberland.9 Coleridge, too, reminded Lamb that reading Daniel taught men to be more responsible and engaged members of Parliament, that is to say, Elyot’s true ‘governors’.10 Since T. S. Eliot seems not to have passed judgement on Daniel, the critical evaluation of him 7 In The Civil Wars, which several scholars still analyse in detail, Daniel follows chronology closely and without imaginary variants, so that it is a fatiguing verse chronicle like a Bruce or a Wallace. The year 1586 had seen the publication of the first part of Albion’s England by William Warner (1558–1609), a confused but also amusing fresco of English history from the Flood to Mary Stuart’s beheading, increased to sixteen books in 1606. 8 Not Thomas but William Browne of Tavistock (BAUGH, vol. II, 402 n. 3). 9 In The Excursion Wordsworth quotes a couplet by Daniel taken from this epistle (an eulogium of the virtuous spiritual life), echoing in turn Sidney’s apothegm of the ‘erected wit’ of man (§ 48. 2). 10 CHI, vol. IV, 132, and BEL, 95, with many more, observe that Daniel might be seen as an Elizabethan Matthew Arnold.

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remained that of those critics who identified literary excellence with a show of masculine, not to say reckless, impulsivity. Taking a leap to present-day criticism we find Daniel demolished for uttering banal aesthetic views and ignorant opinions on literature, even for having scant ear for verse.11 If all that has been said so far is true, we could hardly explain Delia,12 since it presages a friction between poetics, genre rules and codes, and textual evidence. Erotic sonnets had by definition to mime and render the nuances of love, but always take passion for granted, and Daniel was not a passionate man. So it was surmised that this work did not express his heart, but was a collection written according to an established fashion. Did he transfigure into Delia13 his wife, more modestly called Justina? We may find a key to its writing in a few final sonnets expressly marked as ‘made at the author’s leaving for Italy’: they recall that the collection was written and published by a thirty-year-old Daniel, transfiguring, if ever, an immature youthful love. The main historical readers have not been much impressed by Delia, and the assertion that he adorns commonplaces, transforms banal and trite concepts into beauties, and verifies Jakobson’s ‘poetic function’ (that it does not do to translate verse into prose), has become a prudent Solomonic euphemism.14 Like all other Elizabethan sonneteers, he imitates Frenchmen and Italians, yet not pedantically translating, but re-interpreting them with a good deal of autonomy. He has left English readers with unusually 11

C. S. Lewis’s presentation, subdivided according to the genres Daniel practised, is for this once confused and quite inconsistent: after fanatically decreeing Campion’s absolute superiority to Daniel qua artist (ELS, 434), he ends an objective rehabilitation of him with the indefensible statement that Daniel, while not one of the greatest English poets, is ‘the most interesting man of letters whom [the] century produced in England’ (531). 12 Half of the fifty sonnets were issued as a supplement to the 1591 pirated edition of Astrophel and Stella; the whole number one year later, with a flattering accompanying letter to the Countess of Pembroke, praising her brother, Sidney. The prosody consists of three quatrains plus a couplet. 13 Scève had already written poems on a homonymous Delia, a spiritual and quintessential beauty. 14 See ELS, 492. It must be noted that C. S. Lewis had said, about fifty pages above, that Daniel, as a theoretician, reduces poetry and its essence to its content, although not all poets stand by the rules and norms they dictate to themselves.

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effective and pregnant single lines, or dry isolated couplets, or graceful and unusual images, which perhaps prove his inability to develop and bring them to fulfilment. They actually reveal an educated taste, but are anonymous, with correct rhythmic and conceptual structures despite frequent enjambments, and with rare neologisms or precious words, counterbalanced by occasional lapses into slovenliness. The majority are sonnets addressing the woman that is deaf to the lover’s pleas. The absence of an inner story is felt until before the middle of the collection; and after all some sonnets create an argumentative chain by means of recurring links between their first line and the last of the preceding sonnet. At the opening Daniel lets the remembrance of a hopeless passion emerge as the reason itself for the poetry, which might else have remained silent if the beloved had accepted his love. This is the metadiscursive rhetorical justification of the songbook, stressing its own precarious reason to exist: the poet must merely repeat his hopeless complaint, at most illustrating it with variants and mythological parallels (Pygmalion, Acteon). Hence he modestly halves the conventional number of the 100 erotic sonnets. The ‘error’ of falling in love must be read first of all in the literal sense. There is a small bend in such a stalled tale when the poet tells himself that irremovable Delia, being subject only to Time’s mastery, can and must move. This spins a thread of hope. Besides, the poet encourages himself like Browning much later, reflecting that it has been more honourable to fight than lay down his arms from the start, and that nothing is won without risk. Delia errs in not sharing her beauty, for she herself one day shall wilt like the rose, no one having enjoyed the perfume of her beauty; and only the lover will triumph, the hero that will go on loving Delia of the wilted beauty, but a repentant Delia. The goal is still far away, and the songbook closes with the therapy found at the end of certain later epistolary novels; travelling will help to turn away from her. 3. Delia was published together with a Complaint of Rosamund, where Henry II’s favourite, echoing the tones of Delia’s final sonnets, laments the eclipse of beauty and youth, in a kind of revival of the sections of Mirror for Magistrates. This monologue (with connecting links and subtitles) reveals Daniel’s subsequent didactic intent, which would have found a better medium in the dramatic, rather than purely lyrical genre. Dialogue became Daniel’s favourite and most practised vehicle to highlight in the

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dialectic contest the superiority of ethical ideals: this happens in the dialogue between Ulysses and a siren (1605), where Ulysses rejects the seductions of the Lotus-eaters’ life, mentioning love for the classics and the stoical renunciation of pleasure. Still dialogical, Musophilus (a distant memory of Ascham’s Toxophilus, and dedicated to Greville), sets against the eponymous character a Cosmophilus who avers that poetry is useless and action worthier than pure knowledge, but he is refuted and defeated.15 This is clearly a verse transposition of Sidney’s argument in the Defence, and a trait d’union with Daniel’s poetics: the rhyme seen as a compulsive, ordering force that quenches chaos and imposes form, discipline and limits wild and over-flowing fancy. This conservative aim is confirmed by late celebratory works. Greville and Daniel are the chief erudite or classicist playwrights who in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the two Jacobean decades wrote on subjects of ancient or mythological history, rather than staging contemporary events even in imaginary, romance versions. These plays are not in prose, but adopt the rigorous prosodic form of quatrains, rhymed couplets or other verse solutions. A third and fourth feature is that such works were performed, but not for a long time, being unsuitable for the stage, owing to the too lengthy and solemn speeches that punctuated them. A Cleopatra was completed in two versions, in 1594 and 1607,16 and a Philotas (1605), on the trial of the favourite of Alexander the Great, had to be defended against the charge of having indirectly approved the Earl of Essex’s conspiracy. Daniel’s several masques, generally insipid and exhibiting scant scenic invention, nevertheless contain very elegant choruses and exquisitely graceful interludes.

15

16

Daniel stated against Campion, in a Defence of Rhyme whose title openly alludes to Sidney, that rhyme in English poetry is acceptable; its main point is a sort of cuius regio eius religio applied to prosody. There is a general consensus in defining this little treatise a model of sober classical English, without affectations or archaisms. The impressive epilogue of Cleopatra’s death, in decasyllables with alternate rhymes, expanding, without losing in the comparison, the much soberer treatment given by Shakespeare, is a singular anticipation of Browning’s dramatic monologues, being spoken by a messenger.

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§ 70. Other sonneteers and pastoral poets From the number of anonymous, half-anonymous and identifiable poets gathered in the two main anthologies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, The Phoenix Nest and England’s Helicon, we must pick out and remember Richard Barnfield (1574–1627), a first ‘Shropshire lad’ (like Housman, much later, he studied at Oxford), and the author in 1594 and 1595 of two collections of pastoral poems of limited extent, imitative of Spenser and even more of Sidney. His The Affectionate Shepherd, in various sections, paves the way for homoerotic romance telling of the love of old Daphnis for the young shepherd Ganymede, whom he tries to seduce by making lists of the true joys and pleasures of pastoral life, seasoned with rigmaroles of trite maxims. Cynthia earned him a favourable mention in that very review of senior men of letters, compiled by Meres, which hailed Shakespeare’s advent. The work gives an ample vision of Olympians convened in a magic clearing, revealing in the closing the intent to exalt Cynthia, or Queen Elizabeth, as the essence of every earthly virtue, over the trio of the most beautiful goddesses. However, Cynthia has an appendix of twenty sonnets, still concerning the shepherd Daphnis’ vain love for inflexible Ganymede, of which sonnets Barnfield would not seem the author for they are cold, intellectualistic, at times even erudite and pedantic, not pathetic and frantic but analytical; and yet, in other cases, pleasantly and cunningly malicious, rich with exquisite, fanciful mythological anecdotes.1 In 1598 Barnfield, after publishing a third equally brief, brassy collection of satires in praise of ‘Lady Pecunia’, inexplicably ceased writing for the next thirty years, and went on living as a country gentleman. His homoerotic lyrics have roused the interest of gender criticism, but he has also been studied as one of the first imitators of Shakespeare the

1

No. 7 addresses, like Spenser in ‘Epithalamion’, ‘sweet Thames’, and hails loved Ganymede as a swan. In witty no. 9 Venus, a hypostasis of the biblical God, creates an Adam melting a ‘snowy form’ with the blood pouring from Diana’s punctured foot. In no. 11 Daphnis hands Ganymede a mirror and Ganymede, like Sidney’s Pyrocles, looking into it, finds he is himself the source of that grief. No. 13, in the form of echo, also evokes Sidney.

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sonneteer; two of Barnfield’s most famous poems were in fact included in The Passionate Pilgrim.2 2. Nicholas Breton3 (1553–1625) has been thought by a few, possibly on account of an erroneous date of birth, shifted back to 1542, or of his fondness for the ‘poulterer’s measure’ and for medieval allegory, a latecomer belonging to the age of Wyatt4 and Surrey. But his activity spreads over more than forty years, and if from Phoenix we progress to Helicon a metrical improvement becomes evident. The line of fourteen syllables is broken into rhyming halves, and flows smoothly, with no stumbling or monotonous pace. The terse, rarefied, graceful and often melodious pastoral songs of The Passionate Shepheard5 (1604), where shepherds lament and enjoy their loves, contain the poet’s freshest muse, unlike his longer allegorical poems dedicated to patrons, one of them to Sidney’s sister. But in the course of those forty years, Breton sheds his skin, is born again and becomes another type of writer, turns his back on pastoral poetry and puts his name to works that show him to be an author as bizarre and unusual as Sterne. He touches the preludes of genres yet to come, like the dialogical treatise, the sports handbook,6 the epistolary novel, and especially the dry, concise essay à la Francis Bacon. In other words he is not an epigone but an anticipator, no longer fitting the category assigned to him. He went on writing verse, but more biting and less enchanted, and devoted himself prevalently to moral-

2 3

4 5 6

Specifically the two beginning with the lines ‘As it fell upon a day’ and ‘If music and sweet poetry agree’. His mother, the widow of a London merchant, married the poet George Gascoigne (§ 45.1). He may have studied at Oxford, and lived in London, but we know little else (even of his religion, seemingly wavering between the two faiths). His production is enormous, and many of his works, even single, short occasional compositions, printed as pamphlets, have become bibliographical rarities. There is a complete anastatic edition of verse and prose, ed. A. B. Grosart, 2 vols, 1879. In 1893 Grosart took out of it a useful anthology with the title A Bower of Delights, London 1893. There is no doubt that Astrophel’s song to Phyllis and Corydon plays on the term ‘hap’, patently echoing Wyatt (§ 42.5). ‘Passionate’ is the last appellation of the shepherd in the series beginning with Guarini’s fido. Actually the songs in the third person more often relate to a ‘silly’ shepherd. On fishing, before Walton.

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izing prose essays. The Good and the Bad (1615) and Characters upon Essays (1616) are lists of remarks on human life and activities, and of contrasting examples of honesty, vanity and vice, in such a concise and neutral prose, so full of self-evident observations, that one suspects a parodic intention. The twenty-four small pictures of Fantastickes (perhaps 1604) are most literally genre productions, equally dry, already prefiguring the moods of Lamb, Thackeray and Alexander Smith. Post with a Mad Packet of Letters7 (1602) contains precocious preludes to the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. 3. Of the gifted and chameleon-like Barnabe Barnes (1569–1609) only fragmentary and legendary information is available. A friend of Spenser’s friend, Harvey, he was pilloried by Campion, tried as a poisoner, known to many as Shakespeare’s possible rival poet in his sonnets 78–86. His two main works have lain unreprinted for many centuries after their first edition. One, The Devil’s Charter (1607), is a dark, anti-popery tragedy that exposes the Roman Curia’s corruption and fancies Pope Alexander VI in the devil’s claws (Barnes was the son of a Protestant bishop);8 the other is the collection, clearly in Sidney’s wake but with the unhappy title, Parthenophil and Parthenope (1593), a miscellany of sonnets, elegies, madrigals, sestinas and odes.9 The lover’s loves flow in sonnets alternating with madrigals, in a much too easy, discursive and digressive vein, exuberant to the point of cloying, which has made Barnes appear Daniel’s opposite. No. 31 is made of lines all ending in exclamatory marks;10 madrigal no. 13 and its opposite sonnet 63 even contain salacious details. The appendix, perhaps even bulkier, includes another series of elegies, songs and pastoral odes, the latter more concise and in shorter prosodic forms, and thus much fresher, all centred on the poet’s unhappy love for Parthenope.11 A ‘divine century of spiritual

7 8 9 10 11

Each of them, eighty-six in all, deals with a different contextual situation, to be inferred from the letter itself. See the brief comment in PMI, 132. His collected poems were published in the nineteenth century in two volumes, only thirty copies printed, ed. A. B. Grosart, London 1875. Song no. 1 is also full of question and exclamatory marks. The exquisite ode no. 13 is in stanzas with varying metres, and lines as short as three syllables.

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sonnets’, rather routine-like, does not make Barnes less of an erotic, licentious, and yet pastoral poet; especially an able wordsmith. § 71. Davies and Davies of Hereford It is no wonder that three public characters at the end of the sixteenth century bore the name John Davies or Davis, these Christian names and surnames being even today widely coupled in England. We have already met or will meet two Lodges, two Jonsons or Johnsons (apart from others), several Thomsons and Thompsons, half a dozen Halls. It is less easy to believe that, while one John Davis discovered and mapped out the Falkland Islands, the other two John Davies, contemporaries, wrote works of the same kind and within the same areas of interest, and works that categorically reject and repel, in that busy end of the century, the dominant poetic form. They are, therefore, a tangible mark of transition, since, leaving the sonneteers’ sugary tones – their poses, laments, ravings and pastoral disguises – and discarding the old modes, they, with others, gave rise to a more grown-up, more reflective, less emotional poetry. The first Davies frankly defined as ‘bastard’ the sonnets written by despicable rhymesters ‘to their own shame and poetry’s disgrace’.1 The sceptical vein of pervasive doubt concerning the cognitive faculties of the human mind are late Baroque in approach, and the epistemic area is that of the melancholy of Hamlet and of Burton’s Anatomy. The new genre launched by them is the short philosophical poem; but it is still more curious that the two writers had a primary role in the English revival – or rather in the advent – of epigrammatic poetry. The judgement on one of them, Davies of Hereford – who daily risks fading from history – is as varying as the judgement on the other is chivalrous and flattering. 2. Born in Wiltshire, educated at Oxford, the brilliant Sir John Davies (1569–1626) attended the London law school and was a London lawyer in the first thirty years of his life; in the next thirty he acted as a diplomat, civil official and diligent Crown servant at the highest levels.2 In his youth 1 2

Quoted in CHI, vol. III, 268. He was part of the embassy that brought the news of the queen’s death to James of Scotland, who made him Attorney General for Ireland. Therefore he also wrote

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he must have been no angel, if we are to believe that a colleague, having spread an offensive rumour about him, was cudgelled by Davies, who was then expelled from the lawyers’ register until 1601. This watershed in his biography is reflected in his poetry, as his impulsive, sanguine temper was restrained, and quiet, sedate reflection followed. That distressing incident produced a real change, a complete self-reformation. Practically before he was thirty Davies had written the whole of his poetry.3 He began as an author of epigrams, attacking under Latin nicknames several public characters of the time, without any check or scruple, with a barbed wit worthy of an Augustan a century in advance. It is a small, dry file of pictures on the loose life, hypocrisy and squalor of the fabled Elizabethan court, in my opinion Davies’s masterpiece. Orchestra or a Poem of Dancing4 (written in a fortnight in 1594 but published only 1596, in 131 rhyme royals, much polished for all that) is then somewhat dissonant. Its classical frame is meant to veil a didactic purpose. Antinous wishes to persuade Queen Penelope to dance, and he finds analogies between rhythm, dance figures and God-created nature, an idea discussed a century before by Elyot, and quite a recurrent if not trite metaphor of the world’s image – the cosmic dance – derived from the Florentine Platonists and Ficino. Homer’s plot is reworked and completed with no reverential awe, with witty exchanges between the two adversaries, almost as in the form of a parody. However, for nearly everybody Davies is the author of Nosce Teipsum (1599), which, as said above, was perhaps the demonstration of an attained maturity, after Davies had been, in youth, a reckless scapegrace. The poem has the markedly personal flavour of a deeply felt experience, rather than of purely abstract speculation. The morbid process of self-analysis may remind one of Wordsworth, Hopkins or Whitman. The initial cue lies in the awareness that by wishing to know evil one may harm oneself, which echoes the Faustian theme only just then explored by Marlowe. But it is most

3 4

reports on Ireland that might be useful today in a postcolonial perspective (on their value see BEL, 227). Back home Davies entered Parliament, and died having been Lord Chief Justice. I follow the complete collection ed. A. B. Grosart, 2 vols, London 1876. The dedicatee of the poem is the same rival he had assaulted, with whom he had made peace. The author called it a ‘suddaine, rash, half-capreol of my wit’.

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important to know, not the outer, but the inner world, one’s own self. Davies’s Platonist assumption is that the soul exists independently of the body, where it is imprisoned; the soul is the centre where knowledge and apprehension reside, and the senses receive their directions. But this discourse is accompanied by the Protestant and Calvinist warning that Man may be corrupted because of original sin. Nevertheless the poem soon becomes prolix and repetitive, and turns into a verse treatise of psychology and a classification of human faculties (Coleridge, its admirer, on reading it came across a short dissertation on imagination), complete with numbered sections, objections and replies, as in a scholastic summa or in Spinoza’s Ethics. Another quirk of fancy is a series of twenty acrostics to Astraea, that is, to ‘Elisabetha Regina’. Such acrobatics share something of the metaphysical, especially Herbertian, vein, although the play of images and the tissue of arguments fall back on the old patterns and guidelines of the encomiastic sonnet sequences; hence this is Davies’s most disappointing work. 3. A Welshman by birth, but settled in Oxford, a poet and master of handwriting, or calligrapher, John Davies ‘of Hereford’ (1565–1618, dates not certain) wrote as much poetry as, or perhaps even more than, Barnabe Barnes; for the same reasons he has been and is usually slated without any extenuating circumstances, but maybe too quickly or off-handedly. Wit’s Pilgrimage (date not certain, probably youthful, before 1600) came last and with few variations after so many centuries of sonnets on the theme of unrequited love. Symptomatically Mirum in Modum (1602), on divine glory and the form of the soul, chooses a different theme and register, and clearly imitates Nosce Teipsum. Microcosmos (1603), on the other hand, is inspired by Du Bartas (La Semaine, through Sylvester’s mediation) and describes the human faculties and their respective functions. The Muses’ Sacrifice (1612) is a series of too many and too prolix penitential meditations and introspective apostrophes, although now and then ringing a genuine note. But all these edifying works cannot be ranked with the collection of almost 300 epigrams entitled The Scourge of Folly (1611). It was by then the fashion to hide true targets behind Latin names, and Davies too uses a range of namesakes like Brunnus, Classus and Gorgonius and others, in epigram after epigram. In the finest of them, scurrilous and pitiless, he does not play second fiddle to the other Davies.

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§ 72. Hall The epigram contains in nuce the development of satire, and satire represented the first, harsh discordant voice and the first destabilizing literary form of the 1590s. Davies, as we have seen, or better the two Davies, set the ball rolling. Joseph Hall (1574–1656) modestly claimed he was the second, not the first English satirist, duly considering Spenser, but no one else, as his predecessor. Hall and Marston in their turn are normally quoted as rival pioneers of this new genre.1 Donne, too, had written satires, but they came to print much later. The common, sudden intent of these satirists was to erase with a single blow the sonneteers’ love poetry and the Spenserian chivalric poem. Actually, what paid the price was encomiastic poetry. In ‘Colin Clout’ Spenser had sung the praises of court life and made a myth of the queen, and then abruptly taken an angry leave, confirming his rejection with the even bitterer ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’. With late sixteenthcentury satire, Elizabethan civilization is exposed as having cracked, if not having been dismantled, overnight, and the blind or hypocritical poets that had eulogized it are unmasked. The violent frankness typical of the genre sprang from an etymological misunderstanding, for the term ‘satire’ was thought to derive from satyros, and its form had to be correspondingly as shaggy and wild as satyrs. Were it not for such roughness, Marston and Hall would be considered forerunners of the Augustans, whose heroic couplet they also use. What is surprising is that Hall was received, and commonly and proverbially defined, as ‘the good, pious bishop’ Hall of Norwich and Exeter, or at least as a moralist, polemicist and preacher: the English Seneca, and the satirical poet as well. His second career as churchman and prelate eclipsed, obliterated, or more exactly ‘removed’, that of the young satirist. For instance, in his nineteenth-century biographies no hint of his satirical works can be found, thus implying that those satires

1

Marston (whose satires will be dealt with along with his theatre in § 103), competed with Hall for the merit, which Hall claimed for himself, of being chronologically the first or second Elizabethan satirist; but having started in the same years as Hall (his first collection was publicly burnt like Hall’s satires), he became, and is still classified, as a Jacobean dramatist, and therefore associated with Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, and the spasmodic ménage of the early seventeenth century.

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had been a short-lived parenthesis, a forgettable weakness, even a little skeleton in his cupboard.2 Hall’s autobiography3 offers the classic case of a Jekyll and Hyde personality; it is direct, clarifying, God-fearing, but extremely reticent, and you would not believe it was written by one who decades before had jotted down those harsh, acrid satires. In his second identity, Hall is part of the story of the inner conflicts of mid-seventeenthcentury Protestantism. 2. The scholar of Hall must, if possible, seek a cause for his outburst of satirical inspiration, and see if, and how long it persisted. His mother was a fervid Calvinist, suffering from hallucinations and mystical ravings, and Hall was left an orphan. His family, living in a village near Leicester, was very poor, also because Hall had several siblings, and his education ran the risk of being interrupted for lack of means. However, he had been destined from birth to a Church career, and at Cambridge University he distinguished himself so well that at the age of twenty-one he was made a lecturer in rhetoric. In 1603 he was already the rector of a Suffolk parish, and married. Information on these thirty years is too scant and superficial to let us guess at the inner genesis of Virgidemiarum,4 six books of satires, three in 1597 (‘toothless’) and three in 1598 (‘biting’), a work without a skeleton or a guiding principle, seemingly not caring who it addressed, or addressing the author himself in a series of private broodings, although formally irreproachable.5 Its communicative pattern is a surprising foreshadowing of young Browning’s aphasia at the time of Sordello. That is to say, we receive 2

A modern collected edition of Hall’s poetry was published as late as 1949 (The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. A. Davenport, Liverpool 1949). Davenport also authored, with T. F. Kinloch, Life and Works of Joseph Hall, London 1951. That Hall’s satires were published together with Herbert’s poems in 1860 is a symptom of a ‘teleological’ interpretation of Hall’s poems. 3 Large passages of it can be found for example in Bishop Hall, His Life and Times, ed. J. Jones, London 1826. 4 Or, The vintage of rods. 5 To its partial justification, we could surmise that allusions and innuendos now lost to us were immediately grasped by readers of that time. Late sixteenth-century scholars, besides, could promptly decode echoes of classical satire as well as of current literature. Hall’s satires, however, are often furnished by the author with explanatory footnotes.

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the impression that the work was the fruit of bitter disappointment and of inner, unvented and still gnawing vexations, connected to experiences of repression, repulse or revengefulness. Once Hall was noticed, co-opted and promoted, his register became softer. In the satires, on the contrary, his manner is taut and rhapsodic. Actually, it is more exactly Pindaric, for he jumps from one theme to another, without locating and introducing, just vaguely alluding, so that he forces upon the reader an always uncertain interpretation. General theme and target can be grasped, but in the midst of a mass of mere hints. Sometimes Hall allows himself a simile and tells anecdotes he seems to have been involved in, but very soon gets himself into a mess. For all that, we quickly realize that he is prosodically and especially lexically uncommonly talented,6 but too discontinuous, and unable to let his material flow more softly. A symptom of this is his calling satire a porcupine wounding the listener’s cheeks and eyes. In the general proem Hall cannot help pointing out that these lines of his are made use of to reproach the world and vice. In the course of the work he takes to task militant literary genres, exposes their insincerity, affectations and bombast, and moves on to the professions, all bent on satisfying greed and gluttony. Book II expatiates on an elegy of the happy primitive ages without comfort and refined pleasures; the following books, more prolix, review and scourge capital vices. 3. Hall’s satires were therefore considered destructive and revolutionary, as witnessed by their being publicly burned with other harmful and pornographic works, by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hall’s second work, but perhaps the first in reputation, is Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608); it is the prose work of a well-known curate and preacher, by then given to milder counsel. Always a classicist, Hall had followed, shortly after Breton, the model of Theophrastus’ sketch. These rather cold, largely paratactical medallions, enormously improved as to clarity and order, are divided into the two planned sections: but the matter, especially in the second, is 6

Nearly all the editions of his poems, even the historical ones, include a large glossary, like those of Chaucer and the medieval poets. Davenport himself, in the edition mentioned above in n. 2, admits to not having been able to clarify some obscure passages, as after all is common in Juvenal’s satirical tradition (v, xxv).

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the same as in the satires. In describing vice the diction becomes livelier, even venomous when it focuses on certain types of which contemporary drama was occupying itself, like the ‘malcontent’ and the whimsical. With James I’s ascent to the throne, Hall was frequently employed as the royal delegate at the synods, a member of missions to foreign courts, and the Crown’s mouthpiece in Church issues. Made a bishop in 1626, although he was considered an extreme Puritan, he kept a mid-way position with regard to Catholics, but nevertheless Archbishop Laud suspected him of being a Calvinist and obliged him to solemnly disapprove of Presbyterianism. Hall’s last fifteen years confirm the view of a personality totally different from that of his early years. In 1641 he was tried and condemned in Parliament for violation of the Praemunire, deprived of his bishopric and imprisoned in the Tower. Released on bail, his bishop’s mansion was raided by the Puritans of his Norwich diocese. Hall went through this calvary preaching and writing, honoured by many for his patience, humbleness and devotion. Mundus alter et idem (1605), a Latin utopia, was never denounced as apocryphal by Hall. A work still close in time to the satires, it retains its scathing mark. § 73. Donne* I: The holy sinner and the ‘querelle’ on concettism John Donne (1572–1631) described himself as permanently fluctuating, or, worse, masochistically submitting to self-torture: ‘Oh, to vex me, 1

*

The Poems of John Donne, ed. H. C. Grierson, 2 vols, Oxford 1912, 1951; The Divine Poems, ed. H. Gardner, London 1952, 1978; The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. H. Gardner, Oxford 1965; Songs and Sonets, ed. T. Redpath, London 1964, 1983; The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith, Harmondsworth 1971, 1982; The Complete Poems, ed. R. Robbins, London 2011. The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. G. A. Stringer in various vols, Bloomington, IN 1995–, is in course of publication. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and E. Simpson, 10 vols, London 1953–1962; Ignatius His Conclave (with Latin parallel text), ed. T. S. Healy, Oxford 1969; Selected Prose, ed. E. M. Simpson, H. Gardner and T. Healy, Oxford 1967; Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. J. Hayward, London and New York 1930. The main Italian editions of Donne’s works (almost all with original parallel text and detailed introductions) are Sermoni, ed. M. Guidacci, Firenze 1946; Rime sacre, ed. E. Giachino, Torino 1953; Poesie scelte, ed. S. Rosati, Napoli 1958; Selected

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Poems – Death’s Duell, ed. G. Melchiori, Bari 1968, also editor of Liriche sacre e profane. Anatomia del mondo. Duello della morte, Milano 1983; Poesie amorose, Poesie teologiche, ed. C. Campo, Torino 1971; Poesie, eds A. Serpieri and S. Bigliazzi, Milano 2009. Life. I. Walton, The Life of John Donne, Dr. in Divinity and late Dean of Saint Paul, London 1640; E. Gosse, Life and Letters of John Donne, London 1899, Gloucester, MA 1959; E. Le Comte, Grace to a Witty Sinner: A Life of Donne, New York 1965; R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life, Oxford 1970; G. Parfitt, Donne: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1989; D. L. Edwards, John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit, New York 2001; J. Stubbs, Donne: The Reformed Soul, London 2006. Criticism. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), included in ESE, 281–91; E. M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, Oxford 1924, 1948; E. Legouis, Donne the Craftsman: An Essay upon the Structure of ‘Songs and Sonets’, Paris 1928; G. Williamson, The Donne Tradition, New York 1930; A Garland for John Donne, ed. T. Spencer, Cambridge, MA 1931, Gloucester, MA 1958; V. Woolf, ‘Donne After Three Centuries’, in TCR, Second Series, 24–39; C. S. Lewis, ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’, in Seventeenth Century Studies presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, Oxford 1938, 64–84 (an insightful historical-critical survey, marred by the assumption that Donne is a ‘perpetually excited’ poet, unable to understand and explain the reasons of his excitement; a thesis impugned word by word in J. Bennett’s essay which follows it in that book, 85–104); J. B. Leishman, The Monarch of Wit, London 1951, 1959, 1962, 1967; D. Morris, The Poetry of G. M. Hopkins and T. S. Eliot in the Light of the Donne Tradition, Bern 1953 (good on Hopkins, forced if not quite wrong on Eliot); K. W. Gransden, John Donne, London 1954, Hamden, CT 1969; F. Kermode, John Donne, London 1957, reprinted as ‘John Donne’, in Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, London 1971, 1973, 116–48; M. Praz, John Donne, Torino 1958 (issued earlier as part of Secentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra, Firenze 1925); John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. H. Gardner, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1962; R. C. Bald, Donne’s Influence in English Literature, Magnolia, MA 1965; D. L. Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist: Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in the Songs and Sonnets, Detroit, MI 1966; N. J. C. Andreasen, John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary, Princeton, NJ 1967; S. Gamberini, Saggio su John Donne, La Spezia 1967; E. Menascè, ‘A Naked Thinking Heart’. Introduzione alla poesia di John Donne, Milano 1969, 1974; M. Pagnini, ‘Sulle funzioni semiologiche della poesia di John Donne’, in Critica della funzionalità, Torino 1970, 97–120; W. Sanders, John Donne’s Poetry, London 1971; A. Serpieri, ‘Sull’uso del modello comunicativo nella poesia di John Donne: “The Funeral” e “The Relique”’, in Strumenti critici, IX, 3, (1975), 275–308; A. C. Partridge, John Donne: Language and Style, London 1978; J. Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, London 1981, 1983, 1990 (one of the subtlest and most elegant reconstructions of Donne’s imaginary universe; in an appendix [266–80] to the 1990 edition Carey teases Marotti 1986 and

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contraries meet in one’, with the addition that ‘Inconstancy unnaturally has begot / A constant habit’.1 To use his own words (one the title of a lyric, the other ever-recurring in his sacred prose), he felt and showed himself to be possessed by torment up to the moment of his death, but never attaining ecstasy, that is, the peace of inner quiet. To give a preview of my assumptions, from the very beginning Donne’s work shifts between the polarities of constancy and inconstancy, an antithesis taking the form not only of conceits but also of existential concepts, positive or negative according to circumstance, with intersecting meanings: he first takes advantage of female inconstancy, then embraces and exalts constancy in Love and in his own love for a short period stolen from the mastery of time. At a later stage the constancy of faith conflicts with his own inconstancy as the ever imperfect penitent; hence constancy can be that of the static lethargy of ‘two sepulchral statues’, and inconstancy Donne’s endless effort to fulfill his mission on earth. His youthful erotic promiscuity, and an unspecified period of debauchery, carnality, atheism and sinful, systematic rebelliousness, were followed by expiation and voluntary contrition, evoking proverbial examples like St Paul, St Augustine,2 St Francis and, later, Manzoni’s Innominato, Huysmans, Franz Liszt and Tolstoy’s Father Sergius. In Donne, St Paul’s dichotomy of the ‘old’ man and the ‘new’ took the shape of a thirtyespecially Docherty 1986, mentioned below); T. G. Sherwood, Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of John Donne’s Thought, Toronto 1984; T. Docherty, John Donne, Undone, London and New York 1986; A. F. Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet, Madison, WI 1986, and, as editor, Critical Essays on John Donne, New York 1994; F. J. Warnke, John Donne, Boston, MA 1987; R. R. Ray, A John Donne Companion, New York and London 1990; S. Rufini, Scritture anamorfotiche, Napoli 1992, 67–192; CRHE, ed. A. J. Smith, London 1996; J. Johnson, The Theology of John Donne, Cambridge 1999; John Donne’s Professional Life, ed. D. Colclough, Cambridge 2003; The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. A. Gubbory, Cambridge 2006; The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. J. Shami, D. Flynn and M. T. Hester, Oxford 2011; C. Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, Oxford 2011. 1 2

Holy Sonnets, XIX, ll. 1–2. This comparison is made by Walton, who recalls the curious fact that Augustine died after the Vandals and Goths had laid waste his native place: Donne twice mentions these two barbarian hordes in his lyrics.

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year devotion to a carnal mistress, followed by another thirty-year devotion to a spiritual ‘wife’, who was at the same time ‘divinity’;3 in other terms it might be said that the aforesaid dichotomy represented the double identity of a Jack Donne (the first name almost rhyming with ‘rake’)4 and of Dean John Donne.5 Yet it is not so, for Donne strives to achieve a conversion that can never be complete in this life. He is a precociously funereal poet, in the twofold sense of the word, as he does not extol the joie de vivre or the fulfilment of sensual satisfaction, but lives in a perennial state of hallucination in which he imagines his gangrened body in the clutches of death from the moment of birth. Death, at first dreaded, is later invoked as the reunion of the body with the soul and as the moment of their return to the Creator, at the end of their earthly pilgrimage. Especially after the turn of the century, Donne’s life heads towards that eschatological goal, as part of a kind of cosmic drifting. 2. The legend of Donne as a holy sinner, or of a saint who has been a sinner, with no general and widespread knowledge of his nature and stature as a poet, prevailed throughout the seventeenth century for two reasons. His poems circulated among an élite, and were never published during his lifetime; moreover, from a statistical viewpoint, most of Donne’s poetry consists of ‘verse letters to several personages’, accompanied by short series of epitaphs, epicedia and epithalamia. When he died he had been for two decades, for the general public, par excellence the king’s chaplain, the Dean of St Paul’s, and a famous preacher, whose sermons drew enormous crowds in churches and other sacred places. Secondly, until the end of the century this saintly radiance was painted, embellished and confirmed by Izaak Walton’s biography, issued in its first edition in 1640, and in an enlarged one in 1658. Donne’s entelechy, Walton said, was already in his fervent desire, when he was in Italy at the age of twenty, to be a pilgrim to the Holy Land: his spiritual eyes were constantly looking at that goal. This 3 4 5

Hayward 1930, 479. See below on the framework of the ‘rake’s progress’ in Songs and Sonnets according to the biographical critics. An allusion to Jack Donne can be found in a letter to R. Carr dated April 1619 (see Hayward 1930, 470–1). On sacrilegious youth is ‘Litany’, st III.

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biography overlooks or hardly considers Donne’s dissipated ‘career’. It is true that Walton quotes in its entirety Donne’s letter to Bishop Morton, where he charges himself with ‘some irregularities’ in his previous life, for which, however, he had made amends by his ‘penitential resolutions’. From the first years of the seventeenth century Donne had been indeed exemplary as a husband and the father of a family; left a widower, he had cared for his offspring with admirable devotion. Walton believed that Donne had audibly received from God an explicit call, like those made to the prophets, to take holy orders; after being ordained he was regarded as a saint on earth who endeavoured to convert his neighbour like John the Baptist. He habitually visited the imprisoned, the poor and the sick, and gave his riches to the needy. The rhapsody entitled ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’ makes one suspect (in the lines ‘yet all these seem to laugh, / Compared with me, who are their epitaph’) that Donne regarded his life as a written homily, admonishing men to repent and reminding them that the destiny of flesh is corruption and death – just that, an epitaph – and as an icon of death. No other reason can be found for the many portraits that were painted of him, and which he allowed but also requested and even insisted that they be painted, and which, ordered chronologically, form a kind of escalation in their ever greater rhetorical, theatrical and Baroque mise en scene of death. The last6 has only been described by Walton in an ekphrasis, and being lost can only be imagined: it was a portrait of Donne wrapped in his shroud, his eyes closed as if awaiting death, but turned eastward.7 Donne’s poetry, after 1609 only religious and no more than occasional, deals in fact with a quite different theme, that of death as an apocalypse which is not always 6

7

Eighteen-year-old Donne, in the oval at the National Portrait Gallery (the so-called Marshall oval) is a black-suited soldier holding a sword: it expresses firmness, deliberation and thoughtfulness. The Lothian portrait of an unknown painter, of the mid1590s, also at the National Portrait Gallery, portrays him as a fashionable courtier with a black hat, equally marked features, a gloomy figure with dark eyes, prominent nose and cheekbones, flowing raven hair, a shade of moustache and a large grey collar on an embroidered coat. In Isaac Oliver’s portrait of 1616 he has become a smart court gentleman with a white ruff. It served as the model for Donne’s statue by Nicholas Stone, still standing in St Paul’s in London.

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a regeneration, but can be dreaded, if only intermittently, as extinction, without any sequitur of the vital cycle. The young Donne was an Aristotelian Thomist, but one frightened and shocked by the new scientific discoveries that turned existing knowledge upside down, and replaced the precise medieval schemes with the most varied possibilities. His starting point is a historical-ontological pessimism, identifying the world as ‘corruption’s sink’, a conviction not unknown to certain currents of continental Catholicism, but chiefly connected to Calvinism, or a branch of it, at least. In his satires and verse epistles, Donne’s main area for debate are the emblematic negative sites of court, city and countryside, in short the whole traceable universe in its then cardinal points; a fourth place is the home, but as the symbol of lonely inner life. Donne is the umpteenth conscience unable to find its ubi consistam (we have met his forerunner in Hoccleve).8 The epistles, however, show how he stressed the duty of ceaseless increase, and every man’s duty to fulfill his charisma and make his talents bear fruit: he calls for a lively, resourceful intellect, prompts man to be dynamic, impatient and excited enough to achieve the goal designed for him. His comment on Moses, who could not complete his mission, is ‘slowness is our punishment and sin’.9 The soul descending into Man ennobles him, but for Donne, in some exasperated moments, Man remains a beast, is a bestial quid that cannot be extinguished or erased. 3. Donne’s sermons matched, for all their idiosyncrasies serving the same cause, those of other preachers, who became even better known than he in the first half of the seventeenth century, justly called de oro for that genre in England. The number of editions of his poems issued from 1633 to the end of the century gave rise and lent popularity to a secular and sacred, also licentious poetry that looked to Donne and seemed to have inherited its peculiarities. All those editions began by giving pride of place – even if this was not justified by chronology – to the profane lyrics, grouped under the internal label of Songs and Sonnets. This opened one of the longest-lasting 8 § 21.2. 9 In Pseudo-Martyr Donne states: ‘We are not sent into this world, to suffer, but to do, and to perform the offices of society, required by our several callings’. On this see also Carey 1990, 46.

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critical querelles in the history of English poetry, which ended at the beginning of the twentieth century, when a good half of the Songs and Sonnets were finally transferred to the essential repertory of English short poems of all time.10 Recent exegesis has persisted in providing close commentaries, demonstrating that with Donne, more than with any other poet, criticism is largely forced to paraphrase, owing to his syntactically rugged diction, fraught also with sophistries and meandering thoughts. Donne’s poetry, though it can contemplate immediacy, urge, and adopt colloquial forms, is ipso facto dianoetic, argumentative, and – to re-use a well-known label – concettist and ‘metaphysical’; by definition it marks the precocious paroxysm of this genre in the universal history of poetry. Nowadays one tends to deny a specifically metaphysical school of Donne: the poets coming immediately after him, Herbert, Marvell, Vaughan and Crashaw, or Suckling and Cleveland, are independent of him, and his most faithful follower, Cowley, is poorly gifted and blatantly exhibits the degeneration of Donne’s wit. Concettism, at any rate, was not unknown, and Donne did not invent it (Wyatt and Southwell are his predecessors, and Thomas Browne among his contemporaries); still, Donne practised it as his average expressive code. One of the first critics puzzled by Donne’s poetry was the dramatist Ben Jonson, who reproached Donne both for being obscure and for failing to respect the rules of prosody. Dryden and Johnson were to formalize this, and charge Donne with a number of violations of literary decorum, which succeeding ages, as always happens, would hail as marks of greatness and originality. Both Dryden and Johnson deemed wit as unnatural, a subversion of the relationship between poetry and prose, since the love lyric had to be conveyed with ‘sweetness’. Historians of taste, rather unanimously, found that Donne’s poetry crosses the boundary of Kitsch and becomes risible;11 that it puts to the test and unnerves even

10 11

In Palgrave’s popular Golden Treasury of 1861 no lyric by Donne had yet been included. As Praz 1958, 18, 214, notices, Donne’s ‘The Flea’, along with Swift’s excremental poems, is one of the most repellent short lyrics in the English canon; conversely, it is often strangely mentioned as a witty, harmless, though extravagant ruse of seduction. The flea by means of its sting unites the bloods of lover and beloved, which the sexual act was commonly believed to fuse together; but the exhortation to save ‘three

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a cultured reader’s patience, with the extenuating additional recognition that Donne in extremis and at any moment can come out with a single, gem-like and convincing line. But his unit of measurement is hardly ever the single sculptured line, rather the phrase or stanza, hence the impassionate flow. Since practice is habitually in advance of theory, the Romantics re-assessed him separately and erratically, and he inspired the Victorian Robert Browning with his rude, abruptly discontinuous style, his register jumping from the colloquial to the sublime, and his broken music. 4. After three centuries of disfavour or mild consensus, Donne was rediscovered and consecrated in the early twentieth century, when in 1912 J. C. Grierson republished his lyrics, and, soon after,12 T. S. Eliot wrote an essay where he reappraised and re-interpreted the Metaphysical poets, finding formulae more or less fitting and plausible, subsequently accepted and established in critical parlance, to define those poets’ specific approach to experience.13 With his idea that in Donne sensibility is unified, Eliot seemed to subvert Johnson’s objection that in him nothing was associated with anything, for the most heterogeneous ideas clashed with each other in the form of a chaotic discordia concors. The modernists’ almost unanimous enthusiasm for Donne (due to the kinship they felt with a poet living in a phase of deep epistemological crisis, a forerunner of agnosticism, and a poet almost akin to Lawrence in exalting liberating sexuality)14 was, how-

12 13

14

lives’ is repulsed, and the woman crushes the flea, staining her fingers with blood. I agree with Lewis 1938, 69–70, and with Carey 1990, 127 (who mentions Donne’s ‘interest in the body’s excremental secretions’), and 132, where Quiller-Couch’s 1918 opinion is quoted, that ‘The Flea’ is ‘about the most merely disgusting [poem] in our language’. More exactly after the publication of the anthology, edited by Grierson, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century – Donne to Butler, Oxford 1921. Eliot’s formulations to explain ‘metaphysical’ Donne (unified sensibility, sensuous apprehension of thought, etc.) have been very often polemically discussed. Leishman 1967, 90–109, ascribes them to the chief objective of contesting Milton; but see also Carey 1990, 247–8. Donne’s name is not registered among Joyce’s readings, nor in his best biographies, nor in the name indexes of his letters; but in 1912 Joyce lived in Trieste, and was not nor did he want to be up to date on what was published and re-evaluated in England; as a poet, at least, his vein is the antithesis to Donne’s. Still it is true that Joyce (rarely

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ever, rapidly quenched, with objections and changes of mind of academic critics in the late post-war and even pre-war period.15 The half-century that has since elapsed has produced contrasting textual and theoretical views, especially since the watershed of the early 1980s and the advent of poststructuralism with its sub-species. Sharper tools can indeed strip off the surface of texts and reveal that Donne’s highest and most democratic acknowledgements of woman’s role can in practice reflect the stalest male chauvinism.16 He sees woman as flesh and as earth, and at the same time as a purifying agent, as well as Man’s companion in an indissoluble physicalspiritual union; but no less often, with well-disguised irony, he belies this unison. If for the young Donne woman is alternately a fickle prostitute and a model of spiritual constancy, after his conversion in 1600 he only sings of the angelic woman or gentle-woman. His poetry is therefore, in its second phase, more and more a panegyric of living or past feminine examples, exalted above and beyond any biographical truth: dreamed of, reinvented, to a great extent arbitrary, as they were said to be. The synchrony of contradicting veins is a first, primordial kind of association of sensibility; on the other hand, as the third satire affirms, everything is relative. Woman is relatively angelic, that is, and the synthesis of all virtue and beauty, and all spirituality; but her verso must also be seen; and the world that can be dreamed of as Eden, thanks to the poet’s infectious regeneration through his own and his woman’s love, is also sometimes an actual, daily world, degenerate and emptied of godliness.

15

16

mentioned by Donne’s critics; but see a hint in CLA, vol. I, 225) was, like Donne, moulded or, more precisely, marked by Jesuitism, and that both repudiated it but retained its largely indelible formae mentis; and both parody the Thomist article. Eliot’s 1922 essay was rectified in 1931, pretending to forget preceding statements, in ‘Donne in Our Time’ (reproduced in Spencer 1958, 3–19). The diagnosis of an unsystematic and disorganized Donne was to be repeated verbatim even by Lewis 1938, who had in fact never been enthusiastic. Eliot, in his second essay, put forward forecasts of future reception that were to be clearly shown as wrong, and made a questionable parallel between Donne and Dryden; but he rightly stressed that Donne was interested in ideas, in the ‘scrap’ of ideas, more than in their truth. See for an objective overview of gender studies on Donne, cavalier on Donne’s supposed antifeminism, I. Bell’s ‘Gender matters: the women in Donne’s poems’, in Guibbory 2006, 201–16.

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5. As for Donne’s ‘wit’, the distinction, to be appreciated with welladjusted and most sensitive measuring tools, has long consisted in ascribing it to an impassionate emotional enthusiasm, instead of considering it a cold, intellectual, Marinist game;17 and in calling Donne a ‘monarch of wit’, because his lyrics are wholly steeped in wit, and the fact that he does not exploit this as an artificial, occasional whim. Donne the poet had to be set within a European frame of reference, and the Italian connection – Baroque, mannerism, and the Jesuit literature of epigrams and emblems – brought to the foreground. From 1925 on Mario Praz, with repeated interventions showing masterful erudition, easily became for decades the most authoritative world expert on the Metaphysicals and on Donne,18 soon assisted by fellow Italians Salvatore Rosati and Giorgio Melchiori. Praz’s contributions within the early 1970s remained however on the margins of the textual phenomena of the poetic samples, and abstained from any close reading. Praz as a critic of ‘Secentismo’ is the acknowledged master of a certain kind of criticism dealing with echoes, borrowings and parallels: he finds many that are decidedly outlandish although undoubtedly right, showing that at the end of the sixteenth century the atmosphere was concettist, also and above all in contemporary English drama. They were communicating vessels, so that Shakespeare writes, and has his characters speak, ‘just in Donne’s “metaphysical” way’,19 through a mix of Elizabethan and medieval elements. For some reason, at first sight far from clear,20 17 18

But for Lewis 1938 Donne’s aim in some lyrics is to surprise, astonish and show off. T. S. Eliot wanted to have Praz’s 1925 book translated, provided, he added with one of his understatements that Praz seems not to have understood, the quotations that occupy more than half the space were curtailed. Praz’s 1925 book studied Donne and Crashaw together, after an overview of ‘Secentismo’ and ‘Marinismo’ in England. Praz’s short 1958 book only on Donne preserves the structure of a survey of European concettism and seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry; when it goes on to deal with Donne it offers merely a lengthy biographical chapter, and Donne’s ‘art’ is finally treated in a fourth, more concise chapter. 19 Praz 1958, 38. Praz was also a historian of language (as he shows in his edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales [quoted in § 15 Bibliography]); but he never is a stylistic critic, or one really keen on linguistic textual analysis. 20 Praz 1958, 272, also stressed in that year that Donne was a poet ‘destined to be liked by few people’.

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Donne, this forbidding and impervious poet, soon afterwards became all the rage and has gained laurels in Italy especially in recent years, causing a full crop of studies, essays, and most of all poetic editions, translated and commented, of whose number and quality my bibliography gives merely a hint. And while his fanatical cult was fading everywhere – in the 1960s and 1970s – Donne lent himself, as few other English lyricists did, to the investigations of new-born literary semiotics. The first and original essay on the ‘semiotic functions’ of Donne’s poetry was written by M. Pagnini, followed by an equally masterful one by A. Serpieri on the ‘use of the communicative model’.21 § 74. Donne II: Biography Donne was the son of an affluent Catholic hardware merchant of Welsh origins, later the secretary of the London guild of ironmongers; the poet was left an orphan at the age of four, and on coming of age received his bequest of 750 pounds. To these origins one might naïvely ascribe Donne’s familiarity with alchemical and especially metallic metaphors, and his frequent view of the spoiled world like rusted iron. His mother, who remarried a widower, and, left again a widow, another Catholic gentleman, was the daughter of playwright John Heywood and a distant relative of Thomas More;22 and two uncles on the mother’s side, Jesuit priests, were exiled on account of their religion. One of Donne’s brothers, who died of the plague in prison, to which he had been sentenced for having sheltered a banished Catholic, shared this ancestral family religion, and even a certain yearning for

21

Pagnini 1970 and Serpieri 1975, essays that really gave a new direction to Donne criticism, although, being written in Italian, English critics ignored them. The second brilliantly explores in two of Donne’s lyrics (see § 76.4) the meta-communicative, and more precisely the semiotic nature of his poetry, born in an ‘illusionist’ and ‘relativist’ episteme, and therefore rife with inner twists of the communicative model; and a poetry also pervaded with massive instances of an irony not perceived by its addressees or by modern readers. However, the first critic to comment on the ‘semiological functions’ of Donne’s poetry is Morris 1953. 22 On Donne’s ‘Oedipal fixation’ for his mother, see Praz 1958, 71 n. 1, and the book quoted there; and on his frustrations as a failed Catholic martyr and his suicidal fantasies, Carey 1990, 199.

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martyrdom; but in Donne himself this religious feeling gradually dwindled. From the age of eleven he was educated at Oxford (where he acquired the fame of a new Pico della Mirandola), and according to some biographers also at Cambridge, but he could not take a degree, for at the time sixteenyear-old males had to give a sworn assent to the sovereign’s supremacy over the Church of England. Therefore he was enrolled (like Marston) in the London college of lawyers, where, if anything, he learned the legal terms and became familiar with legal practice as is often proved in his poems. A contemporary witness mentions him in London as ‘frequently attending ladies and play-houses, and a great writer of verse conceits’, as well as the organizer of college entertainments. He longed to be admitted to court, and meanwhile nibbled away at all branches of knowledge: divinity, law and medicine, besides the classics. He rose early in the morning to study, and began to debate with himself what confession to profess, doubting the Catholic one for heuristic as well as practical reasons; and he was soon persuaded that it was not necessary to adhere to any visible Church. He owned Cardinal Bellarmino’s works, and they appear to have been long and painstakingly perused. A probable stay abroad between 1589 and 1591, and another more certain between 1594 and 1596, enabled him to enlarge his knowledge of continental languages and habits, customs and political systems, Nevertheless in 1596, eager to make a career, he enrolled among the Earl of Essex’s men for the victorious conquest of Cadiz, followed by a far less lucky expedition to the Azores.23 Back home in 1597 his conversion to Anglicanism, and his growing enmity to Jesuitism, made him an eligible secretary for Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, whose son Thomas had become his friend. Donne fell deeply in love with Ann More, the lord’s niece, and in 1601 married her in secret, moreover in the forbidden Advent season. 2. Donne’s temper was rash, reckless, easily excited, or rather, he was yet another ground for clashes between reason and instinct. Witness his sudden marriage, as well as his lightning-quick fallings in love, justified as Platonic (embodiments of the ideal woman), for other young or mature 23

See § 79.1 for the two poems related to this war action, and the calm that prevented Donne from leaving Plymouth on a second sea-campaign.

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noblewomen. Vice versa his conversion to Anglicanism, or its reverse, his de-conversion from Catholicism, had been an extremely gradual process: emotions were explosive, hard to govern, but intellectual processes muffled and gradual.24 Donne paid a bitter price for his reckless gesture, for his wife’s uncle, outraged and inflexible, denounced him, had him tried and even imprisoned for a short time, although subsequently he had to put on a brave face and pay him twenty pounds a month for life. Released in 1602, and without a job, he went through dark years of serious difficulties until 1612, and in that lapse of time, we do not know exactly when, he wrote symptomatically an essay on the lawfulness of suicide.25 He moved to the suburb of Mitcham and rented lodgings in London – the classic pied à terre of our days – to lend occasional legal counsel. His wife gave him twelve children, before her death in 1617. His abjuration of Catholicism had in the meantime assumed militant and bellicose tones. In 1607 he accepted the position as secretary to Bishop Morton (who was happy to employ what today we would call a ‘supergrass’) in view of a controversy with the Catholics, and Morton encouraged him to take holy orders; but Donne still wished for a career as a diplomat or courtier, or even as a governor of Atlantic colonies, or an ambassador to Venice. He accepted that position after writing an anti-Catholic treatise in 1610, while his nomination to King’s chaplain was owing to a second pamphlet, or rather libel, against the Jesuits. 26

24 Carey 1990, 16. In stanza 10 of the ‘Deutschland’ Hopkins was to contrast St Augustine’s gradual conversion with St Paul’s lightning-quick one. 25 Biathanatos, published in 1644. See Carey 1990, 192–5, and his comments on Donne’s apology, or admission of the lawfulness of, suicide. Carey also recalls Borges’s paradoxical reading (‘El “Biathanatos”’, in Obras Completas, Buenos Aires 1974, 700–2) of suicidal Samson prefiguring Christ himself who, dying, committed suicide, despite the periphrases found in St John’s Gospel. 26 Pseudo-Martyr, which demonstrated Donne’s rhetorical and theological ability to King James, argues that the Catholics’ yearning for martyrdom was causeless, since in Donne’s opinion they were protected by the Jacobean regime, for they could swear faith to the king without compromising their loyalty to the Pope. Donne, objectively, also admits his pain in abandoning the Catholic acts of piety of his early years. The treatise supported the sovereign’s request for an oath of fidelity to the Crown after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

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In addition to the sovereign’s favour he now enjoyed the benevolence of Sir Robert Drury, of whose fourteen-year-old prematurely deceased daughter he sang in two sumptuous odes. The practical advantage was that Donne was housed in the Drury mansion, and his family was able to leave Mitcham. For the second time Donne travelled across Northern Europe with the nobleman’s entourage. He was now the holder of qualifications and benefices, and was sent to accompany missions on the Continent. In 1621 he was elected Dean of St Paul, in 1622 he published his first sermons and in 1624 a collection of meditations. When Charles ascended the throne, Donne, according to Walton, repudiated his youthful writings and even came near to be made a bishop. § 75. Donne III: ‘Songs and Sonnets’ I. The obsolescence of Petrarchism The whole of Donne’s poetic production is not large: the fruit of over a quarter of a century of activity, it is smaller in size than Skelton’s, nearly as large as Dunbar’s and certainly not to be compared with that of Spenser. More than a half of Donne’s lyrics seem to be occasional: verse letters, epigrams, dedications, epithalamia and epicedia. But no real discrepancy in style and register can be identified, and Donne is never too easy to read and simplified for very long; he never relents, never ceases to stimulate his reader intellectually and to problematize his writing. As to the disposition of the inner material and the succession of the various sections of the work – and consequently, as to a logical order in my discussion – everything fluctuates, and the textual debate among Donne’s editors is still ongoing. Few of Donne’s lyrics were printed in his lifetime, and the first edition of his verse was in 1633 and the second in 1635; and only a few can be surely dated by internal evidence. Ben Jonson’s statement, that Donne’s finest lyrics were written before he was twenty-five, that is before 1600, is wrong or has been misunderstood. The poems dealing with religion, along with La Corona and the Holy Sonnets, are later than 1609; apologetic and polemical works, and works answering contemporary events, come after The Anatomy of the World of 1611. Sacred poetry must undoubtedly be located near the end; and this is it, or nearly so. A scoop could be made of a little work registered in 1601 and sent to the press with the title of Amours by J. D. with certen other sonnetes by

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W. S.:27 it was immediately inferred that it was Donne’s and Shakespeare’s joint production, although other poets may hide behind those initials. The need was thus felt for a most accurate ecdotics, in order to establish a chronology and on that basis organize the corpus, maybe even by dismembering the close unity of Songs and Sonnets. Over time there developed a confrontation between Donne’s two most authoritative editors, Grierson and Gardner,28 the one inclusive and optimistic, the second somewhat tight-fisted and distrustful. Grierson prevailed, and from time immemorial nearly everybody goes by his textual ordering. I too, therefore, have kept to the undivided unity of Songs and Sonnets (whose gestation might have lasted no less than twenty years); and I start this discussion from this collection, taken for centuries as a bench mark and measure of judgement, and from its hierarchic pre-eminence. 2. Like many pioneering works, especially symbolic of epochal changes – one thinks here of Ulysses – which deliver the coup de grâce to a previous tradition, Songs and Sonnets lowers the curtain on the Petrarchan erotic lyric of the years between 1590 and 1600; it dismantles it and re-moulds it on new bases and poetic procedures, casting off a number of its features. Echo-seekers go away empty-handed. Donne does not imitate, paraphrase, echo or plagiarize, as Thomas Carew recognized in his funeral elegy; and the commonplace, in this case true, is that certain recurrent images in European concettisti, like that of the compass, are indeed borrowed but completely re-formulated, elaborated and made original. In a sense the base material is the same as that of many songbooks: love for a woman or for Woman, a chain of events where real or lifelike biographical anecdotes converge and frantically mix, but are transfigured, made absolute and emblematic. The breaking of the link with the preceding erotic lyric is glaring. The single lyrics cannot be immediately recognized as parts of an organic corpus, nor do they generate it, but form it pragmatically; and this corpus does contain a greater or smaller canonical number of items (fifty-five to

27 28

Serpieri and Bigliazzi 2009, 10. Gardner 1952 and 1965, based on chronological reconstructions derived from style and theme, which indeed caused more puzzlement than agreement.

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be exact) but without reproducing or repeating the same prosodic pattern. Donne’s restlessness expresses itself in a ceaseless variation of patterns and structures. Scarcely is there one like another, and the sonnet, the dominant measure before his time, is abandoned, except in one case.29 The poet seems instead to practise, quite systematically, an art of substitution, in rhythm, lexis, theme and expressive means. He casts off mythology with its merely decorative function; the whole Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic farrago and paraphernalia become a ‘vehicle’; and life itself with its phenomenology is the correlative of those sophisms. The absoluteness of the love story stands out in the absence of personal or conventional names for lover or beloved: the man is always an I, the woman always a she. Donne never wastes time in the fatuous search for a suggestive fictional name. Thirdly, all the lyrics bear a title, acute, witty and above all stimulating (even surprising at times), a feature on which I shall expatiate below. However, the most characteristic trait is the peculiarity of the diction. Donne is especially famous for certain abrupt, impatient, brusque and colloquial incipits, but actually he writes, or goes on to write in each single case, of love themes that – as Johnson was the first to object –30 would be better and more aptly couched in argumentative, and for that matter very subtle and outlandish, prose. Put into verse, they create balanced but elliptical syntactical organisms, drastically shortened and brachilogical, with a prevalence of hypotaxis (the ‘Nocturnal’ is one of the few Donne lyrics based on marked parataxis), enjambment, or single lines cut midway by a semi-colon or even a full stop. Donne is, in a way, the king of asides and parentheses, of suspended auxiliary verbs, grafted, with the effect of delaying the meaning, onto a finite verb after one or more insertions between commas, auxiliaries being thus left as if

29

‘The Token’, not quite certainly Donne’s, which Grierson includes but not all other editors do. 30 For Dr Johnson (see his Life of Cowley) the Metaphysicals were learned scholars who wanted to show off their learning, and who had the bad idea of dressing that learning in lines which were such merely on account of the number of syllables, but lacked harmony and melody; besides, transgressing Aristotle’s precept of art as imitation, or mimesis, they reflected neither nature nor life. Johnson distinguished wit and poetry as if they were Donne’s ‘elements’.

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hanging in a void.31 He habitually inverts the order of the sentence, and uses solecisms in a regime of extreme grammatical freedom. Often enough the main clause branches into a subordinate, from which one or more subordinates branch out in turn before again taking up the thread of the discourse. Whoever identifies poetry with that vague term, ‘musicality’ in verse, would find himself or herself brutally faced with the opposite: Donne does at times reinforce his verse with alliterations or other phonological ploys; but more often than not he gives the sense of a deliberately slovenly, prosaic, even muddled diction (‘that this her fever might be it’).32 His arguments are supported by metaphysical similes, usually of the ‘extended’ type, and taken from the most various and esoteric areas of contemporary science and activity: alchemy, medicine, anatomy, law, usury; numismatics and geography with the great explorations; physiology and pharmacology; war campaigns, and the branches and conventions of the political body, hence the language of administrators. Donne’s imagery at one moment appears well-ordered, only to pass abruptly, and unpredictably, from one semantic field to another. According to the type of poetic discourse, his most typical lyrics are arguments in fieri, punctuated with explanations, corrections and sudden changes of direction, so that often we know how they begin and what the starting point is, but not how they will the end. The addressees Donne wants to persuade are generally other people, the beloved woman, even himself – clearly a rhetoric of pathos, and a little more a rhetoric of ethos than, for instance, in Hopkins. Donne forecasts the far heavier and alienating plight of this later poet, Hopkins,33 for after all he has no identified historical addressee (his poems, I repeat, circulated in manuscript and 31 32

33

On the similarity of such periods to German syntax see Morris 1953, 69–70. We might have expected C. S. Lewis to expose, which he does not do in ELS, the absence of the ‘golden’ style, with its sweetness, suavity, harmony and euphony, and to find in Donne the ‘drab’ medieval diction in its harshest and most stubborn, yet voluntary and conscious, form. But Lewis had already used such terms about Donne (‘Wyatt’s element in Donne’, but ‘reinforced’) in Lewis 1938. Hopkins, however, oddly enough, never expressed himself on Donne, at least in his letters, maybe for the very prosaic reason that Donne had cast ‘poisoned arrows’ against Jesuitism (the same arrows that Machiavelli verbatim prepares to cast against Ignatius in Conclave Ignatii [§ 83.1]). The whole of Morris 1953 is empirically based

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so they tend to be acts of self-communication). The intrinsic disproportion resulting in Donne’s lyrics is that his persuasive urge is more intense the fewer its actual addressees are. His poetry, like Hopkins’s, is thus of a phatic and conative kind, and makes great use of exclamations, hyperboles and demonstrative underpinnings; it often starts with an invitation to see, notice and listen (‘Mark but this flea’), and as often uses the emphatic ‘to do’ (Donne: ‘an angel did appear’; Hopkins: ‘I did say yes’, to give but two examples); or the urgent rhetorical question or the climax made of expressions often repeated and redundant. Donne’s ‘The Broken Heart’ illustrates in an exemplary way a frequent pattern, the opening with some assertion of a general character – love is voracious and irresistible – and the development showing its truth by anecdotes and proofs. 3. In Songs and Sonnets Donne is primarily a theoretician and chronicler of his own love and of love tout court. He describes and sings of it as absolute and sublime, a new birth, generation and regeneration of humanity and history; it is therefore right and intentional that the songbook should open, at least ideally, with the triumphal, peremptory assurance that a new and true Edenic couple – and copy – is born, and knows it has been born; and that its forming gives rise to a new history, indeed a new era. Everything coming before was a long sleep, a dream, childish play and a dawning.34 Thus, love is not subject to the laws of time: indeed, it dictates them itself. It is imperishable, young and spontaneous as on the day of its birth, unlike all the rest that decays and moves towards its consummation. Donne often wonders how love can indefinitely grow, if he already has been given it all, and has donated it all to his beloved. In ‘Love’s Growth’ love is motionless contemplation, but also constant growth, therefore dynamic. That love, although it does not grow, becomes ‘more eminent’, is an oxymoron.35 Donne’s love is also confined to a restricted aristocracy of feeling, and the layman cannot understand its deep essence, but is satisfied on the assumption of a ‘direct’ influence of Donne on Hopkins, a view shared by one of Hopkins’s leading critics, W. H. Gardner. 34 ‘The Good Morrow’. 35 ‘nobler’ is also the meaning emerging in the two examples of the lexeme in Devotions (see Hayward 1930, 519 and 525). See however a review of the most various suggestions in Serpieri and Bigliazzi 2009, 248–9 n. 10.

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with superficiality and accidents. This is a religious metaphor that spreads throughout the collection, but with modified, inverted meanings; timid, bigoted and formal people are consigned to the realm of unbelievers and the true lovers to that of the orthodox. Donne sings of the immateriality and spirituality of love, yet he feels it must be incarnated in the body, so that lovers strive to be purified and to become like air, and women (‘Air and Angels’) are closer to that goal. ‘A Valediction: of the book’ hinges explicitly on this reversal: those who deny that the lovers are a pattern and even more a ‘faith’ are schismatic. The fourth ‘Valediction’, where the two lovers are priests and the rest of mankind simply the ‘laity’, states that to reveal one’s love is profanity. Donne’s habitual posture is defiant and intimidating, or arrogantly indifferent to whatever worries other mortals, assuming the superiority of the love of which he sings, above all its nature as a model for any other couple of future lovers, its exceptional quality being its own norm. If it is so, Donne cannot but proudly look forward to the beneficent mark left on posterity by his fulfilled love, the synthesis of body and spirit, imperishable because at his and his beloved’s death the souls rising to heaven will empower it further. ‘A Valediction: of the book’ imagines that the letters exchanged by the two lovers will become a schoolbook and give models and precepts to all future couples, for in their example love is directly transfused. This collection of letters is the new bible of love. Even if the world were to succumb to an attack by new barbarian hordes, civilization would survive by virtue of their example. 4. Donne gives his own version of Platonic love in several epochal lyrics, by now classics. In them a countermelody emerges, and even rings with a dissonant, negating voice. He suspends and subverts those bombastic messages of boastful assurance, and admits the threat hanging over the cosmic illusion he has built for himself. ‘Love’s Deity’ tells that at a certain moment, in the remote past, the god of love came down and became a tyrant, whereas before his advent ‘love allowed no beloved one not to love’, and he had lovers mutually fall in love and exchange affection; the more adult god is also more wicked and must be dethroned. If he looks back, Donne also looks forward, and cannot help locating love in the perspective of the body’s dissolution after its division from the imperishable soul, the soul of a lover that has loved and has been, but also above all not been, in unison with his beloved. Therefore his poetical corpus also comes to host

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a copious funereal appendix, where the poet stages and plays out his own death, writes humorous last wills but also expresses dramatic apocalyptic visions. He exalts the absoluteness of the fusion of the two ever faithful lovers, but also sees the other side, and calls all women unfaithful and tyrannous, sometimes even too spiritual. The lover often must leave, and the woman, despite the tokens left with her, might fall out of love and become fond of another. He gives her small keepsakes, like his name engraved on a mirror, so she may remember and not yield or, when about to yield, draw back. The temporary separation of the two lovers is one of the most frequent situations in Donne’s songbook, on the one hand because it verifies and triumphantly tests the indissolubility of love and the full fusion of the two souls; on the other because it arouses fears and anxiety, for two beings so much in love and unison cannot part without equating such an event to death. In ‘Twickenham Garden’ the countess addressed is bitterly reproached for being faithful in love – the poet’s boast in the preceding lyric, where he fears his beloved will prove weak once he has left. Donne, it must be stressed, speaks in two antithetical voices, on the one hand making a panegyric of indissoluble love, and of his love; on the other saying quite the opposite. Proclamations of love’s sublime nature alternate with cynical rebuttals, where woman is only a body to be tasted and eaten, as one eats the flesh of a fruit and throws away the peel. ‘Confined Love’ is a debate on the promiscuity of animals and the imposition of monogamy on men. Commentators have explained Donne’s cynicism by supposing this kind of lyric to have been written in his youth, but this is doubtful. Some ten very contorted lyrics, either despite being or because they are very short, extremely dense, powerful and original, bear witness to even more fearful subtleties, mostly disturbed or sarcastic. They voice a loathing of woman and sex, repulsed like the plaything that children at length tire of. In ‘Farewell to Love’, yet again Donne rings the note of regret for the animals’ unhindered pleasure. § 76. Donne IV: ‘Songs and Sonnets’ II. Love, rescued from, and a slave to, time Criteria for classifying and evaluating Songs and Sonnets include chronology, though largely conjectural and hypothetic, as for instance Helen Gardner does, distinguishing between lyrics written before, or after, Donne’s marriage; or dividing it into libertine, cynical, ‘idolatrous’ lyrics,

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and ‘serious’, theologically orthodox poems extolling the lovers’ indissoluble physical-spiritual union, and therefore post-Petrarchan and post-Platonic. Other classification criteria are based on theme or recurrence, and result in small subgroups of two, three or more items (like the ‘anniversaries’ or the ‘valedictions’), or on vaguer traits of style and tone, and related to the strategies, functions and registers of poetic language. Least practised, indeed roundly condemned, are attempts to create and follow possible biographical traces by identifying female addressees – when Donne does not sing of a single woman – and the relative backgrounds. Donne forestalled such attempts by stating: ‘I did best when I had least truth for my subjects’.36 Altogether, no attempt has ever succeeded in coupling the collection with an external, conceptual or symbolic scheme, save perhaps that of the ‘rake’s progress’, remembering that a few patterns, in the first instance those of Jesuit meditation, have been found to work, especially in the anniversaries commemorating Elizabeth Drury and in the Holy Sonnets.37 We do not know for sure who gave such fitting titles, with excellent critical insight,38 to each lyric of the 1635 corpus (while the 1633 edition bore no titles). Not being disposed to follow the chaotic, ‘extremely fluctuating’ order of the 1633 edition,39 I agree with that of Grierson (substantially the same, with few variations, as that of the 1635 edition, due to compilers very close to Donne), later dismembered by Gardner. I follow this order because it proves functional to an underlying inner pattern. The lyrics’ titles sum up the catalogue of emblematic situations and the conceptual designs of 36 Leishman 1967, 178–9, offers another ‘classification’, consisting of as many as seven groups differing in tone and seriousness or light-heartedness. Andreasen 1967, 76 and 80, divides the corpus into three groups of rather subtle and artificial Ovidian variations. Lewis 1938, 77, lists five recurrent themes: valediction, secrecy, woman’s falseness, the poet’s inconstancy and contempt of love. 37 Praz 1958, 86, denies that ‘any convincing series of events’ can be traced in the lyrics, but he, too, explains many of them by the method of inference and of biographical and psychological conjecture. 38 Redpath 1983, 12, notices that one can start reading from the titles – which, possibly, Donne ‘did not invent’ – to wonder at their extravagant nature. 39 Serpieri and Bigliazzi, 2009, 107. The 1633 edition began, who knows why, with ‘The Flea’. Almost all critics state, although not with assurance, that Donne did not give the collection its title, nor set the lyrics in that order.

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the collection, and provide a suggestive guide for reading when linked to Grierson’s ordering. I do not think I over-simplify when I suggest that Songs and Sonnets pivots on an agon with time and space.40 Every great love sings of and exalts itself, assuming that time stops to enjoy its undiminished unison, even if it attains this unison from a point in time; and every great love is such if it grows to the point of banishing the dimension of space around itself and fills all space, excluding any other. This is the syllogism found in ‘The Sun Rising’: if we are the whole world, the sun illuminating us shines on whatever exists. Born in the morning, Donne’s love rises to its meridian fullness; but historical time presses, and once more prevails; returning under its dispensation, the poet scans the time before and especially the time after, scrutinizing the death of love and of the body, and what will happen in time and until the end of time, for one of the lovers will die before the other. Songs and Sonnets represents, then, the symbolic cycle of a day, or the cycle of a symbolic day, from shining dawn to sun’s meridian through to night. However, as I suggested, the idea of the future intrudes with a more and more disenchanting and harrowing effect. Significantly, Donne writes, and must write, of anniversaries, in order to stress the consequences of time passing; and many poems are structured as imagined projections of present situations, with two future alternatives, one dovetailing with the other. In ‘The Apparition’ the poet imagines the time when he will be dead (I), and when dead (II) his ghost will visit and again find his beloved. ‘The Anniversary’, where the lover loudly and clearly avers that love does not decay but will always be, emphatically silences any doubts of an event to the contrary: he wants to feel assured, and raises his glass to eternity. The surprising thing is that nearly half the poems obsessively play on this opposition between love’s averred eternity and the dreaded, general decay of the cosmos. 2. The first, initial time is necessarily dawn and morning at the rising sun, implying that before that the lovers have slept and also dreamed, and, now awake, during the day debate about love, with the lover, a deceived, often unheeded and thus disillusioned teacher, imparting its secrets to the 40 Meditation XIV of the Devotions deals with the central role of time and space in human life, and in relation to eternity (thus furnishing this interpretative key).

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beloved,41 preparing to practise them with her. Midday marks in parallel the peak of gratification. Also, from the very titles, we realize the double, dramatic nature of this amorous feeling, which can be either a sensual fever or a spiritualized, even angelic passion, thus even a half-divine and infinite one: always mutual, boundless, yet always gradually increasing. The underlying threat, even when the poet sounds most triumphal and boastful – a real miles gloriosus – materializes in four poems with anaphoric titles, caused by the lovers’ temporary parting – the ‘valedictions’, that is, the other side, or even the test, of the proclaimed indissolubility of their love. The clear morning gradually clouds over, twilight brings its shadows and finally night comes – again as a symbol; but love is not ephemeral, only the body, the soul’s lodging, is such, and in death physical decay is overcome, and the love of two lovers remains, as an imperishable model. The task with which we are faced is to trace this pattern in its actual salient moments. ‘The Good Morrow’ is in nearly all of Donne’s editions the first poem, and for this reason it must be accurately explored. Stylistically, we register a clear ring of colloquial immediacy, for it starts with a question and an abrupt interjection; on the conceptual level Donne dares to announce a new historical calendar: AD, so to speak, starts with the blossoming of the poet’s love; before that there was nothing but blissful unconsciousness. But such contemptuous and even foolhardy triumphalism is gradually, almost rhythmically counterbalanced, at times by a list of impossible things, like faithfulness in woman (‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’), at times by the libertine eulogium of promiscuity (‘The Indifferent’), at others by a dark analysis of an elusive female and the uncertainty of possessing her (‘Lovers’ Infiniteness’). ‘The Sun Rising’ saucily denies the ordering faculty of the sun, hence also of chronological time, because love dictates its own time, or rather its independence of it. What is unquestionable, starting with ‘The Canonization’, is the subversion of liturgical terms: the god invoked is that of love, and the saints of the new religion are the poet and his beloved. To these saints – in Catholic theology those who intercede with God – is ironically addressed a prayer: the lovers, in whom now love rages and who, 41 See the beginning of ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’: ‘Stand still, and I will read to thee / A Lecture, love, in love’s philosophy’.

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as ‘The Sun Rising’ shows, sum up the whole real world in themselves and are its mirror, must ask from above, an above that is the god of love, a model of their love. Indissoluble unity engenders a single ‘neutral’ being, neither of one sex nor another. ‘The Anniversary’, celebrating a year-old love now entering its second year, also deals with love’s timelessness, and the lovers’ indissoluble union and royal dignity. Love’s time stands still, love is outside time, ignoring the law of inexorable universal decay; but this is one of the first times when the thought of death, which might part them, makes its appearance; a single grave will be their union’s symbol, even in death that may divide them. In the after-world the lovers’ bliss will equate to that of the other saved; not so on earth, their own superiority making them sovereigns and subjects at the same time. ‘The Dream’ should ideally be set at an earlier time in this hypothetical, symbolical plot, though one unrelated to any likely biographical romance. The overwhelming joy of consummation is again compromised by the fear of parting or loss; in which case, the insistent repetition that love is eternal is only evidence of its ephemeral nature. In itself, ‘The Dream’ is one of the wittiest and finest of Donne’s lyrics. The poet was sleeping and his woman awoke him; or rather, he made her awake him, almost deciding, in homage to her, to stop sleeping (if ever anyone can decide to stop sleeping!). We must credit Donne’s assertion that in sleep he was dreaming, and dreaming of his beloved. But the dream was too vivid and sublime to be only the object of an oneiric fantasy, and the loved one did well to intervene. The dream only appears to be over, rather it continues in reality. If it breaks, on awakening the two lovers can do what in the dream did not happen. From a dreamed of, unfulfilled action to one carried out in wakefulness. At first sight the woman was like an angel; but, on further consideration, the poet could only take her for her own self; indeed the woman’s status is even higher than the angels’. This difference is clear from the fact that angels, like truth-loving women, read a man’s heart and mind, but only through the effects of those thoughts, while she is ‘beyond an angel’s art’ and knows them directly (and whoever thinks differently is ‘profane’). 3. Ecstasy, in ‘The Ecstasy’, ultimately means the fusion of the two souls, achieved by love, and the image of the two fused souls is the sphere joining two hemispheres. When the lyric opens, ecstasy has not been achieved

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yet, or it is the bodies’ ecstasy, while the souls ‘negotiate’ about fusing. A supposed onlooker on seeing this ‘negotiation’ would at any rate go away edified. But he should be a cor gentil, an expert in love, not a coarse ‘layman’, but one ‘by love refined’ and ‘grown all mind’, and, as is said in ‘Valediction: forbidding mourning’, become ‘all spirit’. The ecstasy is achieved at the end of the poem, and the two lovers are aware that what brought them close was not a physical urge, but a spiritual bond. And they benefit from the revelation of the real cause of their feelings. Always spasmodically bent on describing and ascertaining the souls’ fusion after, and along with, that of the bodies, Donne often coins verbs with the ‘inter’ prefix, so as to indicate a second, closer and more complete fusion: love ‘inter-inanimates’ the souls producing a third soul, or one in a further state, ‘abler’, and able not to suffer and hence to overcome isolation. But the bodies must also fuse. Although they are not everything, nor are they to be identified with the lovers, they are their sphere, while the souls are the ‘intelligences’ postulated by Ptolemaic cosmography. The sky’s influence first impresses the atmosphere and, through it, men: the bodies too are intermediaries – exactly as in Hopkins’s ‘To What Serves Mortal Beauty?’ – aiding a soul to address another soul. Likewise, the souls of chaste lovers must come down to passions, that is, the senses, lest love remain only a sterile potentiality. So bodies are necessary, and must be therefore employed. The intruder, the onlooker knowing what is love, akin to the two lovers, has heard them speak but in the paradoxical ‘dialogue of one’. The thought of death represents no danger for the two spiritual lovers. In ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’ the seemingly incongruous first stanza in fact creates and evokes a comparison between death and the impending separation: from the sanctified union to the admission of disunion, in an ideal aftermath. In the other stanzas of the lyric similes cross one another, being introduced only to be denied until those universally famous of the ‘gold to airy thinness beat’ and the twin compasses, with the essential addition of the circle they trace, a symbolical (or rather allegorical) image of the unified lovers; it is a circle ready to change into the no less famous ‘bracelet of bright hair’ of the two funeral lyrics. In ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’, written perhaps when Donne was about to leave for France and Germany with the affluent Drury in 1611, the lovers are described as facing each other, and the tears

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pouring from the lover’s eyes are ‘coined’ by those of the beloved, meaning that they mirror her face. Merely because they bear that image and that mark are they valuable. Tears are the omen of another, greater sorrow, and with every falling tear also that which the latter carries, falls, that is to say, the woman. Through transfusion, the woman is first reflected by, then enclosed within, the tear; but the reflection ceases with their parting. The flowing tears cause and form a second flood, coming from the beloved as from the clearing of a stormy sky. 4. After the lyrics ‘in life’ come those ‘in death’, starting with ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’42 and the death-like feel of winterentombed nature, which however is a joyful image if compared with the poet’s misery, summing up every dead thing. The beloved is a sun that will not rise again. The real sun is significantly a ‘lesser sun’, whose motion brings lovers new longings and lusts. The ‘sun-beloved’, dead, enjoys a nightly festival, and what remains of life is a vigil, awaiting the meeting in heaven. Initially the thought of death is exorcised by means of irony and sarcasm. In ‘The Will’ some personal belongings are left to people who already own, or disdain, them. ‘The Damp’ is an invitation to love expressed through images of death, and the first stanza centres on a fantasy of physicians executing an autopsy. ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’ is based on the metaphor of the shadow diminishing as the sun rises to its zenith, though then the poet sets it aside and repeats that love, unlike the sun, is firm and constant. In ‘The Funeral’ the dead poet’s shrouded body will be found to have a bracelet of his beloved’s hair around its wrist. This is seen as a talisman keeping him from putrefying, or a device keeping his body entire because it comes from her head and brain. But everything changes, and the bracelet may appear biunique rather than unique to the poet himself, so this small circle can mean a punishment or an infliction of grief.

42 Possibly written on the death of the Countess of Bedford, whose name was Lucy, but more plausibly dedicated to Donne’s wife. When he was in Paris he had a vision of her giving birth to a dead baby, as indeed happened. According to other hypotheses it was written in 1617 when his wife actually died. In this night of the world, apart from the coda, one might see the secret model of Hopkins’s ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves’ (as Morris 1953, 31–2, thinks, too).

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This lyric is dramatic in the true sense of the word, for its visual referent can be constantly re-interpreted, and the poetic ‘I’ repeatedly revises what he means by the hair-bracelet. In stanza 1 the poet seems to know that this sign must be kept hidden, a mystery to the profane in love: for the lyric starts on the rhetorical note of caveat. The poet, that is to say, is proud to show that the circle ‘crowns’ his arm, and this term propagates a first metaphoric field showing that the two lovers have been like sovereigns, king and queen, by virtue of their love. Such talismanic power is hoped for or discovered as an antidote to the body’s dissolution, a pious desire of the diurnal mind. In the ecstasy the two souls were two armies, or rather negotiators. The very physiology of the human body is a political system, governed and coordinated by the brain through the nerve system. While after death the souls rise, the brain, falling down, joins the body. But the turn in the argument occurs in the form of a tortuous doubt, or second supposition, in the midst of l. 14, revealing with cunning and again dramatic delay that the bracelet had not been requested, but imposed by the beloved, and that, according to the political metaphor, the lovers’ realm was not balanced, but ruled by a queen dominating the king. She has not explained clearly to him the meaning of the sign, which might even be a mark of her sadism or of her menacing power. The metaphor’s weight is not on the viceroy or the king, but on the manacled man sentenced to death. At the end the poet, in a kind of dramatic monologue, utters defiant words: you did not wish to save anything of mine, and I reply by burying something of yours. Thus the tone of the lyric does a 360° turn from its beginning.43 ‘The Relique’ comprises a diptych with ‘The Funeral’ with the presence of the bracelet of the beloved’s hair tied to the wrist, presumed to be found after burial, when the grave is open ‘to entertain’ another deceased person. This lyric is bristling with problems. Is it a nondescript second ‘guest’, or the poet’s beloved that has lived on after his death? Or a third alien guest, since, as the two subsequent stanzas seem to say, both lovers are buried in one grave, a double grave where the lovers 43 Here the insightful essay of Serpieri 1975 must be completed with a contextual analysis of the metamorphosis of the circle in Donne, both affirmed and denied as a symbol of love’s plenitude.

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lie one beside the other (though it is ‘my grave’, not ‘our’)? L. 2 launches a hypothesis, an aside explaining ‘entertain’: graves have ‘learned’ to be a bed for more than one, like women’s wombs receiving more than one lover. But this hypothesis contains another: what will the gravedigger do on seeing a bracelet of bright hair encircling the arm of the corpse? Will he leave the buried couple in peace, interpreting the bracelet as no other than a sign of the lovers’ union and a mark to recognize each other in the next world, on Doomsday? Then a third hypothesis crops up: in a Catholic country, given to superstition, the woman would be taken for the Magdalene, and the two lovers venerated as reliques. They indeed are miracle-workers, but only owing to the sacredness of their love. Stanza 3 becomes precisely a catalogue of the two lovers’ love-miracles to be told to posterity: fidelity in love, a union transcending all difference based on sex, and also the perfect innocence of their natural love, to which only much later human laws have imposed rules. But the greatest miracle is the very woman he loves. At the end we realize not only the lyric’s underlying irreverence, but its innermost, deeply concealed irony: it takes a very imaginative gravedigger to imagine Christ and Mary Magdalene are buried there, and a bishop or king no less naïve to believe him. Above all, those miracles seem totally negative asseverations, fitting a love only spiritual: that is, the miracle is the lack of courage of the two lovers, maybe only of the woman, in violating love’s laws or rather its conventions.44 § 77. Donne V: Elegies and epithalamia The 1633 edition contained thirteen elegies, five having been rejected by the Royal Commission of censorship. In the 1635 edition, the number rose to seventeen, with titles; others, subsequently discovered and ascribed to Donne in the early nineteenth century, made a total of twenty-one. Helen Gardner considered a good number of these poems to be spurious and removed them from the canon; but many modern editors, ignoring her, have followed Grierson in including and numbering them. On the 44 In a similar way Donne, in the ‘paradox and problem’ (§ 83.1) entitled ‘That virginity is a virtue’, says that human nature tempts man to, rather than deterring him from, the violation of virginity.

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whole the elegies appear linked by themes, tones and forms, but are also strikingly discontinuous. In the first instance the general title imposed posthumously by editors must be considered elastic, to the point of being used faute de mieux. Initially there is a series of farcical and grotesque selfcontained situations and anecdotes, always hard to reconstruct from the internal evidence and because of the many ellipses. The narrating voice is that of an external commentator or of a rather detached member of a group, who either pretends to be an elderly man making rather unctuous recommendations, or offering advice to somebody concerning the inconstancy and levity of married women especially, and their husbands’ jealousy; the advice is always brazen and audacious, practically an invitation to make a virtue of necessity. Some lists of maxims (the second elegy exhorts: marry an ugly woman!) are, or seem to be, trickery supported by specious arguments, or paradoxical tours de force of persuasion.45 The daily life reflected in the first elegies is that of young college students or courtiers, of the surly jealous, suspicious husband, with a flighty wife and her horde of admirers.46 The philanderer takes all the necessary precautions, but a Plautine senex iratus discovers his daughter’s affair by smelling the perfume her suitor has left (in the fourth elegy, a dramatic single act anticipating Browning). This vein disappears for a time, replaced by a form of imaginary

45 The reckless witticism (reflected in the title, ‘An Anagram’) hinges on the fact that the elements creating beauty may be found in beautiful and ugly women in a different order, so that teeth can be yellow and hair red, whereas yellow and red are the colours of other physical parts in other, beautiful women. The conclusion of this specious syllogism is that an ugly wife’s husband will not suspect or spy on her. Similarly, in ‘His Picture’ the woman, often accused of inconstancy, silences those who criticize her for loving a man who has come back ugly and old. The beloved, like a Penelope resisting courting suitors, embraces a disfigured Ulysses, wrinkled, sun-baked and bowed by hardships. 46 In the first elegy there is no dying bishop, as in Browning, but a rich well-to-do burgher with his ‘fond’ wife’, cunning, shrewd, hence insincere, for on the one hand deep in her heart she would like her husband to die, and on the other she feels relieved at the prospect of being free from the grip of jealousy. His relatives look forward to enjoying the inheritance of this great miser. And the narrator notes that woman ‘is flighty’, and that jealousy is right, and a protection.

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dialogue and passionate address, now truly and literally elegiac, brimming over with a lover’s regret for his beloved, vibrant with romantic, eloquent pathos, expressed not directly, but thick with conceits. The ascent to the sublime continues until the ninth elegy, an admiring, devoted tribute to Lady Herbert.47 The middle elegies present sinuous digressions leading neither here nor there, with mimesis foreshadowing a sort of free dramatic monologue; or with recurrent invectives and curses. The genre variety is exemplified by a pure anecdote, a fluent salacious imitation of Boccaccio and Chaucer. In the later ones, the voice of an idle philanderer is heard again, trying to seduce the wives of surly, jealous husbands. A restricted, complementary ventriloquist’s corpus is formed, or a musical score of several dissonant voices, like those of the seasoned self-assured cynic and of the regretful romantic, or the desdichado tricked by a perverse fatal woman. The sixteenth elegy is sung in a soaring, grieving and solemn voice. The romantic outlook turns into the Machiavellian attitude of one who sees love as only a physical assuaging of lust, blind to its spiritual quid. The eighteenth extols copulation as love’s natural, unavoidable goal. Its climax is a description of the upper and lower halves of the female body in terms of sailors’ explorations of the Americas or the Indies, or even of mythological anecdotes. The nineteenth presents the beloved woman doing a striptease, then getting into bed, eager to make love. It is thus a parody or a more brazen version of Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’. The twentieth rejects all wars except those fought between the sheets; its voice sounds idle like that of an Antony embracing his Cleopatra. To reinforce his arguments, pleas and invectives, Donne alludes to chronicles of the intellectual life at the end of the sixteenth century, and to its most proverbial cultural practices and activities. His repertory of images includes the counterfeiting of coins, Catholic and Protestant diatribes, and the cosmetic industry, with reference to the production of perfumes; in the background references to the Scarlet Woman recur as a metaphor for the end of love. The semantic and correlative fields, objective and above all obsessive, are those of the 47 This contrasts with the previous one owing to the warmth emanating from old age, whereas in the eighth elegy the fury of the ugly woman burns everything around her. Reckless arguments support the belief in the superiority of sterility in old age.

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priest, of the faithful Anglican or recusant, the courtier, the soldier and the conqueror, above all the explorer of virgin colonies, or the alchemist, the surgeon and the lawyer. The most acrobatic graphic reference is the one to the ‘angels’, which plays, in the ‘bracelet’ elegy, on the various meanings and metaphorical allusions of the term.48 2. A further short section gathers other poems under the label ‘epithalamia’, one of which celebrates a diplomatic feat, the wedding of King James’s daughter with the Elector Palatine, and can thus be dated February 1613. Here the dominant images, emblematic of Donne’s nuptial philosophy (but common to all the English Renaissance) are the phoenix, the symbol of indissoluble and perennially renewed love, and joined with it the flame of love that rises to burn forever instead of turning into ashes. Like Spenser, Donne exploits the commonplace of the sun that on the wedding day maliciously lingers in the sky, increasing the married couple’s sexual longing. Exceptionally, an eclogue (meant to hail the Countess of Essex’ wedding to Robert Carr) is dated 26 December 1613, and in the wake of Spenser it presents two shepherds, of whom one is the sulky, rustic Idios, acting in the role of Spenser’s Colin Clout, who, being reproached by the other, Allophanes, for not taking part in the court feasts, inserts into the eclogue an epithalamion of his own, of eleven stanzas with a strange prosody. Idios forestalls Allophanes’ uncritical, complacent courtliness with Spenser’s scepticism; equally Spenserian are the swans, that is to say, the couple that ‘interbring’ (or mutually offer, with the recurrent use in Donne of the ‘inter’ prefix) new joys. In a third epithalamion, ‘made at Lincoln’s Inn’, marriage is the tomb of ‘virginity’ (with the added image of the lamb’s sacrificial rite), but also the ‘cradle’ of a better state, and the bride attains, as the marriage is sexually consummated, the perfection and the deserved name of ‘woman’.

48 Here is the most astonishing associative progression of all the elegies: from the angels to the Crowns of France, being the kings but also the coins, both discredited (with a further allusion to syphilis, or French disease, or the French crown). In the fourteenth elegy a third meaning of ‘angel’ refers to the sign of the tavern where the three characters (husband, wife and suitor) stop for refreshments. But when – rarely – Donne tells an anecdote, he proves inferior to other, chiefly narrative, storytelling poets.

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§ 78. Donne VI: The satires Donne’s five satires, probably written between 1593 and 1598, temporarily rejected by the censors in the 1633 edition but re-admitted in the course of printing, are thus earlier, although published later, than Hall’s and Marston’s. They are, like the latter, written in a style that may be defined as harsh, brutal, clumsy and knotty, and constitute the most difficult and unrewarding section of Donne’s canon. The reader gains little from his labours, for they are anything but great poems, some of them prolix and altogether repetitive, others thick with occasional allusions which probably interest only, or mainly, the historian, in that they are a kaleidoscope of scenes of daily life in London and England at the end of the sixteenth century.49 The Augustans were to look down on this ‘asperity’ of Donne’s, and Pope rewrote the second and fourth satires in his own way, making them gentler. The biographical background is that of a Donne still in the making as a poet, and learning to be a lawyer – a disturbed man, subject to bad moods and frustration, and an embittered and apocalyptic pessimist. The period of composition lasted at least five years, since the fifth satire, still bad-humoured, seems to have been written when Donne was still Sir Thomas Egerton’s dissatisfied secretary. The poet’s hypostasis is a secluded ‘grammarian’, harassed in the first satire by a worldly, curious busybody: he resists and chases him, but ends up accepting his company.50 They are 49 Tobacco, thought to be, rather than unwholesome, highly therapeutic, was traditionally and euphemistically ‘drunk’ or sucked; there were shows with trained horses, with elephants and apes, as the second satire informs us. 50 Naked virtue is not prized, and in the city everyone has a mistress or lover, even male, he likes to see naked. Nakedness opens a digression: before the Fall man was naked and began to dress afterwards. Carlyle is not far, for the second half of the satire attacks extravagant and gorgeous fashions, an end in themselves, and allegories of the soul in disguise. Before the end the busybody goes to his fancy woman, a whore he finds with her customers; he has a tussle with them and is beaten. In the second satire the narrator meets with a courtier he ridicules. The anecdote of the fourth had already appeared in Spenser’s ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’, a fantastic meeting with a strange guy proving to be a polyglot courtier fond of extolling court life. Dismissing the busybody with a crown, the poet broods on the corruption and foolishness of the courtier, so very far from Castiglione’s ideal. A broadside on Thomas Coryate (1577–1617), who had just published (1611) a travel-book worthy of a dilettante and

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all mimetic, written in the first person and in the present tense. The diction is discontinuous and disjointed, too, and fragments of an anecdote can mark the beginning of long meanderings without logical associations, as happens in any case with all of Donne’s prose, especially his homilies. The absence of inverted commas in the manuscripts prevents unequivocal attribution of the speeches. Ipso facto it is impossible to ascertain whether it is a real dialogue or the mimesis of a dramatic or even an already internal monologue. Preludes and general asseverations prepare anecdotes and the debate between two voices or opinions. Donne is constantly tempted by the aside, and induced to open abstract, theoretical parentheses and to break the narrative continuity. Even incipits are launched in the middle of a private meditation. Whether or not following a literary convention, Donne’s satires constantly drip rage, disgust and most of all repressed rancour. Hallucinated eyes look down on a devious, sullied world. All mankind is corrupted, revelling in the worst avariciousness, in its thirst for power and vanity, and above all lust – unable to control primary impulses, rotten with syphilis, devoured by animal rut. In short, a dark subversion of the splendid Elizabethan picture. This psychic complex gains strength from semantic fields referring to loathing, night, perversions, sick and putrefying flesh and excrement, such as prevail in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Antony and Cleopatra. The satirical poet is always, at least in flashes, a moralist advocating regeneration. Donne knows how everything should work. His tone is livid, but he inflicts deathly lashes of black humour. The third satire accuses philosophy and religion of inertia, and in a lapidary passage (the circular ascent of a mountain) calls for a true religion, or rather for an incessant quest for it. Conventional Latin nicknames identify the diversified positions in the debate on the confessions at the end of the sixteenth century. But the target remains the present degenerate age and its intellectual apathy. 2. The Progress of the Soul, a 1601 poem, can be seen as a grotesque jest, and therefore an offspring of the satires: its object is not to expound

gloried in it, exudes the same sarcasm with which Joyce (Volume 7, § 132.1) burned to ashes (‘Gas from a Burner’, also in couplets) the Dublin publisher who had rejected Dubliners. The last epigram foreshadows Rabelais’s or Joyce’ style.

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a doctrine, but to show the various manifestations of self-interest and so to expose social vices. And the whole excursus shows that creation began to degenerate, and regress to a bestial state quite early in the history of mankind. This never-completed poem announces a series of incarnations hard to identify, perhaps intending to complete the chain of ‘heretics’ with Queen Elizabeth herself, whose person had lost her glamour after the Earl of Essex’s beheading. Some have even thought or taken for granted that it was still written from a Catholic viewpoint, just before abandoning it. The poem is of course one of the mysterious Elizabethan prophecies, like Spenser’s ‘Muiopotmos’ or ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’, containing barbed allusions to powerful politicians of the time, now too difficult or impossibile to decipher. Already in the first frame, the soul’s adventures bear little connection with the single pictures of a history of mankind on which, as in a lesser Paradise Lost, original sin has left its stain. Eve, that is to say, woman, is the great culprit. The ‘soul’ is rather, in this case, a naïve witness. § 79. Donne VII: The ‘Verse Letters’ Donne had a great number of male and female acquaintances among court diplomats and aristocrats, and wrote them, out of habit or necessity, verse letters, actually addressed and posted; some of these have been found in the family archives of the addressees’ descendants. He wanted to be in their good books, to flatter them even, but verse letters were a classical Latin genre, well tried and established, hence practised not only, or not at all, for instrumental reasons, but with aesthetic and even heuristic purposes. When narrating, Donne does not only tell facts, but embroiders them pleasantly, sometimes pedantically, with refined historical and biblical annotations and commentaries. Quite early, when Donne was a member of the expedition against Spain led by the Earl of Essex in 1579, he sent a diptych formed by ‘The Storm’ and ‘The Calm’ to his youthful friend Christopher Brooke, later a lawyer and member of Parliament. It is a bipartite picture of a vivid sea-scene, a rarity in Donne, because it is almost entirely descriptive.51 At the same time the description of the storm sounds like the dramatic récit of an event very often recurring in contem51

Praz 1958, 244 and 266, justly comments that Donne never pays attention to nature as an end in itself, and that these two lyrics are the only exception. Donne, he says,

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porary plays. A taste for the macabre is evident in the comparison of the tattered sails with the rags of hanged men, but God once more utters his creative fiat, sealing the biblical isotopy, and the storm ceases. Surprisingly, Donne defines the calm ‘stupid’, less exciting than the tempest, like Leopardi exalting danger and its challenge. Also in Coleridge the calm will arouse morbid, delirious hallucinations that will prompt the sailors to plunge into the waves and become food for fish. There is an underlying allegory: stasis is a baser condition than motion, men going to war are moved by a purpose, and the calm prevents its fulfilment. It is like a soulless body, mere potential without action (‘I loose my ends’), and a threatening symbol of the breakdown in the machinery of creative evolution. 2. Including these two marine pictures, the verse letters make up more than thirty items, forming Donne’s largest sub-corpus. Like all the other sections, they were written in the course of his whole working career, with greater frequency in the years after 1600. This section is so large because some epistles have a broad architecture and a complex, if not prolix, argumentative structure, while others are shorter, simple dedications, greetings and compliments, particularly addressed to old college friends and companions, in a more negligent and humorous style. On average these verse letters are relatively easier than other genre options in Donne. To the mother of the Herbert brothers Donne does not write a tortuous dissertation but a witty letter concerning the very letter he is writing, which he feigns to address; it is a letter that will be shy and silent in the presence of the model of perfection it is addressed to, and modestly self-effacing. To Sir Henry Goodyere Donne recalls his cardinal thought, the principle of growth and self-realization, and that everything ripens and changes, never ceasing to be transformed, so that whoever pedantically copies his actions in the previous year is cursed. Only the soul indeed realizes itself in the contrary way to all human things, and in growing becomes younger, attaining its goal; only the feminine principle, and the creating advent of particular female figures, can illuminate darkness and stop the course of degeneration. It is virtuous, lovely, pure, innocent, noble, divine, enlightened women that make Donne hope to live and renew his faith in a positive seems to have spent his life in a study, an alcove or a church aisle. Leishman 1967, 119–20, partially disagrees.

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chain of being. He seems to give Thomas Woodward different advice, but in the last analysis his warning is that one had better dwell in one’s inner retreat than go wandering without a goal. Prosodically, as the verse letters follow one another they abandon the form of couplets with no strophic divisions, and are organized as quatrains, tercets and other metres, with an attendant normalization of both style and conceits. 3. The epistles to the Countess of Huntingdon (the first addressed to her when only a seventeen-year-old girl) illustrate and thus repeat Petrarch’s and Plato’s doctrine of love as spiritual correspondence and purest flame, exhorting men to love virtuous women. In point of fact, the code is not Petrarchan but anti-Petrarchan, for they ring with the apology of a strong, virile, spiritual-carnal love, not languid and wavering, for if such it would authorize the woman’s disdain. Love is fulfilled when its erratic course finds its aim. Donne exhorts overcoming indecisiveness, but hastens to call profane a love that is merely ‘appetite’. The first epistle to the countess tends to take the form of a series of rhymed couplets, sculpting dry gnomic52 concepts in a precocious Pope-like manner. He addresses the more mature Countess of Bedford – the angelic Countess, a divine intermediary for men whom she inspires with reason and faith, that is to say, with her spirituality – denouncing the torpor imprisoning mankind, and especially the court, from which only the countess and Donne himself seem able to free it. The all-virtuous countess paradoxically lacks but a small vice to be human: she must become aware of the court’s degeneration. The third letter opens with a melancholy, pensive prelude, comparing the hiatus between the old and the new year to the existential stasis of the poet himself, who then pays tribute to her in an eulogium that will hardly be believed, unless God himself is its prompter. The most passionate and dramatic asseveration of man’s insignificance, of the world’s present degeneration and deprivation, echoes in the 1614 epistle to the Countess of Salisbury, and even more despondently in that to Herbert’s brother, a genuine philosophicaltheological verse treatise. Man, his spirituality eroded, is regressing, in the future terms of Darwin and H. G. Wells, to the condition of the beast, its 52

In the second Donne denies, or doubts that women have a soul, or are eligible for Church or State positions.

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‘mark’ become visible again. Endowed with free will, he turns into poison the ‘hemlock’ that God gave men so they would make poisonous what was harmless. Indeed it is devilish man who makes poison of a food that could even be therapeutic. 4. Both prelude and development of the first epistle to the diplomat Wotton53 confirm that the frustration and bad humour of young Donne came from applying Aristotle’s philosophic motor to his life, aimlessly navigating like a broken-down ship – as we see reflected in the storm-calm diptych. Here (1597) Donne is explicit about the tedium threatening to annihilate him, the increasing withering of a life whose journey towards the goal of self-realization finds obstacles in the ‘remoras’ of city, country, court routine. Two images or correlatives are named: snail and fish, symbols of self-sufficiency and alienation from the world. § 80. Donne VIII: The ‘Anniversaries’ The two poems thus defined are an exception, for they alone, with just one addition, are far longer than all the others, and the first of them54 is one of the very few printed during the poet’s life. They were occasioned by the death of fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Drury (1610), which produced in Donne a profound, lasting sense of the world’s decay. Rapt by this strange feeling – he had never met Elizabeth – he made up his mind to celebrate the girl’s death every year with a new ‘anniversary’, a resolution he did not keep after the second year, owing to the criticism and perplexity immediately expressed (especially by Jonson) about the excessive, hyperbolic tones of this celebration. Jonson was not entirely wrong, for these two poems do not make up in artistic quality for their repetitiveness and didacticism. The first is rhapsodic, apocalyptic and raving. It quivers with anguish for a world seen to be changing, two centuries before this motif was revived by the Victorians, by now aware of Darwin after the great parenthesis of 53 § 66.5. 54 ‘An Anatomy of the World’. It is worth remembering that ‘The Anniversary’ is a lyric included in Songs and Sonnets, and that the second Anniversary (subtitled ‘The Progress of the Soul’) must not be confused with the third longer poem, Metempsychosis, known also as The Progress of the Soul, examined above.

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Enlightenment indifference followed by the Romantic stress on the organicism of the cosmos. This ode can be taken as an inspiring prelude – above all specifically, even literally – to the morbid warnings found in Ruskin’s two ‘storm cloud’ lectures.55 A trembling, disheartened meteorologist, Ruskin detects and denounces atmospheric phenomena similar to the disappearance of colour and colours from the world registered by Donne. Ruskin too, mutatis mutandis, launches a dreadful alarm concerning new astronomic discoveries. Donne and Ruskin share a pessimistic vision of human history. In Donne the image of the deceased girl remains in the background, when compared to the effects of her death. Leaving aside the occasion, the diagnosis is the same. Elizabeth Drury had been the incarnation of a soul that was achieving her aim on Earth with an influence likely to be beneficent, guiding the progress of mankind and of divine creation. Without her, the world stands still: in a calm, or more precisely in apathy. The progress Donne is always assuming and looking forward to is interrupted. The girl being equivalent to the soul, the soul has left the world and the world is left soulless, lifeless or inanimate. But the world is not aware of this. For a moment Donne admits and announces there is no repairing the loss, no redeeming the world; then he steps back, and catches sight of a surviving, regenerative process that is capable of re-establishing and re-starting the cycle of renewal. Furthermore, Elizabeth’s virtue has enlightened a handful of people. Donne strives to reconstruct a profoundly Calvinistic historical-theological excursus, identifying in the parental couple the manifestation and outbreak of the corrupting disease. He hurls rhetorical questions, laments, deplores and regrets; fancies that Elizabeth, had she lived, would have erased Eve’s stain. She having passed away, only religion is capable of initiating renewal and increase. In actual fact, before Eve the angels’ rebellion had already warned that growth would cease. A third aggravating element is a ‘philosophy’ that, though true, has subverted previous conceptions of the cosmos, unhinging its fixed structures. This, I repeat, clearly sounds as a prelude to the lamentations by Carlyle, Ruskin and Hopkins on the darkened world and on disoriented modern man. The upheaval is conveyed by means of a complex

55

Volume 6, § 48. 3–4.

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astronomical argument showing that the earth is no longer harmonious, but shows ‘warts and pock holes’, fearful peaks and abysmal depths that warp the harmony and symmetry of primordial creation. The final plea is a frantic criss-cross of grammatical tenses: alive, the dead girl influenced a few people, only some statesmen, men of power and religion, and some pious women; now her influence has decayed. The tour de force ends in the appendix of a funeral elegy, based on the conceit that no grave nor epicedium can contain – which is to say equal – the greatness of the dead woman, and give an idea of her. It is symptomatic that her death has cut short the process of renewal that makes everything ever young; the world has become ‘decrepit’. But there is just a glimmer of hope that Elizabeth’s redeeming work may go on. 2. Bishop Hall56 was probably the author of the two introductions, written in the same metre, to Donne’s odes in memory of Elizabeth Drury. In the second he makes an anticipatory abstract of the meditation, in which he says, as usual, that the deceased girl’s soul, sent from heaven to become flesh on earth and be imprisoned in a body, rises again once death has occurred and the body decays, and she completes her mission in concluding her exile and rejoining, after her terrestrial migration, the bosom of the Father, and heaven. Hence ‘Doomsday’ means the accomplishment of the design of Creation. The second anniversary develops, again against the background of the dead girl’s cult, as an almost organic treatise on the soul in the world and the body; and on its goal after leaving the body, and the way it had blended with it. Therefore it is true to its sub-heading, ‘the incommodities of the soul’. The premise, at times denied, at times asserted, is that the world is adrift, and affected by torpor and inertia. To express this idea, Donne uses the image of a ship with flapping sails, or the more shocking one of a beheaded man whose joints still move as if alive; he might as well have reminded us of fish just caught, writhing in their death-throes. The world in its articulo mortis has seen in Elizabeth Drury an apparition soon erased from memory, and on remembering her the poet benefits the world and does something for its salvation. Critics 56 § 72. In that period Hall was the rector of the Drurys’ parish, and had known the deceased girl.

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have endlessly debated on this anniversary’s internal partitions, and on its pattern, presumably taken from St Ignatius’ meditations and from mystical handbooks of prayer. After a kind of prelude, the poet indeed urges his soul to await that day of fulfilment in total forgetfulness of the world. Here we find an especially illuminating example of Donne’s always relative, oscillating use of terms: at first he has condemned torpor, which he now praises, but it is the torpor of the ataraxic soul, only longing to return to the Father, blind to the surrounding world; torpor therefore is turned into positive ‘alacrity’. The souls of the living, not yet liberated, should look to Elizabeth, whose soul even in life looked forward to its goal, heaven. Here the influence of Jesuit meditation is obvious, thanks to the rhythmic inclusion of evocative clusters, as in the many lyrics opening with an anaphoric hortatory ‘Think’: that is to say, the soul, the souls of the living, should think of death and of the soul about to soar upward. But such visual and vivid appeals yield to a new, long didactic section, concerning the perfect harmony of all elements that had reigned in the deceased. It is thus mainly an invitation to reflect, rather than see and imagine, and to reflect that the soul is bound to the body but soiled by it – more exactly poisoned, infected by the effect of original sin. When it dies, the soul is released, and, rapturously flying over and above intermediate bodies, rushes up to the Father. There is one difference: Elizabeth’s body was an exception, it was not rotten but beautiful, and the soul was happy to dwell in it. Elizabeth Drury had already partly realized on earth that permanence or eternity which for others was only occasional. 3. In the epicedia and dirges Donne starts by recalling the principles and concepts of his theology and psychology, then finds how to adapt them to the dead person he is commemorating. In his lament for James I’s eighteen-year-old elder son Henry, he affirms that in Man there are two centres: one, reason, explores the finite, the other, faith, the infinite. Reason cannot know eccentric and non-equidistant things, so faith comes to its help, and the two centres become one. Therefore, exceptionally, also men, not only women, may be able to act as models and intermediaries of virtue and holiness for present times. Henry’s is one of those meteoric disappearances that disrupt an already warped creative machinery, and cause it to degenerate further. In a fourth, longer commemoration of the Countess of

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Bedford’s brother, Donne, instead of coldly arguing, warmly evokes the thought of the deceased, identifying himself with him, accompanying his ascent in his imagination. It is a small tour de force because here virtues are in action, and in motion, whereas the man embodying them is fixed, and blends them into an inseparable unity. Donne is always in favour of nondivision, knowing that gifts and qualities are mixtures of elements that cannot be separated. To assert this he has recourse to metaphors or abstruse samples of medieval theology, like the angel that descends to earth passing through the elements or the process of reading, which no longer distinguishes single letters but finds them combined into words. The image of the compasses is applied to the dead man who has one foot in heaven and another wandering on earth. However, this epicedium soon gets caught up in one of the most embroiled arguments to be found in Donne: why did Henry not leave prescriptions for curing the world? If a pocket watch does not work no harm done, but if the bell-tower clock is wrong, the whole community is damaged. Donne asks him why on earth he did not work like such a clock. He also asks him why, delusively, he let his virtue ebb so quickly. Actually this rhetorical petition – why he abandoned the field so soon, leaving no tangible effects – should be addressed to the Creator who called him to himself too early. The question is in the air, but unspoken. In the other epicedia Donne never ceases morbidly contemplating the lordly dominion of death, and sumptuously staging its voraciousness. § 81. Donne IX: Divine poems I. ‘La Corona’ and ‘Holy Sonnets’ Donne probably composed La Corona, a group of seven sonnets on the commonest themes of hagiography (and consisting of three quatrains and a couplet) between 1607 and 1609. It was a debut in sacred poetry in a minor key, even a rather outward and stereotyped exercise recalling the naïve lyrics of Catholic Baroque poets, made up of simple, silvery, direct expressions. They lack nearly all sense of that perpetual torment and ‘night of the soul’ that one usually associates with Donne. They select six essential moments in the Gospels, preceded by a prelude; given a title, they are like captions under imaginary pictures. Formally the ‘corona’ implies a link between the first line of the first sonnet and the last sonnet’s last line, and every concluding line in each of the seven sonnets is repeated as

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the first of the next, in the guise of a hinge or relay. Donne operates like a stage-designer in evoking the Gospel scenes and at the same time prays and pleadingly implores he may be rewarded with a crown of imperishable glory, not one made of perishable laurel leaves; hence he pursues as much a worldly as a mystical glory. Even this written work is an accomplished mission (and ‘salvation to all that will is nigh’). Once this mission is ended, an infinite, that is to say, an eternal rest will begin. He tells of Christ’s advent following the thread and meaning of those oxymora and paradoxes always weaving the fabric of faith. Conceived without sin, Jesus will take all sins upon himself; immortal, he lends himself to death, since having been born in the flesh he is subject to ‘death’s force’. The highest paradox, an echo of Dante, is that Mary had already been ‘conceived’ by Jesus, as one of the Trinity, before time, so that Jesus is his mother’s father: ‘Whom thou conceiv’st, conceived’. Immensity was enclosed in a small womb: the Almighty made himself weak to descend to human level, and the crib is the small place containing the infinite. At the Temple a ‘shallow seeming child’ can in fact ‘deeply know’ everything. The paradox of the Crucifixion is that Jesus, who governs fate, suffers fate; and also that the infinite is made smaller, diminished, and that Jesus, at first the bearer of the cross, is born by it. The last but one sonnet turns however on a bolder conceit: a drop of blood of crucified Jesus will wet the dry arid soul; but the soul, thirsty before, is now free from hunger, hence satiated (a liquid satiating hunger!). And Jesus’ death will represent life, and life master death, killed by Jesus’ death. The Ascension is an imagined procession of persons going upward. 2. The Holy Sonnets form an organized collection of nineteen sonnets which were gathered together by Donne’s early editors and approved in Grierson’s edition, although probably Donne did not compose and consider it as such, unlike the Corona, for the sonnets were mostly written in the course of 1609, and only the last three in 1617. Helen Gardner once again disagreed with the previous editors in 1952, identifying certain groups as indubitably self-enclosed; but she did not propose or indicate any convincing alternative order, so that most Donne scholars chose to retain the preceding one. After 1633 there were successive additions to the basic corpus: in 1633 the poems were twelve; in 1635 sixteen; after 1897 nineteen, including the last three which until then had remained in manuscript. Altogether, the Holy Sonnets constitute a meditation – divided into and

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set out in dramatically and mimetically circumscribed experiences – on a classic homiletic theme, that of man on the verge of death. The dying person confesses his bitter repentance for the sins of a dissipated youth, dreading impending Doom and conscious that only divine grace can forgive him, while the devil never ceases to tempt him. The framework is derived from St Ignatius’ Catholic meditations, imitated but made darker by the hues of a Calvinism resigned to the unquestionable fact that salvation is doubtful and maybe definitely and irreparably lost because of original sin. After Songs and Sonnets this remains Donne’s best organized collection, the one with the richest network of motifs and thematic links. Its reputation can be explained by considering two facts. First, perhaps with the exception of Wyatt and Southwell, such desperate, heartbroken and anguished expressions had never before been heard in English literature, especially when condensed within the formal confines of a sonnet, a prosodic form rarely practised by Donne. Even after him, Herbert and other seventeenthcentury poets were to produce nothing similar. Donne’s voice was to ring out again, after two and a half centuries of silence of the self-communing religious lyric, in the ‘terrible’ sonnets of Hopkins, because in the latter’s voice the accusation of his sin alternates with the terror of damnation, and humiliation rivals with the glare of Lucifer’s rebellion. Secondly, sixteen sonnets are relatively early, dated at least twenty years before Donne’s death, and yet they manage to create, with a sort of powerful optical illusion, the impression of having been written with death hanging over the poet. As his sermons tell us, Donne felt, or more literally wished all diseases to be mortal, and overstated their gravity and danger; thus he brought the moment of death closer and experienced it in advance. 3. In the first sonnet, which Hopkins seems to echo in the opening of the ‘Deutschland’ (apart from various other lexical and conceptual echoes punctuating his ode, which I shall try briefly to highlight),57 God is the architect of a building that He is once more asked, almost with a commonplace prayer, to preserve and repair. This ipso facto may evoke the

57

The link between Donne’s sonnets and Hopkins’s ‘terrible’ ones has been variously perceived and investigated by many critics: for a deeper examination see Morris 1953, 54 and 73–9.

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old, sceptical, Lucretian reproach to a God that instead of caring about his creation abandons it to itself. He is also an absent-minded God, needing to be reminded that his creature is now struggling with death. It is anguish to be faced with a careless God, and pursued by the threat of damnation, being subject to falling into sin at the very moment when God and Satan are fighting for the soul of the dying man. Any solution is still possible, and still pending, and God supposedly loves his creation, but – in the telling antithesis of the second sonnet – he does not adopt as his own the creature that Satan refuses to lose or yield, although he does not love him and wishes him ill. Calling God into question, bringing an action against him, is a common strategy of mystical rhetoric. God must be reminded that creation was created by him and also ‘for him’; true, it was man, or for Donne woman, whose free will ended Eden’s bliss; but God himself with his sacrifice mercifully recovered what was his own; and yet he lets the devil steal and usurp58 the creature belonging to him. Donne incites God to ‘wake and fight for his creature’. The third sonnet invokes a fruitful love59 and hence a ‘holy discontent’, against the ‘idolatry’ corresponding to the young profligate philanderer’s life. Sin is like a waste of tears and sighs, those wept and these breathed, not to reduce, but aggravate sin and so sin the more; therefore present grief is all the keener for having wasted those sorrows. The unexpected turn in the argument is that vicious man is at least comforted by the remembrance of sinful joys, which he does not consider ‘punishment and sin’. In the fourth sonnet the discourse is suddenly animated by a switch from the first person to a dialogic, apostrophizing tone; more precisely, to self-exhortation. The octave of this sonnet stresses the speaker’s failures and pitiful weaknesses; only the sestet 58

See the already Hopkins-like surprise in ‘Thou art indeed just …’: ‘Why doth the devil then usurpe on me?’ 59 The situation in the first quatrain is exactly the opposite of the opening of Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’. In both cases the eyes are founts and sources of tears, but whereas in Crashaw eyes and fountains are ‘ever pouring’ and yet ‘never spent’, here all tears have been wept, and are tears that in the time of pleasures flowed from the eyes like ‘showers of rain’. ‘Spent’ originates an extended economic metaphor including the terms ‘fruit’ and ‘vain’. Also sonnet 5 bears a similarity with Crashaw in Magdalene’s eyes.

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introduces the question of ‘grace’ and of the strength of the will, that is to say, man’s first step towards preparing to accept divine grace.60 The sixth sonnet again sets in the foreground death’s dreadful imminence and immanence, a sensation coming from the hammering beat of the adjective ‘last’, and from the climactic image of the earthly pilgrimage (as well as of the theatrical show). Here Donne gives a patent illustration of his concept of the human person, for on dying the soul is separated from the body and ascends to heaven and to the Creator, while the body will lie in earth, and sins, separated from good deeds, will descend to hell. Hence, making a sort of diptych, the seventh sonnet depicts a vision of Doomsday, invoked and at the same time dreaded and delayed. The globe’s angles are imagined (or, rather, imaginary, for by now Donne was aware of the Earth’s rotundity). In this pre-figuration the angels’ trumpets awake the souls and direct them to join the bodies, strewn here and there by the variety of circumstances and occasions of death. The sestet turns the octave’s exhortation into a prayer for delay and for greater time for repentance, else the speaker would be damned. Two kinds of plenty are contrasted: a plenty of grace, ever ready to forgive, a plenty of sins, raising too high a threshold to overcome. It is also and above all a problem of time. Too late could one ask forgiveness directly to a judging God, for one must repent a little here on earth. 4. Sonnets 8 and 9 make up an incidental parenthesis of theological disquisition, with scant human accents, and are only tangentially dominated by the thought of impending death.61 Donne feels, like the Pharisee, more saved than other sinners and in comparison with what is said in other sonnets. The first of the two is based on St Thomas’ concept of the angels’ nature, evoked earlier on, in the seventh sonnet, as trumpeters. Donne wonders if the blessed, now in heaven, apprehend in the same

60 This sestet develops a concept very like Hopkins’s most elaborate speculations on divine grace in his spiritual writings. For Hopkins divine grace is not such as annihilates free will, and, grace always pending, there must be a positive token as a first step on the part of human free will. 61 Praz 1958, 157–8, sees the whole collection and all of Donne’s sacred poems as products of a religion born of an act of will, not of the feeling and joyful emotion of divine presence and of liberation from sin.

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way as the angels; if so, one’s father up in heaven will be glad to know that his son is mastering hell (literally ‘hell’s wide mouth o’erstride[s]’), in other words, living righteously. But the second quatrain considers the opposite case, that souls apprehend things not by immediate insight but through images and deductions. If blessed souls understand through images, maybe they can confuse the poet with all the world’s sinful appearances. Only God penetrates hearts and reads their genuine sorrow and repentance. The ninth sonnet actually returns to the strenuous tone of remonstrance, arguing, or re-arguing, that if animals and unfeeling nature cannot be damned, neither could or should Man be, just because he is gifted with reason and intent, in other words free will, gifts that are innate, almost unwilled.62 With disputation choked in his throat, the poet’s voice submits and ends by more fervently invoking divine mercy, that is, forgetfulness: blood and tears melt into a single, purifying, Lethean flood. The final couplet is nearly playful: God remembers sins, and this for some is justice and for others mercy, but only if God forgets them. The tenth sonnet,63 leaving this 62 63

‘His sterne wrath, why threatens he?’ and ‘But who am I, that dare dispute with thee?’ will be distinctly echoed in Hopkins’s ‘Carrion Comfort’ and ‘Thou art indeed jus, Lord …’. Actually, with the interval of two sonnets, the twelfth debates with the ninth, once more comparing beasts with Man, the lord of creation that all other creatures serve, although he is impure and all other creatures pure (not sinful, as nine said). Is then Man truly the lord of creation? Is there not a touch of envy for the beasts’ innate pureness and moral irresponsibility, while Man cannot resist sin , the Creator, though sinless, accepted to die? Man differs as much from beasts as from Christ, paradoxically united as being pure and sinless. Two other meditating pauses are sonnets 15 and 16. The first, paraphrasing a passage by St Paul, centres on God who, though surrounded with angels in heaven, descended into a man, who is adopted by the Father and becomes co-heir of his glory. Here, though, the sonnet contradicts and quite inverts sixteen, where God loves Man but did not choose him; here he ‘Hath deign’d to choose thee by adoption’. In the sestet God is a robbed man who again finds the stolen goods, but they have been sold, so that he must go without, or buy them again. The concept is introduced in sonnet 2, a rehearsal of this. As always the robber is Satan and God must strip himself of his glory to recover Man and free him from prison. In the final couplet a man made in God’s image and a God made in Man’s image confront one another. Obviously it is not the same thing, for a crucial

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suspended dilemma, utters the loudest and boldest defiance ever addressed to death, debased to the level of sleeping draughts and suicidal poisons, or even worse (Hopkins will personify and challenge death at the beginning of the ‘Deutschland’, part two). Men are not death’s slaves if it is true that by suicide they can conquer it whenever they like, nor if death is thought to be a real sleep, instead of a metaphorical, transcendent deliverance of the soul from the body, and ascent to the father. A lightning-quick compression of time marks the eleventh sonnet, in whose Jesuit-like compositio loci the poet begs the Jews to slander, mock and spit at him, instead of Christ. But it starts with a mere fictio, addressing the Jews of Christ’s remote, far-off time, and then goes on to the traditional self-communication. His sins deserve that treatment, the anaphoras echoing the Confiteor (‘for I have sinned’, and committed a worse sin than the Jews). The sonnet also applies an imitatio Christi, comparing Christ’s real crucifixion to the poet’s only desired one; and distinguishing the impure living ego from the wholly pure dead Christ. The last comparison is between Jacob and Jesus. Jacob was clothed in vile attire, Christ in vile man’s flesh; Jacob wanted to obtain, to gain, while Christ wanted to suffer; one disguise was meant to conquer, the other to bow and suffer. From this point on, several sonnets tend to clarify, take up and repeat former observations. The thirteenth imagines again imminent death, not just of the self. A further compositio loci shows here Christ as judge, as well as the crucified; looking at the crucifix the poet doubts whether Christ is firmer in condemning or readier to forgive. He addresses the crucifix’s face, vividly described as in Herbert’s ‘The Agonie’: can such a Christ, who moreover on the cross forgave the interval intervenes, stressed by a ‘before’ that is really an ‘after’: the Son makes himself Man’s image after the theft, that is, original sin. This sonnet, then, clearly stages the Trinitarian God mentioned in number fourteen in the form of ‘God’– ’Spirit’–‘The Son’. Even sonnet 16 glosses, somewhat obscurely, the mystery of the Trinity, since men come to share the divine inheritance according to three, not specified, ‘wills’. The Trinity is addressed in the first of the twenty-eight stanzas of The Litany, thirteen of which have titles (like the sonnets in the Corona); they form a rubric or alphabet of faith, where the Virgin, angels, patriarchs and prophets one by one appear; the remaining stanzas echo with various prayers, all closing with the demand to be freed a malo.

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penitent thief, condemn him? The innermost soul is, in medieval terms, in harmony with the outer face, its ‘sign’, and Jesus’ ‘beauteous form’ assures a ‘piteous mind’. The opening of sonnet 14 mimics that of eleven in invoking corporal punishment (there, a crucifixion), this time not by the Jews but by the very God of the Trinity. God must ‘batter’ the heart, not just pat it softly. But only one verb implies a percussive action, the rest speak of breathing and whispering, or lighting up; in short, of restoring rather than demolishing. Line four shows that the first holy sonnet, asking for ‘repair’, is now denied, for the building must be ‘made new’.64 The initial apostrophe returns to ask, by means of a violent act of deliverance, for a more effective presence of God. Again, the first move must be God’s, and again we perceive Donne’s Manichaean bent, or rather the theme of Man’s powerlessness to resist sin. Earlier on, in the second sonnet, the ravisher was the devil; the paradox of God’s slavery is that it leaves Man free, that of his violence that it leaves him chaste. 5. The first of the last three sonnets refers to Donne’s deceased wife, so it must be later than 1617. Misfortune has further led the poet to spiritual thoughts, while death is spoken about with an economic and soon after erotic metaphor of the kind mystics use, that is with the term ‘ravish’, for the third time linked to a different referent and concept. Donne confirms that by now faith has been found and is assured, and that God assuages thirst; yet that thirst is not quenched. But it is useless to ask for the gift of more love. A humanized God fears, in his ‘tender jealousy’, lest man give his love to angels and saints, although they are divine things, and more seriously lest the devil, world and flesh may extinguish and nullify it. Sonnet 17 resumes the inquiry of Donne’s third satire, concerning which Christian confession can be proclaimed Christ’s true bride. The husband, still within the paradoxical erotic metaphor used for religious purposes, must betray and even prostitute his wife, making her available, although still chaste, to the embraces of all. And yet sonnet 19 may represent the belated key to all the Holy Sonnets, for it admits the poet’s untamed, 64 Why ‘three personed God’? There is a threefold operation originated by the Spirit’s ‘breathing’ (l. 2), as in the Veni Creator Spiritus. Christ the Son is hinted at in l. 11, ‘break that knot again’, meaning the Incarnation.

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incurable, unstable nature. The conquered piety is like a low fever that comes and goes, and again we see Donne as ‘idolatrous’. § 82. Donne X: Divine poems II. The hymns Donne’s religious canon is completed by loose glosses and illustrations of the mysteries of faith. The Puritan hostility to the crucifix is contested in ‘The Cross’ with witty and even naïve ingenuity, and in the central section all kinds of human gestures are made unconscious emblems of the cross, implied, or explicit, in the natural scenes and engraved in creation. The coinciding recurrence of Annunciation and Passion on the same day of the year 160865 impresses Donne, who sees beginning and end, birth and death, as fundamental, historical and meta-historical moments. ‘Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward’ illustrates a deep, pious emotion painstakingly emerging from the opening premise. Reality is made of spheres enlivened by intelligences, and every spherical monad feels the influence of external forces able to make it deviate from its course. This preliminary conceit serves to show that while Donne’s own practical sphere moves westward, the inner intelligence insensibly turns towards the East to contemplate Christ’s passion, on the day when the crucifixion happens. But to view it with direct immediacy without memory’s distancing veil would be a terrible, unbearable experience, which above all needs to be purified of its impureness through Grace. The first of Donne’s three hymns properly so termed, ‘A Hymn to Christ at the Author’s Last Going to Germany’, in four stanzas of eight lines woven of fine antitheses, tells that Donne departed on an embassy to Germany with his mind constantly set on religious themes, seeing reality as a series of religious tokens. He ritually calls a blessing on the island as though he were leaving it forever, as also he blesses his friends; and he expresses his purpose always to resist sin and renews his love and asks to be loved back. By then Donne had re-directed his disparate loves, gathering and summing them up into the love of God. ‘Hymn to God, my God in my Sickness’ was written, Walton says, a few days before his death, but perhaps it dates back to a serious illness contracted in 1623 which, like 65 ‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day. 1608’. The Feast of Annunciation falls on 25 March, which was Good Friday in that year.

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previous ones, Donne must have thought terminal. In this expectation of death there is not terror, but sweetness, and the illness, in the metaphor, is the tuning of a musical instrument and a mimicking of the movements of eternal life. The physicians have become geographers, and the sick body a map where they try to find the South-West Passage, in other words the nature of the illness. Diagnostically the burning fever presages death, but in his fever the sick one sees his sunset that in no way frightens him. In a globe East and West touch, and likewise death touches resurrection; so the first sinning Adam, and the second, the redeemer, overlap. Christ is the mediator and channel allowing us to reach heavenly bliss. The epigraph of the poem says that the God of paradoxes knocks down those he wants to exalt. ‘A Hymn to God the Father’ (1623), written on the same occasion as the preceding one, in almost all editions seals Donne’s poetical corpus with the mark of the instability, the open contrast and the oscillations of his temperament. I began this discussion by highlighting this. The atmosphere is no longer that of the previous hymn’s serene acceptance of death; its prostration and terrifying irony, in verse never so dry before nor so rich in bitter puns,66 are very close to the expressive mood of the Holy Sonnets. Donne doubts that God can ever forgive, when the sin, like that of which he accuses himself, is so great and weighty. The same sin may be committed by many, but once it is committed by a single person it becomes individual. For the sinner there is no extenuating circumstance, and the sin is greater when it extends to others by its bad example. The thought of eternal damnation and nothingness after death is expressed with dramatic wit in the third stanza: Donne’s capture, or the accomplishment of God’s mission, at this point will no longer cause any fear. § 83. Donne XI: Treatises, libels and sermons Compared with his poetic output, Donne’s prose production is massive, and its variety exemplifies the range of his moods and the phases in the evolution of his Weltanschauung in connection with his later public roles. The earliest prose collection is Paradoxes and Problems (printed 66 Here is the most famous of these tragic puns: ‘When thou hast done, Thou hast not done, / For, I have more’. It is the refrain of the three stanzas.

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however in 1652). Its cold, laconic, objective essays, in the style of Bacon and Montaigne, are razor-edge discussions of issues and queries enunciated in the single titles and then taken to pieces, inverted and reconstructed in the course of the discussion, as always seeing recto and verso of each assertion (for instance: women ruin men and at the same time avenge their wrongs). Donne’s three theological or polemical treatises are the above-mentioned Pseudo-Martyr and Biathanatos, and Conclave Ignatii, also called Ignatius His Conclave. The first and third were meant to demonstrate ad abundantiam both Donne’s acquired Protestant orthodoxy and his eligibility for administrative or, later, ecclesiastic appointments. Conclave Ignatii was written in Latin in 1610, and printed three times the following year, the third in an English translation made by Donne himself (hence the two titles). In it Donne ran the risk of dealing with a muddled religious controversy with the weapons not of theological or academic diatribe, but of paradoxical, dreamlike farce. The pamphlet follows in the wake of Lutheran polemics against indulgences, and exploits the commonplace of the Pope as Antichrist and Satan on earth, a debunking expressed in the same harsh, irreverent spirit as Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale67 (which Pasolini filmed and overdid so well). It is also a parody of Dante’s descent to the centre of the earth, where Lucifer keeps his subterranean court by only admitting those he judges worthy of it. Lucifer examines the credentials of various scientists, thinkers, philosophers and churchmen, in order to ascertain to what extent they have really fought and subverted traditional lore and, being thereby true destroyers of the status quo, can aspire to be received into the infernal court. Copernicus is rejected since his ‘revolution’ has not really made havoc of faith; but Machiavelli, and this is what Donne ultimately wanted to show, boasts he has taught Jesuits to deceive and swindle honest people with specious arguments. Machiavelli’s Prince even admitted regicide, and thus, a true enemy of established regimes, it actually threatened order, political stability and regular monarchic succession. But Donne’s work takes its title from ‘Ignatius’ conclave’, and actually Loyola sits at Lucifer’s side as his right-hand man, and, seeing Lucifer 67 § 20.5. Praz (PMI, 140–5) greatly enjoys recounting and summing up the phases of this libel’s questionings, especially, of course, that of Machiavelli.

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about to be persuaded by Machiavelli, he prostrates himself to Lucifer. Machiavelli attacked the Pope, who is Lucifer’s vicar; he was an atheist and above all, not believing in God, he did not believe in Lucifer either, so the latter abandons his incipient decision to set him at his right or his left. At this point, after an endless anti-Machiavellian tirade of Ignatius, Lucifer exhorts Galileo to send Ignatius to the moon, to found there a branch of Satan’s reign; and on this suspended note68 the libel ends. 2. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) is a very precious work, mid-way between poetry and sermon, certainly not to be considered optional reading. It comprises twenty-three short meditations that make a sort of progressive diary of the illness Donne suffered in 1623, and expected to die of, and of his slow recovery. So the poet treats in prose his ultimate theme, illness as a trial and fore-experience of death, and therefore life itself as an illness, and marked by illness instead of joyful health. Many of these devotions centre thus on a consideration of the time factor and of man as subject to mutability as the consequence of original sin. This pervading, irresistible sense of precariousness foreshadows modern negative existentialism, as appears most blatantly, although superficially, from the fact that Hemingway borrowed, for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the recurring image that announces death’s approach as something that must be ‘enjoyed’ and savoured, not rejected. Once the effects of illness – its psychological consequences, the sick man’s anxiety, the physician’s behaviour – have been studied, therapy begins. The most dramatic meditation is the eighteenth: where does the soul go at death? But what interests Donne is that the once robust body is now going to putrefy. Constance is once again the recurring conceptual axis: ‘Man hath no centre but misery; there, and only there, he is fixed’. 3. A body of more than 150 sermons, preached in churches, at court, and to other small communities, and gathered afterwards in ten volumes in the main modern edition,69 may be useful for readers and students of 68 The Jesuits, Machiavelli objects, have invented mental reservation: in the lyric ‘The Will’ Donne says he is ready to present them with his cunning and candour, as of no use to them. 69 Only six sermons were published during Donne’s life; Donne’s son edited three volumes before 1661.

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Donne’s poetry, but is compulsory reading for theologians, biblical scholars and at the very least historians of homiletics. This is suggested by the fact that one only, ‘Death’s Duell’, from time immemorial through to today, appears, as an inevitable appendix and a classic ‘coda’, in most editions of Donne’s poems. This is due, more than to the text chosen, to the excellence of the argumentation, to the greater wealth of poetic echoes and to the occasion and circumstance it was preached in (solemnly related in Walton’s biography). Donne gave it in fact as a sermon for Lent in the king’s presence at Whitehall, on 25 February 1631. It was considered, and indeed was, Donne’s last sermon: the sermon of a dying Donne. It was the climax in the staging by Donne of his own death in the course of his life, and the closure of that hankering, his constant approach to death. Some have objected that this sermon is neither paradigmatic nor representative, given its visible and perceptible difference from the others; and that in order to get an idea of Donne’s art of preaching one should at least read an anthology of passages from other sermons, subdividing them into different groups to achieve a more stereoscopic vision. To say that Donne’s homiletics is distinguished by emotional involvement, the intent to persuade, the rhetoric of ‘pathos’ – and by the recourse to climax and to cumulative effects – is tantamount to stressing the unified and integrated nature of Donne’s universe – the integration, that is, of the first and early Donne no less than the second and later one, the churchman, able to turn and amplify into articulate discourse the theological proofs so concisely expressed by his sonnets and short lyrics. To undervalue the symbolic, final, albeit involuntary placing, of ‘Death’s Duell’ at the end, is a mistake. Donne’s textual journey ideally ends by linking the lover ‘suck[ing] on country pleasures’ with his beloved in ‘The Good Morrow’, with the preacher who, in front of his audience, imagines himself kneeling at the foot of the Cross, ‘suck[ing] at the wounds’ of Christ. 4. ‘Death’s Duell’ deals with the final lines of Psalm 68, and aims to explain the threefold meaning of the ‘issues’ from death, which are said to belong to God. With paradoxical negative rhetoric, Donne concentrates primarily on the first meaning, the issue from life to death that is in fact from death to life, and on life being marked by death even before birth and in the mother’s womb. He says then that to ask of God to barter life with death, hardly a Jesuitical desire, is common in human history. Moving on

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to the other two meanings, we realize that this sermon is also a locus that Hopkins was to re-meditate, by summing up Donne’s central argument – Man on dying is made food for worms and is nullified, but in resurrecting is reborn to life – in the ‘trumpet crash’ of the sonnet on the Heraclitean fire. The turn of the sermon, or an actual deviation in the argument, occurs just before the end, when Donne directly addresses his audience recommending the imitatio Christi and expressly the imitatio of Christ about to undergo his Passion, thereby evoking the spitting Jews of one the Holy Sonnets. Here begins a lengthy compositio loci of the crucifixion, realized by means of hammering anaphoras and a salvo of visual details. The basic conceptual or concettist syllogism is that, just as God made himself human in being born man-God from a human womb, so Jesus dying becomes divine again. The incorruptibility of Christ’s body at his death, not granted to Man who is devoured by the worms, is traced back by Donne both to original sin – predictably – and to Jesus’ ‘hypostatical union’; at any rate, this is accepted as an inscrutable ‘divine decree’. § 84. Puttenham Towards the end of the sixteenth century, aware of what was happening on the Continent, a few English poets, both practitioners and theoreticians, had desultorily begun to write of poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric, metrics and genre history, and to review and analyse the contemporary state of English literature, in its elements of continuity as well as in its peculiarities when compared with literary evolution since Greek and Roman times. But no one composed a handbook as large and valuable as The Arte of English Poesie1 (1589) by George Puttenham (1529–1591). This treatise comes shortly after pamphlets and booklets, some of which I mentioned en passant in the foregoing pages, like Gascoigne’s Notes2 or Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric (1588);3 but it precedes, at least regarding the date of publication, Sidney’s Defence, and also the Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) by Thomas Campion, which Daniel answered with the Defence of Rhyme 1 2 3

Recent critical edition, ed. F. Whigham and W. A. Rebhorn, Ithaca, NY and London 2007. I follow the edition in old spelling ed. E. Arber, London 1869. § 45.2. § 57.1 n. 7.

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(1604).4 A review of drama in the early 1590s is Palladis Tamia by Meres, which will be treated when dealing with Shakespeare. Three years earlier (1586) there had been a Discourse of English Poetrie by the schoolmaster William Webbe, whose intent was enthusiastically to praise Spenser, who at that date could only be the Spenser of Calender. All these treatises are extravagant and dilettantish, and found sympathy with indulgent critics like Saintsbury but met with stern reproach with rigorists like C. S. Lewis. In point of fact, what causes this first collective spurt of aesthetic discussions is the need, or rather the anxiety, to bring English literary culture to the level of continental, Italian and French culture, naturally in an historical moment where the English were not aware that a far more interesting corpus was being written, in which theories and reconstructions could be illustrated. 2. As with Malory, or Marlowe, for ages it was hard to believe that the author of The Arte of English Poesie was such a choleric, polemical, disgraceful man as Puttenham seems to have been, from witnesses and evidence that might indeed have been exaggerated and slanderous, were they not so many. He had to face his wife’s suit for divorce and his marriage was dissolved. He was suspected of rape, and of having fathered many bastards. Cecil did appoint him Justice of the Peace, but this roused the Bishop of Winchester’s rage and his accusations of manifest unworthiness. Incorrigible, Puttenham was involved in a conspiracy against Cecil himself. It is also true that he belonged to a noble family imbued with classical and Italianate learning, and possessing estates near Basingstoke; that his maternal uncle was Elyot, the author of the Governor; that he had been a student at Cambridge, but had left without a degree to join the London college of lawyers. He shrewdly offered his treatise to Queen Elizabeth, who made up for the wrongs his relatives had done him. Thus Puttenham was regularly part of the thick crowd of poets that mythologized and worshipped Elizabeth at the end of the sixteenth century; but he did that with exaggeration, flattery and fictitiousness. Elizabeth is for him the peak of the age’s poetic development, and the terminal point of the progress begun with Chaucer. Such resounding celebration of the queen’s poetic

4

§ 69.3.

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excellence leaves open the question of how much of her production may have actually been lost. Let us recall that the other treatises mentioned above are simple pamphlets, when not mere articles; The Arte of English Poesie is instead an organic study in three books and nearly seventy chapters. It remains the most precious treatise of its time in that it sketches an early historical perspective, evaluates the current situation and offers the first judgements on still active or just deceased authors. Therefore any student of fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poetry preceding Shakespeare and The Faerie Queene cannot but start from its sharp, and sometimes indeed impulsive or even naïve judgements. 3. True to his uncle Elyot, Puttenham fosters and defends a concept of poetry as socially and politically useful, but he ends by being one of the first Englishmen who systematically register the so-called physical and technical elements of poetic language. He thought that the effectiveness of poetry in this respect needed to be asserted at a moment when poets, in his opinion, were despised or mocked as ‘fanciful’. Understandably, he devotes much space to discussing the purpose of satire, which is the critique of depraved and degenerate princes. In parallel, righteous princes were praised and set up as models by ancient poets and playwrights. Puttenham’s specifically English view is that the Norman invasion had checked a natural development that had subsequently resumed its course with Chaucer; his reconstruction of the poetry of the previous two centuries is made by focusing on almost all known authors, save, for obvious reasons, those of Pearl and Gawain. Italians feel they are hearing a kind of Vasari speaking of ‘the most excellent painters’, were it not that Puttenham’s diagnoses are not sufficiently distanced. The most astonishing part of the treatise is the second, when, to exemplify the patterns of prosody, he even uses graphs of geometrical figures. He explicitly identifies the further, ‘ocular’ meaning of a poem, that is the shape and outline that lines take according to their syllabic consistency, and classifies eight of them, namely: diamond, lozenge, acute and very acute triangle, square, cylinder, circle and ellipsis. It goes without saying that among these we find the rhomboid shapes used later by George Herbert and much later by Dylan Thomas. 5 Puttenham describes, and 5

But not that in the shape of wings.

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composes too, examples of column-shaped poems. This bent for visual or visualized poetry explains why he, of all English Renaissance treatisewriters, suddenly found favour with the Italian structuralists of the 1970s, as witness M. Pagnini’s and even my own incunabula. If the first partition of the treatise evokes Vasari, the third, a taxonomic compilation of rhetorical figures of more than 100 pages, makes one think of Heinrich Lausberg’s manual. For all those figures Puttenham chooses the Greek term, but adds a colourful, at times very colourful English paraphrase. Yet altogether what prevails is the persuasive and performative effect. Puttenham admits figurative language, even calls it necessary, but does not overlook violations of stylistic decorum, nor indeed real rhetorical ‘vices’; he thus paves the way to all future controversies in English criticism over ‘extreme’ styles and rhetorical idiolects, like that of Hopkins.6 It is no exaggeration to say that Puttenham, in the last pages of his treatise (chapter 21ff. of Book III, on ‘vices and deformations’ of style), looks ahead to Robert Bridges.7

6 7

See in particular Volume 6, § 190.1. See also Saintsbury (SAI, 306), who recalls Addison’s impatience with Puttenham’s graphs.

Part IV 

The Elizabethan Theatre

§ 85. Tudor masques and interludes As mentioned above,1 moralities were not quite abandoned or replaced in the sixteenth century; rather, along with them and in a more prominent position new dramatic genres emerged, no longer popular in origin, but born and bred in the milieu of courtly entertainment, which produced the first bursts of what would develop into a theatrical epidemic lasting nearly half a century. While Scotland after Lyndsay proves unable to move on, during the reign of Henry VIII England adopts continental models and spreads the fever. The masque2 had first appeared in the first years of the sixteenth century, as a private show organized by court nobles for the sovereign on set festive occasions. Under Elizabeth it became a means of propping up the ideology of power and attacking Catholicism. As often happens in similar cases, at first the scripts are considered less important and were not preserved; later on they were valued much more than the scenery. With James I there was a revival of the masque, and texts were commissioned to famous authors, just as costumes and scenery were to professional artists. Hardly a dramatist or poet but wrote masques until the time of Cromwell: especially Campion, Daniel, and Ben Jonson who – as we shall see –introduced into the basic form of the genre the antimasque, that is, episodes with a contrasting function to the main theme. 2. In the history of English secular drama, the starting point and terminus a quo is John Rastell (1475–1536); immediately after him comes his son-in-law John Heywood (1497–1579). Thanks to the work of both, over half a century the interlude acquires a stable structure and definite norms. It is performed at court or in the mansions of nobles for their entertainment. At first it takes the form of an allegory of Everyman caught between the appeals of vice and virtue, amidst a plethora of medieval personifications. Being mainly concerned with giving moral advice, it consists of a fixed debate between characters expressing opposite views, on which an 1 2

§ 28.4 The term ‘mask’ does not seem to have been linked with ‘masque’, or to have the same meaning as ‘wizard’; but the words were actually taken one for the other until Ben Jonson: it was he who distinguished between ‘mask’ or ‘wizard’, and ‘masque’, that is, ‘show’.

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arbiter finally passes judgement. Its texts are no longer than 1,000 lines; there is a hint of humour but none of a dramatic plot. Since it met with its greatest favour during Mary’s reign, the interlude may also be seen as a Catholic genre and a covert revanche against Protestant drama.3 Hence, it is and is not a direct prelude to the English comedy of the end of the century. Rastell, who had married the daughter of Thomas More, was with his son William a second Caxton, and to him we owe the preservation of plays written and performed until the mid-sixteenth century. He was also charged with the most various administrative tasks and a daring promoter of reforms in civil and ecclesiastical administration; as such, however, he became a danger, so Henry VIII sent him to prison, where he died in poverty. His The Nature of the Four Elements, issued anonymously in the first years of the century, presents the familiar struggle between vice and virtue for mastery of the human soul, made aware of the benefits of learning geography and what Donne was later to name the ‘new philosophy’. This discipline is taught by Naturate Nature, but Humanity is led astray by Sensual Appetite and Ignorance.4 Rastell, in short, is still a didactic author. Heywood gets rid of that compulsion and, rather than aiming at moral lessons, creates drama out of reality, and instead of embodied allegories he portrays living, idiosyncratic human beings, although grouped with a certain medieval symmetry in couples, triads and quartets of figures. A musician, chorister and court singer, he staged under Edward and Queen

3

4

Henry VIII had vetoed interludes with religious elements, but under Edward some such interludes were actually written and performed to discredit the Catholic faith, and immediately countered by apologetic ones under Mary; among them was a Respublica ascribed to Udall (§ 88), attacking the vices of covetousness, insolence, oppressiveness and flattery, supplanted by as many contrary virtues in Mary’s reign. According to BAUGH, vol. II, 365, the south-western dialect spoken by the People in this interlude was to become the prevalent speech of Elizabethan peasants. The wish for science to enter the educational curriculum also finds an echo in interludes of which we know titles, texts and approximate dates of publishing, but not the biographical data of the authors, John Redford and Thomas Lupton. Calisto and Meliboea, where the bawd looks ahead to Elizabethan comedy, was an adaptation, with the substitution of a happy end, of Rojas’s Celestina; its author was, according to some, Rastell, to others Heywood.

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Mary his own and other authors’ interludes; accused of plotting against Cranmer, he was granted a pardon, but when Elizabeth came to the throne he wisely chose to leave England for Belgium, where he died at the age of eighty. To him are ascribed the interludes Witty and Witless, The Play of Love, The Play of the Weather, The Pardoner and the Friar, The Play Called the Four P. P. and Johan Johan. We know when they were printed (in the 1530s), but not when they were composed or (if ever) staged. In the first of them Heywood uses the familiar form of a debate between two characters upon a given theme, without any plot development, entrusting the final judgement to an arbiter. The sanity-folly contrast harks back to More, and through More to Erasmus. Heywood’s second interlude presents four possible situations: a man who loves but is not loved, a lady loved who does not love, a lover beloved, and a lady neither loving nor loved. In both interludes the stiff and fixed form of the debate and the lack of scenic background prevent all emotional involvement. In The Play of the Weather Jupiter sends to earth a messenger to ask what kind of unchanging weather the mortals desire; once each of ten representatives has wittily expressed his subjective, self-interested opinion, Jupiter leaves things as they are. Variety of structure and verbal inventiveness make this play of Heywood’s most lively and most amusing. The ‘four P. P.’ are characters whose names begin with that letter, engaged in competing for which of them can tell the biggest lie: the ‘pilgrim’ wins, by uttering a gross commonplace of classical misogyny. One finds here a return of the salacious humour, tinged with ambiguity and double-entendre, typical of Chaucer. A kind of heightened intertextuality also emerges in the comedy based on two patently Chaucerian characters, the pardoner and friar, who start a quarrel in the street, transforming the genre of the debate into that of farce. Johan Johan, whose French source was identified in 1949, is already a farce (on the classic triangle of jealous husband, wife, and would-be-seducer priest) where at last dramatic action begins to make itself felt.5 Apart from drama, Heywood was practically the inventor of the English epigram, since the wit of and the liking for this genre were probably inherited from Thomas More, and 5

The comic monologue Thersites, the adaptation of a French text and performed in 1537, was probably not authored by Heywood, but by Udall (§ 88).

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genetically conveyed to John Donne.6 Even The Spider and the Fly, a satire on the fly caught in a spider’s web, in no less than 98 cantos, is not alien to the wit of such a Catholic (albeit apostate) as Donne, the Donne with the fulminating wit of ‘The Flea’.7 Near the end of the satire the housekeeper enters and helps the fly imprisoned in the web; after some hesitation she kills the spider ‘setting her foot on him’. But the target of the poem was the hated Cranmer. Indeed in many, if not all, of Heywood’s dramatic and poetical works there lurks an element of political allegory, since they open in a situation of potential anarchy and of divergences finally to be reconciled by a superior instance of order. Before the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the interlude spread into various branches (everyday realism, social satire, pedagogy, ancient and sacred history, and romance) coming close to Elizabethan comedy and farce. The only fixed laws of its structure are the absence of act-division, schematic action, typical and allegorical personages. Most prominent among them is Vice who, starting from Heywood’s messenger in The Play of the Weather more and more came to embody, rather than the powers of darkness, a delightful imp, linguistically witty and creative. He would eventually turn into the fool of full-fledged drama. § 86. Elizabethan drama: An overview Elizabethan literary culture became a predominantly dramatic one thanks to a series of interlocking circumstances. Historians and students of literary relationships rightly assume a ‘chromatic’ continuity between miracle play cycles and moralities, and between the latter and the advent of secular drama. Their contrasting vice-virtue mechanism melts little by little into the psychological analyses of pure and simple drama, getting rid of the principle and paraphernalia of allegory. On the other hand,

6 7

§ 74.1. Owing to a more or less fortuitous coincidence, the image of the ‘seven sleepers’ recurs in Heywood’s comedy of the ‘four P.P.’ (see The Dramatic Writings of John Heywood, ed. J. S. Farmer, London 1905, 44) and in Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’. The most recent edition of Heywood’s works is edited by R. Axton and P. Happé, Woodbridge 1991.

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this transition can also be explained in purely anthropological terms, for drama, in its variety of genres and artistic achievements, had come to exert a strong impact on all layers of the nation’s social life. More perhaps than in other countries, England inherited from the Middle Ages a robust correspondence between religious festivities and massive gatherings of people for festivals, fairs and processions. Even royal visits through the realm were organized as solemn heraldic parades and pageants, and the court itself was the scene of entertainments that came to acquire an increasingly official significance. Popular drama, far from being dead, was still practised in the outlying areas of the kingdom: in towns, streets, squares and inns, in the form of impromptu shows, mime and pantomime, feats of acrobatics and magic, choir or band music. Inevitably, the labour market saw the rise of the profession or calling of the actor, whose reputation and status are worth analysing. The increasing theatrical activities generated an entirely new social category, endowed at first with merely pragmatic abilities. Around the middle of the century, actors were looked upon as little more than vagrants, regarded with suspicion by well-to-do citizens and run out of town by magistrates. Such ostracism only relented when companies of players gained the protection of nobles. There even was, for a time, friction between Queen Elizabeth, who doted on the theatre, and municipal authorities who disliked it. Moreover, even young students loved to act, as both school and university curricula required the study of classical dramas, and asked students to perform, under the direction of their teachers, texts edited by the latter or written ex novo. The queen herself insisted the young choristers of the Chapel Royal be taught to act, and promoted the creation of boys’ companies – St Paul’s became the most famous of them – that rivalled those of adult players. Even Lyly and Peele wrote plays for the boys, but most of the texts written for them have been lost. The plays written and staged from 1580 to 1642 are estimated to number 1,000 – according to others 2,000 or 3,000,1 but the figure must vary if one includes those that have disappeared without trace. The flow was not stemmed by the exhaustion or physiological decay of the genre, but rudely cut off by the closing of theatres in 1642; thereafter plays were allowed to be printed but not staged. 1

But only one sixth, which is around 500, have survived.

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During the long period mentioned above, there are reckoned to have been 50 million theatregoers, with an average of 25,000 weekly over the period (214 days a year) when plays could be performed: an amazing figure, compared with the estimated inhabitants of London and of the whole nation.2 Of course no one can expect the situation to have remained the same for sixty years. After 1603, James I applied a sort of check, favouring a drama based on classical models from distant sources like Seneca and Plutarch, or inspired by them. At Cambridge dramatic works by and for students were written strictly in Latin, with the added veto on acting in English within five miles of the university. 2. From the rich evidence left by sixteenth-century cartographers, memorialists and travellers, we can easily reconstruct a general picture of the ‘Elizabethan Stage’, which corresponds to the title and contents of the 1923 classic study in four volumes by E. K. Chambers.3 One of the most precious records of the Elizabethan period is the diary and payroll of the impresario Henslowe, a mine of information on transactions and performances relative to his two theatres, the Rose and the Fortune. Theatre architecture reflects dramatic practice. Plays had been originally performed in the open air, perhaps facing inns, with onlookers in a circle or semi-circle surrounding the players on a platform; such a circle was also the arena where bearbaiting and cockfighting were held. During most of Elizabeth’s reign, then, there were open-air theatres, located in a ‘courtyard’ where most of the spectators could stand for the price of one penny. Inside the ring were roofed galleries with benches for the well-to-do who could pay more, and boxes. However, instead of circular the plan4 could be oval or polygonal, more exactly octagonal. The wooden stage (a kind of movable platform laid on trestles, with several trapdoors fitted to allow gods or devils to spring forth 2 3

4

§ 34.6 and n. 9. The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, Oxford 1923, last repr. 2009. The topics of this section are also closely analysed in R. Mullini and R. Zacchi, Introduzione allo studio del teatro elisabettiano, Firenze 1992, and in Il teatro elisabettiano, ed. L. Innocenti, Bologna 1994. It is usually inferred from later reconstructions of the theatres of the time; invaluable is the sketch of the Swan theatre made by a Dutchman, de Witt, a traveller to England in 1596.

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or drop into) protruded far out towards the public, and was divided into three areas, front, middle, and back; the last, with a curtain, could be used for indoor scenes. Above there was a kind of balcony or upper stage, again usable for indoor scenes, or as castle battlements; over this was the gallery for the musicians, and on top of that a smaller place serving for a store-room. At the sides of the back stage were two doors for the actors’ entrances and exits. The material of the building was wood, which increased the risk of fire (in 1613 the Globe did indeed burn to the ground), but made it possible, if necessary, to move the whole structure elsewhere.5 But after James I came to power, some dramatists began writing plays for private courts and smaller audiences, starting the new system of ‘private’ playhouses, furnished with roofs and lit by candlelight, where the scenery, hitherto rather scant,6 was more elaborate, and the target audience of higher social standing. At the end of the sixteenth century there were less than ten working theatres in London: the one founded by the actor Burbage had been built towards the outskirts, where the authorities were readier to give licences for acting. The Globe was built in 1599 by Burbage’s sons, who had refused to pay a higher rent to the owner of the land where the former theatre had stood. The average capacity was 2,000 people; performances took place in the early afternoon of working days and lasted no more than three hours, due to the swift style of recitation and the lack of intervals. The law forbade women to interpret female roles, which were acted by children; the scenery was elementary but not absent, its changes announced by writings on placards; costumes, on the other hand, were the object of extreme care and expense. 3. A play’s progress – from the moment of its conception in the dramatist’s mind to its final staging – followed a well-tested chain of established norms and unerring conventions. The concept of authorship was vague to the point of non-existence, as far as the theatre was concerned. Suddenly

5

6

Of wood, instead of concrete, and in pleasant green and violet colours, were also the stands of the Wimbledon tennis stadiums when they were built following the model of the Elizabethan playhouse and taking advantage of at least two other features: the relatively small size that made for greater intimacy between actors and audience, and the closeness of each to the other. But see O. G. Brockett, History of the Theatre, Boston, MA 1968, 185–7.

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there sprang up a class of dramatists and would-be dramatists who did not seek to win perennial fame, but merely to eke out a living. Present-day criticism, alert to the authorship question, assumes that nearly every Elizabethan play was the outcome of either synchronic or diachronic collaboration.7 Owners of the text, in modern terms, were the impresario or the company, and there was no notion of copyright. Every script could be sold, modified or re-adapted. According to legend, the author’s scant earnings were immediately squandered in the tavern, and hunger and need compelled him to write more and more texts for the insatiable market; indeed, the enormous demand stimulated co-production. Apart from Ben Jonson, no dramatist cared about having his plays printed; in fact quite the contrary, for once printed, a play was ‘burnt out’. Hence the proliferation of pirated printed texts, based on shorthand transcription. In order to prevent this, the title of a new play was entered at the Stationers’ Register, which is another precious aid in the dating of plays otherwise undatable. The licence for the performance was issued by the Master of the Revels, who at times would erase parts of the play, mostly those considered politically subversive or offensive to religion. The stage director, in his turn, added captions and gave orders for music and for materials needed. Some shows were admitted for performance at court, and specific companies had an official licence to act there, in a regimen of frenzied rivalry. From the economic viewpoint, theatrical companies were profit-making businesses, and actors were shareholders entitled to quotas of the profits.8 At least two principles 7

8

Shakespeare being an emblem of the whole age of Elizabethan drama, see the first pages of Volume 2 of this work for a detailed discussion of the historical approaches up to the present. Suffice it here to notice the reappearance of source-criticism, once practised by Praz by listing echoes found mainly in second-rate dramatists of classical and contemporary Italian literature; and to hint that the last score years have seen the predominance, even to the point of hegemony, of a poststructuralist reading dominated by Lacan, Foucault and Greenblatt, to the detriment of themes like theatrical communication and the formal structures of dramatic works. As an actor became renowned, he was invited to become a shareholder, paying a membership fee which was reimbursed to him when he left the boards: as an average the actor-sharers earned about fifty pounds a year. Those given only minor roles had lesser pay.

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of evaluation have radically changed with the evolution of taste and aesthetics in history: the twentieth century was to favour the early popular open-air drama; secondly, what was a form of popular entertainment for its contemporaries came to be appreciated as the principal literary mode of that half-century, and one of the greatest periods in world literature. Around 1580 the plays Sidney pronounced judgement on were crude compared with what was to come, and pseudo-aesthetics of a pragmatic type were the guidelines of municipal authorities and of Puritans. The latter regarded the theatre as a threat to public order like present-day rock concerts, and an irreligious kind of pastime that led people astray. Moreover, it violated the Scripture that forbade males to dress like females – and plays were staged even on the Lord’s day.9 In 1632 a Puritan, Prynne,10 penned a Histriomastix, a fanatical, thousand-page rant against the immorality of the stage. Likewise – an example of historical recurrence – pagan Roman drama had been condemned by the Church fathers 1,000 years before. When the novel became a popular literary form, early in the Victorian age, it met with similar ostracism11 on the part of purists and neo-Puritans. § 87. The incunabula I have pointed out more than once that late sixteenth-century English drama was a result of the convergence of two main evolutionary paths, at first sight very distant from each other: medieval drama with its mystery plays, moralities and interludes, and an imitation of Latin classical comedy, initially in the form of new editions, then of translations and finally of adaptations, in Latin and afterwards in English. To these two can be added a third path, of comedies and farces modelled on Italian and to a lesser extent French drama of the fifteenth century. These, however, take us back to the

9 10 11

See however Chambers’s comment (op. cit. in n. 3 above, vol. I, 371), that ‘it would be going rather too far to say that a woman never appeared upon an Elizabethan stage’. § 149.2 n. 4. Volume 4, § 2. Pamphlets, books and sermons, often with titles like ‘the school’ or ‘the anatomy of abuses’, were heaped on the drama at the end of the century by the Puritans. A couple of these were by Stephen Gosson, a (partly) repentant university dramatist (§ 54.2), who was answered by various apologists like Lodge, Nashe, Greene and Thomas Heywood.

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starting point, being themselves generally indebted to the classics, mostly Latin, or merely Latin rather than truly Greek. Slowly, a further step is taken when moralities are followed by plays on Scriptural subjects in the form of ‘lives’, that is, sequences of emblematic stations in a biographical cycle – a very prolific genre, as, moving from religious to lay themes, it lent its structure to the chronicle play, a genre almost solely English. In their turn, Terence and Plautus, the models for comedy, found in Seneca a companion when tragedy came to demand an empty but well-tried model from which to start. What I have given is a synthesis; I have omitted minor paths, different proposals and other and more circumscribed dramatic experiences. Had Marlowe and Shakespeare and their successors not been born, the whole dramatic production of late sixteenth-century drama would have been seen as a pile of options, a frenzied network of possibilities, a farrago of deviated routes, as witnessed by past evaluations of this canon, made of long, dry lists aiming at a mostly textual and philological description. Yet through this plethora there runs an unconscious project: to turn the input from outside into an indigenous, domestic, national idea. The English had a dramatic tradition of their own that, albeit moribund, managed to absorb external influences, paint over cracks and create a natural, real amalgam, although the polarities of popular, indigenous and classical seemed irreconcilable. The other internal, teleological design can be seen in the fact that at the end of this ferment stands, with other playwrights, Shakespeare himself, ready to reap the harvest; he is the last link of a chain, not the result of a saltus, sprung out of nothing. Shakespeare and his contemporaries are the synchronic reflex of the whole set of motifs that for the previous half-century had succeeded one another on the same wavelength, yet with a crude and imperfect technique. Others have already used the alchemic metaphor to describe this precipitate of extremely diverse ‘elements’, both cultured and popular, a ‘reaction’ occurring with the advent of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Hence this overview will be completed when the title of a single play can be matched with a sufficiently intriguing, selfcontained and strong authorial personality, and when artistic quality goes hand in hand with simply documentary interest. Seen in general terms, pre-Shakespearean drama, to use an easy synthetic formula, is marked by the element of speed or even acceleration. After the trammels of the previous decades, dramatic life suddenly goes at such a fast rate that it cannot

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be followed. One may also call it the element of density: two centuries before, literary events and relevant texts occurred within intervals of several years, if not decades; after 1550 they become a stream that bursts banks and inundates fields, the availability of plays hitting the sky, clearly stimulated by demand on the part of the public, court, schools and colleges. It is a disorderly heap of texts, but one cannot deny the progress they mark in the capacity to prepare and stage performances. If, before, plays were the outcome of random improvisation, barely organized, with casts of only a few actors, now they are events in which different classes of workers cooperate: scenographers, costume-makers, composers and musical performers. Performance becomes a composite action. At first diverse in location, being acted at court as well as in streets, squares, public schools, universities, inns of court, drama finds its centre especially in London. 2. Of the plays written before 1574, whether we take the beginnings of the Earl of Leicester’s company as the terminus a quo for the great Elizabethan theatrical age, or later landmarks from more restrictive viewpoints, we know in many instances the titles but less often and with less certainty the authors, and at times not even the texts, so that they can only be inferred and assessed from period evidence. The so-styled academic drama means either Plautine or Terentian texts in the original Latin (hardly ever in Greek), acted by grammar school or college students under the tuition of pedagogues and professors who became primitive stage-directors; or English translations and adaptations, even Latin plays newly composed on classical subjects. Eminent among such Latinists was the Scotsman George Buchanan (1506–1582) and the Nicholas Grimald whom we met as a poet in Tottel’s Miscellany (the author of a tragedy on the Resurrection with a comical counterpoint, and a story of the Baptist). The more the classical theme is made personal and local, the more experimental and original the play.1 A strong stimulus to academic drama was offered by the visits Elizabeth paid to the two universities shortly after her coronation. When she visited Cambridge in 1564 and Oxford in 1566, Latin plays

1

In 1562 Plautus’ Amphitruo was adapted as a farce in Jack Juggler, with a complete change of the original set of names. The milestone of the Plautine comedy genre was a translation of the Andria printed in 1530 by Rastell.

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were staged in her honour, as well as others in English on biblical or Greek themes, already Senecan in their five-act division and obedience to the unity of action. Other minor cycles were ‘prodigal son’ plays,2 and allegorical scenes of academic life.3 Italian drama reached the English stage, as we have seen, thanks to Gascoigne’s prose adaptation of Ariosto’s Supposes;4 another was made of La Spiritata by Grazzini (aka Lasca);5 so others had begun to draw ideas from Italian novellas before Shakespeare came to use them so copiously. When James I visited Oxford, in 1605, he saw the first English pastoral play, by Daniel; the genre was practised, as we shall see, by Giles Fletcher, an exquisite but theatrically feeble dramatist, by Thomas

2 A Misogonus, the work of two minor dramatists, preserved in fragments and dated 1577, has a nurse who reveals that Misogonus, a dissipated youth, has a twin brother who as a baby was shipped to Apollonia, where the father sends messengers to bring him back. This brother’s identity is confirmed notwithstanding tricks and stratagems, and the play has a happy ending with the reformation of the ‘prodigal’ son and brother. The play is in alternate rhymes. On Gascoigne’s Glass of Government see § 45.2. 3 The Return from Parnassus, completed in the first year of the new century, describes in two parts, and with various allegorical personifications with Latin or Greek names, the ascent to the heights of knowledge of two scholars who reject carnal and worldly temptations as well as the ideological pitfalls of Puritanism and scepticism. The vast diorama of this play includes the subplot of a pedant who asks an imitator to compose verse in the manner of Shakespeare (expressly named), for him to recite to his mistress. Lingua, a later academic play by one Tomkis, shows the tongue vainly entering a debate with the five senses, to become the sixth. 4 § 45.2. 5 The Bugbears. One John Jeffere (so the play was signed) carried out a remake of it, changing the prose of the original into rather crude rhymed anapaests; it was staged in 1550 and printed in 1561. Characters are re-named too, at times nicely anticipating Ben Jonson as in the case of astrologer Trap. The comedy turns on a collective trick played on an old miser to force him to give an adequate dowry to his daughter (who feigns she has gone crazy) so that she can marry the man of whom she already is the happy but secret wife. The translation of Pasqualigo’s Il fedele was staged for the queen in 1575 by Anthony Munday (1560–1633), a tireless, versatile writer, who wrote works in countless genres, and was a target of caricatures by the greatest dramatists of the time, who, for all that, were glad to have him for a collaborator, and exploited some of his satirical figures, as Jonson did with Captain Bobadil, and Shakespeare himself with Falstaff.

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Randolph with Amyntas, a very weak remake of Guarini and Tasso, and by Jonson. In this panorama only Gammer Gurton’s Needle6 (1566–1575) stands out as seeming to have no classical source, although it is the work of an eccentric academician who signed it only with his initials. The plot is totally English, apart from the device of the little devil Diccon, a marplot who at the same time presides over the action like a small deus ex machina, and gives a foretaste of Shakespearean atmospheres in the interludes and the more boisterous subplots. The scene is the English countryside, rife with figures later to be hugely popular (shrewd merry wives, curates, constables), engaged in sketches roughly anticipating farcical surrealism: the thefts of the needle a farmer’s wife used to mend a servant’s breeches, and of a cock, bring about the storm in a tea-cup. Another happy anticipation is the verbal firework of interjections, blasts of abuse, ungrammatical tirades, roaring quarrels and colourful vernacular. A drinking song at the beginning of Act II became exceedingly popular. 3. English tragedy7 was born and flourished, without any real break until the closing of the theatres, under the aegis of Seneca, whose ten dramas had all been published together in English in 1581. The unusually 6

7

About two decades later (1598–1599) there is Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abingdon, where female rivalry is set against a more refined social background, with a humorous subplot. An isolated play, William Haughton’s Englishmen for my Money, or a Woman Will Have Her Will, also staged in 1598, is a forecast of Marston’s and Middleton’s city comedies. Between comedy and tragedy stands tragicomedy, a form quite ready to violate history in order to edify the public, as in John Pickering’s Horestes (1567). Richard Edwards (1524–1566), a Chapel Royal tutor (after William Cornish and Richard Bower) presented to the queen, two years before she died, a pleasant Damon and Pythias in rhymed couplets of anapaests and iambs, eschewing the unhappy end, and introducing the intermezzo of a dishonest coal vendor. Among the many coincidences, which could amount to real influences, one is that two friends after a storm land in Syracuse, having with them a rather roguish slave named Stephano. Of another play by Edwards, on the very popular story of Palamon and Arcite, only a song has survived. The English personalized the genre of tragicomedy, fitting it with intermezzos and especially mimes, accompanied by music and rhymed choruses, before each act instead of after it. From Lyly onward, the tragicomedy requires to be dealt with separately.

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deep and widespread knowledge of his works was due to practical reasons, first of all the need of schoolmasters and professors to make their pupils masters of spoken and recited Latin, since early in the sixteenth century few if any of them had learned Greek, and Seneca was seen as a surrogate of Euripides and the other Attic tragedians. A milestone in studies of Seneca’s influence on Elizabethan tragedians is T. S. Eliot’s essay on the ten dramas printed in 1581.8 It starts with an examination of the characteristics and the intrinsic dramatic value of Seneca at a time, 1927, when his reputation was much inferior to what it had been during the Renaissance. Eliot demonstrates that Seneca’s drama was not meant to be staged or even read, but recited and declaimed, and therefore can be considered as looking forward to radio drama. Its characters have no inner life, yet this drama is permeated with stoicism, although of a rather mechanical kind, and for its exotic protagonist the climax is reached with his death and dying words.9 Concerning the horrific and the bloodshed, Eliot suggests that Seneca seconded an innate predisposition, and that the English favoured it further, adding horrors that Seneca would have deprecated. M. Pagnini,10 summing up the data of a by then vast bibliography on the subject, reminds us that the Senecan vogue reached England from Italy through the works and theoretical pamphlets of Giraldi Cinthio (who thought Seneca greater than the Greek tragedians) and of Jodelle; and also that the coterie of Sidney’s sister (herself the translator of Garnier, a French admirer of the lyrical and thoughtful, rather than the horrific, Seneca) had propagated an aesthetics adverse to popular drama, akin to other would-be classical plays by Daniel, Greville and Jonson. Earlier on, Seneca had crossed the Channel by way of Boethius. Pagnini traces the ‘presence’ of Seneca in five sub-spheres: quotations or imitations; forms (especially act division, linguistic accuracy, high style and choruses); themes and plots (the revenge play, overwhelming 8 9 10

ESE, 65–105. Eliot (ESE, 74) quotes a passage from Hercules Furens in Chapman’s translation which he already had included, or echoed, in ‘Gerontion’ (the ‘axle tree’ and the ‘snowy Bear’). See M. Pagnini, ‘Seneca e il teatro elisabettiano’, in PLE, 325–43. On Seneca in Italy before Giraldi Cinthio (that is from Albertino Mussato’s Eccerinis on), see the excellent index card in CHI, vol. V, 61–3.

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force of passions, contempt of death, suicidal thoughts, the short-lived triumph of criminals and stoical heroes retiring to domestic life); ingredients (ghosts and hellish apparitions and messengers’ interventions); apocalyptic atmospheres and premonitions, and dreams and ominous signs. At the end of his essay Pagnini indicates common and different traits of the systems of the two epochs, imperial Roman and Elizabethan, which may reveal some deeper reasons for the Senecan vogue. Seneca fitted in well with an age of boundless egocentrism and fate-haunted heroes; it was an age of crisis, which stimulated a yearning for moral resistance, so that Seneca ‘taught’ scores of real and literary heroes ‘how to die’. Authorial tragedy first shows its real face with Kyd, emerging from a chaotic, anonymous production. Gismond of Salerne, performed at the Inner Temple in 1567, was based on a novella by Boccaccio11 tainted, or rather disfigured, by moral intrusions, with Senecan echoes and quotations. It is much the same with The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), a work by several hands that at least demonstrates the revival, after two centuries, of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s and Malory’s epos, fused with a Senecan taste for horrors and sententious tirades counterpointed by staccato dialogue. The last phase is the Senecan form applied to the chronicle play. A Latin Richard III (1573) by Thomas Legge (1535–1607) and plays with Homeric and Greek plots by William Gager (1555–1622) paved the way for the earliest, desultory historical and patriotic English plays, which after the victory on the Spanish Armada in 1588 were written on the figures of Henry V and King John, in the style of popular drama and of the lives of the saints. An anonymous Leir managed to prelude (having been acted in 1594) Shakespeare’s nearly homonymous King Lear. Other minor plays were written upon famous statesmen or proverbial figures, or emerged in the wake of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and were ascribed to Lodge, Peele and even Shakespeare. § 88. Udall Nicholas Udall (1505–1556), however scant and uncertain our information about him, is the first English playwright with definite characteristics 11

Ghismonda di Salerno innamorata, then re-written in prose in 1591 by one of the five authors and with the new title of The Tragedy of Tancred and Gismund.

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and a various and adventurous career. He was a modern individualist, full of ambition and of unscrupulous opportunism. He must have produced a lot of works, since his contemporaries spoke of his comoediae plures and his repute was such that Queen Mary gave him the name of esteemed court dramatist, clearly overlooking the anti-Catholic views he had expressed. Only one of his plays has come down to us, whereas his authorship of other dramas is purely conjectural. However, that play reveals a talent already remarkably above average. Udall had left his native Hampshire to go to Oxford as a student, took a degree and worked as a heavy-handed pedagogue and principal at Eton. Here began rumours that he was a thief, guilty also of other ‘unnatural vices’, and he was suspended, tried and even imprisoned. After his release he worked as a freelance writer from 1541 to 1555 and then for a few months was re-elected principal of Westminster school. An enterprising and versatile writer, he had written celebratory verses for Anne Boleyn’s coronation, a choice of bilingual passages from Terence, and translations from Erasmus. Although a Lutheran in his youth, he later sought and found favour, as I mentioned, with Queen Mary.1 Ralph Roister Doister carries off the prize as the first regular English comedy, if it precedes Gammer Gurton’s Needle. Its date of writing is controversial: staged first between 1552 and 1555, the only certain date is that of printing, 1566. If so, it was acted by students at Christmas time (its Plautine obscenities were therefore expunged), when however Udall had not yet gone back to teaching. Ezechias is lost, like the even too many good and even excellent anonymous comedies ascribed to him, among them Jack Juggeler, Respublica itself, a play on Jacob and Esau, and Thersites, the last a farce too fulsome and broad, in the style of Plautus’ Miles gloriosus. A variation of the latter is also Ralph Roister Doister, which demonstrates the capacity of the British genius to merrily infect, and thus combine, respect for classical models with a reflection of local and national idiosyncrasies, and the various and comical events of daily life. Though it preserves remnants of the interlude (like the tedious doggerel in rhymed couplets) it offers a pleasant, precociously accurate ordering of the plot, divided into acts and scenes, and respects the unities of time and action, or at least of 1

Ralph Roister Doister ends with a chorus that hails her as a promoter of virtue and corrector of vice.

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scene (a street in front of a house where everything takes place). Seldom is Ralph Roister Doister cited as the sire of the great targets of mockery in Shakespearean comedy, especially in connection with Falstaff and Malvolio; and since this play by Udall is a comedy of contemporary life, it is closer to Twelfth Night, where Shakespeare re-uses the semantic echoes of oddly composed names whose macaronic sound fits and suggests the nature of main and minor characters.2 The mocked one needs a mocker as a director and deus ex machina, and the Henry of this situation, its factotum, is Merygreeke, who cooperates with, but far more deceives, Roister Doister by pretending to help him. Udall is more precisely Shakespearean in that he has the action turn on the semantic subversion or disruption of a verbal message when the punctuation or the intonation of the reading are altered: it is a real anticipation, for in Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies verbal misunderstanding may produce such fatal effects. The scrivener then reads to Ralph the correct text of the letter, revealing it is free of the absurdities which the spiteful Merygreeke had artfully filled it with in the presence of Dame Custance. Udall also cleverly inserts short phrases or more impressive dialogues, like the paradoxical fantasy on Ralph’s funeral, who threatens suicide because of widow Custance’s inflexibility. The latter is the only character unaffected by the atmosphere of farce: she stands for that feminine constancy which for Donne was at times a permanent, at others a precarious reality in woman. A sensible person, she absolutely refuses to enter the game all the others are playing. Near the end there is an episode in the dramatic genre that the nineteenth century will term slapstick, that is, a mock-heroic brawl and shindy between male and female ‘armies’, where Ralph, furnished with a pot for a helmet, confronts Custance, whose maidservants beat him up with pokers, skewers and brooms. § 89. Bale John Bale (1495–1563) was born a Catholic, became a stalwart Carmelite monk, but ended up on the opposite side as a strict enemy of 2

OED, where ‘doister’ does not appear, says that ‘roister’ means vainglorious, explicitly referring to this play. Its female protagonist is Christian Custance, Christian and constant at once. More extravagant is the treatment of the three maidservants, the constable, and the bridegroom Gawyn Goodluck, who will enjoy the ‘good fortune’.

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the Roman faith. The secular degree in theology he obtained very late at Cambridge paved his way to the court, and in that turbulent moment when the needle swung uncertainly to and fro he became a fervent, fanatical supporter of the Reform, under the wing of Henry VIII’s counsellor Thomas Cromwell. Having left his religious order, as an Anglican priest he wrote miracle plays that cared for no diplomatic prudence nor used understatements, struck forcibly at the target of Catholic monasticism and made the attack on popery their special occupation. Three Laws purports to demonstrate that Catholic Roman hierarchies had perverted the laws of nature, of Moses and of Christ. As with Luther, his desire to marry spurred him to abjure; but when Thomas Cromwell was beheaded in 1540 he had to flee with wife and children to Germany. When Edward was crowned he regained favour, came home and was rewarded first with a parish, then in 1552 with the bishopric of Ossory in Ireland. He went on disregarding conventions, customs and traditions, attacking formalisms and circumlocutions. Hence, of course, when Mary came to the throne Bale once more went into exile. He came back in 1560, and lived his last three years under Elizabeth. Bale’s other morality plays and interludes deal with biblical themes, such as Christ’s temptations in the desert and the Baptist’s preaching, and witness the ambition to introduce novelties, at least in the unusual, very precocious five-act division. Bale’s canon is an imposing one of twentytwo dramatic items, five of them surviving,1 accompanied at least by one Catalogus that represents one of the earliest general bibliographies of English literature. 2. In King John2 Bale, the pugnacious anti-Catholic polemicist and historical revisionist (of Polydore Vergil), makes use of the strongest, not to say destructive weapon of Anglican propaganda. Already in other dramas he had been a pleader in favour of contemporary legal issues, like the king’s 1 2

Dramatic Writings, ed. J. S. Farmer, London 1907. The text of King John in this edition is copied, from page 254, from the manuscript written by Bale himself. A more recent edition is edited by P. Happé, 2 vols, Cambridge 1985–1986. Acted in a first redaction in 1538, and in a second twenty years later, before the queen at Ipswich, where the manuscript was found and published in 1838. This is perhaps the reason why the manuscript ends with the phrase ‘Thus endeth .ij. playes of Kinge Johan’.

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divorce, ably displaying his own refutations. King John is the first English king gagged by the Pope, thus a prefiguration of Henry VIII, who was to free himself of the muzzle: if only for this, John must be redeemed in the eyes of his countrymen from the repute of being a timid, surrendering monarch. The play is entirely based on anachronism and on the illusory application of measures and parameters going back to remote times. When the Imperial Majesty, a travesty of Henry VIII, enters the scene at the end of the play, it celebrates the seed of English resistance, and pays homage to what had been, alas, John’s defeat. Structurally, however, Bale’s play is still unrefined: on the one hand the parallel between history and allegory remains forced ( John must confront mainly personifications like Dissimulation and Treason, although they change intermittently into historical characters like Bishop Langdon, John’s antagonist, or his poisoner, but are far from being individualized). On the other, the drama is too much like an ideological debate, an intense ecclesiastical and political diatribe;3 besides, in the long run the unvarying prosody, and the monotonous repetition of long rhymed couplets, bore the audience. Indeed Bale still looks back to Skelton and Lyndsay rather than forward to Shakespeare, who did his part to make Bale’s play seem a precedent or anticipation of his own King John.4 From the very first lines one realizes how clearly this drama is instrumental, made out of a number of polemical theses and recriminations, so that the action gradually sags and sinks to the ground. It is an essay in oblique preaching, in line with those of the great arousers of the masses from the Lollards to Latimer; but, as a play, it is basically unactable. Bale, a strenuous and fervent propagandist,5 when all is said and done did not have any interlocutor or adversary, because John Heywood, the only contemporary Catholic dramatist, being no friend to ideological debates, did not rise to the challenge.

3 4 5

Yet there is a spark of ferocious bathos: ‘I mervele greatly where Dissymulacyon is’, Sedition enquires; ‘I wyll come anon, if thu tarry tyll I pysse’, answers Dissimulation. It is quite unlikely that Shakespeare was able to use this play, because, as I said above, Bale’s play was printed more than two centuries after Shakespeare’s King John. A lost play on Thomas Becket, obviously hostile to the Archbishop of Canterbury, is ascribed to him.

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§ 90. ‘Gorboduc’ This is the title of the play – a blend of comedy, tragedy and tragicomedy, history, romance and legend – which may be considered, artistically and scenically, the most advanced produced in England to date, 1561, when it was acted by the members of the Inner Temple and performed the following year before the queen in Whitehall (it was first printed in 1565). It is usually cited by its title because it has two authors, one the colourless Thomas Norton (1532–1584),1 the other the renowned Thomas Sackville2 who – probably – let Norton write the first three acts and reserved the epilogue for himself.3 Norton is also and above all one of the co-authors of the Mirror for Magistrates. And actually Gorboduc is a sui generis ‘mirror’,4 containing a covert allegory, initially subdued but then openly and unmistakably addressed to those who have ears to hear, that is to say in the form of the ‘play within the play’ as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It points to the dangers that threaten a state lacerated by intestine wars, especially when the succession to the crown is uncertain. With yet another militant anachronism the queen was invited to take the hint and marry, as the people loudly demanded, and produce an heir. Such proceedings were neither extraordinary nor unseemly, and Elizabeth accepted the prompting without turning a hair; she welcomed, perhaps even liked them, and was flattered. In the theatre, discussions of religious and political themes were vetoed, but the veto was regularly violated. This was not the only target, as we shall see; and what is more, the play cannot be reduced to this mere object of debate.

1

2 3 4

A Londoner, an ardent supporter of the Reform, Norton became the son-in-law of Thomas Cromwell. A Tottel’s poet, like Sackville he was a court official and a member of Parliament. When they wrote this play Norton was twenty-nine, Sackville twentyfive years old. § 44.2. The axiomatic premise that Sackville is a great artist and Norton a mediocre one has often led to judge the first three acts stilted and the last two smoother. In my opinion the play’s style is uniformly fluent. L. 462 of the final chorus of Act I literally defines Gorboduc’s example for future princes a ‘mirror’.

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2. Gorboduc can boast of being the first in many respects: once more it draws on the historical, mythological, Arthurian and romantic heritage of the ancient British people, offering the younger dramatists a largely innovative formula. It abandons the doggerel in rhymed couplets, and is for the greater part in blank verse, accepting in drama the metre used in Surrey’s translation of the Aeneid. For all that, history has judged it in a far too negative way, as unilateral, monotonous, sententious, rhetorical and stiffly neoclassical, whereas Sidney hailed it as one of the few examples of dramatic vivacity in his lifetime. Gorboduc is, first of all, a proper drama, not a disorganic and specious sum of partisan tirades, awkwardly dressed up as in Bale; it translates a series of ideas into a number of consistent, more individualized characters. It was written by two responsible politicians, statesmen and custodians of the unity of the state, who feared the nightmarish consequences of national rebellion caused by the lack of a central power. Those were indeed the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, still insecure since her power was uncertain and past examples still haunted the mind of her subjects. In those early stages it was particularly necessary to strengthen power, to start off on the right foot, to establish clear rules and especially to act by them. And yet Gorboduc remains a historical, political and even allegorical play, but not of the usual morality type, or not just that; it is a Senecan play, but also something more. We define it as an early example of ritual and symbolic drama owing to a couple of elements. The act-opening pantomimes5 are miniature masques, with figures and silhouettes that perform, in each case against a background of music played by different instruments, arcane rhythmical motions, usually repeated for the fateful three times in all five acts. One is reminded, with a leap of centuries, of Yeats’s symbolist, Noh-like dramas,6 were it not that the last lines of the short stage directions for those pantomimes relinquish symbolic hints for single allegorical meanings, and in breaking the spell illustrate the connection with the gestures and the events which are going to happen on 5 6

While deriving from Italian intermezzos, they are located before instead of after. Fergus, in the play a duke who tries to exploit popular rebellions to reach the throne, and threatens to establish himself in power as a dictator, is also the name of a mythical, proverbially Yeatsian king.

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the stage. It is also wrong to say that Gorboduc’s blank verse is crude and awkward like a schoolboy’s; for it contains several enjambments, there is an ample gamut of choice terms and the alliterations that decorate the style are not obtrusive. Rather, it is true that the two authors have a resolute penchant for classical language, and that while the play is in blank verse, the flow of its argument might better articulate itself in Augustan couplets or alexandrines – we find, in fact, that Pope liked it. The characters have no idea of mimesis nor try to exert any, but structure their discourse in large, fluent, syntactically organized addresses. Even emotions likely to end in violence produce short structured speeches. The rhetoric recalls the legal, judgemental, Ciceronian eloquence of lawyers in the harmonious imbrication, the turgidly sophisticated syntax that, as in Donne, is hypotactic, parenthetical, and fond of incidental clauses and synonymic appositions. This recitation of course induces a sense of extreme, almost depressed and spent composure, and in this respect the play indeed has not the Senecan trademark of stichomythia (though it has others), for the single speech is not only rhetorically structured, but composed of very long periods. No less static and uniform is the idiolect of the high-ranked and dignified characters, who scrupulously avoid all vernacular license and all risks of bathos, impropriety and pleasantry. The same propensity is felt in the pendant division of roles, with two brothers, four counsellors, two parasites, two messengers, and a chorus which rhythmically steps in to confirm the symbolism presented and announced in the prologue. 3. Sackville and Norton strenuously support the idea that unless monarchic power is undivided there will be anarchy; consequent upon this basic assumption is another: a monarch must never yield or divide his or her power as long as he or she lives. Gorboduc’s mistake is the same as King Lear’s. But the drama also proposes a second, related theme: that of a father’s duty to his sons, and the solution of the problem of the rights of inheritance. Owing to a mistaken scruple, Gorboduc divides his kingdom into two equal parts, without considering his sons’ respective ages or privileging the firstborn. Queen Videna openly takes the part of the elder and accuses the younger of covetousness and ambition, finally going so far as to kill him for having caused the death of his elder brother. The motto that sums up the aims of good government exhorts us to ensure and perpetuate the nation’s welfare and peace. But Senecan fate and fatalism lie in wait, and

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the story’s characters demonstrate how bent they are on anticipating what they believe to be fate’s will: ‘With hateful slaughter he prevents the fate’. Act II shows the sudden rise of a divisive and acquisitive impulse and of its consequence, rebellion, for the moment the son’s against the father. In Act III, the rhythm quickens and messengers rush in, bringing sad news: not only are the sons Ferrex and Porrex, each having been given one half of the realm, fighting each other, but the younger has killed the elder. Queen Videna’s angry, yet still controlled, monologue at the beginning of Act IV preludes Lady Macbeth’s, at least when she curses her younger son saying that he has ‘never suck’d the milk of woman’s breast’,7 but was nursed by a tiger. Then Porrex, to prove his innocence, gives the king a quite opposite version of the facts, saying he killed his brother to defend himself from his attack. A further, sudden inversion is provided by the queen’s maid, who comes on the scene in great agitation, and reports with remarkable consistency and exactness how the queen has committed a horrible crime by murdering her surviving son. From the beginning of the play Ferrex and Porrex had accused each other of boundless ambition, but the main point for the two authors is not how easily evidence can be manipulated, but Gorboduc’s previous political error. The stage direction at the start of Act V explains that, when old sovereigns have been killed by an angry people, there ensues a period of civil war, until monarchy is re-established after half a century. The play however closes earlier, with civil war still raging, perhaps the better to impress the threat on the spectator’s mind. The inner weakness of the royal family has spread over the whole nation, and now attention is focused on the need to keep watch and quench any fires of rebellion that may flare up here and there. The political conclusion resolutely calls for strong authority, as, when order is threatened and results in rebellion, extreme remedies are needed, including extreme violence; it also asks, in the case of vacancy of the throne, for Parliament to be entitled to nominate the nearest descendant.8

7 See Macbeth, I.V.17. 8 Eubulus, an old and wise statesman, utters a concluding anathema against all temptation to yield the crown to a foreigner, which leads one to suppose that the play was written under Queen Mary, and that that barb referred to Philip II.

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§ 91. ‘Cambyses’ It seems hardly credible that Thomas Preston (1537–1598), Cambridge graduate, Latinist, lawyer and principal of Trinity Hall, and the speaker of two official addresses to the queen on her 1564 visit, was also the author of Cambyses (1569), a historical and political play, anything but academic or of the ‘university wit’ kind. Historical data and moral exempla are in fact mixed in this play with – and also largely contradicted by – sharply burlesque intermezzos, barely connected with the main theme and thus causing sudden stylistic turns that generate and spread a sort of intentional cacophony. The play became immediately proverbial due to Cambyses’ pompous and grandiloquent style, its high-sounding words and strings of hyperboles being referred to even in Shakespeare. This later fame was also due to the shocking, sensationally delirious acts of madness shown on stage, as when the drunken tyrant shoots an arrow right through the heart of an innocent boy pleading for mercy, whose breast is then bared to let the onlookers witness how exact the shot was. Cambyses has his brother flayed onstage for advancing a simple objection, and his own young bride executed for another banal dissension. Such horrid feats are not related by a messenger as in Gorboduc, but acted on the open scene. Nonetheless, both plays have the same apparent aim. Cambyses opens with a prologue that presents the play as one more ‘mirror’ for the just prince, repeats the prescriptions of Elyot’s ‘governor’ guidebook, and ipso facto rebuts the acts of the king’s Machiavellian hypostasis: the good monarch is the one who acts for the public good, and whoever abuses royal power ‘His ignomy and bitter shame in fine shall be more great’. From different historical sources (Geoffrey of Monmouth and Herodotus) both plays exhort present-day authorities to ensure with all possible foresight the succession of a good monarch, but are still conscious of fate’s hazards, as when Cambyses, Cyrus’ depraved son, succeeds his father ‘lineally’ and not by usurpation, yet is corrupted by ambition. However, only a lively, alert intelligence can understand such a lesson from past history or else spectators might empathize and identify with the villain; and no English drama was ever more antiAristotelian than this, so that the prologue ends by announcing to the public that ‘the players [are] coming in’. The play looks ahead to Brecht in its use of the estrangement effect. Every written play comprises, by statute,

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two versions: one in the characters’ speeches, the other including stage directions. In Cambyses this double track is macroscopic and polarized; there are few stage directions, but addressed to the reader or even director and stage-setter, while the spectator knows nothing of them, and sees a few of them obeyed, but others are kept secret from him. From the list of characters we know that thirty-two roles could, or even had to be or were acted, owing to lack of money, by only eight players: this subterfuge became the norm for theatre companies, while spectators, deceived and mystified, believed the actors to be different persons. In Cambyses stage directions are exceptional also in being hasty and sketchy, written in a sort of pidgin English for the director’s use. When the king commands that his brother be flayed, a direction says that the scenic effect can be achieved by covering the actor’s body with a false skin made of gum; another, that blood flowing can be simulated by puncturing a bladder full of vinegar. 2. A play of meteoric swiftness, with no delays, extraordinarily fluent and readable, Cambyses of course ignores the unity of time, choosing rather to show climactic representative moments in the Persian tyrant’s career. Cambyses, initially a taintless king, requests and obtains the assent of his counsellors to invade Egypt, wisely making them accept his brother as substitute during his absence. Besides, he has quite clear ideas concerning the duties of an enlightened monarch. But his brother Sisamnes, once he finds himself in power, with Shakespearean suddenness is devoured by reckless ambition, and refuses all check. After Cambyses, back from Egypt, has sentenced his corrupt brother to death, with no less swiftness it is already time for judging the judge, who must prove lucid even if and when he is drunk. The archery scene portrays the kind of gratuitous, futile violence, unflinchingly perpetrated, that will become a specialty of nineteenth-century ‘theatre of cruelty’, such as in Edward Bond’s stoning of the pram.1 The murder of the queen, too, is ordered abruptly both for the sake of historical truth and for the necessity of the dramatic plan. At last nemesis strikes Cambyses, who kills himself accidentally, like certain villains in Dickens’s novels. Exceedingly old and yet exceedingly 1

Volume 8, § 131.2.

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new, Cambyses stages historical, flesh-and-bone characters, still visited by medieval morality traits. High style joins with low and the very lowest. Of course, it is a single dramatic action without act division. The king’s crimes are denounced by as many allegorical or abstract figures, and murders and acts of revenge are the work of other personifications. Coming shortly after Gorboduc, it readopts the poulterer’s measure, laden with rhymed couplets. But the intermezzos (acted by three soldiers craving for booty, outspoken, rough and merry, along with a prostitute and two rustics, thus full of fun and jokes) not only impress us with the fresh and sharp tone of their verbal inventions and comic equivocations, but obtain equal, if not more attention than the main plot, even to the point of transforming the whole into a carnivalesque parody. Among the lesser parts is a scene with Venus telling Cupid he should make Cambyses a lover. The Elizabethan fool appears in the figure of Ambidexter, the intermittent commentator of events, chorus, and inner and outer voice. Being one who ‘plays with both hands’ he is a prefiguration of Iago, and he addresses and almost harangues the public. § 92. ‘Arden of Feversham’ Supposedly written in 1586, Arden of Feversham1 was printed in 1592, rewritten in the mid-eighteenth century by George Lillo and included among the Shakespeare apocrypha in 1770 owing to a clear, obvious superiority to many other anonymous late sixteenth-century plays, and also to the manifest expertise of the author and his remarkable knowledge of dramatic mechanisms. For Swinburne it was certainly an early work by Shakespeare. A credible attribution? Shakespeare never wrote such a play of crime and punishment, investigation and trial, which in fact follows the plot neatly up to its resolution; nor is there in his canon a city drama like this, so totally devoid of anything romantic, visionary and grotesque. It has been stated, and it is partly true, that Alice Arden is the greatest tragic female character in Elizabethan drama before Lady Macbeth, but, as we shall see, she is so only in the final act, after appearing in the first four only as a very shrewd and astute dialectician. Nor can one find in Shakespeare a former butcher 1 Or Faversham (a Kentish village), as in the critical edition by M. L. Wine, London 1973, which divides into eighteen scenes the five acts of the original edition.

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now steward, like Mosbie, although one does come across the type of the foolish jealous husband like Arden of Feversham. No less unusual is it for the Bard to be found denouncing the moral corruption of the English middle class of the late sixteenth century. Indeed Arden of Feversham carries out, if tacitly, the very first political analysis of the capitalist bourgeoisie that puts economic competence and land property before pure and disinterested feelings. The only exception is Alice, who opts for the primacy of passion even to the extent of discarding all moral considerations about good and evil. At the same time the lack of unity of place offers a variety of locations never seen before, or never so inspiring: the scene moves from the Feversham home to London, to St Paul’s, in Aldersgate, and also to heaths, bogs, the banks of the Thames, and lanes and woods, bringing spectators into touch with daily life in contemporary England – a life made dangerous by the underworld of thieves, robbers, vagrants and paid killers. However, Arden of Feversham also includes minor scenes, accidental and unforeseen, of the kind resembling those based on strange nonsensical calembours that often amaze us in Shakespeare: for instance, on the bank of the Thames there is a thick fog, and a boatman (who appears only in this scene) swaps words and salacious jokes, causing a series of funny and often ‘absurd’ misunderstandings, with the passengers he is about to ferry over. The fulsome praises showered on this play are due to a non-Shakespearean virtue, that is, its being a domestic tragedy, whose protagonists are neither crowned heads nor characters out of the Bible, Greek-Roman history or medieval romances, but derived from Italian or Spanish sources. And yet the anonymous author takes his material from an anecdote related by Holinshed, a frequent source for Shakespeare; it was a murder actually committed in 1551.2 2. Arden of Feversham, for all that, is also a tragicomedy, since on the one hand practically the only person who is unaware that he is the target of a murderous plot is the landowner Arden; on the other the couple of adulterers double and even multiply their plotting, assembling into a gang some potential killers whose assent they have gained by blackmail. They do 2

The anonymous author’s scruple for truth and history leads him to mention with great exactness the ‘king’, Edward VI, instead of Queen Elizabeth, and the Lord Protector.

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so also by playing on their desires for Susan, Mosbie’s sister: they promise her hand to Michael, Arden’s servant, who for her sake is ready to murder his master, as well as to a painter and alchemist, an intriguing, curious and original character. This man boasts he can paint poisoned pictures that kill whoever looks at them3 or produce a poison which, mixed with broth, will kill the diner with the first spoonful. The main plot, in short, is entangled with a second minor intrigue turning on who shall win Susan for having dared to kill Arden. The main farcical element is indeed the braggadocio carried on ad infinitum by petty would-be criminals, especially the two scoundrels, Black Will and Shakebag, who are however so inept – indeed this could be called the tragicomedy of ineptitude – that Arden’s murder, which should be impending, keeps fading sine die, and through a series of fortuitous circumstances and intentional scrapes seems destined never to happen.4 And when it does happen, it is a clumsy imitation of Caesar’s killing in the Senate, with the co-murderers joined in stabbing the helpless man who has been thrown to the ground by pulling a sheet from under him while he was playing cards at home. As I mentioned, here Shakespeare seems to cast his shadow on the scene: the murderer’s blood cannot be erased and the spots do not disappear, being the fruit of hallucination and belated remorse. The falling snow might cover the footprints of the guilty who strive to carry away and hide the corpse among the reeds; but it stops falling and reveals them. The township’s mayor is a sagacious detective who applies poetic justice to excess, for even the mere abettors are sentenced to death. 3. ‘This naked tragedy, / Wherein no filèd points are foisted in / To make it gracious to the ear or eye; / For simple truth is gracious enough, / And needs no other points of glosing stuff ’. In these final lines the ‘nakedness’ of Arden of Feversham means first of all that the dramatist has put himself at the service of the event in organizing his plot, based merely on the tension and the fast development of a murder prepared, put off, rendered arduous, executed and punished. The dramatic structure makes the 3 4

This seems to evoke Frà Pandolf, the painter in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, for in that monologue, as here, the duchess’s portrait must be kept covered with a cloth, lest it propagate its psychically lethal radiation. In the boatman’s scene quoted above, the fog makes Shakebag fall into a ditch.

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dialogues mostly subservient to the action and not to declamation, pause or meditative digression. But nakedness also implies a bend towards a neutral dramatic language, a zero or nearly zero degree scripting, and a scarcity or even rejection of the figurative, tropic style. The anonymous author does not wish to sparkle and be admired but rather to hide himself. There are at most a couple of extended metaphors and the surviving similes are at best in a schoolboy’s style, flat and generic, mere lip-service to contemporary dramatic conventions.5 The phrasing therefore never turns into philosophizing or pseudo-philosophical asides, Platonic or Aristotelian debates, complacent fireworks of verbal tricks, or natural or sophisticated euphuistic argumentation: never, in short, into metaphysical wit.6 § 93. Kyd* Thomas Kyd (1558–1594), practically discovered at the end of the eighteenth century, has since enjoyed ever-increasing favour, mainly

5

6

*

Scene 1 opens on Arden allowing himself an Ovidian image to observe that it is early morning; then Alice confronts him in trying to demonstrate that if you name somebody when you are dreaming it does not mean you desire that person, but it is just a Freudian ‘daily residue’. The two other best-known anonymous domestic tragedies, although inferior, and ascribed to Shakespeare even by his contemporaries, are A Warning to Fair Women (1599), on a similar case of a husband murdered by his wife, and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), on a depraved husband who stabs his wife and then kills his children (Middleton’s modern editions now ascribe it to him). Other plays of this kind by known authors will be discussed as we go on. Works, ed. F. S. Boas, Oxford 1901, 1955, 1962. The most authoritative modern edition of The Spanish Tragedy is edited by P. Edwards, London 1959. J. de Smet, Thomas Kyd, l’homme, l’œuvre, le milieu, Bruxelles 1925; P. W. Biesterfeldt, Die Dramatische Technik Thomas Kyds, Halle 1936; F. Carrère, Le Theatre de Thomas Kyd, Toulouse 1951; P. Edwards, Thomas Kyd and Early Elizabethan Tragedy, London 1966; A. Freeman, Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems, Oxford 1967; P. B. Murray, Thomas Kyd, Boston, MA 1969; F. Ardolino, Thomas Kyd’s Mystery Play: Myth and Ritual in the ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, New York 1985; S. Cenni, Il corpo insepolto. Discorsività e affettività in ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ di Thomas Kyd, Trento 2000; L. Erne, Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd, Manchester 2001.

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for external and instrumental reasons, thanks to The Spanish Tragedy,1 his one really excellent play (melodramatic and hammy, as well), based on a very precocious mastery of the revenge-play mechanisms. The son of a scrivener, Kyd attended the same school as Spenser and for a time exercised his father’s profession. As a fledgling writer he was an object of mockery for ‘university wits’ like Nashe, who accused him of trying to ape them with his Latin sentences, and of affecting the academic despite his inadequate schooling. However, the reason why he was later much talked about is that he was a contemporary of Marlowe and, perhaps, a member of the ‘School of Night’, together with him and certain other disciples of Ralegh, and that in 1592 he found himself in danger as the possessor of compromising documents, which he said were Marlowe’s.2 He was the protégé of an unidentified aristocrat whose favour, however, he no longer enjoyed after his release from prison (where he may also have been tortured). But such intrigues might at length have gone unobserved but for the indubitable fact that Kyd wrote, and possibly produced, a lost Hamlet that Shakespeare is quite likely to have remodelled into the first quarto of his play. This Hamlet by Kyd is the great purloined letter of English literature. Yet, even without this missing link, The Spanish Tragedy, such as it is, shows striking similarities to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It overturns Hamlet, or rather turns it around, and becomes the drama of a father who delays revenging his son,3 and does so by staging a play within the play,4 where fiction eventually becomes fact. Kyd’s historical virtue, in short, is that he was Shakespeare’s closest predecessor, or more precisely the very prompter 1 2 3 4

It was performed in 1592 with Alleyn in the cast, and published in the same year. § 95.3. The son’s name is Horatio, the emblem of the upright knight and of disinterested friendship, as in Shakespeare. The story sketched in this play within the play has led scholars to ascribe to Kyd a conventional Soliman and Perseda as its source. Kyd’s other works are a first part of the Spanish Tragedy printed in 1605, of dubious authorship for some, since Hieronimo is a funny character, very different from that of the tragedy; the translation of Cornélie by Robert Garnier, whose classical spirit could not appeal to Kyd, who might have been induced to make it to ingratiate himself with Sidney’s sister, who liked the French dramatist; and a few prose translations from French and Italian, also of uncertain authorship.

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of the play universally seen as Shakespeare’s greatest. Having stated this, we can go back to Kyd’s more independent qualities. Kyd had no sources and The Spanish Tragedy was entirely the product of his imagination, though it must be remembered that he was a pioneer in exploiting recent historical events as material for literature, in this case the 1580 war between Spain and Portugal. The scholarly element, seemingly used to invest with classical solemnity the most topical moments (as when Hieronimo celebrates his son with a dirge in incomprehensible Latin hexameters), principally results in macaronic or picturesque effects, as if trying to pull the wool over the eyes of indiscriminating spectators unable to perceive slapdash anachronisms. The scene is Spanish, but everything sounds rather Italian, starting with the proper names, just as Italian are the frequent interjections, though Kyd certainly was not ignorant of the inconsistency. Such a cavalier, careless confusion of names is clearly typical of English dramatic writing until the age of Ford; but in Kyd there is no trace of the stereotypical Italy or Spain as Catholic workshops of scientifically concocted evil.5 The very plan of Senecan tragedy is reshaped by Kyd with an original approach. 6 He abolishes the messenger and has the bloody deed happen on stage, in utter disregard of conventions; above all, he handles his plot so as to create a shiver in the audience, and – unlike Webster, a descendant of his, always keen on analysis, hardly ever diffusive or dilatory – he splits his plot into concentric subplots which, far from seeming repetitious, actually mirror one another. The play within the play itself is inserted in a second frame, thus creating a dramatic model even more complex than in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The Spanish Tragedy immediately became the most popular Elizabethan tragedy and was also acted on seventeenth-century stages, reputedly with Jonsonian (or, according to some, Websterian) additions. If a play’s success is proved by the number of its parodies, this is true of The Spanish Tragedy, as it is of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. 2. The induction, or prologue, of about 100 lines, is approximately as long as one of Dante’s cantos, or to be more precise to one of the Inferno, 5 6

This is the reason why some think the drama was conceived before the defeat of the Invincible Armada. See the brilliant tabulation of his ‘reforms’ in BAUGH, vol. II, 463, recast in PSL, 91.

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since the ghost of a dead Spanish warrior, Don Andrea, narrates how he lived, was treacherously killed in battle, reached the next world and temporarily came back from it. He had in fact lain waiting near the banks of the Acheron, and having crossed the river and soothed Cerberus had gone on and heard Minos’ judgement. Since Andrea’s friend Horatio had paid him due funeral rites after the battle, Andrea is assigned to the circle of the bravest warriors of all times. This hell comprises three Virgilian realms, and in a deeper abyss are the pits where to the worst sinners are meted out various punishments. Andrea’s ghost is soon graciously sent back by Proserpine, in company with Revenge, to the upper world, there to watch the true revenge to be taken against his murderer, Balthazar prince of Portugal. Thanks to this supernatural framework, the play itself must be supposed to be seen and spied upon by these two spectators who, as a chorus, at the end of every act comment on and also prompt the events. Formally the Senecan five acts are shortened to four, but the third is nearly twice as long as the norm and includes more than fifteen scenes. Save for brief passages in prose, all the dialogue comprises long declamatory speeches in blank verse, employing a great deal of classical figures like antitheses, anaphoras, climaxes and repeated rhetorical questions. Andrea wishes to be avenged, yet he does not actually appear as a ghost to his friend Horatio, nor is there any form of communication between them. His aim, Balthazar’s death, will be achieved, but as the result of laboriously contrived transactions and not by his friend’s hand. Now, why does Lorenzo, the Spanish king’s nephew, conspire against Horatio and successfully plot his murder? To Horatio goes the glory of having captured Balthazar, and Lorenzo, resenting this, has Balthazar’s custody granted to him. The latter raises some suspicion when he praises Lorenzo as less warlike, and ‘kinder’ to him. After this the scene moves to Portugal, with an action somehow parallel, for a noble man is slandered and condemned without appeal on the basis of a false report.7 In the emotional breakdown of the King of Portugal, on hearing that his son is dead, can be seen an anticipation of Hieronimo.

7

The informer Pedringano, instigated by Lorenzo and Balthazar, is hanged in his turn after they have deluded him that a royal pardon will save his life. An anonymous painter, and old Bazulto who suffered his son’s death, are Hieronimo’s mirrors and refractions in other incidental scenes.

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At any rate this Portuguese king, unlike the fence-sitting Spaniards, cannot tolerate delays, and the slandered nobleman is about to be executed when truth is re-established and the slanderer unmasked; he confesses he had acted out of resentment for lack of preferment and is immediately sent to death. Most forward in asking for revenge is Bellimperia, Lorenzo’s sister and the secret mistress of Andrea, whom she knows to have been killed by treason. Yet Balthazar too, abetted by Lorenzo, swears revenge against Horatio because Bellimperia loves him. Therefore Hieronimo enters the scene only at the end of Act I, impressing the public with the strange passion he, a royal marshal, has for concocting and directing court shows.8 The two plotters Lorenzo and Balthazar spy on the eloquent, chivalrous, sublime courting of Horatio and Bellimperia; and the elegant rhymed couplets of the garden idyll are interrupted by the entrance of the two killers. Roused by the shouts, Hieronimo ‘in his shirt’ finds the bleeding corpse of his son Horatio hanging from a tree. For the moment he swears revenge against an unknown man. His identity will be presently made known to him by a letter of Bellimperia, a letter written in her blood; but he cannot believe it straightaway and therefore he waits. In the revenge-tragedy framework Andrea is now replaced by Bellimperia, who acts ‘as a ghost’ for the dead man’s father. 3. That Kyd’s tragedy taught Shakespeare a lesson for Hamlet is an established fact; yet, as far as what happens from this moment onward is concerned, it also follows the same lines as Titus Andronicus, for the plot shows the same range of communicative systems, good for emergency needs, which are at the centre of that drama.9 A variety of pieces of news, some of them true and some false, are conveyed and even repeated; others beneficently contradict previous ones while others seem beneficial but prove to be false and deceitful;10 some further communications are true but are not believed or not convincing. As we have seen, a lack of information brings about the Portuguese subplot where the king, not knowing that his son is alive, is about to hang an innocent nobleman. Alternative means 8 9 10

As a useful pretext for connecting, in the mind of the public, the play’s subject with national and local reality, Hieronimo’s brief curtain raiser cites three somewhat imaginary English victories over Spain. Volume 2, § 24.5. See above, n. 7, for the pardon promised to Pedringano.

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of communication are set in train when the segregated Bellimperia sends Hieronimo a letter written in her blood. Hieronimo’s failing to report the murder to the authorities and to ask for an inquest appears rather improbable. No funeral is celebrated for his dead son and strangely no one inquires about him or notices his absence. A tragic irony is in the fact that Hieronimo is also a kind of police-chief, or justice of the peace in the community. But his son’s corpse becomes a means of visual communication when Hieronimo parades it, with a coup de théâtre, at the end of the play he has staged to enliven the nuptials of Bellimperia and Balthazar, whose father has arrived from Portugal. Hieronimo’s final resolution to act without further delay is brought on by a second letter which settles all his doubts about the murderers’ identity. However, the court performance he will profitably use is suggested to him by Lorenzo and Balthazar. Part of the network of allusions and indirect communications is the notice to the reader, in the printed text, that he must suppose the play to be recited ‘in sundry languages’.11 When three of the actors, ceasing to impersonate characters, have stabbed one another to death on the stage, the two kings ask Hieronimo the reasons for his plan, which he has just stated. Fearing torture, Hieronimo cuts off his own tongue and kills himself with another tool normally used for communication, a penknife. This he does after ‘making signs’ to be given that same knife, signs and gestures, therefore, only good for simplified, object messages. § 94. Peele In his small way George Peele (1556–1594) worked at an even wider range of dramatic genres than was later to be Marlowe’s. Of the five plays ascertained to be his, not one is like another;1 on the other hand, not one of them is a masterpiece, although sometimes they get close to being so, or we should not be giving him space and recognition now. He is often 11

Hence the public must have the impression that the players do not understand what they are reciting; and the two kings watching the show follow it by reading a script or libretto in English.

1

Complete historical edition of his works edited by A. H. Bullen, 2 vols, London 1888, now replaced by The Life and Works of George Peele, ed. C. T. Prouty, 3 vols (volume I being a biography by D. H. Horne), New Haven, CT 1952–1970.

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mentioned as an example of the rule that a technically gifted poet does not ipso facto make a good dramatist, since ability and élan in turning out single euphonic lines, making puns, tastefully or fancifully setting up single episodes, help little unless there is a previous architectural plan of wellchosen and well-connected scenes. It is significant that Nashe’s encomium in a 1589 preface calls him, without realizing the implicitly acknowledged limitation, primus verborum artifex. Significantly, this versatile talent meant Peele was in great demand as a collaborator, though always with reserve, in other reputable, even Shakespearean plays. But of Peele we know nothing else, such as whether he experimented in so many directions because asked by patrons, or quite independently, from a desire to explore new ways. My suspicion is that Peele, who knew how to collaborate with others, was an expert in mending and re-writing, and that his real talent lay in this direction. In short, in his plays he takes ready-made outlines and kneads and moulds them so that they produce bold, often iconoclastic effects. He was anything but a passive, unoriginal entertainer.2 2. The second small mystery of Peele’s drama (apart from that of the dates of his plays’ conception, performance and printing, a quagmire I refuse to delve into) is that he does not show any progress in mastering and refining his dramatic techniques. Judged from this standpoint, his last tragedy, David and Bethsabe, might be his first. The ordered division into acts and scenes is itself relinquished for the option of the one acter or even the interlude. His earliest work indubitably was The Arraignment of Paris, staged in 1581 before the queen and printed in 1584. It is the first instance 2

A Londoner, the son of a hospital accountant, Peele was a brilliant student at Oxford where he was called back in 1583, after he had taken the two degrees of Bachelor and Master of Arts, to direct two Latin theatrical performances in honour of a newly enrolled student, a Polish nobleman. Back in London he lived by his pen, writing poems for public solemnities, dedications to patrons and various entertainments; his canon of only five plays, more or less entirely by him, was completed, in a fifteenyear career, with variously probable collaborations in a number of other plays, plus others which are lost, and some whose authorship might just be his. He died (of smallpox) with the repute of a debauched and impoverished bohémien, like an end-of-sixteenth-century Villon, although he had married a fairly rich woman. A booklet of biographical anecdotes printed in 1607, and providing this portrait of him, has often been refuted as slanderous.

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of Peele as a re-maker. Paris’ famous judgement of the three goddesses is preceded by a first act exhibiting the exquisite hues and flowery pictures of a poem by Poliziano, interspersed with shameless imitations of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender.3 Paris is the saddened shepherd who, as the first to come in sight of the three goddesses, gives the palm to Venus, who takes him to her court. In Diana’s bower, Paris stoutly defends his judgement in front of the gods assembled, but the golden apple is taken from Venus and entrusted to Diana to be reassigned. Here comes the coup de théâtre, as the chosen one is a most beautiful and chaste nymph called Eliza. Witty but altogether superfluous allusions suggest that she is the Queen of England. Twenty years later this will be the mythological-allegorical mechanism of the masque, particularly Jonson’s; but Peele’s daring did not please the queen, and he was not to utter such fulsome praise again. Strikingly different from this play was the oneiric interlude The Old Wives’ Tale4 (1590–1595). Here one breathes fresh air, also because it is set in a labyrinthine wood where various, somewhat entranced characters run vainly one after the other in an atmosphere resembling that of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and also that of Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Milton was to draw from it a suggestion for Comus. But Peele’s stimulus was felt most keenly two centuries later by the Gothic novel, with the classical plot of the wizard who keeps a virgin prisoner in his castle and vainly strives to subdue her by torture. But there is also a web of allusions to motifs familiar to the theatre-goer and observer of the contemporary literary scene. An obvious, irresistible and playful quotation of the ‘ghost’ scene, the hinge of the revenge play, occurs in the shape of sulky blacksmith Clunch, who in the midst of the dark wood appears, a lantern in his hand, to Delia’s two alarmed brothers. Soon after, Sacrapant enters the scene ‘in his study’, exactly like Marlowe’s Faust, whose grotesque double he can play until the end. At the beginning the work’s freshness captures the fancy, but this feeling soon vanishes, as if Peele were uncertain how to proceed and the creative well had run dry. The development of The Old Wives’ Tale, a play which lasts the twinkling of an eye, and could be performed at most in an hour, is the 3 In a couple of cases, songs in perfectly correct Italian are sung. 4 Or, The Old Wife’s Tale.

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staging of interconnected and criss-crossing episodes inside a frame, with onlookers watching it. The three lost in the wood reach the blacksmith’s house, where his wife, old Madge, tells her tale and makes it come visually alive: a couple of brothers go to the castle where Delia fails to recognize them; there, however, a wandering knight absurdly called Eumenides also arrives,5 guided by the ghost of a man he has been grateful to. But the picture is crowded with too many characters and marginal episodes which produce a sequence of meaningless flashes. However, these could plausibly appear as the free dreamy fancies of a sleepy wife on a winter night. The last scene decidedly causes a thrill of horror, since the upright knight is asked to cleave his beloved in two as a reward for the ghost’s services; but it is only the trial of a new Abraham, for old Madge comes on stage to announce that the sun has risen and it is time for breakfast. Amusing and salacious shafts of wit crop up here and there, and the taste for mottos and idioms, popular and dialectal, and as such mysterious words, emerges and continues with bizarre folk quotations. 3. The very successful start of David and Bethsabe (perhaps written in 1593, printed in 1599) seems to promise, given the title, a play centred on the love idyll, or on an overwhelming passion firing the senses in consequence of frantic adulterous love, hence a lyrical drama of erotic enchantment. But there suddenly follows a series of frames as in a chronicle or history play – without act-and-scene division – which mark as many climactic turns in the political-dynastic progress leading to Solomon’s birth. The prevailing stylistic register too becomes that of war rhetoric: command, treaty, malediction, invective and battle-plan. Seldom does the dialogue sound like a lively debate; long, ranting and stentorian speeches are, strangely, never interrupted; and the drab end-stopped iambic metre sounds like that of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. From the Bible Peele drew the same episode that a century later Dryden was to fill with allegory or with political allusions. Once more Peele shows, however, he is not merely an escapist entertainer. In the first two scenes David compels Bethsabe to commit an adultery (welcoming then with honeyed words the warrior whose wife he has lain with), 5

There is an intentionally cacophonic mixture of autochthonous elements with classical echoes: the improbable setting of the inner scene is Thessaly.

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and just after this Amnon incestuously desires, seduces and then repudiates his sister Thamar. In the third scene Absolon swears revenge on Amnon; so once again the theme is by and large that of a revenge play. There follows a chain of barbarous crimes still obeying the law of an eye for an eye, with Absolon killing Amnon, then rebelling against his father, then dying an agonizing death, stabbed in the grotesque position of hanging from an oak in whose branches his long hair has got entangled. David himself, mourning a dead son and unable to draw comfort from a living one, would have evoked painful associations to an English audience.6 § 95. Marlowe* I: The apotheosis and its nemesis Had he lived, instead of dying a violent death before he was thirty, Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) would probably have produced a huge amount of work, although it is no less possible that he might have got stuck 7

6

*

Of the two extant plays ascribed to Peele, Edward I, printed in 1593, belongs to the chronicle genre. Its weak historical plot based on the Scottish and Welsh rebellions is enlivened by the gags of the neurotic, haughty and even sadistic Queen Eleanor of Castille, conducive to a satire against Spain and an allegory of pride punished. Later, historical revisionism was always to anger the English, as being merely arbitrary. The Moresque tragedy The Battle of Alcazar, anonymously printed in 1594, gives yet more evidence of the interchange of themes and backgrounds in Peele, while also presenting the first, pioneering approach to the question of Negritude. In 1578 the King of Portugal had invaded Morocco to support the usurper of the legitimate monarch (in such intrigues the English were always interested). The covert assent to Elizabeth’s legitimist pro-Morocco policy is reinforced in the play with the condemnation of the rebellious Catholic mercenary, Thomas Stukely. This play was at the same time Peele’s answer to the success of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.

The Works and Life of Christopher Marlowe, ed. R. H. Case et al., 6 vols, London 1930–1933, 1955–1966, the first vol. a biography by C. F. T. Brooke; The Complete Works, ed. R. Gill, 5 vols, Oxford 1987–1998. Life. J. L. Hotson, The Death of Christopher Marlowe, London 1925, 1967; A. L. Rowse, Christopher Marlowe: A Biography, London 1981; C. Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, London 1992, 2002; L. Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 2000; C. Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life, Ithaca, NY 2002; D. Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, London 2004, New York 2005; P. Honan, Christopher Marlowe Poet and Spy, Oxford 2005.

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and stalled like some of his contemporaries, such as Chapman and Marston. Leaving aside this sort of conjecture, his canon consists of six plays, one of them in two parts, hence seven dramatic texts, plus the by no means negligible addition of his poetry. At first sight, these plays show trademarks that might, in time, have become more evident and specific, first of which, the variety of settings. Marlowe moves very freely between opposing places Criticism. U. Ellis Fermor, Christopher Marlowe, London 1927, Hamden, CT 1967; M. K. Mincoff, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Development, Sofia 1937; F. S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study, Oxford 1940; R. W. Battenhouse, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy, Nashville, TN 1941; P. H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Thought, Learning, and Character, Chapel Hill, NC 1946, 1974; N. D’Agostino, Christopher Marlowe, Roma 1950, and ‘Marlowe, Icaro e la ruota della fortuna’, in N. D’Agostino, G. Melchiori and A. Lombardo, Teatro Elisabettiano. Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Vicenza 1975, 9–26; M. Poirier, Christopher Marlowe, London 1951; P. Henderson, Christopher Marlowe, London 1952, 1956, 1972; H. Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe, Cambridge, MA 1952, London 1954, 1974; F. P. Wilson, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare, Oxford 1953, 1973; D. Cole, Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe, Princeton, NJ 1962, and Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy, Westport, CT and London 1995; Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. C. Leech, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1964; J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study, Cambridge 1964, 1974; Christopher Marlowe, ed. B. Morris, London 1968; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Doctor Faustus’, ed. W. Farnham, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969; C. Masinton, Christopher Marlowe’s Tragic Vision, Athens, OH 1972; W. L. Godshalk, The Marlovian World Picture, Paris 1974; J. Weil, Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet, Cambridge 1977; CRHE, ed. M. MacLure, London 1979; C. Leech, Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage, New York 1975; Christopher Marlowe, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986, also editor of Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’, New York 1988; ‘A Poet and Filthy Play-Maker’: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. K. Friedenreich, C. B. Kuriyama and R. Gill, New York 1988; R. Sales, Christopher Marlowe, New York 1991; Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. E. C. Bartels, New York 1997; V. Viviani, Il gioco degli opposti. Modelli neoplatonici nella drammaturgia di Christopher Marlowe, Pisa 1988; Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. D. Grantley and P. Roberts, Aldershot 1999; Christopher Marlowe, ed. R. Wilson, Harlow 1999; Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell, Cambridge 2000; R. Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595, Manchester 2002; The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. P. Cheney, Cambridge 2004.

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and times, drawing his material from historical tales, legends and ancient myths. He takes from Virgil the story of Dido and Aeneas, but also stages that most shocking of contemporary events, the St Bartholomew’s night massacre. He dramatizes the deposing of Edward II, a subject untouched by other major dramatists, but after making his debut with Tamburlaine, an epic dating back a century and a half before. With The Jew of Malta he tried his hand at a fantastic, fascinating play set in a largely imaginary location, yet still drawing on contemporary prejudices. His stroke of genius was that he was the first to dramatize that most fertile, and since then most often visited western myth, that of Faust. All these plays use, from beginning to end, just one kind of metre, blank verse, which had seldom been so supple, natural and free-flowing. Marlowe’s language itself has been repeatedly evaluated and analysed on the basis of morphological dominants, such as the images of movement and sound, to which he often abandons himself.1 Also in managing his plots Marlowe lucidly chooses symbolic moments and climaxes, extracting them from a wide time frame. In his drama of intrigue the action is so fast and inexorable as to become almost sketchy. In other words, on stage everything happens in a rush. Marlowe is second only to Shakespeare in eliminating parts of the play where the action flags and long incidental tirades, such as those that clog, for instance, Chapman’s drama. Instead of dividing the play into acts and scenes and providing internal segmentations, he creates a flow of real freeze-frames or flashes, brilliantly following one another with an overwhelming rhythm; or, let us say, lets them alternate in a harsh, farcical, ante litteram absurd counterpoint. While one could consider this an archaic remnant or heritage of medieval theatre, it in fact anticipates a much later drama – Brecht’s2 for instance – based on a different standard of measurement and with the criss-crossing of comical, farcical and grotesque effects. The fact remains that Marlowe’s career was brutally interrupted, with only its preliminaries known to us, so that his 1

2

Whoever wishes for the enjambment in Marlowe’s blank verse and finds instead a prevalence of end-stopped lines, must then acknowledge that in the ten syllables of a single line often a complete, compact discursive unit is formed, with a successfully condensed meaning. On the ‘clever play of linguistic registers’ that Brecht derived from Marlowe’s Edward II, see for instance P. Chiarini, Bertolt Brecht. Saggio sul teatro, Bari 1967, 94–5.

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plays, perhaps excepting only two of them, have been thought fit rather for reading than staging, and attempts to revive them on the scene have generally been desultory and unsuccessful. 2. It is no little vaunt for Marlowe to have been the only one of his contemporaries that Shakespeare cited nearly by name, as if acknowledging him a father, and to have been seen as the Bard’s virtual rival, worthy to form with him a diarchy. Other famous dramatists of his time, like Drayton and above all Jonson, paid homage to him, and his plays, acted by the most popular actors, were enormously successful. But Marlowe’s star began to fade, and he was practically forgotten for two centuries until the Romantics, who hailed him as the forerunner of Byron and Shelley. Lamb wrote that a single scene of Marlowe’s Faust was better than anything in Goethe.3 Among the Victorians, Browning, as we shall see, was the exception. Since then, two main questions have held the stage. Firstly, whether Marlowe’s drama is a coherent whole, or a disorderly sequence of separate and unequal dramatic texts; secondly, what is, if there is one, a possible fil rouge, and what is the underlying philosophy and ideology. Both queries are hard to answer, on the one hand because the uncertain chronology, in a time lapse of six supposed years, makes the eruption of Marlowe’s genius almost synchronic; on the other, because the dramatist left no testimonials, declarations of intent, autograph letters, memoirs or manifestos, and we draw conclusions from his works, with all the consequent risks and reservations. There have been attempts to make his plays fit in with the sparse biographical data, or with fragmentary evidence no one can be sure of, as well as to take for granted, apart from obvious generalizations, that Marlowe absorbed or at least echoed specific axioms of Renaissance ideology. The Renaissance being the time of individualistic energy, some critics thought they could trace the presence of neo-Platonism in England and claimed that Marlowe had thoroughly imbibed the ideas of Bruno, Ficino and Nicholas of Cusa, who exhorted man to deify himself. Apart from the lack of evidence and material clues to support such illustrious humanistic designs, one should remember that he rather resembles a subversive iconoclast, polemically striving to demolish accepted theologies 3

A review of Marlowe’s reception up to the Romantic age is in Praz’s SSI, vol. I, 133–52.

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and teleologies, since he believes in a cosmos where chaos has won back its sovereignty. In this way Marlowe questions the existence itself of a divine being, and criticizes and mocks all versions of a historically embodied divinity. Significantly, in Hero and Leander he derisively falsifies mythology by assuming that Saturn ousts Jupiter. Even the quiet of the Olympians is threatened and in an ominous metaphor the gods, especially Jupiter, are debased and mocked. The hastiest and shallowest kind of interpretation lies in connecting Marlowe’s rebellious, stormy and headstrong temper, sic and simpliciter, with the dramatic energy his protagonists emanate: ‘In his plays intemperate life becomes lyrical thrust’.4 Mario Praz, the author of this assertion, evokes a libido excellendi rooted in the dramatist’s own narcissistic personality – a precocious example of psychoanalytical reading, or a hazardous way of interpreting a man through his works, making Marlowe project himself onto his characters who, allegedly, abjure the same beliefs he had rejected. 3. It is partly true that Marlowe, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, mirrors in his plays the Renaissance fabri soaring above their low fortuna, as he himself had done, no matter how false or true this boast may have been. He was also the nephew of a vicar who was suspended a divinis by Queen Mary for marrying; furthermore, a mystic burned for heresy had been his tutor. Such a determined heretical stand did Marlowe take in 1581 when, thanks to a scholarship, he went to Cambridge. There he soon abandoned the idea of entering the Church, took the degree of Master of Arts in 1587 by the express intercession of Queen Elizabeth, who removed the university’s veto on him due to suspected seditious activities. So there is irony in the fact that Marlowe was thought at first to be a clandestine Catholic who wanted to join the Catholic exiles in Rheims. But the opposite might be true, that is that, when still very young, he had been engaged as a spy and sent to the Continent on secret missions. If the first hypothesis is true, Marlowe took Donne’s second step, changing from a supposed Catholic into an ardent apostate and a member of Ralegh’s School of Night, without taking Donne’s third step by becoming an orthodox Anglican. Apotheosis also means the divine privilege of being outside and against every law, and 4

PSL, 93.

§ 95. Marlowe I: The apotheosis and its nemesis

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so able gratuitously to create and destroy, like Lucretius’ god. Hence the anarchy of his thought and also of an existence that flouted all limits – and, so it is imagined, aiming at omnipotence with precocious Nietzschean undertones. Marlowe died on 30 May 1593 during a brawl probably begun over the payment of a bill, at a Deptford tavern in the London suburbs. He died, in other words, like Faust, having to pay a reckoning, but to another host.5 The most daring hypothesis on Marlowe’s fate is that Marlowe did not die at all, but lived on in exile, incognito, seemingly a pious and penitent man, and wrote poems and plays ascribed to Shakespeare. According to another, more macabre, speculation, the hand that wielded the dagger (reaching the brain through the eye socket) belonged to Shakespeare’s himself. Legend ascribes to Marlowe a great deal of colourful, resounding invectives against the Christian faith, when not actual ungodly aphorisms. There are too many witnesses to such blasphemous apostasy for it to be merely imagined, so that another theory now prevalent can be considered plausible, that Marlowe was murdered by killers hired by the Crown, in punishment for his professed atheism and his formal defence and practice of sodomy. It was one Baines who informed on him, seconded by Kyd the dramatist, who was compelled to testify against Marlowe in order to save his own life. This series of recorded boutades affords ample material to define Marlowe as an ante litteram Marxian critic of religion as the people’s opiate. 4. On two or three occasions Marlowe closes a play when his superhuman hero has reached his zenith, and forbids himself, as it were, to even consider his fall, writing real happy-ending comedies instead of tragedies. Tamburlaine had a sequel and a fall, because the audience demanded it, but the first part ended with the hero in his heyday; likewise Hero and Leander closes on the couple’s erotic climax, neglecting what was to follow. PostRomantic criticism went to the opposite extreme, making Marlowe a stern

5

Usually, in Marlowe’s dramatic devices, someone descends or enters from outside to ask for payment and exact compensation: a hireling, or a tempter to impossible feats, a challenger or also and most of all, a corrupter. Marlowe often cites himself, and there are in his plays uncountable paraphrases and variations of the song ‘Come and be my love’ (§ 102.1), this most pure invitation being used for ambiguous and sinful ends, as for instance in the case of vile Barabas (§ 98).

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moralist and critic of his heroes.6 Biographers have carried out the opposite institutional task, underlining the excessive number of traits that, like a prism’s facets, equate Marlowe to his protagonists, and pointing out how biography melts in and emerges from the work. Marlowe is synchronic, as I said, but, leaving real chronology aside, his attitude to his heroes is complex, varying and dialectical, not to be reduced to anything univocal. It is first of all death that interposes itself between God and man instar Dei: death may or may not be a punishment, but the hiatus remains, and man can never reach real apotheosis, only dream of it. Unquestionably Marlowe’s surviving dramatic opus is largely centred on a hero who undertakes superhuman enterprises. Ironically, if the accepted dating is true, his first hero, drawn from Homer’s saga and Virgil’s poem, is an anti-hero who escapes the dilemma – the torturing dilemma – only by bowing to fate and divine will. Aeneas barely skims the glory of a satanic hero. With Tamburlaine Marlowe boldly steps forward, bringing on stage a great leader surrounded by a romantic halo. There is no reason to doubt the author’s complicity: this hero is made to amaze, arouse sympathy and ardent feelings; anarchic and demiurgic, he is also romantic in that his one défaillance, or infraction of the heroic code, is love for a woman. His story is entirely one of actions planned and accomplished in a hypnotic trance; the heroic challenger Tamburlaine must succumb, but is mourned for and missed. On the contrary, the Jew of Malta’s death is strikingly different, and the frame of reference seems totally subverted and revolutionized. Here Marlowe criticizes the political establishment and politics itself in actu, for the Jew is the hinge of an exemplary parable on power, which in the three theocracies presented – Christian, Moslem and Hebrew – supports the iniquities of power as such, betraying the founders’ ideals. The play is not only nihilistic, giving vent to the absolute distrust of the possibilities of founding a just society (at the end there are neither winners nor losers); it is not even heroic, unless maybe in the parody, or rather the fierce satire, in the Jew himself, of pretended heroism, tinged with second-hand Machiavellianism. To 6

Weil 1977 favours the extreme thesis of a theatrical ironist sprinkling laughter and doubts on his supposed alter egos, all of them reduced to an archetype modulated in the several plays, that of the ‘learned fool’. Weil denies any support and identification on the author’s part.

§ 96. Marlowe II: ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’

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call Marlowe an admirer of Machiavelli in the spirit of the Renaissance is therefore a gross misunderstanding. Guise too, in The Massacre of Paris, is a false and pretentious hero, although the play is, or seems to be, bent on criticizing Catholicism as hypocritical and repressive, and thus aiming to support English Protestantism. Finally, Edward II portrays a political system marred by the thirst for power, and may thus be seen to pity an anti-hero who, like Aeneas, is unfit for his role and is crushed by the machinations of the other political characters. Then there is Faust. With him, Marlowe acknowledges a recent historical parable, yet embodying a primordial law. He supports the satanic revolt but knows ex post that it is doomed to failure. Conscious of human limits, he approves the great delusion; or, rather, he appears resigned, composed and disappointed. Faust however is always irresolute7 – the game was not worth the candle, God always wins and deified man is crushed. The enigma of Hero and Leander, if it really is Marlowe’s swansong, is that heroism is sublimated, transfigured and de-solemnized in the sacrilegious passion of the lover of Venus’ chaste priestess. § 96. Marlowe II: ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ The play Dido, Queen of Carthage, in five acts, of uncertain date, was written with the collaboration, only minimal and conjectural, of Nashe; it was then acted by the Children of the Chapel Royal, and printed in 1594. Given the subject and Virgil’s source, some dismiss it as a university experiment. Act I consists almost entirely of a prologue in heaven, where mythology is sharply satirized and even debunked. Jupiter is a peevish husband that coddles his Ganymede, whom Juno, no less peevish and rather churlish, mistreats. This favourite, adopted by a husband who neglects his wife, foreshadows the later situation of Edward II infatuated with Gaveston. Jupiter simpers like a capricious child wishing to please Ganymede in everything; but other frictions arise when Venus accuses Juno of having provoked Aeolus to cause a storm which threatens Aeneas with 7

Looking at the concordance, we find that the adjectives ‘resolute’ and ‘irresolute’ occur an exceeding number of times in Marlowe’s plays; and that, therefore, the characters’ intents are eroded and weakened, and may be taken as self-persuasions or Freudian ‘denegations’.

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shipwreck. Recalled to his responsibility as chief, Jupiter proves hesitant, and while promising Venus that her son will land in Rome, he warns her that this will not happen without difficulty, and with a synthetic and rhapsodic speech foretells Rome’s destiny after the Trojans’ landing. The play has no formal division into scenes, and in the next section Aeneas, echoing Ulysses, recalls to his companions the perilous stages of the voyage hitherto accomplished, encouraging them. Marlowe makes myth a household word and the Trojan sailors, having landed on Dido’s land, prove first of all to be ravenously hungry. But he also evokes the classic Elizabethan atmosphere of sailors shipwrecked on an island, perhaps empty and inhospitable, where their movements are guided by a kindly spirit – in short, a preview of the Tempest. But this is at the same time a Homeric predicament, for Venus hides in a bush and without revealing herself explains to the astonished men where they are now, thus playing the role of Ariel. Indeed, the supposedly lost ships have also happily landed. On seeing the gates of Carthage, Aeneas has a hallucination, and thinks he is in front of Troy, that history can turn back and Priam revenge himself. 2. On his first encounter with Dido, Aeneas, humble and bashful, abstains from sitting in the queen’s stall. She, a curious woman, immediately looks forward to hearing how Troy fell, how things really happened, and Aeneas launches himself into a Homeric récit duplicating that of Ulysses to the Phaeacians. With another piece of cunning Venus disguises Cupid as Ascanius, so that with his arrow he can make Dido fall in love with Aeneas and repair his ships. Marlowe also underlines the role of Iarbas, Dido’s rejected suitor, shrewdly introduced as necessary for a plot, or subplot, centred on Anna, Dido’s sister, in love with him: she abets and kindles the loves of Aeneas and her sister in order to have the warrior for herself. Act III presents a scene worthy of an early bourgeois drama: Dido rejects Iarbas, yet cunningly avoids exposing herself by saying she has sworn to live in chastity, like Chapman’s widows,8 at the same time proudly showing the portraits of her august suitors. She does repair Aeneas’ ships, but only so that Achates may leave alone and Aeneas remain to defend her realm. The end comes from the result of the struggle between Venus and

8

§ 112. 4.

§ 97. Marlowe III: ‘Tamburlaine the Great’

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Juno. Aeneas is unable to perceive what webs are woven above his head and what Dido aims at in the hunting scene. He is the naïve hero, indeed for the moment the antithesis of Marlowe’s ‘overreacher’, too humble and pious (as in Virgil) to covet Dido’s heart. Yet for an instant he is startled, and also partly becomes Marlowe’s resolute hero: go they must, as Mercury in a dream has commanded him to do. In this case, too, we seem to hear again Ulysses and his shipmates, sinking in idleness on the island of the lotuseaters. Aeneas, who wished to go without taking his leave, is brought back and Dido ruthlessly exposes his lies. The queen is at times a prototype for Cleopatra, providing in these cases comedy and intermezzo, as when the entranced Aeneas adopts measures for a new Troy, to be also called Aenea or Ascania, evoking Tamburlaine’s grandiloquence; but a moment later he prosaically realizes that the ships have got neither masts nor sails. The ultimatum arrives when Mercury orders absent-minded Aeneas to leave. Iarbas comes to his help, offering to equip the ships. For once, Aeneas is firm and clear; Dido, in her excruciated humanity, protests. The play’s end follows the Senecan norm, as Dido throws herself among the flames, and the two other unrequited lovers cut their wrists. Save for a few occasional romantic quivers, Dido is a classical, restrained play, with an approach to its theme and a musical slant that foreshadow Metastasio. § 97. Marlowe III: ‘Tamburlaine the Great’ The intention behind this play, commonly dated 1587–1588, might have been to revisit and bring up to date in the theatre the chivalric epos, since it represents real, literally tragic conflicts, but sometimes also tinged with humour or pathos, and at any rate stylized and artificial, between Saracens and Saracens, but also between Saracens, Jews and Christians, with their predictable consequences of duels, stentorian harangues, rodomontades, and solemn obsequies in honour of the dead. It is a succession of scenes and especially single pictures flowing and alternating on different fronts, as in the parallel stories of chivalric poems.9 Marlowe originally drew his 9

Marlowe drew upon historical sources of Pedro Mexía and of the Italian Perondino, and even more (says Riggs 2005, 203) on The English Mirror (1586) by George Whetstone. The hero’s first name is a transliteration of ‘Timur the lame’, and proof of an autobiographical overtone and identification might be the detail, to be found

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inspiration from the historical figure of the founder of the Timurian dynasty, whose heroic deeds were performed in Central Asia during the fifteenth century; Timur in fact died in 1405, having immeasurably expanded the confines of his vast empire. However, the play is still crude because it lacks all visual and even scenic definition, abounding instead with medium-length declamatory speeches full of curses and resounding promises, and shameless declarations of victory soon given the lie – Tamburlaine alone boasts, proclaims and keeps his word. So, if ever a character from a play can be said to epitomize the outrageous, it is Tamburlaine with his hyperbolical language carried to the extreme of swashbuckling. Criticism is divided on the subject of Marlowe’s intentions. According to Praz he took morbid delight in dwelling on the Oriental atrocities, lust and sadism that would later endear Marlowe to the French Decadents, first of all Flaubert, around 1830.10 On the contrary, in 1941 R. W. Battenhouse wrote a whole book11 to demonstrate, with dubious success, that Tamburlaine is a grand moral lesson on the punishment of excessive hubris. Tamburlaine is indeed at first a ‘heaven-sent man’, that is to say a divine instrument meant to redress the world (not for nothing a Christological shepherd figure). Rising ex nihilo, he becomes a leader endowed with greater abilities than anointed kings; his military ethos is sound and the scene of the Persian king caught in the act of hiding his crown is stark and searing, for Tamburlaine never kills anyone treacherously, much less the helpless and cowardly. The political metaphor lies in his innate charisma, and in his human gifts as a commander. Marlowe admires his immense natural ability12 to hold the masses in his hand and to forge alliances, first of all by negotiation; Tamburlaine never physically eliminates and exterminates without first striving to persuade.

10 11 12

for example in Taine (TAI, vol. I, 386), that Marlowe himself as a young man had a leg broken during a brawl, and had to abandon the acting profession. On the evidence of Spenser’s influence see Riggs 2005, 214. PRA, 182 n. 163. Refuted, among many, by Kocher 1947, and in great detail by Steane 1964, 71–7. His is also a rhetorical ability: Tamburlaine – a shepherd speaking correct language, even knowing mythology in detail, as well as logic and above all rhetoric – is a forecast of Shakespeare’s ambivalent portrait of Othello, a superb orator able to discourse with apt arguments and rich imagery, although he is a Moor.

§ 97. Marlowe III: ‘Tamburlaine the Great’

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Had then Marlowe at this stage an imperialistic, even satrapical, or at least feudal bent? Did he harbour a cult for the superman? Tamburlaine does in fact build an effective federate empire – a state machine – and no criticism or suspicion is advanced against such a possible worldwide, universal federation that he is building without any Machiavellian trick; not a single abuse is perpetrated and the leader confers prizes and punishments in just proportions. Vaguely, he fights and wins even in hoc signo, in that, as I have said, God is the principal and he his instrument, like certain saints and holy fools fighting in other fields, for instance Joan of Arc. Or does Marlowe wish to question the warrior’s integrity and show how hubris is fatally leading him to sadistic, capricious and arbitrary power? Near the end of the first part, the figures of King Bajazet and his wife, inhumanly treated and atrociously humiliated, make Marlowe’s approval of Tamburlaine more relativistic. In the second part, Marlowe’s sympathy for Tamburlaine does in fact abate or quite vanish. The divine scourge is now made to appear merely a favourite of fickle fortune; and the drama turns itself upside down, from the exaltation to the denunciation of militarism. 2. After strenuous tirades in Senecan style, Bajazet and his wife (the latter with sobbing and horrified phrases) kill themselves, beating their heads against the bars of the cage they have been shut in, and the first part ends with Tamburlaine’s empire pacified under his sway. The second appears more fragmentary, unequal and confused, with enormous leaps from place to place on a map spread across an imaginary geography. Politically, Tamburlaine finds himself confronted with a triple alliance hinging on the King of Hungary, dictated by wisdom and common interest, this time of a really Machiavellian sort. This causes the start of a precocious world war. The Christian participants in the anti-Tamburlaine league commit downright perjury and justify themselves by chicanery as being exempted from keeping faith with the Muslims, while not with the Christians, who are worthier of respect than the Muslims. The paradox is that if Christ exists, he must take the Muslims’ side and grant them victory against the bad faith of the Christians. Tamburlaine, who doubts his sons to be really sired by him, being too unwarlike, foreshadows the love-trial scene in King Lear: two of the sons proclaim themselves worthy of their father and promise heroic deeds, but the third blunders, owns he is disinterested and only wishes to keep his mother company. Furious, Tamburlaine publicly murders the

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faint-hearted son,13 and the chorus comments that now his violence calls for chastisement from above. Finally the action moves to Babylon, where Tamburlaine solemnly burns the Koran in impious defiance of Mahomet, like the soldiers at the foot of the Cross, and in a passionate frenzy he decrees his most abominable and unjustified punishment, the massacre of the Babylonians, whose corpses will emerge in the lake of Asphaltis.14 His defiance only ceases when he falls ill and dies, in the act of making a list of the countries still to be conquered. The ultimate lack of coherence of this second part is evinced by a number of marginal, if enchantingly suggestive scenes, like a captain’s stoical death followed by that of his wife and son. An intermezzo displays, with an opposite result,15 the same Marlovian scene of temptation, where a jail-keeper is bribed by huge, magnificent rewards if he will free the briber, Bajazet’s son. § 98. Marlowe IV: ‘The Jew of Malta’ Whoever expected The Jew of Malta (not printed until 1633) to be a static play, consisting of formal, solemn, pompous dialogues, full of pseudoclassical mythological exuberance, finds instead a totally renewed structure. It has a vivid plot, crammed with action and adventure, a chain of tricks and machinations, coincidences much too favourable to be plausible, sudden and repeated changes of place, and teeming with scurrilous terms,16 stratagems, perfidious devices and contests of cunning, with a cast of very practical and concrete types who behave well beyond any reference to sublime values. Romantic epic here has given way to realistic drama. At the same time The Jew of Malta is ideologically far more definite. You could call it a

13 14 15

16

The moral is that, sometimes, too brave a father discourages his sons from imitating him: Calyphas, the faint-hearted son, keeps his bed before the great battle, spreading empty, rhetorical and relativistic doubts on the priority of warlike valour. The history was going to repeat itself in the massacre on the night of St Bartholomew. The woman, named Olympia like a character in Ariosto, is imprisoned by Tamburlaine and wooed by a simple-minded general; she kills herself by inviting him to try the point of his sword on her throat, on which she has spread a purportedly magic ointment. Marlowe apes some Italian swearwords, as in the interjection ‘Corpo di Dio!’ [‘God’s body!’], exactly anagrammatic in Italian.

§ 98. Marlowe IV: ‘The Jew of Malta’

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real, or a first Machiavellian play, or more exactly, as is obvious, anti-Machiavellian. This note is struck in the prologue, purported to be spoken by Machiavelli himself, recently landed on English soil in his wanderings, like an Apollo exiled from Greece and heading north. According to Marlowe, an epidemic, a wave, an avalanche of Machiavellis infects Europe, and not only the Machiavelli of The Prince. Whoever loudly and falsely proclaims himself anti-Machiavellian is a Machiavelli, that is, a hypocrite like anyone who feigns to be pious and religious, or the despot who enforces unjust laws with blood. Machiavellians are above all Christians and Catholics. The attack on religion is a continuation of the theme in Tamburlaine, since, if Muslims beseeched Christ to disavow and punish Christians, now it is the Jews who denounce them, entreating their God to punish his own children who are still their scourge, just as was Tamburlaine. Once more Marlowe does not spare anyone, and condemns to the same doom Christians, Muslims and now especially Jews. As the three main religions are so rotten, the world cannot be redeemed, and the play’s nihilistic conclusion is that ‘there is no love on earth’.17 2. Jews and Judaism are the centre of attention. Marlowe starts from a pro-Semitic position only to turn later to an anti-Semitic one. Barabas the Jew enters the scene by exalting his economic success: he is enormously wealthy and considers this a mark of God’s favour, but receives the sudden blow of a huge tax levied on him by the island’s governor in order to pay the ten years’ tribute to the Turks. Only at that moment does Barabas have an iniquitous, blackmailing law read and recalled to him; its terms are meant to oppress the Jewish community, barely integrated in such a racist context: the Jews are compelled to give up half or the whole of their wealth, otherwise they must be converted. The balance for the moment turns in his favour, raising the legal dilemma if, and to what extent, the citizens of a community are obliged to cope with economic emergencies, and how taxation should be organized, whether in a proportional or arbitrary way. But the Christians object that the Jews are foreigners in Malta. And moreover, they maintain that the people who crucified the Saviour are damned by history. From this moment on the play becomes a contest 17

The words come from Abigail, Barabas’ daughter.

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of Machiavellian tricks between the Jew and the island’s political authorities. Barabas, overcome by desire for revenge, reacts by using stratagems and intrigues in his turn. Marlowe makes him draw the same aberrant conclusion as the Christian King of Hungary had applied in Tamburlaine to the pacts sworn with infidels: by that convention, Christians and Jews can perjure each other. From the Jewish viewpoint, The Jew of Malta states the final secularization and westernization of Judaism. The second part, from Act III onward, completes the mutation or degeneration of Barabas, who after a number of rocambolesque adventures is actually made the Machiavellian governor of the island. But in the end his Machiavellianism is overcome and conquered in extremis by the deeper cunning of the Maltese knights. Jewish Machiavellianism is thus inevitably defeated. 3. Barabas, then, is apolitical and asocial; whatever happens, as long as the status quo persists and he is allowed to safeguard and increase his wealth, that is enough for him. But after all he lives in a community, although he wishes to be a parasite. In short, Jews want to go on profiting from the situation without taking an active part in the government of society. This is their fault. Barabas, however, reminds the governor that God cannot curse a whole race instead of judging men singly: there are, he warns, good Jews and Christians, and bad ones, and God rewards and punishes single persons by their merits or demerits, not by their races. Overcome by his thirst for revenge, Barabas is the first to transgress these sensible principles, and feels authorized to pursue all kinds of retaliation. He persuades his daughter Abigail to go to a nunnery, feigning conversion; he buys a slave to make him a killer, plots a duel where both suitors of his daughter will die, poisons the nuns with a rice soup, as well as murdering two friars, one Abigail’s confessor, another the possible denouncer of his misdeed. He goes to the point of having his own daughter murdered, because after feigning her conversion she has actually become a Christian. All these events, linked to one another, open and close on the stage in a staggering rush, and their surreal sensationalism has raised the suspicion that the play’s second part was written by one of Marlowe’s collaborators. But this possible collaborator must then have been even abler and more gifted than Marlowe, to devise the macabre, lightning-quick elimination of the two friars, and to create the ambiguous, hallucinatory, shady atmospheres of the slave Ithamore’s improbable naïve amours, with a sly but elderly prostitute

§ 99. Marlowe V: History plays

569

abetted by a filthy go-between. Those three die after accusing Barabas of having poisoned them, but at the trial Barabas rebuts their evidence and feigns death; his corpse, abandoned on the seashore, awakens to plot a last revenge: yield the island to the Turks who are coming to besiege it. To them Barabas, like Homer’s Sinon, reveals a secret passage whereby to reach the citadel. Made governor of the island in the Turks’ name, Barabas feels threatened by the hate of both Turks and Christians, and offers the latter a plan to rid themselves of their conquerors. The text does not explain how far such a proposal expresses Barabas’ real intention or if it is a trap to ruin the Christians rather than the Turks. Has Barabas done an act of supreme honesty, although out of selfish calculations? The Christians make him fall into the fatal trap and now reap a triumphant victory, because the Turkish ships are burnt and the Turks must make the best of a bad job. § 99. Marlowe V: History plays An English play from beginning to end, Edward II (printed in 1594) follows the model, already tested in the last decade of the sixteenth century, of the chronicle play, with all the risks deriving from an obligation to historical facts – so that, were Marlowe to be judged on this one drama, he would not rank very high among Elizabethan authors of history plays.18 It is true that Marlowe for a long time maintains a neutral, middle-of-the-road attitude. In the first half of the play it is impossible to say who he sympathizes with, defends or indicates as responsible for the disorder in the realm. Before he has ceased to reckon with the extenuating circumstances, he begins to show more clearly the responsibilities of the many characters at variance. On the one hand, Edward is too inept for his role, on the other the barons are too grasping. The young sovereign is so infatuated with his favourite, Gaveston, that he heeds no reason and makes reckless decisions. The play repeats, and transmutes to the point of transmogrifying it, an element of The Jew of Malta: the alienation and total neglect of all public interest in

18

Extremely popular soon after it had been first staged, Edward II fell into oblivion and was revisited only during the twentieth century. The two milestones of this revival were Brecht’s remake (1924) into a paradoxical apologue of anti-politics, and Derek Jarman’s film (1991) stressing the denunciation of homophobia.

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favour of private emotions and overwhelming loves and passions. Yet there are in Edward some traits of the romantic warrior, because in his occasional dreamy raptures and emotional indulgence he echoes Tamburlaine, of whom, however, he most patently lacks the steely grasp and lucid view of things. The barons on their part crave to possess greater power. There is a political struggle between absolute power and collegiate government, and the question is to what extent the court is held to bow to an incapable king and thereby allow the nation to be irreparably damaged. The play opens with a very long scene that suggests the analogy with Tamburlaine, for Edward savours the imminent renewed pleasure of his idyll with his favourite – only just readmitted to court in spite of the barons’ dislike – in delicate, exuberant imagery. In the prolonged conflict, his adversaries are stimulated by class prejudices, since Gaveston is low born, but also driven by strictly political reasons, as the favourite is a blood sucker for whom the king is emptying the royal coffers of the money needed to fund his French and Scottish wars. This aspect of Edward was likely to please the audience, in that Marlowe presents his policy as a way of rejecting papal interference; in other words, he speaks, anachronistically, the later language of the Reformation. Soon, however, the barons are accused of Machiavellianism, supported by the queen: they plan to recall Gaveston from Ireland so they can have an easier opportunity to murder him; and so they do, through secret, rather cumbersome, drawn-out treaties.19 As the play turns on Edward and Gaveston, their relationship might suggest a proto-illuminist discourse about a different, taboo subject: the theme of homosexual ‘guilt’ is kept in the background, and Marlowe builds no clear thesis upon it; still, there is a perverse humour in his recording the historical fact of the humiliation inflicted on Edward in the Dantesque contrappasso, since the homosexual king had a burning rod thrust into his anus.20 Synchronized with this is the theme of male prevarication: the queen can do nothing but lament the king’s disaffection and is even

19

Marlowe’s distrust of solemn promises and oaths is again evident when the nobles, huddled together, must decide whether they should let the king see Gaveston one last time before his execution. 20 See, among many, Levin 1954, 124, who quotes Empson.

§ 99. Marlowe V: History plays

571

compelled to plead with the barons for Gaveston’s return. Deprived of Gaveston, Edward rapidly becomes feeble, closely following history, only to rise again in the epilogue. Edward’s temporary victory over the rebels is nullified by the English-French league organized by the queen; finally the king gives up the crown, and an equivocal order to kill is issued, which could be interpreted in two opposite ways according to the punctuation. In the classic encounter between Edward and his murderer, who study each other as very often happens in Shakespearean plays, the king, imprisoned in a stinking cesspool, is smothered on a bed, in a grimly powerful scene, rich in symbolic flashes. The new king, Edward III, re-establishes order and law, rounds up and executes the Mortimers, the rebels’ leaders, and sends the queen to the Tower. 2. In The Massacre at Paris,21 the most negligible of his plays, perhaps because it has come down to us rehashed and heavily abridged, Marlowe fearlessly deals with a very recent historical event, and, above all, from the very first speeches appears for once to take a clear ideological stand, and even to give his countrymen constructive suggestions. St Bartholomew’s night had been the summit encounter between the forces of enlightened and tolerant Protestantism, and the old, popish or Machiavellian Catholicism; its effect was to strengthen and lend the sanction of history to the Navarre French and the Elizabethan monarchies, allied against Spain. The anticipated climax is the massacre, whose bloodthirsty frenzied principal is the Duke of Guise with the support of Catherine Medici. But the play, reduced to a kind of unity of time, is in fact prolonged up to 1589 and to the death of Henry III: after he has destroyed the whole Guise entourage, he is killed by a friar who thinks this action will gain him merit and pardon for his sins. Fitful, surreal, barely relevant outbursts, comical or farcical, interrupt a plot that lapses into a summary dramatic recital of the historical events. Archers from the bridges pierce the Protestants swimming in the Seine trying to escape; the logician Ramus is killed, after he has uselessly argued his antiAristotelianism, as a symbol of the new ideologies and an indirect proof of Catholic obscurantism. A courtier chops off an ear of the man who has cut off his gold buttons, and the Guise finds out, to his utmost shame, that 21

Dates of composition and first printing are both unknown.

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his duchess has a lover. Almost at the same time Chapman was describing the slimy atmosphere of morbid, impure Catholicism in Bussy D’Ambois. § 100. Marlowe VI: ‘Doctor Faustus’ I. A short history of Faustism For this play, dated 1589 by its contemporaries, it was later proved that Marlowe used the first English version of the German Faustbuch, dated no earlier than 1592, unless he had been able to see the manuscript already in 1588, before it was printed. Since Marlowe’s Faust is the first milestone in the written tradition of a western myth that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries grew apace, invading the nearby areas of figurative arts, music and finally cinema, we had better view it against the background of the rise and expansion of the German magician’s fame, and consider through what stages it spread across Europe. From the nineteenth century the English manifested their admiration and cult of Marlowe as the initiator recalling that Goethe himself, author of the second and greater Faust in literary history, had felt Marlowe’s stimulus. The first parting of the ways occurs between the historical Faust and those reinvented from Marlowe onward. The historical Faust, in his turn, is already a historic-imaginary, or mostly imaginary, sub-creation, in which an always phantasmal set of records mixes with oral and legendary anthropological remnants from time immemorial. Faust is a typically marginal phenomenon of closed, formalized cultures of the ‘syntagmatic’, illuminist kind. In short, as a means of contesting the cultural system, it is part of those peripheral phenomena which, according to Yuri Lotman, help to enrich culture, being only halfintegrated in the cultural system itself. 2. So who was Faust, then? There were two known Fausts, maybe brothers or twins, in mid-sixteenth-century Germany, one Georgius and the other Johann. Georgius Sabellius, prince of magicians, self-styled Faust junior, in 1507 was made a schoolmaster in Kreuznach. An abbot’s letter reveals that he escaped punitive sanctions for acts of obscenity with the schoolboys (in other words, for homosexual avances). Johann Faust in 1509 received a Bachelor degree in Divinity at Heidelberg University. Another churchman reports, however, that one Georg Faust in 1513 was behaving as a braggart in an Erfurt tavern, in 1520 drew the horoscope for the cardinal of Bamberg and in 1528 was commander and tutor of the Knights of St John. A few days after it was rumoured he had been expelled from Ingolstadt as

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a fortune-teller. In 1532 the magician and sodomite Faust was refused safeconduct from Nuremberg. In 1535 and 1540 he made two prophecies that turned out to be true. This confusing evidence leads one to see the literary Faust as a syncretic figure, an archetypal synthesis of magicians possibly synonymous or hard to identify. The dominant trait is that all Fausts suffered from sexual disorders or deviations. Contemporary humanists and scientists agree in saying he was only a braggart and that his prophecies were frauds. Nor did demonologists think him of any account. Nonetheless, the reformed clergy, in the wake of Luther and Melanchthon, accused him of trafficking with the devil. Faust’s demonic tradition begins with Faust himself, who boasted that the devil was his companion or familiar. It was also whispered that the devil had strangled him. The Protestant legend about him said he was the last in the lineage of Persian magicians, who had already been discredited in the last days of the Roman empire, and banished by Catholicism. The pact with the devil – by yielding one’s soul – had arisen with Theophilus of Adana, and it implied a belief in the devil’s unlimited powers. The Lutherans spread the idea of Faust’s eternal damnation because Faust, using such satanic powers to satisfy his thirst for knowledge, denied the anti-humanistic tendencies of the Reformation. The etymology of Mephistopheles’ name was explained by having recourse to a range of evocative possibilities: as Mephotophiles he is ‘the hater of light’, as Mefaustophiles he is ‘Faust’s enemy’, as Mephiz-Tophel he is ‘the destroyer and liar’. The first who confused Faust with Fust of Mainz was the Storm-and-Stress poet Max Klinger. This blunder and contamination was crucial and rich in implications, because Fust the printer, himself active in Germany and contemporary to Faust, was accused by the Erfurt theologians of having interpolated and corrupted Plautine and Terentian texts; but the real connection is of a different nature, because printing as such, since it made use of proverbially black ink, could be condemned as a magic operation or deemed an instrument in the spread of the new science.22 Heine indeed maintained that this confusion was due to the superstitious dread of the spreading of knowledge. I cannot think of any use of this near-homonymy in literature, or of a similar analogy of 22

MIT, vol. I, § 172.

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intents, as astonishing as Browning’s short dramatic dialogue ‘Fust and His Friends’.23 3. The confluence, in Faust the historical-legendary, demonic wizard of the sixteenth century, of the later incarnations of the wizard-figure, was first exhaustively delineated in E. M. Butler’s The Myth of the Magus.24 In her opinion all the historical magicians, and Faust with them, comprise a single figure, with ten characteristics or recurrent phases: 1. Mysterious origin. 2. Prodigies at his birth. 3. Dangers threatening his infancy. 4. Initiation. 5. Wanderings, including the exploration of the netherworld or otherworld (a very important category for Faust). 6. Magic contests. 7. Trial or persecution, another crucial phase for Faust. 8. Last scene. 9. Violent or mysterious death, like that of Orpheus torn to pieces. 10. Resurrection and ascension. Those ten points make up the bones of the magician’s archetypal life. But in nearly all versions eroticism is atrophied and diminished, outweighed by the thirst for knowledge and by magic objectives. The magician’s function was originally that of the healer, for the welfare of the tribe: thus he worked miracles and metamorphoses. He was also able to do evil, to murder and weave noxious spells. He also had the virtue of controlling natural phenomena. And he could foresee the future. His genealogy comes from the East, from Zoroaster to Moses to Solomon to Pythagoras to Apollonius. Even Christ is included, and we get as far as Simon Magus. Pythagoras was believed to be Apollo itself, the ‘Pythian’, or hyperborean or northern Apollo. Abaris, a priest of Apollo, recognized the god in Pythagoras, who showed him his golden thigh. Apollonius of Thiana, in the first century AD, shows how in the variety of magician figures one can already trace the Apollonian and the Dionysian models. For Apollonius, in certain events and features of his existence, exhibits strong analogies and similarities with the figure of Christ, and Christ too can be the god-man and hero of a mystery tale. In fact the Gospels astonishingly re-present some of the points of the magician’s identikit: divine origin, miraculous birth, with See Volume 6, § 23.5 for a closer reading. In Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Faust was to become a musician. 24 E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus, London 1948, Cambridge 1993. By the same author is the overview The Fortunes of Faust, Cambridge 1952. 23

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annunciation and prodigies, threats in infancy, initiation with the Baptist, contests with Satan. Extremely relevant is Christ’s refusal to perform magic feats to demonstrate his divinity: this would mean the start of the belief that magic is demonic. Still, Christ works miracles like other magicians; and in anthropological terms he is the god devoured and torn to rags like Pater’s Denys l’Auxerrois: rituals, those, especially stressed in the apocrypha. Simon Magus is the first explicitly ‘black’ magician, a sinner against the Holy Spirit, the founder of agnosticism, hence of heresies. 4. The Frankfurt printer Johan Spiess compiled the first Faustbuch in 1587, taking a Lutheran stand, which was to condemn the figure of the magician.25 Badly told, and coarsely farcical, it is a gallery of wizardries much like those attributed in the past to magicians. It was Spiess that invented Mephistopheles, whom Faust asks to describe hell, which he will visit eight years later. Every night Faust has a different woman, but all prove to be devils. Helen is evoked in order to be the temptress of the students. In the didactic finale Faust admonishes his disciples not to follow his example. The book was read in translation all over Europe. Its rival, the more learned, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic Faustbuch by Georg Rudolf Widman (1597), was reprinted in 1674, and in 1725 broken up as a ‘popular primer’. Spiess was translated into English in 1592 and inspired Marlowe, but in Marlowe the tragic plot is already flanked by a comic one. Farcical developments were in England those of W. Mountfort (1687) and a pantomime by J. Thurmond (1724). In his turn, from the beginning of the seventeenth century Marlowe was acted in Germany by itinerant players, with many changes favouring the sensational and enriched with burlesque traits, a tradition lasting two centuries. Lessing (in fragments of 1784) opened a new chapter, that of Faust saved, ennobled by his desire to extend knowledge. Among the salvationists, Goethe granted Faust an apotheosis. From 1791, to confine ourselves to late nineteenth-century German literature, more poets and dramatists, like Klinger, Chamisso, Platen, Lenau, Nürnberger and Heine, obsessively revisited Faust. The first parody was by Vischer in 1862. Faust’s popular cult must be read against the background of successive cultural typologies. In the late German Middle Ages Faust lives in examples of anti25

J. W. Smeed, Faust in Literature, Oxford 1975.

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Faustian literature, as a counter-phenomenon of rebellion to the dominant culture, in a climate where religion and superstition are at a crossroads, and heresy and witchcraft hover insidiously. Marlowe’s Faust is a layman or apostate with a thirst for lay science, an axis along which Renaissance and Enlightenment meet. If the Enlightenment approves of Faust, who refuses to leave black holes or leaks in the cosmic plan, the Romantics welcome him as representing at the same time a rebellion against rationality; the tamed, ‘domesticated’, Biedermeier Romanticism also finds there elements to support its fortunes. Necessarily, nineteenth-century Darwinism, scientism and positivism are sworn enemies of Faustism, since they agree in rejecting the search for what cannot be known. 5. After Marlowe and Goethe, every later Faust was by definition a minor Faust, as was quite apparent to the early Victorian poets, who consciously wrote in the shadow of this myth and its surrogates. As we shall see,26 Browning did not begin his career with a Faust, lest he should be uncomfortably compared with Goethe. Standard English Fausts hardly made a name – one by G. Soane, Faust, A Romantic Drama, 1825; one by W. L. Rede, The Devil and Doctor Fausus, 1844; one, a novel, but published anonymous, by Louisa May Alcott, A Modern Mephistopheles, 1877; then W. S. Gilbert, Gretchen, 1879. Transpositions and variations of the Faustian myth cover a wide range of categories. They can represent the basic canvas as re-made (from Faust to Fust), metonymized (from Faust to Paracelsus), parodied, combined and agglutinated. Several writers chose the last way, ingeniously fusing and coalescing the plots of Faust and Don Juan, the two most fortunate and most often revisited modern western myths. Just as there was Spiess’s Urfaust so there was Tirso’s Ur-Don Juan, and the Juan myth went from Spain to Italy (ca. 1640, Cicognini), with the commedia dell’arte, puppet plays and the opera buffa, then to seventeenth-century France and Molière.27 The logic for this 26 Volume 4, § 110.1 27 Faust was also associated with the Wandering Jew, Icarus, Prometheus, Cain; he was given analogues in Vathek, Melmoth, Frankenstein, Manfred; opposites in Jean Paul’s Wutz or the ‘Oblomov type’. On the Faustism of Clough’s Dipsychus see Volume 4, §§ 143–5; on the Spasmodics (Bailey, Dobell and Smith), Volume 4, §§ 224–7;

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fusion of the two figures was an antithesis turned into equivalence: Don Juan is the symbol of the sexual demonic, just as Faust is the symbol of the spiritual demonic.28 Baudelaire was the first to imagine Don Juan in hell, and, as Macchia notices, in late Romanticism Don Juan is Faustianized and, infected with anxiety, he yearns for the absolute and experiences nothingness. Pushkin and Lenau, for their part, did not write a Faust cum Don Juan, but two distinct plays.29 6. ‘How greatly it is all planned!’, commented Goethe in 1829 of Marlowe’s drama which he had probably read in one of the later quartos, but seen performed by puppets already when he was studying at Leipzig. Marlowe’s Faustus, born out of the translation of the Faustbuch, had returned to Germany and been acted, together with other plays, by English companies touring there. Periodical repeat performances took place in the Styrian and Dresden courts. Still, during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, there were successful remakes including comic and melodramatic intermezzos, played by the most popular German and Italian stock characters. Goethe’s earliest reference to Marlowe occurs in a note in his diary of 1818, but as I said he must have read the Faustbuch and Marlowe’s drama long before then. The Storm-and-Stress Goethe could only feel sympathy for the English atheistic poet. Afterwards Goethe, in successive remakes of his own drama, went beyond his first imitative impulse towards a new approach (Faust as ‘wise man and man of action’).30 In the strictly theological sense Goethe subverts the conditions of the Faustian pact: Faust will be damned if he ever can achieve on earth the peak of happiness and sensual gratification; but this does not happen. Marlowe’s frame survives, in the two parts of Goethe’s Faust,31 enriched with episodes from the Faustbuch that Marlowe, more economical, left aside. Those, and and, on the subtle Faustian allusions in Pater’s tale ‘Carl of Rosenmold’, Volume 6, § 180.2. 28 G. Macchia, Vita avventure e morte di Don Giovanni, Milano 1991, 75. 29 On the ‘grammar’ of Faustism and above all Donjuanism, see my own ‘Morphology of the Mythic Remake’, in A Goody Garlande, ed. R. Mamoli Zorzi and A. Cagidemetrio, Venezia 2003, 255–70. 30 MIT, vol. II, § 177.2. 31 But this is categorically denied in MIT, vol. II, § 177.2.

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they are not few, who prize Marlowe above Goethe do so because of the stormy, rugged immediacy and essentiality of the one in contrast with the multi-layered, often heterogeneous drama of the other. § 101. Marlowe VII: ‘Doctor Faustus’ II. The drama of irresolution In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the textual question is complex, because there are two versions, one shorter and starker, text A of 1604, and a later, ampler one, text B of 1616; a blend of both resulted in a Frankenstein-like text C.32 The drama’s structural plan may appear unwittingly far-seeing, especially owing to the alternation of high and low, sublime and coarse, ‘thin’ and ‘fat’. Certain entrances resemble an avant lettre theatre of the absurd (the horse-dealer), or Boccaccio’s tales (the banquet at the papal palace), giving the impression of a random development with no obvious logical sense, even of scenes inserted by a different author,33 instead of clearminded choices based on firm, cogent planning, more so as the play (in A) is not divided into acts and scenes, but is a sequence of sudden sparks and abrupt flashes. Faustus is, as La Palisse would say, Faust’s drama. If in his monologues he often speaks about himself in the second person, this is the typical sign of a double personality. This is a device that perhaps mimes the inner dynamics of the author himself, between compelling momentary impulse (the cause, many think, of the play’s genesis) and cool reflection. With Marlowe, Faust reaches the height of irresolution. He aims at no Renaissance celebration of human powerfulness or at any apotheosis. Instead, he seems conscious that the character’s double name came from the oral tradition that begot him. The clown thinks that Wagner, the servant to Faustus, talks a ‘Dutch fustian’.34 Later Faustus is called by a horse-dealer ‘Master Fustian’, which implies the same suggestion. These are tangible and unambiguous signs of the anthropological contamination of Faust and Fust, and we can also see this in the fact that in the subplot Robin and Ralph have got hold of Faustus’s ‘book’, the book of magic but presumably also 32 33 34

Such is the text edited by F. S. Boas in vol. V of the Case edition. According to some critics Samuel Rowley collaborated with Marlowe. Hints of this sort are due, as Riggs notices (Riggs 2005, 182), to the fact that Marlowe may have heard of the Faustian myth when he was sent to Holland on a mission.

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the Bible of Fust the printer. But at another level the drama is also that of Mephistopheles, Satan’s aide and himself a fallen angel – reckless, subtly penitent, nostalgic and elegiac, and thus an unwilling tempter. Hence at times Faust is his tempter, and, tout court, the Tempter. This ambivalent Mephistopheles looks ahead to Milton’s Satan. Even in this case Marlowe does not abandon his eminently theological approach to a drama pivoting on the question of the ultimate, immense monstrosity of sin and of eternal damnation or the chance of God’s pardon at the last moment. It is an allegorical parable: man shall not transgress the limits God has imposed on him. So it has the flavour of a morality play, as can be seen from the personified seven deadly sins, that is to say, from the medieval danse macabre, didactically stressed by the final speech of the chorus. 2. The play’s outline is this: from the birthplace ‘Rhodes’ to Wertenberg,35 where Faust faces temptation, the demonic pact, and anguished doubts concerning God’s loving kindness and the possibility of eternal damnation. From there to Rome and back home, to Germany. Sleepless Faust accomplishes ‘miracles’ and kisses Helen’s phantom. Twentyfour years later, inexorably, death comes and eternal damnation with it. Marlowe, as I mentioned, followed selected passages of an English translation of the Faustbuch in about sixty chapters, by an unidentified P. F.; but several of them were reproduced word by word, barely adapted to the rhythm of blank verse. So the first scene of ‘Faust in his study’ places us in medias res. Faust has probed the sciences of his time to the bottom without achieving satisfaction of his longing for ‘eternization’ and for material wealth at the same time. After theology, not even medicine can pacify him, because it cannot master the supernatural nor bring the dead back to life. Echoing Satan’s first admission, he realizes that ‘yet art thou still Faustus, and a man’, takes his leave of medicine and ponders on law, and the Bible itself confronts him with the truth that what awaits us is death and the wages of sin. Only magic will make him rich and omnipotent. After the initial monologue, good and bad angels face each other as if on the stage 35

Rhodes is Roda in the Saxe-Altenburg duchy. There are many other wrongly named places; Marlowe contaminates Luther’s and Hamlet’s city with the duchy of Württenberg.

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of Faustus’ conscience. Evil spirits must first satisfy his covetousness and aspiration towards a lavish, gaudy world, but also allow him to fulfil his thirst for power and to become absolute lord of Germany. In short, Faust has put down the Bible and opened the book of black magic. Like all devils, Mephistopheles rushes in whenever a man is on the road to damnation, so as irrevocably to push him towards hell’s abyss. Here the play touches upon the theological problems of, on the one hand, irresolution in evil, which surprisingly also concerns Mephistopheles; on the other, of the eternity of pain and damnation, and the possibility of sins being pardoned. There is bitter irony in Faustus’ pompous speech to Mephistopheles, promising to teach him ‘manly fortitude’. The following scene subverts and thereby ironically redoubles the temptation: the ragged beggar decorously contests Wagner’s opinion that he would sell his soul to the devil for a leg of mutton. The poor man would not abjure God, for he would want to have it not raw but well roasted. So Wagner tries to enrol him, but in vain. To punish his resistance, Wagner evokes two devils; they enter and exit and at last this personage is won over to the cause of magic; he wishes to be transformed into a flea so as to wallow under women’s petticoats. An intermezzo where the clown jokes with Wagner precedes the scene where Faust, alone, perceives the first cracks in his assurance. He might go back, or forward; he decides to go forward. But the very fact of enjoining himself to ‘be resolute’ suggests that he is not. Faust in fact does not trust his own strength but Mephistopheles’; the latter wants the pact implying the soul’s release to be sworn in blood, but the blood freezes, a sinister omen. By now Faust believes he cannot escape, since a very stern punishing god would at any rate cast him down into hell. Yet at the same time this is a hallucination, for the writing ‘homo fuge’ appears and disappears. Mephistopheles states that hell has no confines, but exists under and in the sky, and that after Doomsday it will be whatever is not heaven: words that speak an immense bitterness. What follows is a discourse on the Ptolemaic cosmos that Faust wants learnedly to verify, an astrological argument leading to the query about the mastery of the world and its first principle, whether it be God or Satan. He is truly desirous to find salvation and humbles himself before Lucifer in person. 3. The opaque and fragmented central section of the play might have the function of demonstrating that one must pay a very high price

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for magical powers able to yield anything but superlative gratifications. Opening and epilogue offer two superb, luscious monologues, but the middle part is lengthy and nondescript, a space filled by a rascal’s jests and nasty tricks, or even by insipid squabbles, hardly or never connected to the Faustian plot, between characters casually arriving on the scene, yet still representative of the average poor man who can hardly scrape a living and tries all he can to find some consolation. Marlowe seems to forget Faust’s challenge,36 and the play flags. Mephistopheles had looked too ugly on his first appearance; coming back in the requested shape of an old Franciscan, he had unenthusiastically, indeed rather dryly, replied to Faust that his call had only been an incidental cause: Faust does not realize that he is a rather powerless magician. But Faust’s drama becomes bogged down because its frame of reference incorrigibly remains the traditional believer’s, and Lucifer has to come down and command him to erase God and Christ from his mind. Faust becomes indirectly associated to an overbearing Tamburlaine because, in an episode only present in the B text, he compels a rival pope, a ‘Saxon Bruno’ (a name alluding to Giordano Bruno without any historical plausibility), to bow, lie flat on earth and offer his back as a footrest. Faust and Mephistopheles disguised as cardinals actually send the papal aspirant to the stake; but it is a device to carry him off to Germany and set him free. At the Pope’s court Faust, invisible, creates havoc during the banquet, stealing all the dainties; and slaps the pope when he crosses himself for the third time. The friars sing a grotesque dirge mourning the ruined meal. After the doubtless polemical encounter with the spiritual power comes that with the secular power of Emperor Charles V, a famed astrologer. Faust accepts the challenge to resurrect Alexander the Great, that is, bring him back from eternity; his mistress is identified, almost as in Cymbeline, by a birthmark on her neck. As on other occasions, solemnity gives way to tragicomedy and farce, and the knight that had doubted Faust’s magical abilities is punished with a pair of horns. Faust’s encounter with the horse-dealer is a queer, mysterious forecast of Macbeth because now Faust is insomniac, yet another symptom of irresolution. If Christ pardoned the 36

Likewise Goethe ‘forgets’ in his own Faust (see MIT, vol. II, § 180.4).

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thief on the cross, the more surely will he pardon him. The antidote to repentance is Helen, the quintessence of beauty and sensuality which for ten years bewitched whole armies. In the final scene Faust beseechingly asks that the Judgement be postponed sine die. The fragmented, mimetic, meandering style of his speech imitates his too tardy élan. If salvation tout court can no longer be had, at least the pains of hell might be temporary. John Donne had often complained like Faust that animals are not responsible for their actions. Formally the chorus concluding the play, after regretting this great waste of talent, emits the sentence of the old moralities: let the wise meditate Faust’s hellish fall and simply wonder at the sinful adventures of the spirit. This voice, however, indirectly also implies that ‘forward wits’ can always be induced and tempted to overcome that limit. § 102. Marlowe VIII: ‘Hero and Leander’ The song in six quatrains of rhymed couplets, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,37 printed in 1599, the only single surviving lyric ascribed to Marlowe, is full of trust, euphoria and harmony. It is a homage to the pastoral genre; but small hints suggest a parody or a jocose variation on Marlowe’s basic dramatic core. Behind and under the sweet conventional surface and the erotic codes of the genre, there is a tissue of images of excess, hyperbole and saturation. The term ‘all’ occurs with a frequency well above average and betrays a Faustian aspiration: it is a rhetoric of persuasion expecting an almost infinite erotic satisfaction. From beginning to end there is not the least shade of doubt in the waking dream of this flawless idyll. The shepherdess, should she consent, will be rewarded with all the ‘pleasures’ – licit, or maybe even illicit – that nature, considered piecemeal in its varying aspects, can offer. The numerical and hyperbolic delirium continues with the figure of the ‘thousand’ fragrant posies, the ‘kirtle / Embroider’d all’ with myrtles and woven of the ‘finest’ wool, and the homely slippers whose buckles are made ‘of the purest gold’. In the last quatrain the shepherd promises an uninterrupted time of feast and pleasure, as the dances will go on without stopping ‘each May morning’. 37

There is some resemblance, if not real derivation and amplification, between this song and the episode of Mercury and the shepherdess in Hero and Leander.

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2. With the mythological poem Hero and Leander, thought with good reason to be Marlowe’s last work before his death, he deserted, perhaps only temporarily should he have lived on, the field of drama, and, more significantly, the representation of superhuman hubris. He chose a femalelike hero such as Edward II had already been, abandoning the poem, not surprisingly, just before the punitive catastrophe that Chapman felt obliged to narrate.38 This is also a work painstakingly chiselled, of pre-Morrisian ‘aesthetic poetry’ avant la lettre, whose rhymed couplets show at the same time a carefree Chaucerian humour, and bland embroidery rather than heroic power. This proclivity towards static lyricism is apparent from the opening, which sumptuously describes Hero’s garments, and the diaphanous, veiled sublime aspect of this oxymoronic ‘nun of Venus’. Leander in his turn, emasculated, given his long hair and snowy skin – Leander the naïf, Leander a ‘Theban Hercules’, but only ironically so – pleads his case convincingly, so that after all he too is tempting a superhuman enterprise, the same argument with which Donne had urged on his mistress, that sexual consummation is the ultimate aim of spiritual love: ‘Beauty alone is lost, too warily kept’, an apothegm which Hopkins may have had in mind, only to literally subvert it, in his ‘Echoes’. The first sestiad ends with a further parody of Faust’s temptation, the mythological digression of Mercury pursuing the young flesh of a Marvellian, ‘coy’ shepherdess, disposed to yield only in exchange for the gods’ nectar.39 Hero and Leander’s embrace, however, is presented in an aura of comic pantomime, with coquetries and suggestiveness barely dissimulated, the antithesis to a climate of dazed sensuality.40 Leander is nevertheless a ‘chaste fool’ that vaguely perceives the lack of a nuptial ‘rite’. Indeed, during the night the two lovers have only exchanged a promise, without enjoying physical love; and in the morning 38 § 111.3. 39 Mercury is wooed by the fates, or by the Parcae, and he takes advantage of this to plot a Promethean expulsion of Jupiter, temporarily imprisoned in hell and victim of Saturn and Ops’ usurpation; but the Parcae reinstate him, and Mercury, the symbol of knowledge, from then on was the husband of Poverty. 40 Praz, however, applied his proverbial algolagnic thermometer, and said that Hero is a femme fatale sadistically pretending to reject men, but really yearning to have them prostrate, and even bleeding – having been scourged, maybe – at her feet.

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unconditional passion has to face everyday life with its bathos. The motif of temptation is redoubled, for in the second sestiad a mocking and prurient Neptune falls in love, dazzled and rejected, with Leander swimming in the Hellespont. The author’s more and more frequently inserted or parenthetical comments, aiming to stress the hidden cunning of the weaker sex, and Hero’s lust masked as modesty, end up destroying all aura of Sehnsucht in the scene of the real embrace. § 103. Marston* I: The satires John Marston (1576–1634) seems to authorize the oblivion to which four succeeding centuries have sentenced him. He expressed the wish that the epitaph Oblivioni Sacrum be carved on his tomb; and in the dedication of his satires he admonished: ‘Hee that thinks worse of my rymes than my selfe, I scorn him, for he cannot, he that thinks better, is a foole’. As we shall see below, such attitudes are partly sincere, and partly rhetorical, therefore implying the opposite. But it is undeniable that Marston, an exceptionally talented dramatist as I shall argue, as a licentious and satirical poet is indifferent, slight and quite forgettable. As mentioned earlier, he competed with Joseph Hall, when both were very young, for the merit of reintroducing and re-establishing English satire in the last years of the sixteenth century; so, chronologically at least, he is an Elizabethan poet. Hall lived into the Caroline period, but after his early satires wrote principally as a theologian,

*

The Works of John Marston, ed. A. H. Bullen, 3 vols, London 1887; plays edited by H. H. Wood, 3 vols, Edinburgh 1934–1939 (eliciting in the same year a rather perplexed essay by T. S. Eliot, in ESE, 221–33), the poetry in The Poems of John Marston, ed. A. Davenport, Liverpool 1961. M. S. Allen, The Satire of John Marston, Columbus, OH 1920; A. Maugeri, ‘Antonio e Mellida’: studio critico, Messina 1951; G. Pellegrini, Il teatro di John Marston, Pisa 1952; A. J. Axelrad, Un malcontent Élizabéthain: John Marston, Paris 1955; A. F. Caputi, John Marston, Satirist, Ithaca, NY 1961; B. Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton, London 1968; P. J. Finkenpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting, Cambridge, MA 1969; R. A. Foakes, ‘John Marston’, in Marston and Tourneur, Harlow 1978, 7–26; G. L. Geckle, John Marston’s Drama: Themes, Images, Sources, Rutherford, NJ 1980; The Drama of John Marston: Critical Re-Visions, ed. T. F. Wharton, Cambridge 2000.

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thinker, preacher, aphorist and polemist, although this second phase did not take up all his time. Marston, instead, after 1600 turned decidedly to the theatre.1 Marston the satirist is, with Hall, the first man of letters to radically question the establishment. Dissatisfaction with it had been emerging since the time of Chaucer and Langland, but they were concerned with moral values; Spenser, too, had felt doubtful as to the ethical worth of the court as a microcosm of national life. But those were parenthetic objections, whims, recurrent doubts soon overcome and conquered. With Marston, on the contrary, we have a Daedalean if not Icarian youngster firing off a hail of accusations aimed at bringing down the whole building. This is also a mark of megalomania, and as in all such cases there is always, underneath, a slight malaise, a large or small wound or ulceration, a sense of not being rightly valued, or slighted, and clamouring for compensation. Marston’s temper can be summarily defined as basically schizoid, with a bent for excessive, spasmodic2 romanticism. A writer of this kind usually crams his style with streams of words that engross the attention to distract it from their meaning, and disregarding their object. For Marston the satirist, literature is invective and slander, and a means to compete, overcome and conquer any rivals threatening his primacy. Up to 1600 he strives to make a name for himself as a satirical-licentious poet and clashes with Hall; his second enemy is Jonson, who called him a ‘poetaster’. These feuds are a foretaste of the heated, often fiery temperature of the literary scene at the end of the sixteenth century. With 1599 and his conversion to drama, a double mode of fruition of the dramatic text begins. In one aspect every Elizabethan and Jacobean text is a pre-text, since poets and playwrights harshly jeer and taunt each other in their works, resulting in a rich parody

1

2

His father, a rich Coventry-born landowner, had become a professor at the London college of lawyers, the Middle Temple, and his mother, née Guarsi, was the daughter of an Italian physician. Marston took his degree at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1594, but did not follow his father in the lawyer’s profession, although he had rooms at the Inns of Court until 1606. For the nineteenth-century poets adopting this name, see Volume 4, §§ 224–8. Concerning a hypothetical, traumatic sexual initiation of young Marston and his disgust of sex, see Davenport 1961, 22–3, and the critics quoted there.

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implying both the mnemonic acquaintance of each other’s works and the fact that the knowledgeable audience could grasp and appreciate this network of quotations. Audience and readers of later centuries, on the other hand, are limited to the critique of the play as such. 2. In 1598 Marston published The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image, with the appendix of ‘certain satires’. The mythological tale is modelled on Ovid and adopts the metre of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, so it was surely created as an attempt at emulation. In the same years he published eleven satires formally signed W. Kinsayder,3 entitled The Scourge of Villanie. The copies of both works were publicly burned, although Marston asserted in the satires that in the licentious poem on Pygmalion, like Dante with the damned in hell, he had meant to parody the erotic poetry of his time. The poem dwells on the anatomy of the ivory statue, and especially on its pudenda, and on the naïve but thrilling embraces of the couple. Until today it has been the fashion to slate it mainly because of its contradictory motivations, and indeed for the artificial, unconvincing revelation of a didactic aim, as well as for its metrical shortcomings. But it is in fact one of the smoothest, most concise and disciplined of Marston’s works, while remaining after all a very light and flimsy little work. The satires coming with it are a series of tiny portraits of types with Latin names, caught in a fleeting, airy instant of action, or an idiosyncrasy of dress or gesture. It is, as in Hall, an unhelpful pointillisme that makes one wish for a more continuous and definite image; it is ruined, at any rate, by obscure private allusions, and by classical and mythological reminiscences. It was immediately inferred that Marston was systematically aiming at Hall,4 whose techniques – a sophisticated taste for circumlocutions and rare words – he indeed employs. The fifth satire lapses into a mosaic or phantasmagoria

3

4

The term might signify, according to Bullen 1887, vol. I, xx n. 1, ‘the cutter of dogs’ tails’, an open reference to Joseph Hall. Still, Marston might have connoted even himself as a bull-dog. The name Kinsayder, applied to an enemy of Marston himself, occurs also in Marston’s play What You Will (ibid., xlvii). By then nicknames, like Lollio, had become accepted and proverbial from Davies’ and Davies of Hereford’s time. Yet the targets have increased: the perjurer, the papist, the lustful man.

§ 104. Marston II: His theatrical career and his early retirement

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of mythological reminiscences, nevertheless told with impressive flashes. The Scourge of Villanie is divided into three books, and comprises eleven satires, not different from the first except for an overgrown egocentrism and a jealous sense of the author’s worth. At the beginning of each satire Marston launches torrents of words against the impiety and degeneracy of a world that he must attack with frantic anger; but hardly ever does he go beyond these preliminaries, and when he does he sinks into sheer verbal delirium. He slightly improves on the way, when his anecdotes are in better focus, producing a few sparks of sour, unlikely farce. His main obsession is always ‘pollution’, that is, the sin of lust and the reduced hegemony of reason.5 But on the whole, at this stage he is fiercely elaborating a personal style made of exclamations and delirious assertions: and these satires already border on the dramatic monologue, or more properly on the soliloquy of the melancholy, radically disgusted character, in other words the ‘malcontent’ of his later drama. The in medias res, directionless opening, typical of each satire, brings Browning to mind. Marston shows his originality in a harsh and devious diction, hard to understand, but full of vigour, creativity and flavour; also through a rich fabric of borrowings and echoes that recall some plays which Shakespeare was at that time conceiving; and a few of Marston’s tirades end partly on the lips of Thersites, Iago, King Lear. § 104. Marston II: His theatrical career and his early retirement These satires were sufficient to impress contemporaries like Meres and John Weever. Marston then passed to the theatrical arena, perhaps also to avoid further trouble with the censors. Hired by the impresario Henslowe, he made his debut on the stage in 1599. From then until 1608, in less than a decade, he produced in quick succession around ten plays – some in

5

‘Pollution must be purged’, says Pietro Sforza (II.1.70 of the second part of Antonio and Mellida). Around 1595 Marston belonged to a movement of young intellectuals moved by the impulse to rejuvenate literature, and lovers of novelty as an end in itself. At the same time they had imbibed the ideas of Seneca, Epictetus and the neo-Stoics, along with Montaigne (Caputi 1961, 58–67). Concerning the drama, they believed in synteresis, the divine spark ever present in man, as an antidote to ‘pollution’.

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collaboration –6 earning for himself the title of Jacobean playwright tout court, well above that of Elizabethan satirical poet. T. S. Eliot wondered whether Marston was a poet who took to satire because of external causes, and against his will. He observed that one might think this change of genre suspect, and yet, on reading, he found even more poetry in the drama than in the satires. Still, in the end he maintained that the dramatic medium antagonized Marston. His theatrical ability cannot however be questioned. He rivals Shakespeare in a pre-Joycean capacity to invent and coin words,7 and use them even in different languages. His theatre is experimental: he invents new sub-genres like the city comedy, and practises a wide range of accepted genres (excepting only the chronicle play), reinterpreting and transforming their mechanisms. He has received scant acknowledgement for this; indeed, everybody has believed the address to the reader of the satires and taken him at his word. And yet Jonson feared him, understood that he was a serious rival (the harmless are not mocked) and became his friend, ready at the end to negotiate and collaborate. All other contemporary evidence is flattering. When the theatres were reopened in 1660 some of Marston’s plays were revived and rearranged. However, he was long an object of disfavour, admired only by Lamb, Hazlitt and Swinburne, so that his opera omnia did not find an editor until the end of the nineteenth century. 2. Modern criticism, too, has expressed mostly negative, hasty judgements, or limited itself to questions of philology, of editions, of sources, of borrowings to and from Shakespeare in an effort to decide which came first, and to clarify corrupt passages, identify references to contemporary events, and explain frequent nonce words and phrases. This took place in a climate of previous mutual agreement to deplore Marston’s style, deemed archaic, turgid and flamboyant, grandiloquent and exaggerated, completely lacking in the Drydenian decorum which was destined to ostracize many eccentric authors, up to the 1930s. Hence, Marston was stubbornly kept outside the 6 7

Histriomastix and Jack Drum’s Entertainment, performed in 1599, are not entirely by Marston’s hand. This is confirmed by a statistical study quoted in Davenport 1961, 27 n. 3. The same page and the one following contain useful observations on the linguistic consanguinity between Marston and Shakespeare.

§ 104. Marston II: His theatrical career and his early retirement

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cohort of the greatest Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. The critical ‘new wave’, in the 1960s and 1970s, restored him to his place in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Emphasis was laid on the fact that his plays were performed by the Children of St Paul’s, and that his public felt the same alienation that Marston for his part sought to stress and sharpen. Indeed he pursued a constant, subtle parody of theatricality itself; his plays insisted and reflected on their own theatrical nature, highlighting it to the point of ridicule. His audience consisted of the refined gentlemen of the private houses, not the naïve spectators of the public theatres. The sobriquet he was given by modern critics was that of a burlesque playwright,8 of a mocker, a scoffer and also a forerunner of the theatre of cruelty and of the absurd. Marston does indeed strangely persist in breaking and shattering the mimetic continuity of his dialogues with strident phrases and comic pantomimes; his tragedies border on farce and his stage directions verge on incongruity. Few other Jacobean authors are so intent on constantly warning the spectators that the characters on the stage are actors reciting their parts. On the other hand, this is something that could be said when metatheatre had become a household word: but to reduce Marston to metatheatre is misleading. He remains a satirical dramatist bent on communicating a criticism of life. He believed in the educational efficacy of his theatre, and spoke to his countrymen directly or from behind the veil of the Italian exotic. The author who ‘devoted himself to oblivion’ was also the one most conscious of his drama’s addressees. Unlike Shakespeare, Marston begins all his plays with dedications to the public that present, clarify and display his intentions. He did not leave his plays to their destiny, but personally took care of the way they were performed. A similar disposition was also clear to Jonson. Marston, perhaps in 1605, had married the daughter of a court chaplain, and Jonson thrust one of his jibes at him, saying his father-in-law wrote Marston’s plays, and Marston his father-in-law’s sermons. The phrase may imply that, after all, he was consciously a moralist, even if, or maybe 8

This is the idea of Caputi 1961, Foakes 1978 and SES (see for instance 214–15). The first two are vigorously rebutted by Geckle 1980, 25–7, with whom I agree. Shortly after, the same critic (28) defines Marston, and again we are with him, ‘first of all a moralist, and secondly an experimenter’.

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just because, his satires and plays were scurrilous and foul-mouthed. I for my part think that the key to understanding Marston is his sudden disappearance from the stage, an act of near-madness carefully hidden in his very dramas, but one that in the end does emerge if we read them carefully. There is no doubt that he was a dualist: he conceived of life as a clash of extremes never meeting, or meeting just for a moment, converging only to diverge again. He had a view of human psychology as rather precariously balanced: willpower wavers and man is weak, and is chaste or passionate, more often irremovably chaste until he yields to passion. The adjective ‘insatiable’ fits more than half the protagonists of the plays of Marston, one of the early seventeenth-century dramatists most obsessed by the common theme of irrepressible lust. Going back to the above query, the seemingly unanswerable question is: why did Marston leave the stage? It was a farewell shrouded in total darkness. As far as I know, no one has psychoanalysed Marston, or reconstructed the aetiology of his abandonment. Not only is it inexplicable that no kind of document of his survived after 1608 (no letter, prose or philosophical discourse, by this one-time professor at Oxford), but even more so the fact that the frenetic creative activity of the first decade of the century should be followed, without any sign of repentance, by twentyfive years of abstinence.9 Marston must have left the theatre and the stage in the way a smoker, having smoked his last cigarette, throws the packet into the bin. My hypothesis is that Marston could no longer hope for any real success of dramatic satire to reform man, society and history, so his was a gesture of resignation and defeat. This idea is supported by the fact that in his drama there never appears a satire of religion, especially of false religion. In his plays there are no priests, dignitaries, prelates or cardinals in leading roles. But it is significant that the sudden decision of fleeing to a cloister is attributed to several of his characters, such as the deliverers from Mendoza’s tyranny, above all the Earl of Cyprus. After a disappointment

9

A few critics, with scant support, have ascribed Marston’s retirement, after he had sold his shares in the Blackfriars’ Company, to a lost drama the king had found offensive. In 1609 he devoted himself to the study of philosophy, and became an Oxford professor in the subject, afterwards becoming an Anglican vicar. He was given a parish in Hampshire and he died in London.

§ 105. Marston III: Plays of disguise and revenge

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or a temporary victory, they choose a lonely life of meditation and prayer, and leave the world behind. § 105. Marston III: Plays of disguise and revenge Though this is not the prevailing opinion, Marston’s first three plays reveal the uncertainty and clumsiness of a beginner, and in keeping with a natural crescendo remain inferior to the following ones. In the diptych formed by Antonio and Mellida (1599–1600) and, in 1601, Antonio’s Revenge, Marston was choosing the readiest solution at hand, that of plays with an Italian setting, or more exactly the sketchy caricature of an imaginary court, known merely by hearsay,10 but which had an enormous impact on English theatre-goers. At the centre of such courts were ferocious sanguinary tyrants, cynical and fearless, impassive before the most heinous deeds. Necessary ingredients were therefore the tyrannical usurper and the righteous sovereign with a revenging son. The semantics of names is no less transparent, verging on the burlesque: a protagonist is called Sforza (from ‘sforzare’, to force or to rape), and his servant Strotzo (from ‘strozzare’, to throttle); one of his courtiers Matzagente (from ‘ammazzare’, to kill). The current aesthetics demanded that such a plot have a counterpoise: mysteriously, the tyrant’s daughter is a pure flower blooming in the midst of corruption, in love with the no less righteous son of the defeated sovereign. By the same norms, this tragic structure is counterpointed by accessory scenes with comic types taken from the commedia dell’arte, constantly blurting out jokes, puns, or simply nonsensical phrases. The intermezzos are already the typically Elizabethan ones, skirmishes of the fop dressed with gorgeous extravagance, the exquisite fencing and ripostes of Mellida’s cousin, or the nurse telling about her four husbands. In these first of Marston’s plays prose alternates with verse, as comedy or low characters alternate on the stage with noble people. Feasts, banquets and rituals demand songs, and 10

Marston may have heard at home, from his mother, a few Italian words; at any rate literary Italian was familiar to him: whole passages of Italian verse occur in the first three plays for mimetic purposes. He also often uses the Italian anglicized interjection ‘Catso!’ (appearing in the correct form in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta; on the ‘Gadso’ and ‘Godso’ variants see PMI, 377–8). Marston, however, had never travelled to Italy.

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Marston says that they are sung but does not give their texts: having derided songsters in his satires he could not now appear as an author of songs. In the development of the play, which in these first two cases is instantaneous, and observes a perfect unity of time, dialogues that make the action go forward alternate with sterile gossipy exchanges, and, periodically, with self-analytical and self-diagnostic monologues. Such methods can nevertheless be related to the deepest core of Marston’s Weltanschauung. Human hubris splits into two hypostases, with conscience inexorably rising to condemn it. 2. Accused – and self-accused, in his satires – of failing to contextualize, Marston accepts a procedural rule of contemporary drama: he opens the first of the Antonio plays with an introduction where the actors, so to speak, dress as their characters, expounding in short speeches what has gone on before. The first scene of the actual play is a parade of Elizabethan clichés. The shipwrecked Antonio, disguised as an Amazon, as in Sidney, is in Venice while his father Andrugio, the Duke of Genoa, just defeated in a sea battle against Piero, the Doge, is thought to be dead. It certainly seems unlikely that Antonio should be in love with Mellida, the daughter of the doge who has defeated him, nor is there any hint of how their love may have blossomed; and at this point it is not clear why Piero should so fiercely hate Andrugio as to want to have his head cut off. But in fact this is a master move, by Marston the ante litteram Ibsen-like playwright. Piero loved the woman who married Andrugio, but this will be revealed only in the second play, after the illusory happy end of this first one. The echo of Sidney becomes more evident when the two cousins, Mellida and Rossalina, meeting the false Amazon, want to hear her story, like Basilius’ daughters in Sidney; and the Amazon tells them of the furious storm in which Antonio is supposed to have lost his life. From now on the two plays by Marston look like canvases that Shakespeare might meticulously have perused, and then freely recreated and turned into masterpieces. The first denouement happens when father and son wander across a moor, the old father mouthing curses and invectives like Lear on the heath (as Lamb rightly observed). Once Antonio is inside the court, the two lovers who have agreed to flee must meet at ‘the Jew’s’ and then set sail for England (Antonio disguised as a mariner and Mellida as a page). Needless to say, both plays take place entirely in Venice. Piero Sforza, marked by a stutter

§ 105. Marston III: Plays of disguise and revenge

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and sudden sharp commands, with whole lines made up of imperatives, orders that the two fugitives be caught. But in Act IV, as in King Lear, Antonio’s father, thought to be dead, enters the scene on the Venetian shore and utters a noble ethical testament on the right concept of kingliness. Once Sforza has stopped the fugitives and all seems lost, Andrugio puts on his armour and stoically presents himself to Sforza who wanted to kill him; but this example of Roman and Senecan stoicism convinces him to grant him a pardon. Soon after, a funeral procession parades on the stage following Antonio’s coffin, but the dead man wakes up, bringing about the happy ending. 3. If Hamlet was staged in 1601, Shakespeare found not only in Kyd, as we have seen, but also in the second part of Antonio and Mellida, promptings that were, to say the least, alluring, and yet, as always with him, powerfully symbiotic. Of the many previous plays containing anticipations of Hamlet, this one by Marston, the most often imitated, shows astonishing and continuous similarities. From its very opening Marston’s second play hinges on the flashback: Piero – in a sudden development, for the new action starts without a break from the dawn of the next day, a few hours after the conclusion of the first play – tells his trusted henchman that he has only feigned to forgive Andrugio, for he wants to reclaim Maria, whom he loved and lost when she became Andrugio’s wife. Fired with jealousy and desire, Piero has poisoned Andrugio, who now is dead, although he alone, in the ducal palace, knows this. In another room Antonio lies in a fitful sleep, ominous of dark hours to follow. There is a flaw in dramatic verisimilitude when at sunrise Maria, Andrugio’s wife and Antonio’s mother, arrives unexpectedly from Genoa to meet her husband. So Piero is a Shakespearean Claudius that desired and coveted Maria, and now with difficulty obtains her consent and marries her, like Claudius with Gertrude. Antonio is the son who witnesses the infidelity of his mother, too quickly oblivious of his father; the only difference being that the two suitors are not brothers. But Piero has poured poisoned drops into a cup to eliminate his rival. He expounds to Strotzo the perverted logic that has led him to these nefarious deeds. In this first phase, the revenge play is that of Piero. Antonio’s dream is full of echoes of Hamlet too. But meanwhile a trial is suddenly put on to ascertain and punish Mellida’s impurity. Piero hypocritically condemns the degenerate world, and then

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immediately tells his listeners that Andrugio died of joy. Like Hamlet, Antonio is incredulous. In Marston’s play too, Piero’s hubris has political undertones, for he is bent on pursuing a mad dream of power: having defeated Genoa he will marry his daughter to a Florentine nobleman, and become chief in a league of a few great Italian signorias. Of course in his speech he quotes Machiavelli. Like Hamlet, Antonio feels he must act, and his monologue reviews and sums up his situation; in the meantime he hears the real or imaginary voices of the victims of Piero, who in his folly has killed his father and his best friend. Antonio and Mellida’s farewell at the bars of her prison is a poignant scene. No less reminiscent of Hamlet is the tense dialogue between mother and son, when she calls him mad (‘My father’s trunk scarce cold’). Piero, however, is Claudius plus Iago because, when preparing the trial, he says he will get rid of Strotzo once the latter has testified in court. In Act III a pantomime shows that Maria is going to yield to Piero; but the principal scene takes place within the walls of St Mark’s basilica, with a singularly evocative effect. Antonio, near his father’s tomb, hears his ghost renew the appeal for revenge. Antonio does indeed take out his dagger, but then stops. In the meantime he murders Piero’s little son after cuddling him. In the night Andrugio’s ghost also appears to Maria as she is going to sleep, and Antonio goes to her with bloodied hands. The father’s ghost enjoins him to organize a collective revenge, which should also appear as a revolt against the tyrannical regime in the whole of Veneto. Antonio, like Hamlet, feigns madness (he comes onstage with a nutshell in his hand and a cup of soap-bubbles to blow), for thus disguised he will not arouse Piero’s suspicion. At the trial he talks nonsense. As a coup de théâtre, not only is the informer Strotzo actually strangled, but news arrives that Antonio has suddenly thrown himself from a tower. Piero seems to have achieved full success, Mellida is dead, too, and the wedding feast is about to begin. The rebellion of the nobles, led by Antonio, re-establishes order, like Fortinbras’ arrival at the end of Hamlet. The banquet, however, is that of Thyestes, because Piero is offered, on a dish, the dismembered body of his little son. For some prophetic reason that I have tried to suggest above, the commando of rebels does not establish a republican democratic regime, but announce their retirement to religious life.

§ 106. Marston IV: ‘The Malcontent’

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§ 106. Marston IV: ‘The Malcontent’ Jonson, accused by Marston of debauchery, satirized him as Clove in Everyman, Crispinus in Poetaster and Hedon in Cynthia’s Revels, saying that Marston was a plagiarist, with a bizarre style marred by ugly neologisms. For his part Marston was able to pay him in kind through several of his dramatic characters. The two subsequently made peace. Marston dedicated The Malcontent (1604) to Jonson, and wrote a preface to Sejanus in 1605. The theme of The Malcontent is immoderate lust, not to be tamed or disciplined by reason, creating the widespread hallucination of a world rife with sexual betrayals and faithlessness; it is associated with the hubris of power, neutralized through the allegory of an honest governor who is however weak and passive enough to allow his role to be usurped. But he finally expels the usurper. However, the villain is not, as we would expect, Pietro, the Duke of Genoa, for he allies himself with Altofronto, disguised at court as Malevole, against the cynical and wilful Mendoza, who uses his affair with the duke’s wife as a ladder to power until he is deposed. This tense revenge play is offset by almost irrelevant scenes of everyday life, which are, however, pleasant as interludes. The keys are the serious and funny names, like Malevole and Altofronto; Bilioso and other names are taken from the commedia dell’arte. The scene is Genoa, a pendant to Antonio and Mellida (there is not much Genoa in contemporary drama). 2. T. S. Eliot, who of all Marston’s plays preferred Sophonisba, allowed The Malcontent to be his masterpiece, but after all could not find any specific merit in it, save the absence of the defects of other plays by Marston. The plot is a plodding and complex machine, and perhaps the best scenes are the occasional ones, full of jests, squabbling or mere nonsense, nearly always crammed with likely sexual double entendres and allusions to infidelity and adultery; or others, with a charming Shakespearean flavour of grotesque and pathetic comedy – as when Pietro, oppressed by jealousy, goes deer hunting, and is entertained by a witty page before he sleeps. Puns are omnipresent. The plan is based on disguises and a network of asides. These are the flowering ground of Altofronto’s cynical and pessimistic comments on a truly Elizabethan world out of joint, where no one is faithful to anything anymore, and history is the history of great cuckolds.

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Malevole, that is Altofronto, enters like an embittered Rigoletto with full licence to utter harsh jests: he goes on talking ceaselessly, sometimes blurting out prurient speeches. Yet he is a fool insulted, marginalized, rejected and demonized. He looks like a Mephistopheles and therefore imitates Iago: he tells the duke that his wife cuckolds him, and vividly depicts the way in which, while in her husband’s arms, at the climactic moment she thinks of her lover. At court Malevole can confide only in his friend Celso, who knows of his disguise. But Mendoza in his turn behaves like Iago with Pietro, promising he will show him his wife in bed with her real lover. As to the political background, Duchess Aurelia is a Medici Florentine, so the two lovers plan to get rid of Pietro and take his place. Mendoza is a Huguenot, or perhaps is so called in jest. How Altofronto lost his power is left vague; perhaps because the people rebelled under the lead of the Genoese nobles; but now Duke Pietro is too weak and the Florentines are no longer going to support him. Altofronto’s plan to recover his duchy should imply his readiness to kill Pietro, as Mendoza asks him to; and also to let Mendoza get married to Maria, Malevole’s own wife, for then the Florentines will desert Aurelia. But in the forest Altofronto, instead of killing the sleeping duke, wakes him up and tells him of Mendoza’s plan; and even becomes his ally against the greater evil, Mendoza. He disguises Pietro as a hermit and tells Mendoza that the dishonoured duke threw himself from a cliff into the sea, and the hermit himself narrates the story at court with Malevole. Before the end Mendoza vainly tries to get rid of the hermit, that is, the disguised Pietro, and Altofronto, by poison. The happy end arrives when the villain’s triumph seems to be at hand. Duchess Aurelia, expelled, comes back penitent; Pietro too repents, and decides to support Altofronto before knowing that he is face to face with him (at which point Altofronto uncovers himself ); and Maria, Altofronto’s wife, does not yield to the temptations of power and the flesh. As in Antonio and Mellida a small group of upright, honest or reformed persons cooperate to re-establish justice. The splendid comment of the resigned procuress, shortly before the end, seems to express the prevailing and conquering philosophy of a world adrift, of which everyone should take advantage to reap the highest profit; but for the moment, the end gives it the lie.

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3. Parasitaster, or The Fawn (1606), another play with an Italian setting,11 is however a rather surreal and sour farce. It is pervaded by morbid, obsessive misogyny, which extends to several incidental scenes taking up more room than the main plot: the plan of the widowed Duke of Ferrara to marry his reluctant son to the daughter of the Duke of Urbino. The attention is centred, successively, on court gossip relating to real or imaginary adulteries, longings, meetings and amours of courtesans; the play, in short, deals with the incurable rutting instinct, an absolute menace to human and social integrity. Its protagonist is therefore the court itself, teeming with excited fops and prurient courtesans, one of them wearing the emblematic name Puttotta, while a cuckold is called Zuccone. At the same time Marston experiments with the Boccaccian motif of cunning and wit having the upper hand on foolishness and gullibility. Duke Hercules’ son Tiberio is the somewhat awkward and obtuse young man who is slow to understand the device used by shrewd Dulcimel of Urbino to make him fall in love with her and seduce her. If the cunning Ferrarese duke sends his son to Urbino purportedly to ask her to marry his father, sure that the two young people will fall in love, Dulcimel too has her device ready, and her own father becomes the tool to achieve her aim. He suggests to the young man, under the form of a veto, to climb up a plane-tree whose branches reach the girl’s window. There, a priest is ready to celebrate the nuptials of the couple before they make love. The Duke of Ferrara ipso facto reminds us of Browning’s duke, also because Tiberio, the reluctant 11

Last but one of this type, recalling Shakespeare’s comedies of ‘errors’ and his ‘linguistic banquets’ (like the grammar lesson in scene 3 of Act II), is What You Will (1607). It begins with the supposed shipwreck of a merchant of Venice, Albano, who enters the scene just after a man looking very like him, sent by Albano’s brothers to prevent the wedding of the presumed widow with a French knight, has been unmasked. Complimented for his perfect disguise the unknowing victim of shipwreck is astonished. The climax is a feast during which the true merchant and his likeness appear to the widow and at last reveal their identity. The widow recognizes her husband and everything ends well, thanks to the usual device of the birthmark on the skin. It is a rather incoherent and insipid play, full of prolonged meaningless jests and stock characters, such as the wooer talking in rhymed sonnets, and the magniloquent and pompous Lampatho Doria.

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son, arriving at Urbino shows the court, like a middleman, a portrait of his father. But here the aspects looking forward to later writers end, and there are others that look backward in a play that is much more intertextual than the average. Marston may have cited or paraphrased in particular Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale with his story of January and May, for he judges unnatural a marriage between Hercules and Dulcimel, based on political reasons. In this case, however, Hercules is an exception among Marston’s characters, being immune from lust, and also the opposite of Browning’s duke as a promoter of nature’s healthy forces. In itself the device of the plane-tree recalls Chaucer literally. In various scenes of the play there are comments on the surreal brainwave of the whole court departing aboard a ‘ship of fools’. § 107. Marston V: The two city comedies A comic-satirical play, which gently satirizes certain contemporary themes, Eastward Ho (1605),12 where Marston collaborated with Chapman and Jonson, is for that very reason largely in prose. Verse now seems merely an obligatory homage to convention, out of tune with the harsh, brutal, jargon-like tone of dialogues that sound as if taken straight from the street. Some connecting parts remain of course too long and diffuse. However, they unite with the freshest, wittiest, most unheard-of scenic inventions, which make Marston’s theatre a pioneering one, with few rivals apart from Shakespeare and Jonson in the contemporary panorama. Eastward Ho provides an alternative that undermines epic and historical drama, and an early example of a realistic bourgeois play. It also appears to be the most symmetrical he ever wrote, with the healthy but brusque jeweller and his two daughters, who with the shop assistants make up two couples polarized in different ways, simplicity versus pretentiousness or husbandry versus wastefulness. There is also a clever use of a variety of names, alluding to a range of precious materials like silver, gold and mercury, as in a parody of medieval poems. It is the script and stage directions that offer the greatest anticipations and violations of received models. The first scene opens 12

In a passage of Act III there is a criticism of the privileges James I granted his Scottish countrymen, who prospered in the Americas. Because of this simple allusion Marston was accused and imprisoned together with his co-authors.

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in medias res, in the jeweller’s shop during the early morning, and the dialogue defines with naturalness the characters, their grotesque idiosyncrasies and conflicts, as well as the antecedents.13 It is the first example of a truly Dickensian atmosphere. The play somehow makes one think of a theatrical version of a story by that much later novelist, or of a fantastic tale by Stevenson. The underlying didacticism – humbugs and pretenders are finally uncrowned and punished, and morally reformed – is the same that we regularly find in Dickens. But what stand out are just the structural, constructive analogies. Places, to begin with. Marston sets his play at first in the jeweller’s shop; the active honest businessman, as well as the small handicraft enterprise, will be classic elements in Dickens; no less than the couples of humble or vain sisters, contented with little or dreaming of false nobility. The good jeweller preludes to Dickens’s axiom that there is a natural and an artificial kind of gentleman.14 The play’s principal change of scene is from the jeweller’s shop to the inn in the Thames slum, where a bunch of shady characters, a usurer and a lawyer among them, plan an expedition to Virginia, dreaming they will soon get rich there.15 In this case, too, the play foreshadows an essentially Dickensian theme.16 Finally, the play ends in another typical place, the prison, where, once again with a similarly surreal Dickensian touch, the villains’ accusers and judges are 13 14

15 16

Also like Dickens, Marston uses identifying idioms (like that of Captain Cuttle): three of them resound continually, that of the title, Touchstone’s ‘work upon that now’, and ‘look to the accounts’. Scene 2 of Act I can be seen as looking forward to Dickens’s satire of self-importance, when Gertrude enters the scene mouthing a lot of obsolete, sophisticated words, for what can be termed a very impatient fitting with the tailor for a fashionable dress. To leave abstractions and stay with Dickens, Mildred is a kind of Amy Dorrit while her sister can be Fanny’s ancestor; even jeweller Touchstone is a Dorrit after his metamorphosis. Mildred shares a small defect with exemplary Dickensian characters, since she utters too many moral sermons. The married couple Mildred and Golding (the honest shop-assistant) are much too idealized and sober. Petronil Flash has fascinated Gertrude, the jeweller’s daughter, has got her to marry him and made her sell an estate to finance the expedition to Virginia, and boasts that he owns a non-existing castle. The departure is delayed by news about a ‘porpisce’, that is a figure-head seen close to Thames Bridge, its name mispronounced for ‘porpoise’.

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the very victims they derided before, and here the group of malefactors, inexorably hunted down by human and divine justice, cannot but confess themselves repentant and contrite, promising, at least hypocritically and temporarily, to mend their ways. These few lines show that Eastward Ho is a narrative play, with many events succeeding one another, plus a few more that, being non-dialogical, must necessarily be narrated on the stage. Structurally the highlight is the beginning of Act IV, when, all of a sudden, a butcher’s boy, quite external to the facts, portrays for the spectators the scene of the bold explorers in their boats: having all left the inn quite drunk, they end up in the Thames and are fished out with difficulty, not only wet through, but made to look ridiculous. Of course there is no expedition to America. Also in a Dickensian key are the pantomimes of the sister, Gertrude, climbing like a lady, all dressed up, into the aristocratic carriage, among the overheard comments of the women in the street.17 2. The Dutch Courtesan (1605) is on the same wavelength. Freevill, leaving his kept woman Franceschina to make a respectable marriage with Beatrice, introduces her to his friend Malheureux, who to obtain her love must bring her proof, in the form of an engagement ring, that he has killed her previous lover. The new suitor of course refuses, and agrees with the friend he should kill to plot a stratagem. But the respective parents of the two men believe he is guilty, trap him and have him arrested; his sentence is reprieved and the law indicts the courtesan. The plot is in itself weak and artificial, based only on the courtesan’s spite, bent on revenge on the lover who left her, and repaid with the two friends’ deception. The close is hasty, as if to stress how easy it is to pass from accusing to being condemned. Marston’s moral premise is the difference between courtesan and wife, mercenary love and nuptial, monogamous love. A surviving sense of honour makes it possible to reject blackmail and conquer danger. As in his previous dramas, Marston lets the plot reach the point when everything seems lost, to reaffirm in extremis the victory of justice and the success of reasonableness over immoderate passion. The allegory is also evinced from

17

Of great theatrical impact is also the moment when unyielding ‘lady’ Gertrude wants to be a lady even after discovering that she has been ruined and duped, and repeats the rite of climbing into the carriage.

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the characters’ names: ‘courtesan’ is the synonym of prostitute; and Freevill is not only, probably, the name the Dutch woman mispronounces, but also means the ‘free will’ of whoever refuses to be mastered by instincts. Malheureux is unlucky because merely human, that is to say, led and overcome by passion, even more so as, honest and upright when he enters the scene, he is immediately trapped into the meshes of sensuality. Malheureux is blinded while Freevill, a tolerant and pragmatic philosopher knowing human frailty, gaily recovers respectability. The strongest points of the comedy are its setting in a London brothel, where the figures of the conventional kindly procuress, and above all the silhouette of the protagonist, are neatly outlined: the latter strikes us as pathetic, a little savage, though also subtly dreamy and naïve, helpless, alienated, misunderstood, and in the end tragically deceived. Marston’s realism is here first of all linguistic: throughout the play Franceschina speaks in an Anglo-Dutch which is quite plausible and believable, and Marston proves to be a truly polyglot playwright. Franceschina’s way of speaking is one of the best things in this pièce. The plot is indeed extremely modern, like a sour-sweet Restoration comedy, or like something much later, suggesting French naturalism in the manner of Zola or Maupassant, if not even porno-theatre or cinema; and it is significant that prose far prevails over verse. Act III is already a bourgeois comedy of whims, with Beatrice’s sister, the husband-hating shrew, and the intolerably wheedling fops. § 108. Marston VI: ‘Sophonisba’ The historical play The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606), without any subplot, is based on Livy, already a source for a few minor Italian dramatists and lately for Trissino. Marston himself provides a new start for a European cult of that figure, who will be used for example by Corneille, and in England after the reopening of the theatres. In a prefatory note Marston states he does not act as a historian but as a re-creator, using Livy’s chapter as the basis for a plot dealing with arduous dilemmatic choices and examples of impossible conflicts for a human being to reconcile. This play opens his last dialectical diptych, for to Sophonisba’s incorporeal self-sacrificing purity he is going to oppose the devilish lust of the ‘countess’ in the succeeding play, passing from one extreme to another. In this case Massinissa and Syphax are rivals for the love of the same woman, and the

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play opens with Massinissa foretasting nuptial joys, while the Romans are already in the gulf of Carthage, and are allied to Syphax, who has deserted in revenge against the rival preferred to him. Unexpected and unaccountable optimism led Marston, the inventor of so many plots without any gleam of redemption, to present the real historical example of an upright warrior, and above all, considering the misogyny of the Dutch Courtesan, of a spiritual woman. Massinissa willingly gives up his wedding night, and almost on the verge of lovemaking he sees messengers calling him to battle. For Sophonisba, too, state reason and the defence of her country come before love. In fact Marston had not ceased to consider the instability and riskiness of human honesty and temperance. The Senate decides first of all that in order to win they must regain Syphax and his army, and the means to achieve this is Sophonisba, who led him to desert: ‘Profit and honesty are not one in the state’. It is the Machiavellian subversion of the morally unquestionable motif of Massinissa and Sophonisba’s action. But Massinissa too is incensed when he hears of this about-turn, and now allies himself with Scipio. The possible idea of a nobler humanity is further weakened when, in Act III, Syphax is about to consummate his forced marriage with Sophonisba; she has been sold to him, but she only agreed in the belief that her legitimate spouse is dead; however, with a stratagem she manages to postpone the hateful embrace. Marston does not hesitate to arrange an umpteenth hard, risqué scene, where a proud bragging warrior, transported with sexual rapture, grotesquely finds himself in bed with Sophonisba’s black maid. Inexorably Syphax makes a second attempt but once more is scorned, for in bed he makes love with a witch who, with a touch of pure neo-Gothic, had promised to help him. After Massinissa has defeated Syphax in the duel permitted by the Romans, and regained Sophonisba, comes the last dilemma: must he give her back to the Romans as requested, or obey her implorations? There is no way out, save the tragic choice of giving the Romans Sophonisba, but dead, and thus keep his promise. § 109. Marston VII: ‘The Insatiate Countess’ Nothing would lead one to suspect that The Insatiate Countess (1608) was Marston’s farewell to the stage; it is, on the contrary, the most genial and enjoyable play in his canon, absolutely bursting with verve. Only, we

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do not know how much of it Marston actually wrote, and how much the actor and poet William Barkstead who collaborated with him. It remains the lightest, most sparkling and ethereal thing written by Marston, or whoever it was; it is also the most irresponsible, for it captures and confirms the quality that seems to obsess Marston, the unpredictable and dangerous capriciousness in man’s, and especially woman’s, nature. The charm of this play lies in the wake it left behind. The plot’s rhythm is that of a minuet as in Mozart’s ‘Italian’ operas: for there is no attempt to analyse the characters’ psychology, nor any plausible reason why the countess should be insatiable. She always falls in love by chance, fatally, as moved by irresistible hormonal urges. By a kind of optical illusion we seem to have plunged into the atmosphere and milieu of Firbank’s novels, a Firbank already absurd, but whose absurdity is still this side of an articulate and explicit existential foundation, and where the characters are merely puppets. That is why at a certain moment, with the most spectacular effect in the play, Marston even looks forward to Pinter and The Lover:18 two wives cunningly deceive their husbands and make them believe they are enjoying the pleasures of adultery, whereas each is unknowingly making love in bed with his own wife. Of course it does not matter if in all of Marston’s canon this play is the most schizoid. Indeed the reader must realize that the second plot, the one that does not give the play its title, is by far the more important. 2. Marston responds, for the third time, to the irresistible appeal of Venice, which, however, had never seemed so stylized, generic, devoid of genius loci. Venice is only the location of the second plot, because the Swabian countess, after flagrantly violating her solemn vow of keeping faith to the memory of her late husband, being just married jilts her spouse and moves to Pavia, and, soon fed up, asks an infatuated colonel for help to get rid of both wooers. The murder is discovered and she is condemned, but before the execution a friar comes to her: it is her legitimate husband, who had retired to a convent and has romantically come to forgive her. In the play many heads fall, but in a climate of grotesque farce

18

See Volume 8, § 122.5. The jest of the mistresses’ exchange also recalls the wives’ tricks in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

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and magical realism, while the early Marston had begun under the mark of blood-dripping Senecan drama. This perplexing, swift about-turn of human balance had already been seen in Malheureux in The Dutch Courtesan. So there are three ways of reacting to fiery sensuality and temptation to adultery. Act III opens showing a Mendoza Foscari19 climbing to the room of a widow who has just rejected his insistent wooing. In fact this sort of Sophonisba is fragile, and willingly hooks up, as if under hypnosis, the ropeladder the man has thrown over her balcony. It is the second, if belated, case of female fall, finding its antithesis, however, in the merry resistance to adultery, and to promiscuity, of the two gallants’ wives. The scene of climbing to the balcony is a little masterpiece of humour and parody, of resounding pompous words of passion conflicting with a dangerous situation. It becomes even more amusing when Mendoza falls down as the rope breaks, and is wounded, and the posse of constables accuses the two husbands of assault; the two, coming out of the chamber in their underclothes, prefer to plead guilty to being shown up as cuckolds. At the trial Mendoza, for respectability’s sake, has to pretend he tried to reach the widow’s room to rob her. In Marston the happy end always occurs, but one can never deem it final. § 110. Chapman*1I: ‘Homeri metaphrastes’ This antonomasia, supposedly copied from the name of the hagiographer Simeon Metaphrastes, is written in black letters on a golden background in the epigraph of George Chapman’s (1559–1634) complete Homer, 19

Marston often used names from his previous dramas (§ 106), still filled with their implications. This implausibility would not be justified otherwise.

*

The nineteenth-century complete edition, Chapman’s Works, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 3 vols, London 1874–1875, was partially superseded by the one ed. T. M. Parrott, 2 vols, New York 1910 (tragedies) and New York 1914 (comedies). The standard critical editions are now The Comedies of George Chapman, ed. A. Holaday and M. Kiernan, Urbana, IL 1970, and The Tragedies of George Chapman, ed. A. Holaday et al., Cambridge 1987. The Poems of George Chapman, ed. P. Brooks Bartlett, New York and Oxford 1941. Homeric translations ed. A. Nicoll, London 1957. Bussy D’Ambois, translation with parallel text, ed. M. Pagnini, Roma 1985. A. C. Swinburne, George Chapman, a Critical Essay, London 1875, also included as a Preface to vol. I of the aforesaid Shepherd’s edition; F. L. Schoell, Études sur l’Humanisme Continental en Angleterre à la Fin de la Renaissance,

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collected in 1616, and circled with a cameo rim idealizing the poet in the shape of a Greek warrior. The two Homeric poems, the Iliad in fourteeners and the Odyssey in rhymed couplets, had appeared in instalments in 1598, to be completed and published only five years after the appearance of the Authorized Version of the Bible, after which it can be surely defined the monumentum aere perennius of the seventeenth-century art of translation, and first ranking in the field of secular literature.1 Although appreciated and respected, in actual fact this translation has never won full approval since its appearance four centuries ago; and yet it remains, for the English, the one most identified with its author’s name, apart perhaps from his completion of Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander. The eighteenth century tried to supplant it with Pope’s Homer, but with the Romantic age critical opinion became more favourable to him and Keats’s famous sonnet did the rest. Not even Matthew Arnold, despite his classicist aesthetic ideas, could resist the charm of this translation and praised its syntax and diction, while reserving his judgement concerning the Elizabethan ‘fantastic’ that he disliked.2 As to Swinburne, he asserted that Chapman had translated Homer in the style of an Icelandic skald. The modernists’ revaluations Paris 1926 (a systematic catalogue of classical, and neo-Renaissance Platonic sources); J. W. Wieler, George Chapman: The Effect of Stoicism upon His Tragedies, New York 1949, 1969; J. Jacquot, George Chapman, sa vie, sa poésie, son theatre, sa pensée, Paris 1951; E. Rees, The Tragedies of George Chapman, Cambridge, MA 1954, repr. as The Tragedies of George Chapman: Renaissance Ethics in Action, New York 1979; M. Pagnini, Forme e motivi nelle poesie e nelle tragedie di George Chapman, Firenze 1957; M. MacLure, George Chapman: A Critical Study, Toronto 1966; C. Spivack, George Chapman, New York 1967; F. Kermode, ‘The Banquet of Sense’, in Renaissance Essays, London 1973, 84–115; P. Bement, George Chapman: Action and Contemplation in his Tragedies, Salzburg 1974; R. B. Waddington, The Mind’s Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapman’s Narrative Poems, Baltimore, MD and London 1974; H. Ellis, Chapman, Norwood, PA 1976; M. C. Bradbrook, George Chapman, Burnt Mill 1977; G. Snare, The Mystification of George Chapman, Durham, NC and London 1989; A. R. Braunmuller, Natural Fictions: George Chapman’s Major Tragedies, Newark, DE and London 1992; C. Sukič, Le héros inachevé: étique et esthétique dans les tragedies de George Chapman, Bern 2005. 1 2

Chapman also translated works by Musaeus and Hesiod from Greek. See Volume 4, § 161, for a more extensive discussion of Arnold’s theories and judgements on Chapman in On Translating Homer.

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of Chapman’s theatre, and in particular Eliot’s, did not greatly modify this judgement; some eminent nineteenth-century critics were in fact more severe. From a purely philological viewpoint there are two opposite estimations of Chapman’s Homer: one history-conscious and lenient (every translation is an interpretation), the other destructive and defeatist. According to the latter Chapman’s work is unequal, his philological equipment is patchy, he hardly knows Greek (he had to depend on Scapula’s dictionary and Spondanus’ commentary), and hence he made gross recurrent blunders and was unfaithful to the original. Paradoxically, however, a critic of his drama can profit from the frequent accusations levelled against Chapman, of having deformed and falsified Homer, and made him a didactic moralist with arbitrary interpolations and glosses between the lines. The Homeric poems translated by Chapman are hence a work apart, but at the same time the pivot of whatever else Chapman wrote and left behind. This is confirmed by this phrase in the dedication: ‘The work that I was born to do, is done’. Chapman’s style, often also defined as pre-Metaphysical, but based on long and detailed similes, is Homeric; above all, he models his dramatic heroes following parameters drawn from Homer, or rather read somewhat arbitrarily in Homer, together of course with non-Homeric ones. His tragedies are constructed along Homeric lines, more or less as in Joyce’s Ulysses. To anticipate: Achilles is the archetype of the passionate hero, Ulysses of the hero who learns to conquer passions and reaches the heavenly haven. 2. Chapman’s Homeric translations are still in print today, but his ‘creative’ work has long been put to one side and left to specialists: the poet and dramatist are scarcely read, studied, taught and reprinted, except in editions that are largely anthological and academic; the critical debate is at present anything but lively. By contrast, for his contemporaries he was an esteemed, emulated, proverbial protagonist. In his circle he was fairly well liked, owing to his physical features, to which I will return, and his innocuous temperament. He was also famous for his naïvety, and his regularly mistaken choice of patrons, who ended up on the gallows, or died soon after he had managed to get them; he was often swindled, and, pursued by creditors, sent to prison. Often enough he was also the target of other artists’ caricatures, and if we are not absolutely sure he was Shakespeare’s Holofernes, he was certainly mirrored

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in Dekker and Webster’s Bellamont,3 he and this portrait being like peas in a pod. Meres, Shakespeare’s ‘discoverer’, acknowledged Chapman’s merit as a writer of comedies and tragedies. Marston and Jonson, and later Shirley, collaborated with him, his plays were performed by the best companies in the most respectable playhouses, and his masques much sought after.4 The judgement of the Restoration turned this appreciation to enduring condemnation practically until a century ago. Like Donne’s, Chapman’s poetry was considered obscure and harsh; and as with Donne, the Augustans thought Chapman deserved to ‘be hanged’ for his failure to make himself understood. The most severe critic was Dryden, who loudly called Chapman’s ‘a dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words’. As a playwright too, he remains a poet who fell back on drama. He had not, such was the prevalent view of him, the power to identify with any other person but his own self; and his plots are complex, clumsy, hardly exciting, lacking that innate and most necessary gift, ‘theatricality’. Lamb called him a devotee of imagery, and said he seemed to pounce on and catch every word that came to hand. Swinburne wrote a devastating critique, curiously brimming with rhetorical ardour and turgid imagery very much like Chapman’s, whom he summed up in three vaguely alliterating terms – barbarism, bombast and obscurity, barbarism hardly being suited to the man who went on to become a translator of Homer. The critical balance on Chapman remained the same up to the early twentieth century, when the revaluation of Donne spilled over onto Chapman. It was discovered that Chapman knew and perhaps was familiar with Donne, and since Donne’s poetry had been circulated in manuscript it was supposed that Chapman knew it; or perhaps it was the other way round, and it was Chapman that

3 4

This is a character in a minor drama, Northward Ho!, on which see § 124.1 n. 1. Only survivor The Mask of the Middle Temple and of Lincoln’s Inn, performed in 1613 at Whitehall, together with other pieces, with scenes by Inigo Jones, to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine. The motif is the eulogium of English colonial expansionism, and American natives appear onstage in picturesque, and therefore conventional and fantastic local costumes, to symbolize the conversion of the colonies to Christianity, and hence the empire’s civilizing mission. Two gold and silver mountains represented the new world. In the short text, recited after a long stage direction, allegorical figures and symbols of the arts dance and sing.

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had influenced Donne. Whatever the truth, Metaphysical poetry was in the air. T. S. Eliot astonished the scholarly community with a definition taken up verbatim by Praz: Chapman’s characters are aliens in the context where they live, like Dostoevsky’s idiots and brain-damaged people, and they think and speak as if on a ‘double track’. As a poet tout court, Chapman anticipates the metaphysical vein in that he takes his cue from obscure sources rather than from life and experience, and uses dense, labyrinthine image clusters. Lamb had perceived this even before Eliot, for his poetry and drama pivot on images and imagery, forming large clusters, most often without responding to any poetic need. That is, they are systematically superfluous, to some degree. So, is there any resemblance between Chapman as a poet and Donne? Donne as a young man had various lovers, then a beloved wife, and finally as a widower he was spiritually married to theology. Chapman devoted his life, apart from a short final period of lessened activity, to the profession of literature; a literature in its characteristic traits neither lyrical nor erotic, though it is itself ‘metaphysical’ in the true literal sense of being oriented to establish the confines between bodily and spiritual love. From Eliot onward the critical tradition has been more anarchic and varied, yet always very scant and specialized. The evaluations of single works show deep, often bewildering disagreement among scholars. Some exalt and some reject the completion of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, while others raise single inferior plays to the first rank of art. 3. Homer, to resume our discussion, is crucial, since he is at the heart of Chapman’s heroic dramaturgy. But this dramaturgy, more or less contemporary with his completion of Homer’s translations, is a third or fourth stage in his activity, preceded by poetry and comedy. If we find this career tortuous or even inconsistent, this is also because we know so little about the chronology of his works; and knowing just as little of his life5 it is difficult to investigate his ideas, for there is no external, first-person evidence concerning them,

5

The son of a landowner, Chapman was probably self-taught, for he does not seem to have been a student at, or a graduate from, Oxford or Cambridge. Before he was thirty he was perhaps a soldier in Flanders, and back at home was among the favourites of the Earl of Essex and of Prince Henry, at whose death his new patron was the Earl of Somerset. Chapman chose to defend this nobleman’s scandalous marriage to a divorcee with Andromeda liberata, and met with a deluge of disapproval. Like

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save short dedicatory epistles; added to this is the fact that his poetry has a subtly objectifying nature. There are two hypotheses: either in the course of time Chapman substantially modified or even suppressed some ideological options; or else, he was a syncretist able to blend and integrate reciprocally incompatible doctrines. This in particular makes it necessary to decide whether he described a single hero progressively selfperfecting and self-defining, or, as critics seem to point out, he contrasted two irreconcilable typologies derived from the chief polarity he found in Homer: the ‘Achillean’ hero ‘prevalently perturbed’, and the Ulyssean hero, symbolizing the ‘superior wisdom of self-control’.6 Chapman’s early heroes are not stoical, but the later ones are. Cato might be the final goal, but in a play necessarily coming last, as a conclusion. Should we then bow to the myth of an escalation, or believe in a non-linear dialectics? Is it true that tout se tient in Chapman, or rather does everything shatter into a myriad contradictions? Today, deconstruction prefers contraries in explicit tension to harmony and the reconcilement of various and even opposite vectors. Chapman, it is said, represents not achieved contemplative spiritual order, but the limits and subversions of that ideal, which might mean a radicalization of that concordia discors or discordia concors that pervades the Renaissance, or the reflection of a more advanced view of individual man as perennial disorder. Interestingly, this ambivalence is suggested by a number of portraits: the old Chapman is a venerable, wise man, bald and bearded like a hermit; as a younger man he has a lean face and a somewhat enigmatic, elusive smile. 4. In his early thirties Chapman spoke of obscurity as natural to great poetry, and the result was a convoluted, confused, often contorted syntax. Two of many introductory epistles – to the poems of 1594 and 1595, addressed to the minor poet and mathematician Matthew Roydon – enclose in as many endings a ‘defence of poetry’. The esoteric Chapman entrusted obscurity with the task of excluding illiterates from comprehension: the preacher of simplicity errs when he conveys the meaning to the reader instead of impelling

6

Marston, for mysterious reasons he slackened off, or even stopped writing a good twenty years before his death. Between the two was Menelaus, for Chapman a character only deserving smiles or laughter.

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him to make an effort. Obscurity is therefore not gratuitous or fictitious, but ingrained in the substance of the expression – all these axioms are exemplified by striking images, like those of gems and diamonds hidden under the earth.7 Those two poems of 1594 and 1595 came from Chapman’s affiliation to the semi-clandestine occultist cadre called the School of Night, which drew on Ficino, the translator of Corpus Hermeticum, a text teaching how one can recover the lost mastery over nature. This apprenticeship took place in the context of an axiom: the decline of the cosmos and the need to regenerate it. The School of Night inclined to scientism and atheism,8 but a few years later, when Chapman began his career as a comic playwright, he sounded like the exponent of a more democratic and even popular aesthetic, and of a more traditional morality. The nexus still linking Chapman the poet with Chapman the comic playwright is a discourse on eroticism in the general context of individual and human psychology. One should keep in mind the degree to which his celibate life, sexual frustration and repression, reverberated in and flowed into his work: down to and including Bussy, his poems and comedies are marked by the idea of an overbearing eroticism to be repressed; heroes go out of their mind and are obsessed by lust, and women too, but they hide it better; this notwithstanding, Chapman is rather misogynous. Women are fortresses to be seized; and intermediaries recurrently appear on the scene, courting them as go-betweens. Or else, women’s attention must be drawn to the male virility they are unconscious of. It was Swinburne who acutely conjectured that The Widow’s Tears was dictated by ‘personal rancour’, and noticed that from Byron on, the role of the woman gradually fades away.9 Up to that moment Chapman is neither an erotic nor a nuptial poet, yet he still hovers on the edge of lust, and like a true Protestant expresses disgust at lust but describes its manifestations, and consumes his frustration, stopping on the 7 8

9

He derived the concept of poetic obscurity from Hermes Trismegistus and Bacon, who asserted that ancient poets had communicated and concealed philosophical truths under the veil of myths. Whoever thinks that the various components of Chapman’s philosophy were harmoniously integrated (like Rees 1969, 195 n. 73) must also doubt that the School of Night was a unified group or even existed, and maintain that antithetical positions and personalities were part of it. Swinburne 1874–1875, xxxi, xli.

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verge of sexual fruition: this happens in nuce in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense and in the continuation of Hero and Leander. Between abstinence and sensual pleasure, between chastity and copulation, Chapman places the kiss: an intermediate link, but dangerous like an antechamber, and the barrier one must not cross. The cult of the hero and of heroism in Chapman the tragedian, which sets him alongside Carlyle alone, may have had an equally psychological or psychoanalytical genesis, as the projection, exorcism or even admission of his own psychic frailty; but it is also an ideal repercussion, feeding the palingenetic and apocalyptic hunger present also in other Jacobean playwrights. A deep gap separates Bussy and Byron from the approved, stoical, upright heroes; and it has been fully understood10 that Chapman the tragedian is ironical, that is, critical of heroes that had always been conceived as epitomes of the virtuous hero. As with many moralist poets, one must not equate representation with approval, but take into account many linguistic hints. Bussy and Byron are two versions of the absolute, superhuman hero, redeemed and redeeming but weak, overcome by passions, yet still noble in his fall. Other later heroes are and remain upright, bent on the conquest of a stoic tranquillity modelled on the aphorisms of Epictetus, Plutarch and Seneca. § 111. Chapman II: Orphic and mythological poems The Shadow of Night (1594) is the marvellous start of an esoteric, inspired poet, full of faith in the tasks of philosophical, educating and enlightening poetry, able to suggest and communicate, by way of imagery rather than concepts, the need to clean the world from turpitude and restore the individual’s dignity. It was like the necessary pass for entrance into the School of Night. Its very dedication is a manifesto that criticizes weak literati and bristles with shafts that are now blunted, as we no longer know exactly who they were aimed at. Those literati were active in the fiery climate of the late sixteenth century. What importance Chapman ascribed to it is shown by his handwritten glosses to the text, which T. S. Eliot’s critics later said were imitated in the notes to The Waste Land. The text itself is exceptional in that it consists of a long composition without either anecdotes or narrative lines, merely conceptual and evocative save 10

Rees 1949 and 1969.

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for the slight addition of a single mythological cameo; no less exceptional is the rhetorical, declamatory, oratorical élan. Shakespeare alone could boast of a similar, divine glossolalic verbal gift, a magical diction brimming with suggestive or even quite fantastic links. The compactness of the composition is striking, if one thinks that it can be seen as a collage of passages from Mythologiae by Natale Conti (Latinized as Comes). This poem by Chapman will provide the basis for the poetic idiolect of early and late Romanticism – particularly Shelley’s – and especially of Hopkins’s and Francis Thompson’s Catholic Decadentism. But behind it one certainly hears Hesiod’s and Lucretius’ arcane voices. As a poet singing hymns to night Chapman takes an eminent place in literary annals alongside Foscolo and Novalis. In the first of the two hymns he traces out the fantasy of a world created from chaos, a cosmos that was orderly but subsequently degenerated and disordered. It is the Elizabethan obsession with a world besmirched with the most various human vices, but first of all carnal lust. It sounds like a primeval, atavistic cry of terror, cast in spasmodic despair at regression to the state of chaos, a cry for the imminent and immanent hell the creation delivered us from, but which we can always sink back to. Leaving symbols aside, night is a coveted moment of quiet from the pangs of sensuality. It is opposite to day as a realm of false light, for day is only the stage of the contrary journey to corruption and primordial chaos. Since night is the realm of unalloyed chaos, innocuous because it preceded creation, the poet yearns to return to the nothing that was before creation; so bitter is his poetry as to appear, and be, really nihilistic. In the second hymn the moon is a hypostasis of Elizabeth, the lunar, virgin and chaste queen. It evokes the atavistic cult of the moon and the awe she inspired in ancient times; then with a sudden turn it speaks of the English that sing her in native metres, instead of aping Roman and Catholic prosody. The panegyric supports the identification of the moon as a mythological goddess and her coincidence with Elizabeth, a defender of liberties against obscurantist Europe. Chapman never quits his manner of rambling, so at the centre of the hymn there is a hunt led by the nymph Eutimia, in the guise of a panther followed by her dogs, brimming over with incidental scenes and visionary pictures. The rhapsody ends with the ancient Ephesian temple rebuilt by the chaste English ladies.

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2. The ambiguous, deceptive, and for once much-discussed Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595), in 117 stanzas, is indeed a narrative, apparently licentious and erotic poem. But it turns out to be less surprising, being centred on an Ovid somewhat de-Ovidianized who looks forward to enjoying the pleasures of the senses, but is stopped before he can satisfy the fifth, touch, preluding coitus. The sudden reversal – the sophism – is that the senses are purified and sublimated when excited by the presence and the sight of Corinna naked in her bath. This is an acrobatic demonstration, that to satisfy the senses one must purify them, and that appetite vanishes instead of growing – to quote Hamlet – with what it feeds on. These are quirks really worthy, in other ways, of Donne, in rendering, studying and defining the stages by which the senses are de-sensualized. Corinna, at first angry on seeing the voyeur, ends by opening her peplum and offering her snowy breasts to Ovid’s kiss. The curtain falls on the sequel, but ‘Intentio, animi actio’. The ‘banquet of sense’ is a topos or motif going back to Plato’s Symposium, and it had often been reconsidered by the Florentine NeoPlatonists. The first query relates to Chapman’s revision of the order in which the senses work according to the Platonic studies of the ascent to spiritual beauty. To avoid misinterpretations, the poem is enclosed between an ‘argument’ and a ‘coronet’, explaining that Chapman is not making an apology of sensual, let alone bestial love. Indeed the ‘argument’ preceding the ‘narratio’ does not allude to exciting or even arousing the senses, but to a ‘comfort’, a vague wellness and aesthetic satisfaction. Ovid might be a shrewd, cunning ‘ravisher’ intending rape on a female body, but at the same time he is unconscious of the goal that his senses, satisfied with Corinna’s sight and music, are guiding him to. Past and present meticulous discussions fail to contextualize the poem and ignore the continuum in which it should be placed. In defiance of polarized interpretations I agree with those that see here represented both the senses’ fatal dominance, and the necessity, at times favoured by chance (here the coming of other ladies interrupting the courtship), to abstain from carnal contact and coitus with prostitutes and outside marriage. Kermode’s reading11 is quite parallel to

11

Kermode 1973 thinks of an ironical Chapman actually seeing Ovid ‘descend’ the senses’ ladder to the bestial love Ficino spoke of, and sexually enjoy Corinna, although

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the more explicit reading made by Chapman of the myth of Hero and Leander: erotic passion is overbearing, and its effects are painful; only, Chapman in this poem does not mention them, or just hints at them with a series of threatening allusions that Kermode skilfully captures. The countermelody, and here lies the ambiguity, is that Chapman seems convinced that the senses have a precious function, at the same time of ascent and descent, towards the carnal-spiritual ‘interfusion’ exalted by Donne in ‘The Ecstasy’. 3. Chapman revealed himself as a poet and playwright in 1598, the year he wrote the remaining four of six cantos to complete Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. He agreed to do so because Marlowe had cut short the story of the couple in love without commenting or bringing it to its tragic end.12 The underlying or rather explicit idea Chapman adds to it, while Marlowe had been reticent, is that, the two lovers having had sex before marriage, this transgression must be punished, although the flame of pure love could and should be rewarded by being immortalized. Marlowe had celebrated the burning of the flame: now it was necessary to ponder the consequences and point out the lesson: ‘Shun love’s stoln sports by that these lovers prove’. From the very first lines the deviation is not only conceptual and axiological, but formal as well. Where Marlowe is harmonious, balanced and flowing, Chapman is discontinuous and cumbersome.13 Now and then he can be even sweeter and more melodious than Marlowe, but becomes awkward when he uses dissonant or unequal compound words, circumlocutions that are much too long twisting and twirling into spirals heading nowhere – frigid concetti vaguely recalling, but far more artificially, Donne’s wit.14 Of course Chapman, Homer’s future translator, is very good at narrating the compressed dynamics of single material events,

12 13 14

out of sight; but he also admits that Ovid is unconsciously surrounded by dissuasive elements, like the statue of Niobe. Marlowe was a member of the School of Night, and at any rate the two poets were introduced by Ralegh, or thanks to a trait d’union, Sir Francis Walsingham. ELS, 514, is of a different opinion: Marlowe could not tell the end so well as Chapman, and the two poets realized a perfect collaboration. Like Donne’s is especially Hero’s argument to celebrate the lovers’ indissolubility: if Leander and I are as one, my virginity is not violated.

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but to this he alternates moral and proverbial mottos, and often becomes digressive and irrelevant. Another evident difference from Marlowe is that he writes longer cantos but with less matter, so he is forced to adorn, embellish, and more exactly dawdle, with weak and tiresome additions. This meandering narrative progress, combined with interlinear, parenthetic commentary, at times reminds one of Spenser, another sublime fable-teller; but Chapman is far less natural and repeatedly sinks into bathos. Spenserlike is the minute pictorial description of the drapery, particularly Hero’s in the fourth canto, reaching the peak of miniature painting in the splendid depiction of the woman’s shawl, with the embroiderer’s needle nearly making the waters where Leander swims wave as if by illusion; and one seems to actually see the fisherman drawing the nets: masterful cameos, a kind of new Achilles’ buckler. The metre is directly derived from Marlowe, but Chapman handles it a little clumsily: to keep the rhyme he is often generic and approximate, incurs in dreadful semantic risks, like distorted meanings, or awkward and unnatural phrasing. The conceptual framework that I announced is exactly that recurring in Shakespeare’s dramas: Chapman was fascinated by a case of ‘rank desire’, of sexual incontinence inherited from a still pagan age, a sin at least for the conscience, if not yet codified by the Christian religion. Elizabethan drama numbers dozens of cases of women yielding their maidenheads, and being accomplices. At the opening Leander is swimming towards the Sextos shore and the sun ‘gilts’ him, but the poet fussily stresses the homophony of ‘gilt’ and ‘guilt’, of gold and sin, the sin of having wanted too soon what the nuptial rite alone can allow and confirm. This is why Leander on his return to Abydos finds the allegorical figure of Ceremony, followed by a Spenserian pageant of other figures reproaching him. Quite parenthetic is the intermezzo with the wedding of the two rustics celebrated by Hero, and the mythological tale, in the fifth canto, of the nymph Teras, ending however with a beautiful epithalamion suggesting that Chapman, had he wished it, might have been an exquisite song maker. The sixth sestiad is the most intense and balanced, and the pathos increases until the Dantean metamorphosis of the lovers into two birds, winged with symbolic colours.15 15

After 1609 Chapman’s blank verse, quite copious and varied, sings dead English Protestant heroes, like Prince Henry or the seaman Kysmet; or includes epithalamia

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§ 112. Chapman III: The comedies on the trial of chastity Chapman’s surviving theatrical works comprise, more or less in chronological order, six comedies and seven tragedies, all for various reasons set outside England (mainly in France and Italy),16 to which there must be added at least a masque, and the above-mentioned collaboration on a successful ‘city play’ by Marston. No comedy of Chapman’s is strikingly exciting.17 Their pivot is usually the nexus between two complementary plots. As is typical of this dramatist, they suddenly pass from a descriptive routine to bursts of verbal virtuosity and grand monologues only vaguely related to the subject. Chapman began his playwriting career in the Admiral’s Company with The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1598), a farce with no division into scenes or acts, seemingly following the route of his poetry, with its ambiguous and devious discourse on sensual temptation. The Queen of Egypt has exiled a duke who has tried to seduce her, but she misses him, and this is Chapman’s precocious and classic theme of sanctimonious-looking female frailty. The duke, disguised as the blind soothsayer Irus, appears under many successive identities that enable him to seduce nymphs, to whom he prophesies that they will meet a husband, that is, his very self disguised (a long-nosed Jewish usurer, a crazy count Hermes in a velvet cloak). The comedy gets lively when the beggar engages in play, and makes himself a cuckold by conquering his wives one after the other. This is an evident muted metaphor of the adventurous, promiscuous erotic inclinations of the society of the time, at which satirists like Hall, Marston and Donne fired their shots. The plot is wisely moved to an imaginary Egypt, and today we cannot say who this great blind artist of the quick change might have alluded to. With the denouement all disguises are shed, and the widow

16 17

for people of high rank, and other encomiastic poems. ‘The Tears of Peace’ is a long discontinuous ode, recalling in sometimes beautiful, moving lines, Homer’s appearing to the young poet. For Rees 1979, 24, the reason for choosing a French setting was the ‘Machiavellian’ presence of Catherine de Medici, which made France the typical locus of ‘policy’, that is, of the Machiavellian raison d’état. PSL, 202, on the contrary, thinks them eminently ‘theatrical’ (unlike the tragedies, which give an impression of ‘deformity’ and of complying with a so-called ‘double plan […] fatal to performance’).

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queen marries the loving Cleanthes whom she hypocritically exiled; and Egyptian power is politically strengthened. The queen is however always a queen who – a hint at Elizabeth, as in Gorboduc – must marry. But on a moral level the consequences of active bigamy are presented, since two ‘widows’, got with child by the blind beggar, become wives to two kings. An Humorous Day’s Mirth (1599) is an even more paradoxical and surreal farce that, after setting sail well, is shipwrecked on a myriad of unconnected scenes. This does not have an English setting either, for Chapman chooses a most improbable France, where married ladies must be on their guard since dandies are very fast and chastity is always in danger. The norm of prudence is naïve and anachronistic, for the main plot concerns a jealous husband, whose Puritan wife yields to the tempting sophisms of a beau as bold as Ovid in the homonymous ‘banquet of the senses’. The paradoxical point of the temptation is that a kiss is the necessary step towards the highest and most perfect proof of fidelity, being the closest to carnal fruition, yet still legitimate. So, in order to achieve the proof of fidelity it is necessary to defy as many temptations as possible – a motif destined to recur. The husband sees the temptation without hearing its words; the result is as always ambiguous and provisional. The end consists in a long royal party animated by a riotous dance of fleeting apparitions, undefined but for their belonging to the conceptual area of lubricity, and also of linguistic obtuseness. 2. A few years later, with All Fools (1605), Chapman, now working for the Children of the Chapel Royal, was able to bring to the theatre the experience he had gained in the meantime, and structure his new play in the five canonical acts. This play aims at demonstrating that the whole planet is full of cuckolds, and therefore it is set in one of its imaginary epicentres according to Protestant prejudice – Italy for sure, Florence probably. This primary theme is at first subdued, and gives way to the classical geometry of a farce full of action. Two fathers each have two children, male and female, who celebrate secret inter-marriages, deceiving their fathers until the time comes for self-discovery, when they manage to make them accept the fait accompli. One of the two fathers, Gostanzo, believing he has the situation under control, flaunts his liberality before the other father, only to realize he has been duped too. When he recalls his loves and ridiculous feats as a young man, Gostanzo echoes Polonius, also because on discovering his son’s affair

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he wishes to repeat Polonius’ strategy of making Ophelia keep Hamlet at distance. The main plot is centred on a Cornelius who, as his name hints, is obsessed by jealousy but is cured of it, or simply accepts it. Chapman seems to have become more balanced, and has one of his characters state openly on stage that if women are whores, this finds a counterpart in men who are all philanderers; this insoluble antithesis must be accepted. All things considered the ‘game of chess’ between fathers and children is convoluted and confusing. The cuckolding plot runs more smoothly, with the amusing and elaborate incidental scenes of the physician after the duel with the suitor, and the notary public’s reading of the sentence. The moral becomes vaguer and even playful: Gostanzo, accepting that he has been duped, asserts the idea that only sexual consummation constitutes adultery but all its preliminaries are condoned; and also that the rutting impulse is genetically transmitted and so implies no responsibility. Valerio, one of the two sons, concludes the play with a harangue based on the ages of the world, the last of them being the ‘age of horns’. 3. The Gentleman Usher (1606), set in a stylized Italy, is based on a middle-aged father and a young son who are in love with the same woman. The target is now the folly to which father and son are driven, in a close, airless cosmos. The action is therefore hardly engrossing, and the only good point is a comic play within the play, because this small and absurdly ambitious duchy puts on shows, masques, and dilettante plays midway between life and art, reality and fiction. The plot looks at the same time like opera, melodrama, operetta or naturalistic comedy before its time, with a major-domo agreeing, in a steady trickle of confrontations, to act as go-between to the duke’s son and the woman that the father also loves. So the wooing goes on awkwardly through a third party. Yet this action is insufficient to fill the play, which strays into outlandish fuddled subplots, like that of a hunting nobleman wounded by an arrow no one can take out, or of a young mixed-up horse-rider making senseless gestures. Miraculously enough in the denouement the father gives up his beloved to the son. The colourless Monsieur D’Olive (1606), by contrast, is a psychiatric and even necrophilic play. A countess Vaumont accuses herself of a rather guilty liking for a friend, and as expiation lives secluded at home among privations and unnatural penances; a count keeps his adored wife unburied to celebrate her memory, all his friends vainly trying to dissuade him. We are

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in fact led back to Chapman’s theme of the boundaries between friendship and love, platonic and carnal love, legitimate and forbidden wooing. As to D’Olive, he is a wordy courtier entering the scene with much clamour but hardly anything to say, ceaselessly producing artificial verbal tricks, like those found in certain future poems by Browning. Two plots go on keeping at a distance, the second relating to D’Olive’s ambitions to become the duke’s ambassador to France, until he loses this preferment.18 The first plot plods on slowly and uninterestingly; D’Olive takes up more room, but only to talk more and more at random.19 4. The Widow’s Tears is a rare, exceptional creative spark of a Chapman who perhaps might have been at his best as a writer of comedies, working in a climate of remakes of classical sources.20 Dated 1606 at the latest (since it might imply a satire on justice, owing to the sentence I mentioned above, of imprisonment against him and the two collaborators of Eastward Ho),21 it was printed after the first performance, in 1612. More than ever before, here Chapman quits all paralysing excess of verbosity and presents a series of comic, farcical, and even macabre vicissitudes that make this play his liveliest, easiest and most amusing. This is also due to, among other things, his decision to abandon grand solemn harangues for dry, curt speeches, and to an impartial division into verse and prose. The result is an ideal script for recitation, like certain early, or even late, romantic Shakespearean comedies – a cross, that is, between The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night Dream and The Winter’s Tale. This is made possible by the internal symmetries of construction, 18

Typically, in the too long spun-out scene of D’Olive’s investiture, Chapman lets him rant that he had publicly defended the lawfulness of smoking tobacco, a point inserted in homage to James I’s authorship of a treatise or invective on that subject. Chapman displays his erudition quoting an indecorous, irrelevant phrase by Savonarola, calling him however Johannes. 19 Also ascribed to Chapman is Sir Giles Goosecap (1606), which sets in the present time the story of Troilus and Cressida; also, mistakenly, two more tragedies, printed in 1654, Alphonsus Emperor of Germany and Revenge for Honour, the latter ascribed by most to Henry Glapthorne. 20 The plot is partly modelled on the very fortunate episode of Petronius’ Ephesian widow in Satyricon. 21 § 107.1.

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a crackling misogynous wit, fixed ingredients of classical comedy, like cunning servants, enterprising procuresses, prurient but hypocritical widows, marginal figures in bright relief and fresh, suggestive inventiveness. Chapman turns upside down, hypothetically, the axiom he posits in his tragedies, and Tharsalio enters the stage like a soliloquizing Bussy who refuses to submit to Fortune – the blind goddess that overlooks merit and rewards fools – and proclaims himself a liegeman to Trust. Thus, loudly and at the same time beforehand, he gives the lie to Chapman’s stoical tragic hero, presenting us for once with a new character, the hero striving to reach a real good, faber suae fortunae, whom we can love and smile at. Tharsalio has a double plan: to gain the hand of a rich widow determined not to remarry, and to arouse doubt in the mind of his brother, too confident that his own wife will not remarry if she is widowed. It will be, so to speak, a double demonstration of the frailty of widows and their vows of chastity. The rhetorical exploit of the procuress consists in warning the widow against marrying the philandering Tharsalio: as is to be expected, she achieves the contrary result and conquers the widow’s false sanctimoniousness. Once he has conquered the countess, Tharsalio is ready to witness the foolish, paradoxical effects of his brother Lysander’s jealousy, and at the same time to prepare a new assault on female frailty.22 § 113. Chapman IV: ‘Bussy D’Ambois’ and the surrendering hero In style and imagery Bussy D’Ambois (1607),23 the first and most important tragedy by Chapman, is breathtaking, like few others in its time. However, this judgement must be reconsidered if not overturned, for it remains an uneven play, insufficient from a purely theatrical viewpoint, very difficult to

22

23

May Day cannot be surely dated owing to conflicting internal allusions; perhaps a first version written in 1601 was retouched at a later time, closer to the 1611 printing. Freely drawn from Piccolomini’s Alessandro of the previous century, it is a very lively, eventful and adventurous comedy, filled with sketchy characters, or rather puppets (the cunning servant, the practical joker, the romantic couple) in a Venice milieu forerunning Da Ponte and Goldoni. Performed perhaps as early as 1604. I follow the 1641 edn. Bussy is a historical person, on whom Chapman’s sources were merely oral. His murder was not in fact the Duke of Alençon’s (§ 153.2) but the king’s work.

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stage,24 and certainly effective only when read. This necessarily implies that it quite contravenes the usual norms of theatrical communication. The first thing noticed on reading it is that the structure is crude and unsubtle, and that the lavish signifier is made to serve a plot with very little dramatic force. In concrete terms, dialogue and monologue do not proceed in concert with the action, but on the contrary ignore it. Here one must agree with T. S. Eliot’s double-track theory. Chapman’s procedure, even more than in his comedies, consists of a series of efficiently performative speeches, but quickened by sudden flashes, parentheses and declamatory pauses, where the character’s imagination fires and bursts out. Today’s well-read reader immediately thinks of a later poet, Dylan Thomas, who, though he had not Chapman’s familiarity with myths, declared and demonstrated that his poetry needed a ‘host of images’; or of Hopkins and Thompson indulging in Baroque rhetoric. Whenever Chapman’s character gives in to his tirades, the action ceases and the character suspends the dramatic action, preens himself on his linguistic cleverness and quivers with grandiloquence. This gap between acting character and isolated, commenting hypostasis becomes particularly evident in the last two acts, where the image-forming exaltation reaches its peak. In these acts Chapman also adopts, though only in an imitative, burlesque form, some modes of the medieval morality, making a further break, that is materializing the different psychic components of the human personality in allegorical personifications, or using other modes of a magic, supernatural, visionary type, although ghosts, shadows and biblical monsters come out of the wellknown trapdoor of the Elizabethan stage. Theatrical communication is in low frequency because the spatial mimesis is vague and the links between scenes and phases are weak; as always, Chapman cannot structure compact plots. Blank verse deliberately groups itself in pairs, tercets and quatrains adorned by rhymed clauses, or in sequences of varying length. The impetus of images, extended metaphors and circumlocutions, being uncontrolled, produces unusual, disproportioned, non-pertinent digressions, breaking into forced, strident and seemingly unrevised phrases, or macroscopically 24 The King’s Men had it in their repertory until the closing of the theatres; after the Restoration it again was successfully performed, but thereafter not again until 1985 (Pagnini 1985, 24). D’Urfey’s remake is a symptom of its later reception.

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dissonant lapses in style. However, there is exceptional continuity in the imagery. Ungovernable passions are subterranean gases, or ferocious and aggressive birds; a restless man is like the ever-moving sea, and disgust of the world is associated with excrement and putrescence – repeated images, recurring as leitmotivs and as such elaborated. In Bussy Chapman the tragedian goes back to his prevalent mood of ten years before, to his beginning as a poet with the black apocalyptic nihilism of The Shadow of Night. He shows an unredeemably degenerate world: the court is a dead heart, a den of vice, and the cosmos itself is damned and unintelligible; and in the midst of it man, even when noble, is at the mercy of his evil impulses and contradictions. 2. Bussy therefore begins with a monologue, a sort of prologue or prelude, of Bussy who reasons, as if ex post, on chance governing a world whose values have gone crazy, left to the whims of a Fortune that is blind fate, so that whoever aspires to anything great and noble is defeated and paralysed by the fleetingness of things human. Still, the last long sentence of this prologue is a surprising anacoluthon: at the end of the ambitious worldly journey we must live under virtue’s guide, lest we shipwreck. Bussy is depressed, demoralized, resigned; but Monsieur, the king’s brother, himself a dependant on that very fortune and its favours, objects to him that fortune favours bold men, and exhorts him to be ready and seize on circumstances. With a first abrupt reversal we see Bussy newly received at court, where Monsieur has brought him to make him serve his own purpose to eliminate the king and reign in his place. Throughout the play the French court proves a place or microcosm shot through with veiled conspiracies and insubordinations, and love affairs in the form of open, scandalous courtships of duchesses and countesses under the eyes of their husbands. Curiously enough, the king weakly criticizes himself in front of his assembled courtiers imparting moral instructions nobody listens to, or immediately gaily contradicts. Bussy however enjoys the king’s favour because, being not only a brave and bold soldier but also a poet with a quick repartee, he is seen as a source of wit and wisdom. At the time Chapman, like Spenser and Ralegh a few years before, could allow this French court to express malicious jibes against the English court. Concerning Bussy’s arrival among them, the courtiers themselves make a just objection: why has modest and virtuous Bussy come to court, having

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just denounced its vices, and impulsively and impudently challenging and putting to a test its verbal habits and its codes of hypocritical respect? It is the first unresolved contradiction. The play’s first action is the duel of Bussy and his two allies against as many courtiers who have slandered him. A Senecan messenger narrates its outcome with an epic récit showing Homeric solemnity. The king is artfully requested to forgive the murderer, violating the law or the custom; and he forgives with the sophistry, or aberrant motif, that if the law does not protect the individual, the latter can transgress it; that man is law to himself, and therefore outside the law. Bussy again contradicts himself because, having been pardoned, he confesses in an aside the intention of committing a second illegal action: the conquest of Tamyra Montsurry.25 He has been so hot in justifying absolute freedom and the free man’s indifference to law that he cannot realize he has gone much too far. Here the dramatist deserts him, though he does not cease to admire him, after saving him in extremis from the king’s punishment. Tamyra (defined as ‘Puritan’, like the lady in An Humorous Day’s Mirth) in public feigns not to know Bussy and to reject all suitors: ‘A husband and a friend all wise wives have’ is the court’s custom, which she disdains.26 But passion has broken all bounds. Chapman keeps harping on his own obsession with the untameable sexual drive. Mutatis mutandis it is the contradiction that three centuries later will resonate in Wilde’s drawing rooms: how on earth does this kind of Lady Windermere agree to live at court, where the ethics she affirms is flagrantly violated, and at any rate endangered? Two pure beings are fatally put on the spot. Tamyra speaks kind words to her husband, and as soon as he goes to attend to his political duties she rushes to think of her incipient illicit loves. Her frantic monologue during the night watch is rife with wild antitheses. At the end magic erupts as, from a trapdoor, the Elizabethan trapdoor, there rise her friar 25

We must be conscious that Tamora, a name that echoes Tamyra, is the Queen of the Goths in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a play presenting an evident connection with Chapman’s for the many variations on the theme of the means of writing and communication (see Volume 2, § 24.5): in Chapman’s tragedy a letter to Tamyra is written with his blood by her suitor Barrisor, and in turn Montsurry compels his wife to write one with her blood in the epilogue. 26 That virginity and chastity are mere words is also observed by Mosbie in Arden of Feversham.

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confessor and Bussy, and Tamyra trembles with self-loathing but wallows in her temptation. The friar, a Catholic friar of course, is perhaps the true villain of the whole play: with glorious casuistry he admits, and makes his protégés morally admit, that the rage of senses cannot be tamed and must be, à la Burton, seconded.27 3. At the beginning of Act III a fade-out gives us to understand that the night meeting has ended in seduction and sex, and the two lovers comment on it onstage. Shortly before Tamyra perceived that somebody was looking from above; Bussy imprudently replies that this sin is really non-existent because only three people are in the know. His monologue holds forth the axiom running through the whole play, that man is ‘dust’ lit up by sunbeams, that he has only a minimum of moral strength and is doomed, as in Calvin’s view, to sin. It is astonishing that soon after Tamyra can unsay what she has said, when the morning brings back the husband absent through the night. In the subsequent court assembly it becomes clear that the main protagonists incorrigibly find themselves asserting the opposite of what they do and have just done. Bussy too must aggrandize his inexistent moral stature of fighter, like an eagle or an Atlas, against flattery and lies. The king has by now baptized him a primeval spirit of resistance to tyranny, a living demonstration that impartial nature would not yield to partial fortune and competing avarice. Montsurry is fatally seized with jealousy and doubts the chastity of his wife. Here begins the worst and shakiest part of the play, with the conflict, too long and excessively filled with magic effects, between ghosts subservient to one and the other faction, the plotters and the spied upon, and ghosts evoked with dog-Latin formulas. On the one hand the cuckolded husband by dint of Senecan dagger-strokes compels his wife to write, with blood pouring from her wounds, a letter to fetch her lover; on the other Bussy is lured by a disguised person to a mortal ambush. The final admission of the two survivors, Montsurry and Tamyra, is in seeing this as the example of an upside-down, perverted, degenerate world. 4. The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (published in 1613, after the two parts of Byron) has as its background the lurid gleams of St Bartholomew’s 27

See Pagnini 1957, 174, 183.

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night. It shows France orphaned of a genuinely great man, Bussy, whom two brothers and a sister yearn to revenge; while a few honest courtiers see it declined from a past when justice and honour prevailed. A formal challenge to a duel made by Bussy’s brother, Clermont, is rejected by Montsurry, and this initial event shows that Clermont is a very different man from Bussy, a thinking hero and a cunctator, more circumspect and less brazen than his brother, above all more of a philosopher. The analogy with Hamlet consists not so much in the belated apparition of Bussy’s ghost (in Act V), as in the temporizing of Clermont, whose too evident pedantry risks becoming a target for satire. Hamlet is no stoic; at most he is a cynic. The action is continually put off by learned debates stressing the contrast between stoicism and sophistic, Machiavellian expediency. Bussy’s shadow re-enters the scene with the dark, turgid, Gothic metaphors of the previous drama, whereas before the characters’ diction was very plain and unassuming. § 114. Chapman V: The stoic hero After Bussy nothing imperishable came from Chapman’s tragic pen, and the plays that follow give the impression of one chewing the cud with ineffable prolixity, though they rise now and then to a good metaphor, an expressive turn of phrase or a verbal quirk. Recent French history furnished the subject of another diptych, the first part of which is The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608). This ambassador of the king to the European courts represents France’s new Atlas, the deliverer and pacifier of a disordered state, more exactly a utopian, lonely hero pitting himself against conspiracies and machinations, and hence also a naïve hero, easily falling into the traps set for him. Byron’s pride is wounded on hearing (from the conspiring villain La Fin, re-baptized La Fiend) that the king is jealous of his deeds and denies he gained him a victory. But the drama is already flagging and wearisome in delineating intrigues with no coup de théâtre or scenic contrast – save only when suddenly a touch of magic appears, and Byron goes incognito to an astrologer to inquire about his future. The good man, much unlike Shakespeare’s witches, is so reticent that he makes disguised Byron tremble, and repent of what he has done. Byron foresees his fate, but as a humanist he trusts in man’s power to subvert predestination, to challenge and change destiny. Back from

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England he stands in direct rivalry against the king who accuses him of treason. He yields, and the play comes to a happy end, to re-open again as a tragedy in The Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron. The king finally holds by the law, and has Byron tried, instead of simply ordering his execution. Byron’s self-defensive harangue is unbearably long. In his cell he allows his heroic nature to flash out in extremis. 2. The Tragedy of Chabot Admiral of France, dated between 1611 and 1622 and published in 1639, the last play drawing on French history, was written by Chapman in collaboration with Shirley, without becoming by that means either shorter or livelier. The pattern is not changed, and an upright servant of a state in a corrupt court is suspected, on the hint of a jealous minister, of conspiring against the king. Investigations prove nothing, and as in Byron the play closes with a trial – largely written in prose, with a few jibes at Latinate legal verbosity – and a verdict condemning Chabot, who stoically refuses the king’s pardon, since accepting it (IV.236–7) would mean acknowledging himself guilty. Caesar and Pompey, printed in 1631, may have been written either in 1612–1613 or at much earlier period, as witnessed by obvious dramatic weaknesses combined with internal allusions to events between 1590 and 1600. Dating it is not futile, for if one accepts the second hypothesis this play, possibly never performed, would be one of the sources of Shakespeare’s two Caesarean plays instead of the other way round. Here the classical antagonism, as in Plutarch and Lucan, becomes a triadic conflict with Cato the Younger taking the role of co-protagonist. However the play, whether prior to or later than the French tragedies, flagrantly changes the approach to the subject, focusing on a dualism, what is at stake being absolute tyrannical power. Like all Englishmen, Chapman favours Pompey, but the real hero is Cato of Utica, who stoically receives and ponders Caesar’s flattering bribes and rejects them. Little can be saved of a play, stippled with loose harangues in Chapman’s usual ‘grand style’.28 28

Wieler 1949, 164–5, wonders at this conspicuous variation, arguing – with the same specious reasons as could be, and have been, used to demolish Hamlet – that the tragedy of a stoic, and built on a stoic, would have denied ipso facto the principle of tragedy, that is, action; and, more reasonably, that the stoic apology of self-murder was contrary to Christian doctrine. Rees 1969, 145, recalls instead Dante’s precedent in Purg., I. On Donne’s condoning suicide, see § 74.2.

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§ 115. Jonson* I: Construction and deconstruction of Jonson’s classicism161 Perusing nearly four centuries of a history of taste, we realize that Ben Jonson (1572–1637) has never had a ‘grand elector’, that is, an authoritative 1

* Works, ed. C. H. Herford and E. M. Simpson, 12 vols, Oxford 1925–1952 (vol. I is a biography by the editors); The Yale Ben Jonson, ed. A. P. Kernan and R. B. Young, New Haven, CT 1962–1971, in 3 vols of which one is Complete Masques, ed. S. Orgel (1969); both are now replaced by Works, ed. D. Bevington, M. Butler, I. Donaldson, 7 vols, Cambridge 2012. Complete commented editions of the poetry ed. W. B. Hunter, New York 1963; ed. G. Parfitt, Harmondsworth 1975 and, rev., 1988 (from which I shall quote; this edition contains in appendixes Timber and the conversations with Drummond). Masques, ed. A. Amato, 2 vols, Roma 1966, is a collection of twenty-eight masques with introduction and notes, a masterpiece of Italian scholarship produced under the wings of Benvenuto Cellini. Volpone’s fortune in Italy is witnessed by various translations with commentary, among them the ones edited by M. Praz and A. Lombardo, Milano 2005 (with Praz’s sparkling introduction), and by F. and F. Marenco, Venezia 2003 (with a general, very informative overview). Life. M. Chute, Ben Jonson of Westminster, London 1954; R. Miles, Ben Jonson: His Life and Work, London 1986; D. Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life, Cambridge, MA and London 1989; W. D. Kay, Ben Johnson: A Literary Life, Basingstoke 1995; I. Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life, Oxford 2011. Criticism. A. C. Swinburne, Study of Ben Jonson, London 1889; M. Castelain, B. Jonson: l’Homme et l’Œuvre, Paris 1907; G. G. Smith, Ben Jonson, London 1919 (in the same year it elicited T. S. Eliot’s essay [ESE, 147–60]); J. Palmer, Ben Jonson, London 1934; L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, London 1937; G. E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputation in the Seventeenth Century Compared, Chicago 1945; G. B. Johnston, Ben Jonson: Poet, New York 1945; E. B. Partridge, The Broken Compass: A Study of the Major Comedies of Ben Jonson, London 1958; J. B. Bamborough, Ben Jonson, London 1959, and Ben Jonson, London 1970; J. A. Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, Cambridge, MA 1960, and, as editor, Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1963, and Volpone: A Casebook, London 1972; W. Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems: a Study of the Plain Style, Stanford, CA 1962; S. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, Cambridge, MA 1965; G. Capone, Ben Jonson: l’iconologia verbale come strategia di commedia, Bologna 1969; G. B. Jackson, Vision and Judgment in Ben Jonson’s Drama, New Haven, CT and London 1968; J. G. Nichols, The Poetry of Ben Jonson, London 1969; J. A. Briant, The Compassionate Satirist: Ben Jonson and His Imperfect World, Athens, GA 1972; Ben Jonson, ed. A. Lombardo, Roma 1979; Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. C. J. Summers and T.-L. Pebworth, Pittsburgh, PA 1982; A. Barton,

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apologist, an ambassador ready to swear by him. On the contrary, influential literary dictators of various periods have been reticent or absentminded in his regard, or, if they have spoken of him, they have expressed stern reserves and perplexities, although mixed with some dutiful acknowledgements.2 Only very recently has criticism remedied these errors and tried to make amends, asking indulgence for an author after all second only to Shakespeare in his time. Anyone seeking reasons for this coldness finds only two or maybe three of them, repeated: Jonson lacks ‘charm’, and not only he does not love any of his characters, he treats them all without compassion – indeed, he simply loathes them; in particular, he cannot convincingly portray a woman – it is a euphemism to say that he is misogynous, even callously anti-feminist. Critical studies on him are not very numerous, nor particularly brilliant, but rather weak and inconsistent; no first-rate general scholar has dealt with him; and on theatrical posters his name is seldom seen.3 Coming to details, in 1616 Jonson unquestionably 1



Ben Jonson, Dramatist, Cambridge 1984; K. E. Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind, Princeton, NJ 1984; S. J. Van Den Berg, The Action of Ben Jonson’s Poetry, Newark, DE 1987; R. N. Watson, Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies, Cambridge, MA 1987; R. C. Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, Lewisburg, PA 1989, and Jonson and the Contexts of His Time, Lewisburg, PA 1994; CRHE 1599–1798, ed. D. H. Craig, London 1990; R. Miles, Ben Jonson: His Craft and Art, London 1990; R. Mullini, ‘Volpone’ di Ben Jonson: la teatralità della simulazione, Pisa 1990; New Perspectives on Ben Jonson, ed. J. Hirsch, Madison, WI 1997; L. Tosi, Comunicazione e aggressione. Strategie di violenza e stati di contesa nelle commedie di Ben Jonson, Bologna 1998; The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. R. Harp and S. Stewart, Cambridge 2000; Ben Jonson, ed. H. Bloom, New York 2001; J. Loxley, The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson, London 2002.

1

Here, between Chapman and Jonson, the discussion of Shakespeare’s poetry and drama, and the whole content of Volume 2, finds its place. Palgrave’s famous anthology contains only three poems by Jonson, one of them, in fact, only a stanza taken from a longer ode. Jonson’s drama is largely made for reading, and at least two of his masterpieces are linguistic tours de force, graced with a network of puns that, as the most ‘linguistic’ of Shakespeare’s plays, put very arduous problems to translators; a third reason for Jonson’s relatively scant fame outside England is that his plays give too much resonance to contemporary polemics now quite irrelevant. The end-of-century ‘war of

2 3

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reigned on the stage, owing to his success as the author of masques and to the unconditional favour of James I, as long as he worked in close partnership with the scene designer Inigo Jones; as a pure playwright he was already decaying, and his last plays had a colder reception. So, when Charles I came to the throne he was in his decline, relatively poor, and also sickly. In Westminster, significantly, he was merely buried, the stone on his grave bearing a celebrated epigraph which was carved by a stonecutter for a few odd coins. Ben Jonson’s ‘rarity’ mainly referred to his poetry, for while he still lived a group of adepts was formed who proclaimed themselves his sons and were called ‘Cavalier poets’. They wrote in an epigrammatic vein shorn of imagery, scrupulously abstained from wit and competed for primacy with the followers of Donne, the other poetic leader.4 To say that Dryden, in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, was unfair to Jonson is misleading: he sets him immediately after Shakespeare, but what impressed people most was that he announced to the world, ‘I admire [ Jonson], but I love Shakespeare’. Dryden regularly cites Jonson as an example of obedience to the good structural laws of ancient comedy. A special section devoted to Jonson in that essay is followed by a detailed analysis of Epicoene, certainly Jonson’s most regular and classical play. When the importance of drama abated, Jonson’s influence became transversal, in that it extended to late eighteenth-century novelists and Victorian sketch-writers, most clearly to Dickens (another comedy writer, in a sense). Indeed Jonson can boast a gallery of immortal types and grotesques that, like Sam Weller and Captain Cuttle, go arm in arm with their idioms (captain Bobadil with his oath ‘by Pharaoh’s foot’, Justice Overdo with his ‘enormities’, or foolish Troubleall with his eternal antiphony of the ‘warrant’). They are grotesques that – as in Dickens, who will adopt this stylistic feature – are

4

the theatres’ aroused passionate attention at the time, but today it can hardly excite us. In 1638 these ‘sons’ published the thirty-three elegies of Jonsonus Virbius (in Latin mythology Virbius is the equivalent of Hyppolitus, the man Aesculapius brought back to life). A ‘son of Ben’ can also be termed the minor comedy writer Richard Brome (ca. 1590-ca. 1652), who after collaborating practically with everyone – from Dekker to Heywood – in 1638 authored, alone, The Antipodes, on the contemporary mania for the literature of travel, and in 1641, just before the curtain fell, the blandly satirical A Jovial Crew, or the Jolly Beggars.

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given colourful, self-revealing names. In 1889 Swinburne summed up the whole history of Jonson’s reception and gave him, so to speak, his death blow, slating his apprenticeship, calling him an incompetent, indeed terrible translator, questioning the worth of his poems, especially the religious ones, and only disagreeing with Dryden by sparing a late play and passing an enthusiastic judgement on the prose of Discoveries. But what about the modernist and imagist early twentieth century? Was not Jonson an anticipator or an inspirer when writers reacted to the vague, exotic, turgid language of the Romantics, consequently calling for a dry, virile, concrete poetry? Anyone who opens T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay on Jonson can hardly believe such an explicit, icy beginning, and the impression is not modified by the following pages. The time was not yet ripe for revaluating Jonson. Some of his apprentice plays, and especially the last, show that Jonson is also, or partly, a romance playwright, or a forerunner of the twentiethcentury ‘fantastic’ or the absurd. Cynthia’s Revels and especially The Devil is An Ass, though in themselves unexceptional, seem to have sprung out of flashes of inspiration or even fiery hallucinations, thus precociously forerunning that later genre. 2. With Jonson we soon realize we are facing the paradox of an instinctual, immoderate, stormy temperament prone to rapture, and nevertheless yearning for, articulating and proclaiming the first self-conscious English literary theory and classically minded series of precepts, ipso facto privileging balance and a harmony of forms gradually brought to perfection. In the opinion of many historiographers this programmatic classicism pervades, informs and moulds his dramatic and poetic work, and Jonson is the first English classicist. Now the question is to what extent this label applies; and if something, even a mere remnant, of romantic rebelliousness penetrates and undermines his work. Are Jonson’s comedies really classical, at least some of them? Is not classicism a goal, or rather an asymptote? Besides, if we talk about a ‘classic’, we should place it against its antagonist, ‘romantic’; but both terms did not then exist in a real historiographic sense; unless we call ‘romantic ante litteram’ – owing to some of its components – the conceits and the Metaphysical stylistic features of Donne and his followers. Let us remember that Jonson disliked the earlier, so-called ‘romantic’ comedy. Jonson’s second or secret soul has been from

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time to time identified by the occasional shrewd critic, but in general it has been overlooked. For G. Gregory Smith it was futile to wonder ‘whether Jonson was a transformed romantic or one blocked in his development, or a classicist born outside his time’,5 but he did ask the question. We catch Mario Praz fostering a misunderstanding, or at least choosing a shortcut: starting his essay on Jonson and Italy he presents a dramatist enamoured of classical models to the point of pedantry, and condescendingly sets aside Boas’s remark that enrolled Jonson, with Marlowe and others, among the Elizabethan ‘giants’.6 Aldous Huxley once wrote that Jonson ‘could have been a great romantic, one of the sublime inebriates’.7 Jonson’s preaching that the literary work had a long ponderous gestation, that it reached perfection after much labor, is alien to his temperament, and this is just strange. Nothing prevents an erudite that has the classics by heart from living a passionate life. For this very reason Jonson’s opposite pole, Marlowe, could be, indeed is, a classicist, since he too had the classics at his fingertips. Contradictions and doubts arise instead when one finds those precepts practically transgressed, or undermined. 3. Jonson is unquestionably the first Englishman alert to the modern concept of the author’s status, as is evident from the two editions of his opera omnia, the first edited by him in 1616.8 He was also the second, after Sidney, to draft and discuss a Weltanschauung, namely an almost complete cultural foundation such as is drawn up in Timber,9 a nearly 360° overview of the arts, literature, psychology, religion, sociology, ethics and politics. Organized in the form of a dictionary (one cannot fail to see him as a precursor of Diderot), though not in alphabetical order, with Latin headwords followed by entries of various lengths, Timber shows that Jonson is

5 6 7 8 9

Smith 1919, 295. PMI, 195. Quoted by R. McDonald, in Harp and Stewart 2000, 113. The term Works caused a stir, for up to then it was used only for philosophical, theological or scientific treatises. But exactly in this way was Jonson the first to raise the dignity of theatrical work. A compilation largely drawn from a variety of classical sources, but indeed reasoned.

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a centrist. This text is a handbook of moralia, minima and maxima, rather like a sequel to Boethius or a résumé of Elyot. Its theory of state is explicitly anti-Machiavellian. A prince is praised for honesty, uprightness, clemency and prudence. The dramatist’s personal style emerges in his attacks against cosmetics and his scorn of fashionable affectations. Jonson’s dramatic aesthetics is set out in this handbook and especially in the epigraphs to his comedies. In Every Man out of His Humour he follows Cicero in calling drama imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis. He just as often remembers, like Horace, that he must delectare while teaching, or chastise mores ridendo. It is not surprising, then, that his plots are derived and adapted from the Greek-Latin comic repertory. The productive chain of literary art is modelled on Quintilian and goes from inventio to tractatio, always in company with and with the help of imitation of the best Latin authors. Poems and dramas can be said to be finished only after they have been subjected to a careful labor limae, and in composing there is no worse enemy than indulging in rapture. Literary language should always be mingled with contemporary words and avoid showy archaisms; abstruseness, obscurity and gratuitous idiosyncrasies are banned. Such directives, which sound also like antidotes to metaphysical conceits, herald Dryden and Pope’s aesthetics, especially in praising a ‘strict, concise style’, clearness and perspicuity. In his dramatic practice Jonson’s classicism takes on fixed forms and formulas. It is usually thought that the first group of comedies is divided from the major ones by two tragedies; and that there is a fourth group of ‘later comedies’. In point of fact, in his forty-year career there are very few signs of evolution. Between Jonson’s first and last play there is less formal difference than between Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Tempest. Moreover Jonson always keeps his rough drafts and provisional versions secret, presenting only the finished product. For instance, he uses only the structure in five acts and several scenes, and all plays have nearly the same size, slightly longer than the standard. The classical Jonson differs from romantic Shakespeare by naturally keeping to a given measure, a measure seemingly tested by the clock in order that his plays may last the same time when read or performed, without the capricious difference shown by the Bard’s long and short dramas. Jonson’s last play alone is in three acts, but they are accomplished and chiselled, with no fragmentary

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sketchy additions.10 Some escalation, however, can be perceived. Initially Jonson plans unified, if never skeletal plots, for instance never centred, as with Marlowe, on a great character standing above all others; his plots are choral, with many co-protagonists and secondary figures. The representative character stands apart, hardly visible. A gradual tendency to have too many protagonists results in – or is caused by – a plot that becomes more complex, convoluted and fragmentary. Jonson’s mature and late plays never give the idea of being carved in marble, with Shakespeare’s divinely inspired chisel; they rather look like Byzantine mosaics. As a consequence it is difficult for the reader to familiarize with his plots, and once he has managed this, he is faced with another change. So he ends by finding them looser than those of contemporary dramatists, and often unduly laborious. 4. The next step is the rather easy temptation to deconstruct our author. Jonson, with his licensed rascals and unscrupulous swindlers, was an exorcist, since they were the dark face of his split personality. On the one hand he could not condemn them (hence his occasional indulgence), and on the other he did so, only to challenge himself. Thus he practically admired them. Adapting Dryden’s well-known image, we might say that Jonson, far from being an objective author, ‘invades’ the play ‘like a monarch’ or a conqueror. He makes it subjective, a field where his inner grievances are transfused and gravitate. In every play, one Jonson sympathizes with a would-be, confused, sometimes dilettantish and dwarfish Titan; another Jonson puts him on trial, but at times also lightens the sentence or even absolves him. His mocking scoundrels are his ambiguous versions of Marlowe’s Faustism.11 Criticism of mediocre men implies praise of true Titans; he damns the poetaster, but exalts the Poet. Jonson’s Roman tragedies, in particular, centre on the Elizabethan archetype of hubris defeated. 10

11

Twice completed with the two lacking acts, in 1783 and 1935, was The Sad Shepherd, a pastoral comedy of 1637, mostly in rhymed couplets. It knits the traditional story of Robin Hood and Maid Marian with that of shepherd Aeglamour mourning his beloved Earine, kidnapped by the witch Maudlin, a stage-manager of illusions and enchantments. Jonson had never written before anything like this comedy, praised (in my opinion more than it deserves) by nearly all critics. This analogy is well caught in T. S. Eliot’s essay on Jonson in ESE, 154.

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The playwright’s recurrent target is the class of young men ‘studying’ how to be admitted to court, learning and aping a series of petty, risible precepts. This is why Jonson often portrays the master of etiquette who teaches the would-be courtier good manners, or the sword-man’s thrusts, or the terms of fashion and cosmetics. Jonson, in short, is the castigator of fads, and of all the far less harmless forms of manic obsession, or ‘humours’.12 But in his masterpieces the action moves on by introducing two or three shady characters, or even simple pranksters, who organize some scam or other, and then in separate and quite distinct scenes lure a series of fools into their net; thus the action is made up of a number of rip-off attempts, all doomed to failure. Biographers tell us that in Jonson there were, together or in succession, various mutable personalities: the bricklayer, soldier, player, author, murderer, ladies’ man and long-distance walker. He also often played at being a crook, and passed himself off as an astrologer, a kind of alchemist, to make fun of credulous people.13 In Swinburne’s opinion he tried at all costs to excel himself, and was unjustified in his contempt for the ruinous decay of the theatre, seeing that an author like Shakespeare existed; his admiration for the Bard was ‘this side idolatry’, with an obvious shade of regret for not being himself, instead of merely a writer for his time, one for all ages, immortal.14 People suffering from inferiority complexes are in desperate need of more or less imaginary foes. Jonson’s life was full of such battles. For instance, he collaborated with those he had recently abused; in private he fired slanderous attacks at his colleagues as if bent on destroying them. Cruel to his peers, he was mild with those he acknowledged his betters – Shakespeare, Donne – and flattered them. Shakespeare he often weighed with two measures: in prose he underlined his virtues but especially his defects, but did not do so in the ode placed

In such cases he harks back, like Burton, to Latin furor or insania, or melancholy ecstasy (‘ex malinchonico evadit fanaticus’). 13 Chute 1954, 178. 14 Humorousness, unbalance, crazy hallucinatory states, melancholy and a certain hypochondria à la Oblomov were stressed by Romantic historians, as for example Taine. Edmund Wilson completed the portrait of a person blocked at the erotic-anal stage in an essay in The Triple Thinkers, New York 1948. 12

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at the beginning of the 1623 Shakespearean Folio. The ‘war of the theatres’ masks his need to disguise himself, deride, and criticize, and his dismay at having to be and appear an eternal second. Religious faith is perhaps the most sensitive thermometer of these oscillations. Born a Protestant, in prison he converted to Catholicism, and afterwards converted back again.15 It is a rather normal schizoid parabola, and it stresses Jonson’s irresoluteness, or maybe his tendency to catch fire suddenly and then to cool. He is not an atheist like Marlowe, far from it; his sincere, candid faith in God is never in doubt, and he manifests it also in a section of devotional poetry in Underwoods. A professed defender of medietas, he attacks fanaticism and every kind of enthusiasm even in religious matters, condemning that extreme form of Protestantism, Puritanism, with its manias, its obsessive language and its rituals. He always manages to achieve and preserve classical balance masking the effort, and as if repeatedly reminding himself of the norms that are transgressed. The lyric ‘Epode’ analyses the divergence between instinct and reason trying to forbid temptation to enter the heart, although erotic passion should not be mistaken for pure wild flame. Here Jonson enunciates his most complete theory of human psychology.16 In elegy XXXVII of the miscellanies he admits the possibly inadequate ability to resist temporary passions.17 5. Thus Jonson, the promoter of a meditated, phlegmatic art and of a theatre following rules, proves a different author when read carefully. Critics abound in praises of the classical compactness of his plots, not realizing how dynamic they are, unstable, jolting, indeed uncontrollable in some cases. So it is wrong to see him as a driver impassively holding the reins, while the horses blindly obey him. The metaphor of the good play like a ball of silk thread unwound the right way to avoid it becoming tangled must be read contrariwise: what happens on stage is precisely the entangling of threads. This appears from the persistence of confusion up to the last moment. The forces of disorder seem to prevail, and Jonson hesitates 15 16 17

Indeed, he may have become again a Catholic in his last years (Harp and Stewart 2000, 10). You can opt for chastity out of fear of sin, and here the will is involved. Parfitt 1988, 173–6.

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to tame them, nostalgic for the chaos they produce, which he loves to see still irresistibly exploding. Jonson the classicist seems to bow to Sidney’s law because his comedies keep to the unities, do not shift from one setting to another, and do not extend their geography infinitely, nor create sudden subversions, but are governed by identity of place. Yet in the developing plot there are inserted a number of minor, parallel or converging ones, and their criss-crossing produces a chaos that, instead of abating, bursts out with unbelievable force. A few lines from the end the reader cannot yet guess how the author will resolve and placate the chaos he has created, how he can possibly conclude the play smoothly and tie all the loose ends. Only now does a demand for order regularly descend – an ethical, moral, or even positively legal order – to assert a form of intelligibility and ensure a return to the status quo. To the source of disorder, often the cunning servant whose action is quite visible at least in the masterpieces, the playwright grants the strange indulgence he has him proclaim, because, though a licensed scoundrel, he leaves the field unhurt thanks to his intelligently devised stratagems, tricks and disguises. These non-linear, concentric developments, demonstrate a dramatic aesthetic peculiar to Jonson, and make Bartholomew Fair his unattainable masterpiece: a theatre of sub-communities enclosed in a labyrinth, sunk into a dreamlike, surreal adventure, acting and moving in a sort of drunkenness or trance; a theatre au ralenti, piétinant sur place, where the links between the acts dissolve and dematerialize; a theatre of self-sufficient, unconnected elements, looking ahead to Shaw’s Heartbreak House and Barrie’s Dear Brutus. This search for new forms revaluates the often criticized Every Man out of His Humour thanks to the presence on stage of a ghost of the author, a ghost inside and outside the play, and also of various critics whose insinuating voices debate on the virtues and defects of those very plays. 6. All this is confirmed by the quantity of avant-textes and para-textes that normally come with Jonson’s plays: dedicatory letters, arguments, double and even triple prologues, above all ‘inductions’: in short, diaphragms before the curtain rises. These parts have a mimetic time-role, occurring between the ‘second’ and ‘third’ bell announcing the beginning of the play itself. This proves that Jonson cares about the correct way of addressing his audience and testing their real comprehension. Once more

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he acts the opposite way to Shakespeare, who never added a word of comment and therefore should be considered the true classicist, whereas Jonson actually corrupts and weakens the very principle of dramatic objectivity. We see him habitually thrust into the dramatic action external figures with the role of mouthpieces, to comment on and explain the play from the inside; at other times provide synopses in his name. Not content with the syntagmatics, he gives us paradigms of his characters, in the shape of psychosomatic descriptions and a case history. After his golden period, Jonson turned his prologues into soundboards to increase his fame and glory; he quotes himself by name in his plays, has the prologue-writers describe and historicize his career; even transcribes in his last drama an epigram that one character ascribes to Jonson himself. § 116. Jonson II: The comedies of ‘humours’ Jonson’s family18 came from the same area of Scotland where Carlyle, another flamboyant user of words and extravagant moralist, was to be born.19 Jonson’s father (an Anglican priest) died a month before Jonson was born, and his mother married a master-builder, one Brett, who lived in Charing Cross, London. At Westminster School, where he was enrolled thanks to an anonymous benefactor, as in a novel by Dickens, Jonson had for a tutor the learned William Camden, who taught him most of his Greek and Latin. As an adolescent, he was a bricklayer’s assistant, and without attending university went as a soldier to the Netherlands, where he boasted he had challenged and killed an enemy in duel. Back home he married, had two children who died in infancy and others who survived; but he married too young and too imprudently, and confessed to Drummond that his wife was ‘shrewish, though honest’, and very soon they lived virtually apart (in 1623, perhaps a widower, Jonson married another time). In the mid-1590s he was already employed and engaged in the theatrical world, for he was connected with the impresario Henslowe, collaborated with other 18 19

Biographical data were first derived from his conversations with the Scottish poet Drummond of Hawthornden. The language of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, the Puritan of Bartholomew Fair, is very like Carlyle’s.

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dramatists, and acted central roles in the most popular plays. We probably have reason to regret the loss of important works, if it is true that Meres included him in his famous catalogue as one of the best dramatists, though in ‘tragedy’. The quarrelsome Jonson very soon was guilty of killing in duel, although in self-defence, the actor Gabriel Spencer. Saved from hanging by a legal quirk (‘benefit of clergy’, that is, ability to write), in prison, persuaded by a Jesuit, he converted to Catholicism. Twelve years later he was again an Anglican. When he was released from prison the initial of the prison’s name, T, was marked with fire on his left thumb. A lost play written with Nashe had as its recognizable satiric target an important personage, and Jonson – but not Nashe – was again imprisoned for a time. His first play for the Admiral’s Men in 1598 may have been commissioned thanks to Shakespeare, who acted in it. But previously Jonson had re-elaborated Plautine models in The Case is Altered20 (1597–1598 and 1609). 21 Some relevant data of Jonson’s spiritual biography emerge in this play, which is set in Milan but obeys the fixed formula of the English comedy of the 1590s, for a son has lost his father, and a miser, a first sketch of Volpone, is madly in love with his wealth (the scene of the old man hiding his gold beneath horse-muck is surreal, albeit expected). The cast of characters is a rich mosaic of comical English and pseudo-Italian names, conspicuous among them that of a Count Ferneze, already used by Marston in a coeval play. Paulo, the count’s son, goes to the war entrusting his beloved Rachel, a beggar’s daughter, to his friend Angelo. But the beggar is the disguised former steward of a French lord whose newborn daughter he has kidnapped, also robbing him of his treasure and, apparently, trying to seduce his wife. Act II reveals Jonson’s endemic vice of filling a slight plot with dilatory incidental scenes, which at any rate turn the spectator’s attention to events and people of the present. In Act III three wooers besiege Rachel,

20 The title copied the proverbial phrase of a famous lawyer, who thereby justified a stronger defence of his client, and the higher fee requested. The motto recurs in the play like a refrain, commenting the many agnitions. For its re-use in Jonson’s comedies, see § 118.3. 21 As usual, the dates between parentheses refer respectively to first performance and first printing.

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among them not only Angelo, whom Paulo had asked him to protect (and whose angelic name hides lust, its contrary, like that of his namesake in Shakespeare: what a lot of echoing names!), but also the count his father. Angelo’s diabolical cunning allures Rachel to a meeting under the pretext of seeing Paulo. Returning, Paulo himself prevents the rape. But from the war there also returns Camillo, Paulo’s long lost brother together with Rachel’s true father. The two scoundrels are exposed, but not before a daughter of the count’s – a mischievous detail – has discovered she was in love with her own brother. A Tale of a Tub,22 acted in 1633 and printed in the 1640 Folio, may have been the revision of a youthful work, unless the touch of archaism and the rather idiomatic cockney of the dialogue are an aged man’s parody. If it truly was a late repeat, then Jonson chose to vent his rancour on Inigo Jones, now his enemy, although the latter managed to have the more slanderous passages censured. In itself the action, a sort of frenzied cops and robbers game with a lot of characters, consists in the mutual tricks played by the suitors of fair Awdrey, who rejects all the others and marries a simple doorkeeper. The alter ego of Inigo Jones is the mocked squire Tub, and the wedding is solemnized by a masque, as in Cynthia’s Revels. 2. The text of the first performance of Every Man in His Humour,23 in which Shakespeare was an actor, was printed in 1601. It had a Florentine setting and characters with descriptive Italian names.24 In the second version of 1598, printed only in 1616, my text, the plot was transplanted to London but the transparently expressive onomastics was retained. Wellbred is antiphrastic because he is anything but ‘well-mannered’, but Downright is impeccably unbending; the deus ex machina Brainworm is literally a brainy worm, but a worm that in the end earns real approval. It is a pleasant

22

The title puns with the name of squire Tub, but the idiom alludes to an incoherent, nonsensical story. 23 The titles of this and the following comedy contain an implicit therapeutic metaphor. 24 The Italian topography has often been criticized as quite unlikely. Barton 1984 devotes an interesting chapter to Jonson’s ‘science of onomantia’, and to what she terms ‘charactonyms’ (chapter VIII, 170–93), and suggests that for them Jonson made use of Florio’s dictionary.

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comedy, gently satirizing fatuousness, credulity and human idiosyncrasies, rife with eccentric figures and fine witty dialogues, with a subplot that seems meant to make up for the slightness of the main plot, but cleverly intertwines with it. In this promising beginning of his theatrical career, Jonson already achieves a peak, before the four-part opus on which I shall expatiate. Borrowing a definition that applies to the twentieth-century novel, Jonson can be said to describe the daily life of a group of Elizabethan ‘bright young things’,25 a company of thoughtless, well-to-do lovers of literary life, ready to boast and drink too much, to indulge in the questionable vice of tobacco-smoking,26 and to engage in sexual affairs; above all, fond of making fun of aged people tied to a rigid and obsolete code of manners. He therefore adopted the classical Plautine pattern of the generation gap. In the first scene a father, already worried and prejudiced, somewhat bigoted and obsessed, orders a servant to follow and spy on his son when he goes to the London taverns to meet with his dissipated friends.27 The servant joins them, and there begins one of the myriad Jonsonian scenes where nothing happens but an incessant interchange of words, in total keeping, however, with the kind of language actually heard on such occasions. Prominent among these young men is Stephen, a clumsy, idiosyncratic type that the others continuously make fun of, because he is still a beginner in vice and in quick repartee; and also the self-styled captain Bobadil, who vainly tries to enchant onlookers with tales of his wonderful and totally invented feats as a swordsman, tales enriched with long lists of technical terms and comical, repeated interjections. One Matthew, instead, enthusiastically recites to increasingly indifferent listeners passages from his abominable poems. Thus Jonson, besides criticizing the fad of poetry as a frivolous business deprived of its high purposes, parodies and mocks celebrated, proverbial

25

Volume 8, entry ‘Bright young things’ in the Thematic index. The association with Huxley is made by Wilson, too, in the essay quoted above in n. 14. 26 In a rather peripheral gag a judge would have a frank and nice water-bearer (Cob, one of the freshest caricatures in the whole gallery) arrested for abusing the youths’ habit of smoking or ‘drinking’ tobacco. 27 Always, then, a righteous father, who somehow has ‘lost’ a son he believes to have deviated from ancient values, but will be reassured of his son’s uprightness.

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lines, even antonomasias, like Hieronimo’s garb in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. This dwelling on purely verbal skirmishes of the youths in the tavern could be considered just padding, or a flat interlude, but it actually meshes with the subplot and might even come to a tragic end. One Kitely is in fact struck as by lightning with jealousy, and believes that one of these ‘louts’, the fans of his own brother-in-law Wellbred, is courting his wife. In one very subtle scene the servant Brainworm swears secrecy to him with the words, or rather the same negating echoes, of St Peter (but the servant’s name is Thomas) in the Gospel scene in the Praetorium. Kitely is the proverbial self-styled cuckold, whose suspiciousness interprets every phrase the wrong way, and who is yet afraid to act and temporises. The play flows towards its conclusion through too many coups de théâtre, most of them devised and enacted by Brainworm, whose capacity for disguise is equalled only by all the others’ inability to recognize him and avoid deception. The epilogue is crowded with recognitions, the first of them Bobadil’s, who attempts to show his boasted swordsman’s prowess, and is easily outfenced in a duel. Edward Knowell, the only balanced, ironical young man, sincerely and disinterestedly courts the lively Bridget. For their part, the Kitely couple, each suspecting the other’s infidelity, go to a craftsman’s home thinking it a brothel and there, after a lively exchange of invectives, are made to realize their mistake.28 The denouement is set in motion in front of a bizarre judge, and at first no one understands what is happening. Brainworm, the chief organizer of all the intrigues, though he confesses to being a licensed scoundrel, is unexpectedly absolved, as a kind of acknowledgement to his cleverness. 3. Every Man out of His Humour (performed in 1599 and printed the next year) was at its time the highest example of a play by Jonson with the very slightest plot, existing merely as a pretext for hosting a gallery of the most different ‘humours’ in the category of courtiers. The very fact that the list of characters is, contrary to custom, completed by the playwright describing each of them in a couple of paragraphs, stresses 28

A similar scene is to be found in Marston (§ 109). It is not Brainworm, but the apparently depraved Wellbred – Kitely’s brother-in-law, the villain of the play – who sends the Kitely couple on this false path.

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the paradigmatic, non-syntagmatic nature of this play: a succession of self-sufficient, non-interacting scenes. This play therefore plods on, prolix and at times quite static, wearisome and boring. The only reason it keeps together instead of going to pieces is that the characters are related by blood – too loose a connection. The twinship with the earlier play – a sort of hendiadys or diptych – is that the hitherto benevolent playwright has lost his temper, gone splenetic, and wants to scourge, not forgive, as appears from the prologue that expounds, or fully defines and describes, Jonson’s theory of the four humours of which one prevails, and prevails on the others through the whole body. At the same time the pragmatic formula of the play is questioned, for one of its figures never really takes part in the action, has one foot in and one out of the plot, and is thus a hypostasis of the playwright commenting behind the wings.29 This is Macilente, the wise but melancholy, sceptical and rather resigned philosopher. With him there are two other mere observers, Cordatus and Mitis, who utter short comments between one scene and another. This unusual metatheatrical variant hints at a form of impotence: in this didactic prop of the play, Jonson speaks openly to any person unable to understand his intentions. The scene opens on an Elizabethan vanity fair, with a variety of meanings and facets including moral weakness, caprice, childishness and actually folly. In Act II the extremely foolish knight Puntarvolo comes into the limelight with his absurd mawkishness, his anachronistic and Quixotic aping of chivalry, together with the affected student Fungoso and the servile little husband of a fussy wife. Each character cuts out his or her own specific sketch, concluded by Macilente’s moralizing remark. In Act III a landowner thinks he will hang himself because it is not raining and he cannot speculate on his grain reserves, and is saved in extremis by the peasants he is starving (and once saved, he miraculously converts to neighbourliness). The following scenes are mere repetitions, only differing, if ever, in the unthinkable degree the various characters’ idiocy can reach. The final act reunites them all in

29 This Macilente is the spitting image of Jonson himself: ‘wanting that place in the world’s account which he thinks his merit capable of, falls into […] an envious apoplexy’.

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the palace of vain Lady Saviolina.30 Not even this time does Jonson give up his liking for confusion, when Macilente amuses himself to prevent, and even subvert, the partial return of orderliness. His brutality, however, manages to open the eyes of a few hypnotized and infatuated fellows (but not all). Macilente slides out of the plot, and from the limelight speaks to the spectators and draws the moral. In a later version he ascribed the recovered gladness to the presence of the queen in the playhouse. 4. The mirage of a virgin queen, a female Arthur able to unite around herself a court of chaste knights and establish a regimen of moral uprightness incessantly watched and strengthened, where every subject was under control and permanently educated, was, as we saw, a deeply felt aspiration and one of the most fertile myths related to the figure of Elizabeth. It was also an example of the Elizabethan double consciousness, for Spenser and Ralegh, who idealized Elizabeth as Cynthia, were the first to know that the court was a den of social climbers and a sink of corruption. Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1600–1601) is based on a far from bad idea: the two gods Cupid and Mercury, disguised, or appearing as invisible phantoms, are hot on the heels of some courtiers incessantly sporting their stupidity and fatuousness. However, the idea does not result in a tense dramatic plot, and only creates an unending stream of pointless chatter, let us call it a multilingual bedlam, especially in Act IV. It is a banquet of languages if ever there was one, enough to call this the peak of virtuosity among Jonson’s plays, but for the fact that most of them are just that. The clearest ‘humour’ common to all beaux, who dress up, fondly study how to deserve being admitted to court, and aspire to a lady’s hand, is egocentrism. The fable of Echo and Narcissus, very delicately evoked at the opening of the play, is the only symbolic link with it. After this scene come the various sessions, as if suspended in a surreal aura, where a group of foolish gallants and shrewder ladies, with transparently allegorical names, carry on weary verbal skirmishes just now and then enlivened by flashes of wit. The various Amorphous, Asotus and Prosaites are the stand-ins of the gallants, dawdlers, and dreamers of the two Humour plays. The growing effect is of nausea, a 30

There is a great ado relating to a little dog, knight Puntarvolo’s beloved pet, poisoned by disenchanted Macilente.

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planned effect, since the public must necessarily listen to tiresome, cloying talk.31 The author no less constantly sets alongside his characters a sort of vague critical conscience, the courtier Crites who comments on them, or decidedly criticizes them, addressing not them but the audience in the theatre. To relate the events in the central act would mean to evidence their blatant repetitiveness: a tissue of anonymous verbal exchanges, catechizing speeches, long wooing exercises, pastimes, and frivolous society games. Act V, instead, nearly as long as half the play, describes first the beaux’ wooing competition in court etiquette and the funny pantomimes it occasions. Cynthia’s role is above all that of giving the plot a dynamic turn, and of being the pivot of a script evidencing the courtiers’ inadequacy. If Crites is Jonson’s stand-in, Cynthia’s praise is a subtle and witty form of self-flattery: Jonson felt the queen approved him, or else he challenged her indirectly to do so. The play owes a lot to Arthurian verse poems, hybridized with the masque genre. The ladies sing praises and offer gifts to the queen, as do the men, in two symmetrical minuets; and Cynthia seals the scenic action issuing a little series of decrees for moral cleanliness. She turns Cupid away and gives prizes to Mercury and Crites; the aspiring courtiers will have to atone for their frivolity, and come back to court reformed. The last scene, with their ‘mea culpas’, is a parody of Catholic litanies. 5. These comedies are full of ambiguous shafts at the playwrights of Jonson’s time, and even today books and essays strive to identify the targets with no general consensus. These coded allusions bespeak, as I said, Jonson’s immense pride and unwillingness to bow to anybody. What is he doing in short, in The Poetaster (1601–1602)? He turns into romance a single piece of Roman literary history, mixing reality, fiction and outrageous farce, like Dürrenmatt and Graves in the twentieth century; but his chief or only aim is to present the contemporary scene under this flimsy veil, and proudly describe himself as Ovid, Horace and finally Virgil, whose greatness is fully acknowledged by the Emperor Augustus. Notwithstanding this the whole play, with its invariably episodic structure, is hardly trenchant, though at times enlivened by comic gags. It is flat above all because in the worst cases

31

L. C. Knights (PGU, vol. II, 308) rightly reminds us that ‘the exhibition of tedious follies becomes itself tedious’.

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Jonson seems to be compelled to ask the reader to follow long tirades of dialogue that seem taken from life, but only loosely transferred on the page; except when the reader is brusquely awakened by a series of coups de théâtre. At the beginning Ovid is overwhelmed by his father’s request that he devote himself to the law, not to poetry; behind which we see the old dilemma of many Elizabethan would-be lawyers studying at the Inns, who in fact became poets and playwrights; but altogether this is a repetition of the apologia pro vita sua that Jonson, poet and dramatist, recites before his father’s hypostasis for having entered the dangerous dramatic arena. Act II shows a drawing-room scene where many Roman poets, real or imaginary, ape the future Elizabethan gallants in a similar milieu. Of course there are true poets and fake ones, poseurs. Jonson was afterwards to write dozens of such scenes, consisting of mere recorded chatter. From the nameless group rises one Crispinus who asks Horace how exactly one can become a poet. In a very long sequence Horace, with whom Jonson now identifies, finds it hard to get rid of the loquacious interloper, and then complains his satires have many enemies, but is encouraged not to stop writing them. One of the sketches that, as anticipated, remain unforgettable and proverbial occurs when Crispinus is given a pill that makes him vomit abstruse words and bizarre metaphors – that is, Marston’s most typical pedantries and arabesques. Augustus is interested in true poets, and Virgil comes in to read him a section of his poem, the burgeoning of love between Dido and Aeneas – an inspired reading, interrupted, with impressive scenic contrast, by the arrival of Horace’s clamouring accusers. The poetasters are scorned and publicly chastised, while good poetry receives the emperor’s imprimatur. As though this were not enough Jonson begins speaking directly against his own enemies, insisting that by shifting the scene to Rome he meant to show that all ages are corrupt; as well as to maintain the excellence of satirical poetry, first born in Greece. § 117. Jonson III: The Roman tragedies I believe it is feasible to suggest that if Jonson decided to pass from English comedy to Roman tragedy it was from a rankling ambition to emulate Shakespeare, who in 1599 had written Julius Caesar; and that he tried, so to speak, to thwart his older rival, now out of the running, and close the match with a second tragedy in 1611. Very astutely, Jonson of course

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did not make his challenge on the terrain, more congenial to Shakespeare, of the imaginative dramatic recreation of ancient sources, but chose to base his play on an accurate study of the latter, not subjectively interpreted but scrupulously documented. Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s historical contexts are totally different, though they nearly intersect in Catiline. But Jonson’s plays are always objective and at the same time subjective, owing to their intrinsic nature. Still, he works in the furrow first opened, and ploughed until a decade before, by Marlowe, on the theme, once more and even more obviously, of ‘apotheosis and nemesis’. In both cases the dramatist traces a very fast ascent to the peak of power, achieved by silencing every scruple and moral restraint, and then the quick fall. Jonson redoubles this plot, as the two protagonists are seized and possessed by a similar hubris, which is also divine because, as we know, the emperor was a divus. Sejanus His Fall was performed in 1603 with scant success, and found consensus mainly among the learned (addressees of the abundant notes referring to the classical sources); but it created a hubbub when it was printed in 1605, the year of the notorious Gunpowder Plot. Jonson was called to trial for apology of Catholicism and seditious activities, clearly from a presupposition that the remote episode of Roman history alluded to contemporary events – that the drama at once secretly mirrored, warned and dissuaded, at any rate referred to, a present threat. Did those who saw an apology of sedition or an attack on the king’s person grossly misinterpret Jonson’s intention, or were they misled by excessive prudence? Was Jonson speaking, between the lines, of the English court? Is every court a heinous den of conspirers? Is it not possible to find the same parallels, after all exhibited just before, in The Poetaster? And who was the Arruntius of the moment, the upright laudator temporis acti? Anyone who tries to answer such questions risks making awful mistakes. The official intention is dissuasion, reinforced by denounced and newly exposed scandal. There are two targets: Sejanus first, and then Tiberius himself, an example of moral weakness, culpable absentmindedness and turpitude. The drama is born of the contest between two corrupt men, but it does not end with order being re-established. Tiberius wins, but he knows perfectly well the extent of his corruption, which confirms that corruption is intrinsic and recurrent in human history, thus justifying Jonson’s deep discontent and his pessimism concerning history

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and nature, as Sejanus’ successor and Tiberius’ new right-hand man is a copy of him. There are no hints likely to confirm a hidden, veiled apology of corrupt Sejanus, apart from his courage and boldness in conceiving and supporting his dangerous personality cult. The fact remains that Jonson takes a risk in devoting so much space to this social climber, albeit in order to condemn him. The tragedy, entirely in verse, chastens the verbosity of Jonson’s comedies, but without overcoming the proverbial obstacle for all authors of history plays except Shakespeare: how to reduce to essentiality events covering a vast time span. This is a Senecan drama too, with long and well articulated declamatory speeches, horrific deeds happening onstage, and noble stoic suicides.32 But it is also a late Machiavellian, indeed antiMachiavellian drama, as always with the English. 2. Jonson divides his Roman characters into two groups: the corrupt, and the few who chorally denounce the ongoing oppression of liberties. As in all despotic regimes, the enemy of conscience is habit, or even blindness, since Tiberius seems a responsible monarch. Sejanus’ first action is a gesture of partiality, as he sells a tribune’s place in exchange for political support; he is striving to affirm his role as emperor’s counsellor and to climb the next steps. Doubtless the timorous flattering physician behaves according to the Elizabethan custom, not only promising the poison that will kill Drusus, but making up the widow’s face to render her more attractive. For Sejanus, inevitably destined to become a Machiavellian, adultery is the least wrong he could commit to reach his objective (‘All for a crown’). In the course of the purges Sejanus carries out for Tiberius, a historian’s books are burnt: an example of how every dictatorship first of all destroys the truth, diffusing and imposing the history the regime demands. When the zenith is reached, Sejanus’ gradual descent begins. Jonson’s pessimism indicates in the slave Macro the foil likely to repeat Sejanus’ ambition and corruption. Sejanus’s deposition is no good omen: his successor will be as savage as he, and the mob seized with madness appears soon after repentant and worried.

32

A Senecan moment occurs in Catiline when the conspirators drink wine mixed with the blood of a sacrificial victim, symptomatically a slave.

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3. Catiline, in 1611, was a return to tragedy after more comedies, and though it met with scant success the author considered it his best tragic work. In a way it resembles Marlowe’s plays in that it dramatizes irresolution: at the crucial moment Caesar encourages Catiline to be ‘resolute’, for he is indeed a man lacking determination, who needs to be prompted.33 Jonson’s two tragic heroes differ most in this respect, Sejanus being merely an ambitious man athirst for power, whereas Catiline is a wavering utopian, partially justified by his would-be aim of saving freedom from the threat of dictatorship, in a moment of inertia in law-making. But, Jonson being the author, Act II drops the reader into a gynaecium with an abruptly changed scene (and prosody too, for it is in mostly stichomythic prose), quite extraneous to the sources, at the end of which, after much dilatory meandering, an influential courtesan discovers the conspiracy and discloses it. Cicero is elected consul, and hearing of the conspiracy bitterly comments that the Roman republic is saved by a common whore, not from any patriotic spirit, but from her hot hatred for another courtesan. Act IV dramatizes the famous scene where Cicero attacks Catiline before the senate, with big chunks of his oration versified. Cicero is the main object of approval in this play, as a man able to conduct a calm, patient, if also partly Machiavellian negotiation;34 as to Catiline, he dies on the battlefield, faithful to the last to his ideas. § 118. Jonson IV: The tetralogy of tricksters I. ‘Volpone’ and ‘The Alchemist’ Spectators and critics of Jonson’s plays were the first to identify and define a quartet of comedies that, though not strictly chronologically related, are linked by theme, ideal and symbolic setting, common typology and variety of characters, so that they stand out from the others, according

33

It seems hardly deniable that in Act III, Scene 3, Jonson gives Caesar, when speaking to Catiline, a paraphrase or variation of Brutus’ soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (II.1.63–5): ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream’. 34 He indeed enrols a repentant conspirer, and placates the Allobroges eager to be exempted from a tribute, and though he knows of Caesar’s conniving with Catiline, grants him a pardon.

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to the general view, as the most admirable sub-group in Jonson’s whole canon. ‘Quartet’ or ‘tetralogy’ are simply convenient labels, for between one comedy and another came the tragedies, and their time of composition occupied as many as fifteen years; nor was a series planned, but the group came into being quite spontaneously. There are indeed many links and reduplications between one comedy and another, and variants and inverted parallelisms as well. The first three take place indoors, the fourth is en plein air, and not only lacks a protagonist, but is totally in prose. Presumably Jonson was dialoguing with himself, planning variants of the connecting thread. This connecting thread is human selfishness. But he did so with a series of digressions and of playful and reductive ironies, even turning the intoxicating yearning for riches into a nearly artistic form of self-exalting hubris. One can immediately see Volpone and Subtle as two stand-ins of Ben Jonson the dramatist, in their very skill in handling the thread for the pure pleasure of moving the various characters as they like. The human material in all four comedies is therefore neatly divided into exploiters and exploited, deceivers and deceived, the final punishment, however, inexorably falling on the scoundrels. Apart from this constant theme, one comedy has an Italian, three an English setting; but even in the first there is an English subplot, though marginal and vague.35 Jonson’s dexterity reaches its peak when, on two occasions out of four, the action follows a double track with a line of development which is manifest and a secret one which is hidden from the audience and so the more surprising when discovered – and, what is more, ignored by the very characters in the play. 2. With Volpone Jonson failed to move once more the setting of his drama from Italy to England; or rather, if he ever thought of so doing, he luckily abstained, for Volpone renders with perfect naturalness, in a

35

It concerns Sir Politic and his wife, an English couple of naïfs, filling with their mawkishness, their foolish gaffes and Firbank-like inconsistences, the gaps of the main plot; they seem to come straight from the previous ‘humour comedies’. Certainly they made the audience love the play with their hints and palpable allusions to English contemporary events.

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splendid, vivid lifelike way, the Venetian genius loci.36 Concerning this comedy performed in 1606 and printed in 1607, Jonson’s most proverbial and universally known to the general public even outside England, one of the first questions is what really sets the plot going, and what motivates Volpone’s plan for duping three other Venetians, who strive to oust one another from the role of his heir. Volpone will increase his assets with precious gifts repeatedly offered by his flatterers, who dream that in so doing they will gain an enormous fortune in exchange for small gifts. But Volpone makes a mistake in handling the scam, a fatally absent-minded oversight: he does not reckon on the fact that his accomplice, Mosca, feigning to play along with him, hides a card up his sleeve that makes him the third player in the game: at the right moment he will lead his master to feign death and to sign in his favour a will not merely formal, but legally valid. Mosca will think he has thus nailed Volpone and won the match, getting at least half of the whole fortune at stake. Poetic justice, at any rate an ethical minimum, forbade the scoundrel to escape unhurt: and the two scoundrels, together with the contemptible would-be heirs, expose one another. When the curtain falls they are punished by the law with penalties cleverly fitting their crimes. The question asked above involves no automatic reply. Volpone is a miser and by definition, as such, always and at every moment wants to increase his wealth; but the motive of his scam is also good old lust, Elizabethan Renaissance style. We realize this when he asks Corvino to bring him his beautiful, young, chaste wife, for him 36 Praz (PMI, 230ff.) quite rightly ascribes the exact references to Venice to the consultation of Florio’s Italian-English dictionary (and also to his ‘cicalate’ [‘chats’]). To sketch a summary history of nineteenth-century interpretations, I suggest these succeeding essential routes (broadly useful for all of Jonson’s dramas) linked to the evolution in taste, ideology and dramatic aesthetics: Volpone was first examined for its dense web of classical echoes and quotations, of which Praz made an insuperable catalogue in his notes to the play (Praz 2005); then the Freudian critics read it looking for symptoms to psychoanalyse the author by; Foucaultian Marxists saw it as a precocious parable of the ‘reification of the human’, centring on the relationship between literature and power (Marenco 2003, 37); for genre historians it conflated and coalesced motifs from folk tale and the commedia dell’arte; lastly, much has been made of its metatheatrical counterpoint.

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to enjoy. He is then moved not by desire for more riches but by a secret disgust, a need to vary his life with a gratifying diversion, the pleasures of the flesh. In this sense Volpone and Mosca, so long as they act together in perfect symbiosis, are directors and actors of a play within the play, engaged in a recital for each other’s entertainment. The means however are inferior to the end, as was very apparent in Marlowe’s drama of Faustus, for after all Volpone is unaware that his trickery is an end in itself, the demonstration of almost superhuman powers, and proof, once more, of man’s abject vileness: a spectacle of mankind’s purely animal status, and a summing up of human history as a grotesque, Aesopian fable. With Mosca it is quite another matter, for, as in a way like Sejanus, Volpone, too, is a contest with two players acting within another, bigger match. Indeed, Mosca is the ad sensum delayed protagonist, the arch-deceiver overtaking his co-rider on the run. If Volpone is a naïve, irresponsible demiurge, Mosca proves to be the real, calculating Machiavellian. 3. Volpone opens on a scene already seen, even a veritable quotation: Marlowe’s Barabas prostrate in a room, adoring his wealth. Volpone is not a Jew but wants to increase this wealth, not just to contemplate it; indeed, unless employed and invested, it could diminish. However, he is a wealthy bored man, or a bored wealthy man, keeping with him, as I said above, actors who enter and soon recite a grotesque mime whose subject is the same as the play’s, namely mankind’s bestial degeneration through Pythagorean soul transmigrations. Then, one after the other, three will-hunters arrive: Voltore, Corbaccio and Corvino. Indeed the one most duped is the second, lured by Volpone into making him his heir instead of his own son. It is a well-hatched hoax, for into the ear of deaf, dying Volpone – as Corbaccio is made to believe – Mosca pretends to shout a battery of invectives. But Act II loses momentum, and the disguise as an itinerant surgeon Volpone dresses in to show off is too long a tour de force. In that disguise he sees Corvino’s wife, covets her lauded beauty, and has her brought home to him. But meanwhile we enjoy the malicious satire of the jealous husband, Corvino, who like an eastern pasha keeps his bride hidden at home, closely watched by a guard, and harshly reproaches her casting her handkerchief to the false mountebank Volpone; but then, making an about-turn like a base Elizabethan villain, he holds forth on honour as a flatus vocis and

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prepares to prostitute her to Volpone so as to be named in his will. Mosca behaves as his master’s classic pander, but then he adopts and synchronizes two profitable moves that in the end neutralize each other. Just as Celia, Corvino’s wife, is in Volpone’s house and indignantly repels his embrace, Corbaccio’s son Bonario, called by Mosca, watches the shameful scene from his hiding place, and like a noble paladin rescues Celia from Volpone’s grasp. In a ramshackle trial Bonario is tried for attempted parricide, and Celia for unfaithfulness to her husband. The court summonses Volpone and immediately releases him as unquestionably impotent. The play seems about to end with the success of the hoax and the victory of all the rascals. At this point Volpone conceives the further prank that will be his ruin: he feigns death in order to enjoy a last sight, that of the ‘hunters’ hoaxed once and for all. The best scene is perhaps the third in Act V, when Mosca makes a careful inventory of the riches he has inherited, and Volpone disguised, being officially dead, gloats at what he believes a jest – a jest within a jest, thinks Volpone; but Mosca is in earnest. The news that Mosca is the heir amazes everybody, and is a thunderclap for the three who thought they would inherit. In the denouement ‘the case is reopened’, the two accused are absolved, the three ‘hunters’ punished, and Volpone is compelled to shed his disguise lest he allow Mosca to win; and – a clever retaliation – his riches are devolved to the Venice hospital for incurables! 4. The Alchemist (1610–1612) is, of the four we are examining, the closest to Volpone – three scoundrels, or foxes, are finally punished, and all their bustle ‘ends in smoke’, an Italian phrase Jonson liked – and for this reason it must be discussed as second, although it constitutes chronologically not the second but the third ‘movement’. The first difference is that a stylized though very true Venice is replaced by a quite realistic London. The prologue calls the capital city a centre for recruiting all kinds of delinquents, and sets the play at a time when a pestilence is raging. As the curtain rises, a well-to-do citizen, fearing contagion, gives his house in custody to a cunning servant and leaves for the countryside; the servant then calls on two accomplices to help him swindle the neighbours, extorting money with the promise of transforming various minerals and metals into gold and silver by alchemical means, and other kinds of magic. As in Volpone, one fool after another easily falls into the trap, exalting the scoundrels’ managing and

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scenic ability to entrap them; but the main focus is, on one hand, shifted to the various, typical victims who provide a two-dimensional spectrum of social life, and, on the other, to single comic sketches of great pantomimic and linguistic efficacy. While Volpone has an intelligible geometry of its own, The Alchemist creates panic showering the audience with a series of scenic inventions and evolutions. The beginning in medias res already constitutes a fusillade of angry, broken speeches that reveal both what has gone on before, and the not at all peaceful complicity of the three rascals. It also gratifies a taste for furious quarrels, with Dol the prostitute trying in vain to appease the two quarrellers. Wise and thoughtful in evil-doing and swindling, she points out that the two are going to ruin each other and thus fail in a very lucrative enterprise. The various scenes then periodically roll out a succession of speeches crammed with seemingly technical words to bamboozle the visitors. The fragmented dialogue prevents the display of grand oratorical monologues and of asides that would have been out of place – with the exception of Sir Mammon’s singular, original, though also partly Spenserian daydream of sensual and sexual pleasures, rich in grotesque detail and paradoxical inventions, as if foreshadowing a Des Esseintes. 5. Unsurprisingly, The Alchemist does not develop in a linear but in a circular fashion, showing how the diverse characters come to the three swindlers, each with different intents but all ready to give great sums of money in exchange for magic and alchemical operations. Yet the reader wonders whether the choice of episodes should not have ended sooner, and how many of them might have been left out, being less lively; as a result in the long run The Alchemist too is intermittently boring, and the parade of alchemical parodies proves flat and predictable. But, take it or leave it, Jonson’s drama almost always has a single focus, and happens in a compact and uninterrupted unity of time, and above all place; in cinematic terms, it has a fixed objective. Thus it is to be expected that some characters should be brought onstage once more, to be cleaned out of everything they have. The great alchemical Doctor, or Doctor Subtle, and the sceptic Surly are surrounded with a team of figures with etymological or comic names, some too much so, that is, grotesque or exaggerated. With the exception of one single character, Jonson works to demonstrate that all mankind falls, from moral weakness or unredeemable foolishness. Satire invests the

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whole spectrum of classes and also religious confessions and sects, and the timorous though deluded Anabaptists are a special target. The naïve Dapper is comic in being twice duped; but Sir Mammon is accompanied by sceptical Surly who is not bamboozled with big words, and wants to appear as the author’s mouthpiece for a crusade against alchemy and its lies. One incidental scene, showing Mammon courting Dol the whore, is wrapped in a falsely sublime atmosphere of chivalry, miserably torn to pieces by numberless whoppers. Dame Pliant is palmed off to Surly disguised as a Spaniard, at which contemporary spectators will have laughed in disgust (further on there is a furious quarrel between the would-be Spaniard and an Anabaptist). All this revelry has begun and gone on in the absence of the master, whose sudden return alarms the three swindlers. Two of them run off while the cunning servant justifies himself with a ruse. Captain Face, as the servant has renamed himself, pretends amazement and can only just protest his innocence denying the neighbours’ testimony, once he has quickly shed his alchemist’s clothes and shaved his beard. The epilogue is surreal, verging on Brechtian alienation. The master takes it in good part, indulgently credulous, ready to get married straightaway to the ‘widow’, a customer of the so-called alchemists. Curiously, no one realizes that Face is facing them, although, or perhaps because, he is shaved and wears his servant’s livery. § 119. Jonson V: The tetralogy of tricksters II. ‘Epicoene’ and ‘Bartholomew Fair’ Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609–1616), can be seen as Jonson’s return to good dramatic norms, for he restrains his urge for novel and eccentric forms and creates a concise, drastically simplified plot, centred on a main event set once more in a city milieu: a London story, in short, indeed rather sensational and extreme, but quite likely to occur and to be credited without an effort of the imagination. Once more it is emblematic and didactic, for the characters’ names suggest clear temperamental elements, moral and thus ‘humoral’; moreover, the hoax is based and depends on a specific, irrational idiosyncrasy naturally making it easier. As said above, this is Jonson’s most classical, cold-bloodedly conceived, schematic play. This case-history of human folly pivots on a different axis, and Epicoene, for

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one of the first times in history, is centred on a neurasthenia that Jonson, had he been Dickens, would have said was caused by childhood traumas, rather than by a capricious whim. But this is a comedy of types, not a clinical case. The hyperacusia, or intolerance of noise, of Morose – a clearly significant name – produces farce, awkwardness, misunderstandings, the most memorable in Jonson’s canon, among them the funny mimic and kinesic gestures exchanged by servant and master to communicate with as few words as possible, or no words at all. Instead of clamour, a mere slow trickle of words is Morose’s confrontation with a Figaro-like barber and a bizarre courtier, disguised as lawyer and theologian who proceed to recite in florid dog-Latin the twelve impediments that can annul a matrimonial contract. Thus the plot, for Jonson, is concise but never fast-moving, for external subplots and gratuitous speaking competitions adorn and delay it. In the intervals Jonson cannot resist the urge to make secondary characters jest, malign, allude, wink, with an irrepressible exchange of gossip, whispering and backbiting. Altogether we wish Jonson had focused more on the idea of Morose’s tic, instead of diluting and breaking it into loose, less biting scenes. On the way indeed one begins to suspect that Morose’s plot may become a secondary or equal part of the umpteenth satire on the vacuousness of the court entourage, as also on an accommodating husband and on his shrewish wife. 2. Morose, irked by noise of any kind, longs for silence, but only that of other people; he only loves to hear his own voice, and this is a humoral form of egotism. However, he is also selfish in the classic Jonsonian sense, for he denies his inheritance to his nephew Dauphine. His confidant Truewit is at first the director of an inner plot, and he offers to dissuade Morose from marrying so that Dauphine may enjoy his hereditary rights. But Dauphine strangely proposes to his uncle, on account of his trouble, marrying a silent or mute woman. The extent of Jonson’s persisting indiscipline becomes tangible as an outburst of Ionesco-like absurdity when, at the beginning of Act III, one Captain Otter appears onstage with various cups he labels as his bears, dogs and bulls. And the next moment we are acquainted with his spouse, a tyrannical, etiquette-loving woman, loudly determined to order her husband about. During these goings-on, Morose is wed to Epicoene by a vicar with a bad cold who utters hardly understandable phrases. The coup

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de théâtre is that Epicoene is a torrent of loquaciousness, ready to knock the bridegroom into shape; Morose realizes his mistake and bursts into curses at the middleman-barber. He is so disgusted that he immediately asks for a divorce.37 When the act starts, two braggarts talk of Epicoene boasting they have enjoyed her favours. The recital of the marriage impediments to the impatient Morose is piquant for it mentions clauses of sexual import; it is also a boomerang, for in conclusion Morose cannot start, but must rather undergo, a request for divorce, having confessed his impotence. The rope is made tauter because Epicoene accepts him as he is, and the only way out is that the two braggarts should accuse her of adultery. But this fails. A few lines from an ending as if cut short in a rush the nephew, having just been declared heir to his uncle, reveals the hoax (taking the wig off the supposed Epicoene), and with it the greatest and determining impediment to his uncle’s marriage. The architect of the play is thus Dauphine, while the other hoaxes are due to Truewit. The denouement is really unforeseen, for the double reason that not only the spectators, but the audience of the inner play, save only the weaver of the plot, ignored that a hoax was being carried on with a young actor, well tutored by Dauphine, in Epicoene’s role. 3. Bartholomew Fair, performed as late as 1614 and printed in 1631, seems the fruit of the desire and pleasure of finding any setting whatsoever – the fair of St Bartholomew, imagined in fact in the London district of Smithfield – to parade a number of variously ranked characters, all with loose tongues ready for chatter, repartee and allusion, who sooner or later fall out, quarrel, exchange irrepressible insults and even come to blows. This scenic space – for Bartholomew Fair is, after all, precisely a study in space – gradually becomes symbolic, rather than realistic and playful as it seemed to be – a surreal, even carnivalesque space, where roles are continually inverted, or a realm of likenesses, mirages and hallucinations where 37

More than ever a digressive filling-up is the scene where the deus ex machina Truewit sets up a hoax of his own, causing a fight between two cowardly but vain fools, with the pretext of making each one die with fear of the other’s supposed warlike temper; the two are immediately reconciled as if nothing had happened. In this secondary action, if such it is, Dauphine proves to have earned many approvals with the socalled ‘Collegiate Ladies’.

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reality blends with shadows. Bartholomew Fair appears the exact contrary of Epicoene. The latter is Apollonian, just as the former is Dionysian if not wildly dithyrambic, even more frenzied than The Alchemist on account of its absolute maximum of characters and movement. Very often criticized in the past as lacking plot and story-line, violating the laws of literary decorum and the most elementary structural demands, I think it is destined to become in the future Jonson’s most representative and most acted play – even a cult piece – because it is closest to the modern and postmodern aesthetics of drama. There are for instance the intermittent apocalyptic harangues of a fanatic, half-crazy Puritan who does not know what he is saying and, in a trance-like state, brays out Bible passages and prophecies. A naïve justice of the peace, in disguise, is a permanent presence on stage, observing what people are doing and no doubt weighing up what measures are needed to correct them; and among this band of misled, absent-minded people, a real madman, a furious paranoid, breaks in. The play is a web of overlaid, often absurd movements, sometimes intersecting, sometimes running parallel; and also a web of repeated phrases, refrains sticking to characters like labels and bouncing from a scene to another, so that people acquire a real physiognomy from their idiolects – the justice is hunting for ‘enormities’; the madman goes on repeating he will never do anything without a signed ‘warrant’. These are real anthology pieces, featuring the symptoms of a pathologically warped imagination. The comedy is entirely in prose, save for the final number, the puppet show performing the story of Hero and Leander. 4. For all that, the play begins in the most tiresome and awkward way ever to be found in a masterpiece. It denies the audience all information on previous goings-on, and its lexical register and idiolect are dense and opaque. The jokes are tame and flat. But soon the comedy starts and on comes a Jonsonian parade of nutcases, with volleys of gags that keep the action totally static, but set in stark relief the humours of the characters on stage, many of whom love to swell their speeches with bombast, while others unaccountably season every utterance with interjections, threats, colourful expletives, eccentric comments, and would-be witticisms sounding sometimes like naughty pre-Wildean aphorisms. Act I ends with more of these idiosyncrasies and fixations, giving no idea of where the action is

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moving to. A completely foolish young man is going to marry a totally unwilling young Grace; a proctor has a wife with child, and his mother-inlaw, obsessed with the idea of impurity, speaks in the hallucinated visionary language Jonson nearly always ascribes to Puritans, pivoting on fear of damnation, desire of salvation and visions from Revelation. At all events, Jonson launches a ‘Dickensian’ satire on religious hypocrisy with the clamorous entrance of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, one of those nicknames that Bunyan will give to some of his allegorical hypostases.38 Act II brings all of them together to the fair, where everybody wants first of all to ‘eat pork’, that is to merge, aware or unaware, in carnality.39 Acts II to V are an umpteenth Jonsonian tour de force, as they follow with a pre-cinematic technique40 the often inconclusive meanderings of the group, united, then scattered, then united again. Act II opens with a review of the booths in the fair and colourful exchanges of jests under the eyes of justice Overdo, who wants to assess personally, and en abyme, the state of the world in this microcosm of the nation, where, as in Langland’s dream, various English classes and ranks of people are portrayed. Their chatter is admirably amplified. Of course it is mainly a negative show, since buyers and sellers act underhand. The average is below par, and human nature is, however attractively, always corrupt. The pork seller Ursula, fat and dirty but pleasant, must perforce use verbal jokes and insults as well as slapstick. A cutpurse robs the mug, Cokes, as he listens, fascinated, to ballads about cutpurses. At intervals the Puritan minister blares one of his loud biblical sermons. All these seemingly loose, wilfully chaotic pieces are tied together by one secret connecting thread. The obvious question, which the dramatist anticipates and perceives, is whether this band of brainless nutcases contains at least one reasoning person; as in every play by Jonson there is one, and it is Cokes’s promised bride, Grace. While instinctively fleeing from her idiotic husband-to-be, she makes it

His idiolect is Carlylean avant lettre, just as his ‘Jesuitical’ mental reservation anticipates Stiggins in Pickwick Papers. 39 As Buffone comments in Every Man out of His Humour, in scene last but two in an inn, ‘nothing in flesh and entrails assimilates or resembles man more than a hog or swine’. 40 Bamborough 1959, 17.

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clear to the two suitors, who think they can easily seduce her, that she cannot yield straightaway to either. But even this sensible objection fades, on hearing how she will choose one or the other.41 The human material, in the course of a single day, is caught in a progress of perceptible, inexorable degeneration: by twilight, part of the group is drunk at the pork seller’s booth; some feel the urge to relieve themselves. It is no exaggeration to see in this symbolic parable and scenic fulcrum – the fair with the booth of pork-meat, and the dreamlike, hallucinated aura – an anticipation of ‘Circe’, the brothel episode in Joyce’s Ulysses. Towards the end, no fixed point keeps its place and everything turns into its opposite. By nightfall, the space has definitely become a labyrinth filled with more and more monstrous ghosts and sudden unpredictable shows, like a crazy, wild kaleidoscope. It is the time for changed identities, deceptive disguises and lawless solutions. The last episode sees the foolish Cokes, repeatedly robbed and mocked, come on the scene quite euphoric, ready to watch a puppet-show. This play within the play – Jonson’s umpteenth metadrama – is no quick dig at Marlowe, but a bona fide parody of his Hero and Leander. As always, and more so than previously, Jonson feigns to ignore the fact that he has brought scenic chaos to an unsupportable peak, and in this case, as never before, the play is rushed to its rather forced quiet ending. § 120. Jonson VI: Last Jacobean and Caroline plays The frankness of his plays, at the beginning of James’s reign, had caused Jonson new troubles with the censors, but the king’s rehabilitation arrived with the extremely popular masques I am going to discuss. In 1605 there was a rumour that Jonson, as a Catholic, was trying to warn his co-religionists to prevent the Gunpowder Plot. In 1618 he planned to walk from London to Scotland, where he was the guest of Drummond of Hawthornden. That same year he obtained a royal pension (100 pounds, then raised to 200) virtually due to his appointment as Poet Laureate, not yet formally instituted. Charles I also made him royal chronologer. In 1623 many of his papers and 41 She promises she will take the one who writes on a piece of paper the word most acceptable to the first visitor they meet at the fair. By the end, neither of the two has conquered her, and this is one of the many clues in the play left without a solution.

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his sketches were burnt in a fire that destroyed his whole library;42 in 1628 he had a heart attack and in 1637 he died in relative poverty and decline. The Devil Is an Ass (1616–1631) had been a resounding flop which made Jonson silent for a decade, yet it is one of those plays sprung from an idea little short of brilliant, one that nevertheless, as often in Jonson, was not fully executed and consequently successful. Nothing can be more ‘fantastic’ in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, nor more agreeably parodic, with a touch of mockingly Faustian and Marlovian quotation, than raising the curtain on hell. Here Satan in person allows a presumptuous minor devil, wittily called Pug,43 to descend on – or more exactly, rise to – earth, to tempt an anti-Faust like Fabian Fitzdottrel to vice. No denunciation of the incorrigible world is more definitive and at the same time boisterously ironic than that of the very Prince of Darkness, who does not believe there can be a still unexplored storehouse of vice, or room and matter for action, in that loathsome cesspit, London. Satan allows the mission, and Pug is reincarnated as a hanged man for the space of the day to preserve the Aristotelian unity, which causes a cumbersome development by inducing Jonson to cram the five acts with an unbelievable quantity of incidental episodes. The Pug-Fitzdottrel pact parodies the Faustian pact with its desecrating mockery of the awful and sacrilegious aura in Marlowe. Fitzdottrel is not, like Faust, seeking forbidden knowledge, but a treasure; yet he is presented making fantastic Pickwickian projects (like the drainage of boggy terrains, to be then sold at very high prices) in order to get rich, and falls into the trap; he is after all Jonson’s usual fatuous gallant full of whims, with added repressions, for he keeps his wife quite segregated. A maniac? In exchange for a costly, lavish fashionable coat that he can proudly flaunt at the theatre, he allows two gallants to have a look at his wife, a prurient and allusive detail. Pug, like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, tempts the chastity of Fitzdottrel’s spouse and is cudgelled, and seeks for other preys to pursue; the real devils prove to be the members of a gang of merry rascals, intent on mocking the foolish and ignorant Fitzdottrel with the most various 42 Reflected in a colourful, crackling ‘execration upon Vulcan’ in verse (Parfitt 1988, 181–7). 43 Technically the name indicates the canine race of the pug-dog.

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stratagems, intent on the double purpose of enjoying his wife and stealing his money. In short, the properly Faustian plot becomes secondary to a warp of closely successive and overpowering scenic reversals.44 For once in Jonson the denouement is owing to a rascal who repents thanks to the persuasiveness, and good sense, of a woman, Fitzdottrel’s wife; she anticipates her foolish husband, blocking in extremis the transfer of the patrimony to the chief delinquent. The opening and end are the best moments of a play that is too fragmentary and chaotic in its central part. Pug terminates his mission as, literally, a poor devil: mocked, defeated, disappointed, he is imprisoned because he is found dressed in the stolen clothes of the hanged man. Satan in person must appear cleaving the prison’s walls, to grant Pug’s request of going back to hell, and harshly reproach him demonstrating that not even devils can make London vice worse: ‘the best devils’ are the rascals he dealt with, and Pug has dishonoured the category. Hence only one quick blow of the magic wand can re-establish order, give back sense to the scatter-brained and punish the villains. 2. The Staple of News,45 dated 1626, in the early Caroline period, shows that Jonson was not yet finished as a dramatist, and that his mind was alert and watchful. Swinburne, too, ascribed to Jonson four masterpieces, including this play instead of Bartholomew Fair. As a satire of journalism and its system of communication, the timeliness of this intervention sufficiently proves its originality.46 Thus the play draws new lymph from a previously non-existent activity of social life that was taking its first steps. The second aim, also a militant one, was to dissuade England from going 44 Almost totally incidental is Act III, where ‘a great Spanish lady’ takes the lead, being in fact one of the rascals disguised, who should associate Fitzdottrel in a lucrative sale of cosmetics! 45 According to R. Harp, in Harp and Stewart 2000, 90, ‘staple’ means not ‘market’ but ‘monopoly’. 46 The first war bulletins on the Thirty Years’ War had appeared around 1620 in Holland. At the start of the play the barber explains to Pennyboy just come of age how the first centre of news diffusion worked. The play therefore has some documentary value. It is also curious that the first practitioners of journalism use a primordial semiotics, maintaining that news is such only as long as it is oral, for then it makes for more fluidness, while written news will be always verifiable by empirical criteria.

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to war together with the European Protestants, as the earliest journals instead hoped. But the press and its world remains a background, and the play centres on the farcical affairs of the Pennyboy family in the milieu of the Caroline regime and the familiar mania for self-advancement. In itself the plot, unusually fast and slender, without the habitual long-windedness, is indebted to the Greek-Latin classics, but is quite Jonsonian and therefore also ante litteram Pirandellian, thanks to the alienating and metatheatrical operation of making four members of the audience drop in, to disturb the prologue (as had already been seen in Every Man out of His Humour), and then offer comments against the very management of the play, and criticisms of its plan that are clearly to be interpreted as typical of philistine ‘men in the street’. Uncle and nephew Pennyboy court the same lady, unashamedly called Lady Pecunia and thus enormously rich, and surrounded by a lot of servants and also by a court of penniless suitors who insult each other with sets of picturesque, loud Jonsonian invectives. Pennyboy father, officially dead, goes around incognito disguised as a minstrel to spy what happens behind the wings – nearly a constant device in Jonson’s comedies under various disguises, from Jaques to Macilente to justice Overdo of Bartholomew Fair. The world of the press enters the game, and representative aspects of it are shown ad hoc, for one of the suitors works in it: a technique confirming Jonson’s method of using more and more juxtaposed sketches, finally intersecting one another. The comedy develops along the thread of the battling suitors’ prolonged, blatant bickering. This anarchic situation goes on until the proverbial move when the disconcerted outsider, Pennyboy father, redeems his inconsiderate son from his moral frivolity. Residual surreal follies, like the exhilarating trial of the dogs of the ridiculed uncle, open the way to the foreseen general amendment and the return of good sense. 3. The New Inn, or, The Light Heart, of 1629, was the most dreadful flop in Jonson’s whole career; the first performance in 1631 was hooted down and one planned for the king was cancelled. The play was also left out of the 1640 collected works.47 Marks or simple signals of decline, weariness and lack of inventive, are the mysteriously interpolated lines from 47 Jonson, who threatened to leave the stage – in a very bitter self-addressed ode – received warm encouragement from Carew, Cleveland and Randolph, whose poems are usually printed as an appendix to modern editions of this play.

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one of Fletcher’s dramas, and especially the use of the device of the inn as a setting for the dramatic plot, as rich as ever in trompe l’œil effects and, consequently, hardly original. Illusions and magic follow one another on the stage without the usual villain, only with some naïve and harmless deception, until a sequel of surprising, unexpected denouements makes the curtain fall.48 The Magnetic Lady, or Humours Reconciled (1632) was coldly received, too, and scoffed at by Jonson’s enemies. It not only repeats the outworn metatheatrical device of naïve and ignorant onlookers onstage, but also the equally predictable one of the pretty orphan girl in the grasp of an avaricious usurer, coveted by the usual army of penniless suitors, opposite to one another in terms of humours, their whims and quarrels the usual material. As was to happen in the novels of Jonson’s most careful reader, Dickens, queer turns of nature and chance cause the ward of that guardian to be lovingly fostered by his sister, the lady that gives the play its title, a kind, generous soul called Loadstone, or Magnet (other attending characters are also given names as meaningful and richly allusive, as they had been in The Alchemist). And yet new gags, fresh and even buoyant while incidental – like the physician’s diagnosis of the ward’s sickness – reveal a playwright still in his prime, and full of inventions. The last three acts abound in braggadocio, faints, duels avoided, rhetorical sermons and other kinds of fuss, particularly enlivened by a touch of ticklish mystery: the ward is discovered to be with child and gives birth offstage, but she has been exchanged at birth with the true heir, her maidservant, whose identity is acknowledged after the most various transactions, and legitimate aunt and niece marry the worthiest of their suitors.49

48 The climax is a performance set up in the inn by Lady Frampul’s maid, where the innkeeper’s adopted son acts in female clothes; and he acts so well that melancholy Lovel thinks him a woman, falls in love, and secretly marries him (the marriage impediment is traced from Epicoene). At this point Jonson’s play becomes as complicated as ever, and after a series of sensational adventures the supposed male is found actually to be a female, indeed Lady Frampul’s long lost sister, and this too looks back to The Case is Altered. With the help of other improbable agnitions two marriages, the lady’s and the merry maid’s, reinforce a rather optimistic moral. 49 Also the fake ward marries the factor, once the latter has confessed he is the father of the child.

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§ 121. Jonson VII: The masques Masque and play differ, as I mentioned, in style, size, density, audience; the masque is a heteroclite, composite show that today we would call multimedial, where the text is less important than the scene, and subordinate to music, dance and costumes. Hence it diverges from literature as such, becoming a phase in the history of entertainment. It is moreover a show requiring other kinds of personnel, like machine operators, painters, costume-designers, music-players and musicians (among them Alfonso Ferrabosco, Morley, Dowland), dancing masters and choreographers. It is also brief, since parts of its ‘text’ are not words, but dance steps, mere scenic designs, tableaux vivants and pantomimes: in short, a visual show, more visual than pure and simple drama, which is always and above all spoken. Jonson’s masques, moreover, are never longer than twenty pages, one fifth of the plays as such, or as long as a single act, or even two or three scenes of them; but just because a few phases were planned and described in detail in the stage directions it lasted nearly the same time. With the masque Jonson deserts his main, if utopian recipient, the people, and addresses himself chiefly to the court. The performance is dedicated to an élite, and the masque becomes an allegorical show where power celebrates itself with the method and the weapon the Renaissance had magnificently exploited, an iconic reconciliation of paganism, and classical myth, with Christian symbolism. Altogether Jonson composed somewhere between thirty and forty masques, quitting his harsh bitter vein for a supremely smooth and light doggerel. This happy spell was the outcome of Jonson’s temporary and highly successful collaboration with the scenographer Inigo Jones, who had made many quite profitable journeys to Italy. The fashion spread, and James and his queen spared no outlay to satisfy their fondness for dilettantish recitation and dance. The enormous costs required for the staging were financed by the sale of aristocratic titles, which quickly doubled the number of English nobles. This wastefulness was soon evident and infamous, for each masque, created for a single celebration and commemoration, was never subsequently performed, and the lavish costumes were reduced to rags. Jonson’s masque made the history of the genre owing to two striking aspects. One is structural, its beginning frequently with an antimasque performed by scoundrels or scurrilous rustics, who immediately

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after are routed away from the stage.50 It is a symptomatic invention: through it Jonson hints at the threat of the sovereign order that must reign once the antimasque has been repelled and silenced. He thus inverts or reshuffles the dramatic process that goes from order to disorder to order again. Here in the masques he seems to dwell instead on malignant forces, like witches and gnomes, which turn order upside down, seeming to establish their power and scorn the forces of goodness. The other aspect is the quarrels and misunderstandings that finally divided Jonson from Inigo Jones (one of the many enemies the dramatist needed to vent his rancour on) owing to irreconcilable disagreements on how to produce the plays; but this happened in Charles I’s time. § 122. Jonson VIII: The poems Jonson himself divided his poetry in the 1616 Folio into the two sections Epigrammes and The Forest. Underwoods, a third section, appeared instead in the posthumous two-volume edition of 1640 edited by Kenelm Digby, but perhaps summarily prepared by Jonson himself before death. Modern editors have formed a fourth set of songs and poems drawn from plays and masques, a number of pieces of various kinds, and also of translations, the greatest of them (in size, rather than in quality) being that of Horace’s Ars poetica. The woodland metaphor that in the title links the two collections exhibits some imagination and wit,51 but not a shadow of agudeza can be found in the texts. One might call Jonson’s lyric poetry generally and collectively conceptual, certainly not ‘concettist’, as it uses a minimum of imagery and favours the neutral language of denotation. It avoids the shocking and extended metaphor, and a fortiori the symbol.52 Every single poetic specimen is the fruit of a reaction and impression that 50 Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue begins, for instance, with the expulsion of the fat little monster Comus and of the pygmies, while Hercules personifies Jonson’s aesthetics, founded on the alliance of usefulness and pleasure. Comus will of course reappear, totally transformed, in Milton. 51 With Timber: or Discoveries added. 52 ‘Metaphors farfet hinder to be understood, and affected, lose their grace’ (Timber, in Parfitt 1988, 431), where the unspoken target seems to be John Donne.

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dries up and is deposited on the page. Therefore Jonson’s poetry feels dry or, as Swinburne said, rigid. In some miraculous, flawless little songs, and even in some quite imposing odes, one feels inspiration breathing, but few in the mass have entered the collective memory and reward the fatigue of reading the whole corpus. With this vein, incapable of rapture and Sehnsucht, Jonson was not long in becoming the main referent and master of the ‘Cavalier’ poets. His lyrics deal with chaste, reasonable and mature love, not with the fire of passion; and when they do, they do not adopt the forms of the sonnet or madrigal to a sublime or angelic woman.53 A harangue against rhyme is in rhyme, and it is one of those few harsh, bold, peevish poems one really likes. 2. By the end of the sixteenth century the epigram had become an established genre with its own fixed laws and rules. Among its conventional attitudes one was nihilistic defeatism, and the epigrams of Jonson’s book are much like those of Davies, Hall and Marston. They had to be stern, brutal, categorical and irreconcilable; necessarily curt, they had to strike hard in a single couplet. Jonson, diffusive in his plays, here is concise. Tyrannical brevity stifles the diction and the reader is at a loss to catch a meaning when, rather than one more syllable, he finds a series of ellipses. A breathless excess of rhymed couplets makes for further compression. The influence of the classics – first of all Martial – appears not only in the elliptical syntax, but mostly in the mimesis of Latin phrases, which obliges the reader to reassemble the syntactical elements set in an unfamiliar order. Anyone who minimizes the difference from Donne, the author of a few surviving epigrams, must in part change his or her mind, faced with many equally knotty examples. After a conventional start, the book sketches a little gallery of emblematic types in a society without redeeming values; reveller, thief, whore, procuress, usurer, poetaster and plagiarist playwright, succeed one another on the scene. But soon the rhythm becomes that of a pendulum, for one is startled not only by the sadistic pleasure of attacking 53

An attempt to create an English Pindaric ode on two English heroes (see Parfitt 1988, 211–15), based on a formal tri-partition, remained isolated. Hopkins, another who harked back to Pindar in the nineteenth century, will draw upon quite different Pindaric elements as an inspiration for his odes.

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enemies at random, but also by the mania for praising and even exalting hyperbolically; there is an equal measure of encomiastic, respectful, flattering and obsequious epigrams addressed to known public figures like statesmen, heroes, soldiers, or poets like Donne and Sidney; however, most often even the most expert commentators cannot give a name to the addressees. The world adrift, where crude pessimism looks on without hope, can only trust the few noble, disinterested souls54 seen as archetypes. Later on, the spectrum opens into a small miscellany containing sober, composed elegies, or dirges where the author mourns his dead. His two little sons are gone, and he remembers them with dry eyes. Brevity expires when poems that are no longer classically epigrammatic offer anecdotes still in concise paratactic verses. A fine thing among such variations is an invitation to supper, naming in merrily courteous tone the various dishes of a Pantagruelian list, from appetizer to digestive drinks.55 3. For cultured readers The Forest meant the Latin Sylvae, a ‘miscellany’ as in Statius. It assembles often long and even sumptuous odes, and also verse notices (for instance book dedications, or answers to gifts received). Its gem is the first of the seventeenth-century poems on country mansions, ‘To Penshurst’, the idealization of an ordered microcosm diligently and pleasantly analysed in its Edenic variety and harmony. The mansion of the Sidneys was a mise en abyme of a world governed by a functional do ut des. The recreation of utopian rural peace also throbs in other encomiastic odes on landowners. Here there are also extrapolated some of the airiest songs from Jonson’s plays, like those to Celia in Volpone,56 that of Echo regretting Narcissus, or that of the toast (‘Drink to me, only, with thine eyes’), supreme demonstrations of a graceful mixing of sources, and little jewels

54 Among them the Countess of Bedford, often praised by Donne. 55 ‘On the Famous Voyage’, the nearly 200-lines-long tale of a ghostly oneiric journey, and a parody of the classical descents to Hades, riotously crammed with repulsive disgusting details, concludes the collection of the epigrams. 56 The song ‘Come, my Celia’, Jonson’s most famous lyric, more than any other evidences the need to be contextualized: in the comedy Volpone uses it to break Celia’s will, overcome her shyness and have sex with her; and this savagely subverts, and even desecrates, the pure poetry one finds in it when read in the song-collection.

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of combinatory art. The number of gratulatory epistles is greater than in Donne; but they are far less intense and crucial. Jonson’s poetry, hardly ever in strophic form, is talkative and prolix: born with epigrams of two lines, towards the end it contravenes brevity. Underwoods shows the same variety as The Forest, apart from a chord of sacred devotional poetry, disappointing and conventional, however, save in a hymn to God the Father, characterized by remarkable syllabic compression, and therefore more personal. § 123. Tourneur* At first sight Cyril Tourneur (1575–1626), on the basis of what little we know of him, reminds one of Sir Philip Sidney. Like the latter twenty-five years before, he was a man of action as well as an intellectual, a cultured Elizabethan dignitary with a bent for literature who survived into the Jacobean era. Born into a family of soldiers, public servants and diplomats, he carried out missions and held administrative posts in the Netherlands. In 1625 he took part in the unfortunate English pirating expedition to Cadiz led by Sir Edward Cecil. In a similar expedition Sidney was mortally wounded; Tourneur caught the plague and on the way back was put ashore in Ireland where he died. But, were we to retrace our steps and reconstruct the man from his writings, we would not find the least likeness to Sidney, not only because Tourneur wrote no sonnets and romances and Sidney no plays, but above all because Tourneur’s work tells us nothing about him as a patriot and an upright servant of the English Crown.1 Our first reaction would be to say that Tourneur is obsessed with the demonic, with *

Complete Works, ed. A. Nichol, London 1930, 1963; Plays and Poems, ed. J. C. Collins, 2 vols, London 1878, now replaced, only for the dramas, by The Plays of Cyril Tourneur, ed. G. Parfitt, Cambridge 1978. A. C. Swinburne, ‘Cyril Tourneur’, in SAS, 259–96; T. S. Eliot, ‘Cyril Tourneur’, in ESE, 182–92; P. B. Murray, A Study of Cyril Tourneur, Philadelphia, PA 1964; R. A. Foakes, ‘Cyril Tourneur’, in Marston and Tourneur, Harlow 1978; M. White, Middleton and Tourneur, Basingstoke 1992, 143–75. Since Tourneur’s chief tragedy is today attributed to Middleton, several essays and studies have been transferred to this dramatist’s recent bibliography (§ 130).

1

Sidney’s name appears in Charles Lamb’s two short paragraphs he dedicates, in the Notes to Specimens of Dramatic Poets (§ 124.3), to The Atheist’s Tragedy (where

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skulls, bones, and hideous, loathsome forms of fornication. His works are filled with sacrilegious fancies and monstrous hallucinations, to a larger extent and perhaps with greater potency than in any other Jacobean playwright. He appears to have acquired somehow an uncommon knowledge of psycho-pathological states. Only Webster rivals him in this respect, so it was instinctively surmised that one of his two plays, as I shall say, might not have been his, but Middleton’s. Tourneur hides behind the screen of drama and, like dozens of dramatists who were his contemporaries, he plays a sly game with the reader, leaving him or her in doubt as to the meaning of his epilogues, which seem to bring down punishment on the villains and atheists who thought their misdeeds would go unpunished. Anyone who supports this optimistic interpretation supposes that the man who wanted evil punished and the offended God victorious must have experienced and shared that kind of hubris, and afterwards swallowed and spat it out only with great effort. 2. Tourneur wrote an exoteric, very obscure philosophical poem, and also satires, elegies, and eulogies; and three plays, one lost, one very famous and legendary, and one wrongly considered less significant and distinctive. I will abstain from pronouncing on the umpteenth philological question of long standing, and from contributing to the most undecided tug-of-war ever fought on a Jacobean drama, the one relating to The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607). Ascribed until half a century ago to Tourneur on the word of a 1656 printer, at the end of a very long comparative investigation this tragedy has now been definitely taken from Tourneur and assigned to Middleton,2 whose philological ‘party’ is certainly more powerful, though its lugubrious atmospheres and morbid evocations would rather link it with Webster’s world. Webster seems distinctly echoed and parodied3 in a nihilistic, though

2 3

Tourneur might have identified himself with Charlemont at the siege of Ostend) and to Borachio’s récit in that play. See the 2007 edition of Middleton’s complete works in this dramatist’s bibliography, § 130. Websterian, and thus revealing, is the habit of inserting almost continually rhyming couplets as aphorisms, at times unrelated with the psychology of the character uttering them. It is impossible to state with certainty which of the two came first.

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also Calvinistic view of a cosmos doomed to vanity, futility, and the loss of all values. As this is not the right place for philology, I shall tacitly give this play to a ‘Tourneur’ in inverted commas, or to an anonymous author, or to Tourneur and Middleton together. Unanimous and uncontested, on the contrary, is Tourneur’s authorship of The Atheist’s Tragedy. I shall only observe that either both are Tourneur’s or both Middleton’s. They make an inseparable couple of plays, a complex diptych, and they employ the same plot though not the identical dramatic style (which was why the second play was long thought to be chronologically the first). They are two tragedies centring on a certain character type; they stage a revenge and follow its achievement from seemingly diametrical and mirroring positions, in two nearby, Mediterranean countries, the usual convenient screen. The first is the story of a ‘revenger’ retaliating against a duke guilty of an infamous outrage; the second is that of a villain bringing revenge upon his own self. Both are atheists in their way, that is, lacking fear of God. There is an identical ideological framework pivoting on the hidden, though also delayed, action of divine justice, and on the compulsory force of bestial lust, with various recurring scenic devices, especially the delusion or the tragic mistake of the poisonous kiss of a skull taken for a woman’s lips. The historiographic tradition cannot be changed and, as Gianfranco Contini says, ‘a work lives in its interpreters’.4 For three centuries and more The Revenger’s Tragedy was considered a play by Tourneur, with all the errors and mistakes of attribution and dating. Anyone who wished to behave like Orwell’s Winston Smith and systematically substitute Tourneur with Middleton would be showing rare critical foolishness, for he would destroy the Tourneur myth, which sprang up and was rooted in Romanticism and has flourished ever since. Very few writers have occasioned such brainstorms of identification and fancies hardly linked to their object, as if devoted to a non-existent dramatist, so very emphatic, enthusiastic and, especially, inventive are they. Charles Lamb was the first to feel this fiery power, after a centuries-long silence around the dramatist’s name. By 1896 the idea of a cosmos doomed to evil and of a Tourneur as the forerunner of the Decadents had taken root, and Marcel

4

See his 1973 essay, 166, quoted in § 11.1 n. 1.

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Schwob seemed to describe rather Marlowe and his blasphemous drive in a cameo much too fantastic – far more ‘imaginary’ than Pater’s – to deserve the name of critical document. If Heywood was the pivot of Swinburne’s 1908 book on Shakespeare’s contemporaries, at its conclusion Tourneur is proclaimed the worthy heir and the first and highest disciple of the Bard. Tourneur is the subject of the most elated and ecstatic essay in that book; Swinburne celebrates him as the quintessence of a Romanticism resembling a river bursting its banks and spreading its waters all around, and sees his work as a jet of ‘rhythmic lava’. In 1930 T. S. Eliot opted out of this Romantic reading, yet still said Tourneur’s was a ‘torrential style’, though sparely managed, and that The Revenger’s Tragedy had been written in ‘one sudden heat’. The Tourneur revival, inaugurated by Trevor Nunn’s staging in 1966,5 today still exploits the many grotesque, farcical or quite comic elements emerging from the tragedy; likewise, some commentators have discovered similarities and links between Tourneur and militant dramatists of the present, like Orton or Griffiths. 3. The formula of The Revenger’s Tragedy is that of fusing the medieval morality with the Elizabethan-Jacobean revenge-play. Vindice is a programmatic name; other characters have categorizing names, signifying luxury, ambition and bastardy. But early in the seventeenth century this scheme was revisited and by now re-made, and no longer unmediated. A recent ideological interpretation locates the play (stressing its anonymous appearance) in the climate of proverbial disenchantment with James’s court, compared with the glorious times of Elizabeth; and not without reason Vindice’s fiancée, poisoned by the duke, is called Gloriana. But the action gains from the flashback evocation of rape and poisoning, though Vindice’s first move is dilatory, or at most preparatory. Vindice, after saying he will leave the court, actually stays on, disguised as the pander of the duke’s son, who covets no other girl than Vindice’s own sister Castiza. When Vindice asks his mother to persuade Castiza to prostitute her body he is conducting a test or throwing out a challenge: can a mother be a procuress to her own daughter? The mother rejects the attack, but then she yields to the

5

White 1992, 149–50, and SES, 218–21, recall that Artaud wanted to stage Tourneur.

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persuasion of gold, which for Vindice is evidence that the world has gone to rack and ruin, and all women are frail. The reader of the time could find several elements recalling Hamlet. Vindice enters the scene with the skull of his promised, dead bride in his hand; the duke, threatened with murder, like Claudius begs for time to repent; as in Hamlet revenge is delayed, or once more aimed at a secondary target, since Vindice and his brother go in search of killers to get rid of Lussurioso, the duke’s son from an earlier marriage, and favour the rise to the throne of Ambitioso, the duchess’s eldest son. In the most evocative scene in his whole drama Tourneur has Vindice, disguised as a pander, lure the duke to an ‘unsunned lodge’, the same place where Lussurioso is to encounter the duchess, and make the duke kiss the poisoned mouth of the skull of his own beloved, Vindice’s betrothed; in his long agony the duke is compelled directly to witness his wife’s adultery. As often happens in Jacobean drama, the climax arrives too soon. Act IV has different actions happening at the same time, with the court ignorant of the duke’s murder; but Vindice and his brother have a new idea: to repeat the staged scene with a further conjuring trick, dressing the corpse of the dead duke in the clothes of the seemingly drunk unconscious pander. In this guise Lussurioso will kill the duke. There are thus three men stabbing a single corpse. The new duke Lussurioso will die killed by Vindice, who in turn will die at the command of a new duke. The question to be answered is why Vindice confesses to the murder, when he could keep silent and live on a free man. Looking back at the development of the play, we realize that Tourneur makes him an inner stage director and a player in a game that is an end to itself, whose motifs he at times forgets, thus becoming a mere pawn. Vindice destroys everything with an imprudent speech because only in that way can he reveal and reap approval for his brilliant design and his ability in carrying it out: ‘’Twas somewhat wittily carried’, he says with complacent pride, and ‘well managed’; on the other hand, he further confesses, he has reached a stage where he finds no more enemies, and where the murderer, with no other option but suicide, would turn against himself. 4. In The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611) set in France, the aristocrat D’Amville, in order to acquire a posterity and increase his princely prestige, wants his son (not knowing he is impotent) to marry chaste Castabella, already betrothed to D’Amville’s nephew, Charlemont, whom he deviously sends

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to war to make the marriage to his son possible. The happy end will arrive, although after the failures of criminal plans, in an almost tragicomic atmosphere comprising several grotesque subplots and flat intermezzos with bibulous servants. This play, more easily accessible for the audience, seems to be the work of a different hand, as if a great lapse of time, instead of a few years, divided the two styles and their dramatic registers. The female characters are still schizoid: on the one hand, women possessed by unchecked hunger for sex, and on the other, mothers of pure virgins. Such are the ineffably named Levidulcia and her daughter Castabella. One seems to hear a remote echo of the debate on ‘nature’ in King Lear,6 since the characters secure for themselves a presumed margin of freedom to behave as satanic challengers, and, like atheists, scorn divine punishment and bow to nature, especially beastly nature. If divine justice descends on them too soon and inexorably it is because the god they denied has always kept the reins in his hand, let them think he did not exist but actually held the leash, and, finally, swooped down on the sinners. In the end, the atheist is redeemed, acknowledges his error, promises never to sin again, and repudiates his past;7 or, as with Levidulcia, conscience bites him or her so hard that the sinner is forced to kill himself. 5. The counsellor Borachio (obviously a Shakespearean name) in an impressive récit relates that Charlemont has died heroically in the Ostend siege, so we expect him to reappear disguised and the denouement to be at hand. The first moves are all favourable to D’Amville, who eliminates his brother and compels Castabella to marry his own son. While the two villains rejoice in their success there is a thunderclap that Borachio interprets as a good omen, giving it an ante litteram Darwinian explanation, very pleasing for D’Amville. But before the end of Act II Charlemont, still incognito, has a vision of his father’s ghost – a classic quotation from Hamlet. The ghost, however, exhorts him to be patient rather than active; 6

7

In Act IV, Scene 5, Levidulcia realizes she feels the same sexual drive as beasts do; her maid incites her to sin with a sarcastic ‘feminist’ sentence: a woman must not feel scruple or remorse for a single adultery, where men commit many. There is also a satirical portrait of the ‘Puritan’ chandler who, having become a chaplain, is one of the most vulnerable to fleshly temptations and of the most hypocritical. Tourneur, always careful in his onomastics, hides ‘damn’ in D’Amville.

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deciding to leave revenge to ‘the King of kings’ Charlemont is a precursor of the later Jacobean hero who rejects bloody revenge, proverbially embodied in Heywood’s kind and melancholy Frankford.8 This does not mean that man should not facilitate it, and Charlemont furtively enters the morgue, where he sees D’Amville attempt to rape Castabella to get himself an heir, and thwarts it; this providential night scene is also full of quid pro quos, since on the appearance of Charlemont D’Amville runs off, and besides the proud dignitary looking forward to the pleasure of rape is actually about to embrace a corpse, and – for the second time in Tourneur’s drama – kisses a skull. Justice is re-established, but, as always in Tourneur, fatally bringing losses on the guilty and the wicked. Castabella’s father catches his wife in flagrant adultery, and husband and lover kill each other. D’Amville’s gain is the death of his two sons and the end of his progeny. He witnesses the epiphany of a nature whose power is not unique and supreme, and must acknowledge a higher, divine one. In the final trial scene D’Amville raves, the usual psychic reaction in Jacobean dramatists; but his suicide is lucidly premeditated. Thus also D’Amville, above all D’Amville the atheist, repents. He obtains permission to be himself the executioner of Charlemont, who having killed in self-defence is condemned without appeal for murder. In other words D’Amville’s death is not an accident, as was always thought: quite otherwise, it is the supreme demonstration that the character has completed his expiation, and he voluntarily cuts his own head off with the axe. § 124. Webster* I: Nihilism and possibilism in the Italian trilogy One could almost call the two main tragedies by John Webster (1580–1625 or 1634) children of an unknown father. They are most frequently staged today thanks to their wealth of scenic, sensationalistic and 1

8

§ 147.3.

*

The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas, 4 vols, London 1927, New York 1967; Works, ed. D. Gunby et al., 2 vols, Cambridge 1995–2003. E. E. Stoll, John Webster, London 1905; A. C. Swinburne, ‘John Webster’, in SAS, 15–59; R. Brooke, John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama, London 1916; M. Praz, Il dramma elisabettiano. Webster-Ford, Roma 1945, 68–88 (with a rather peppery appendix on Webster’s Italian translators to date); C. Leech, John Webster, London 1951, and Webster: ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, London 1963; G. Baldini, John Webster e il linguaggio della tragedia, Roma 1953; T. Bogard, The Tragic Satire of John Webster, Berkeley, CA 1955;

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spectacular suggestions. They are followed by a third much less sinister play that can be termed a tragicomedy, unjustly, it seems to me, scorned by critics in the past with strictures that I shall try to rectify and even subvert.1 With Webster, in point of fact, we have no biographical information to throw light on how the dramatist reflects and transfigures himself in his work; and the corpus of plays ascribed to him is too slight to permit any other analysis than that of the plays themselves. Were we to proceed in the opposite direction, however, we might infer some pre-existing data from elements recurring in the aforesaid three works, which present much the same structures. These data might be as follows: as a child Webster lost his father (a singularly absent figure in the plays), was not an only son, had a much loved sister, and converted to Roman Catholicism. Given that a whole act in one of his tragedies deals with legal proceedings, and that behind them there were relatively recent news items – so that this kind of play fits into the category of militant muckraking – we might further infer that Webster, G. Boklund, The Sources of ‘The White Devil’, Uppsala 1957, and ‘The Duchess of Malfi’: Sources, Themes, Characters, Cambridge, MA 1962; R. H. Dent, John Webster’s Borrowing, Berkeley, CA 1960; I. Scott-Kilvert, John Webster, London 1964; A. Serpieri, John Webster, Bari 1966; Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, ed. N. Rabkin, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; John Webster: A Critical Anthology, ed. G. K. and S. K. Hunter, Harmondsworth 1970; John Webster, ed. B. Morris, London 1970; D. C. Gunby, Webster: ‘The White Devil’, London 1971; R. Berry, The Art of John Webster, Oxford 1972; G. Melchiori, ‘John Webster’, in N. D’Agostino, G. Melchiori and A. Lombardo, Teatro elisabettiano. Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Vicenza 1975; M. C. Bradbrook, John Webster, Citizen and Dramatist, London 1980; J. Pearson, Tragedy and Tragicomedy in the Plays of John Webster, Manchester 1980; CRHE, ed. D. D. Moore, London 1981; L. Bliss, The World’s Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama, Brighton 1983; F. Pellizzoni, Le tragedie di vendetta nel teatro di John Webster, Udine 1983; C. L. Forker, Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster, Carbondale, IL 1986; D. Goldberg, Between Worlds: A Study of the Plays of John Webster, Waterloo 1987; C. Luckyj, A Winter’s Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster, Athens, GA and London 1989; L’ansia del teatro. Saggi su John Webster, ed. M. M. Parlati, Napoli 1999; L. Tosi, La memoria del testo. Un’analisi macrotestuale delle tragedie di John Webster, Pisa 2001; D. Coleman, John Webster, Renaissance Dramatist, Edinburgh 2010. 1

Predominantly to Webster, with Dekker’s additions, are ascribed two plays from the first years of the seventeenth century, making up a quartet of the ‘cardinal points’: Northward Ho! and Westward Ho!, both full of intrigue and of scenes set in brothels.

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like many other playwrights, for a time entertained the idea of becoming a lawyer. Another hypothesis is that in his early twenties he was curious about and interested in many branches of the new science, which ipso facto made the old one totter on its foundations.2 The fact that The White Devil refers to no written sources has led scholars to postulate an oral source by an unknown intermediary; but no one suggests the unverifiable hypothesis that the dramatist went to Italy in person, to view the corrupt courts of an Italy blindly identified with a deep-rooted Elizabethan archetype – bloody, devilish, decadent, ‘Vatican’ and Catholic, and Machiavellian at the same time. To anticipate my conclusions, Webster’s theatre explores the very disorientation of the seventeenth century. Unlike Jonson, he is a thinking dramatist with a probably well-structured ideology. His protagonists are distinguished by their volubility and by the contradictory nature of their behaviour on stage: they demonstrate to the spectators, but without themselves realizing it, that the relationship between intention and consequent action no longer holds. This is not simply equivalent to the basic mechanism of tragedy from the Greeks onward: Webster comes nearer to modern psychic alienation. Whether or not he was un-converted, he operates according to a binary, rigorist view of life. We are not told where Lamb found the information he records in a footnote, saying that the fact that Webster was a parish clerk at St Andrew’s church in Holborn explains the ‘anxious recurrence to church-matters’ in his plays.3 According to some critics, Webster represents the second of three succeeding phases in the full bloom of Elizabethan drama: the first marked by individualism, the 2

3

Recent biographers would reject these conjectures. At present it is thought that Webster was born in London, the son of a coachmaker, also member of the tailors’ corporation, who died about 1615, when Webster was already grown up. It seems certain that he enrolled in 1598 at the Middle Temple, the lawyers’ college. Given his frequent allusions to Dutch habits and events Webster might have been, like many writers in his time, a soldier in the war campaigns in the Netherlands. Married in 1604, he may have been the father of many children. However, as B. Morris notes in his introduction (Morris 1970, vi), no portrait of Webster exists. Brooke 1916, 78, quotes a contemporary rumour to the effect that Webster had been a military chaplain, author of bigoted treatises and a university reformer. His theology is often said to incline towards that of Calvin (cf. Leech 1951, 1, 56–7, 60).

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second by sceptic disenchantment, and the third by tragicomic relief and a new serenity.4 One of the dilemmas facing historical criticism is whether his scepticism hardened into nihilism. It has been suggested that this is the case, that in Webster death is not ‘the wages of sin’, nor a moment of passage to eternal life and an encounter with the Christian God. Evil is not stanched, it establishes and proves its power. This opinion stresses Webster’s ‘sperdimento’5 at the irreconcilable contradictions – béances, as once they were termed – that reality opposes to the premises: in the end, life belies man’s reckoning. This is a ‘Hamletic’, existentialist and Kierkegaardian reading at the same time, in which we recognize the sense of angst engendered by the very fact of living. The antipode of Webster is, in certain respects, Marlowe, at least in the sense that Webster questions and rejects any form of apotheosis for his characters, immobilizing them in their debilitating determinism. But the debate is ongoing, and many Webster scholars still strenuously support a clear-cut moral scheme with rewards and punishments inexorably assigned, and find in him a providential vision of life.6 Webster’s ambiguity remains open and unresolvable. 2. Webster started his career at the beginning of the century as a collaborator of Dekker, Marston and other playwrights. The extent of these collaborations is still uncertain (data concerning him are confused because his family name was very common). As usual, I shall deal elsewhere with the various plays he had a hand in, without getting involved in debates on authorship; they will be discussed when dealing with their chief authors.7 Even considering only the three plays assuredly his, Webster’s prestige runs very high. Many parameters have been adopted in an attempt to decide 4

5 6 7

This schema was very clearly posited and emphasized by U. Ellis-Fermor in a 1936 study (see Serpieri 1966, 17). For Praz 1948, 70, Webster’s authority of the second phase was Montaigne, whose essays ‘coloured’ the view of a decaying world, doomed to die. ‘Sensation of being lost’, a term Serpieri 1966 uses very often. A passionate supporter of this antithetic view of a Webster as author of moral parables, is the critic and editor D. C. Gunby in the works cited in the bibliography. Besides the plays cited above in n. 1, Webster is ascribed fifteen ‘characters’ in a 1615 Theophrastic collection by Thomas Overbury, an elegy for dead prince Henry and a pageant, Monuments of Honour (1624).

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which dramatist is second only to Shakespeare: Marlowe is second until 1593; Jonson all the time, but within the overall range of drama; Webster is second (or ‘his station is at Shakespeare’s right hand’)8 from 1600 to 1615 as a pure tragedian. It has been justly noticed that Webster does not amaze the reader immediately, but impresses him or her more and more as he or she go on reading; that some of his acts and scenes are quite unparalleled, and that he is a master of the psychological climax and the coup de théâtre. Among his hallmarks are pioneering devices like the dumb show, pantomimes and mimes seen as the protagonist’s hallucinations, and scenes expressing obsession, alienation, fits of insanity.9 The chiaroscuro, dark and phantasmal atmosphere of his plays has elicited the most arbitrary and subjective associations with other arts,10 and at the same time, as we shall see, infatuated dozens of later writers. From a strictly dramatic viewpoint Webster is a realist who assigns to his characters a small number of formal monologues and neat arias tending to the lyrical; he prevalently weaves dialogues of dry, biting, curt, at times nearly stichomythic speeches. If one wishes to classify him within the range of current styles according to the fashion of defining authors by contrastive comparisons, Webster is not gifted with the sinuous, natural, sumptuously sculpted line of Marlowe; he is awkward, knotty, heavy, unmelodic. He seems ungrammatical, even graceless, roughly impressive but in need of more labor limae – but we know that, like Jonson, he was unable to work effortlessly.11 He is the John Donne of drama also by virtue of the unfamiliar and ‘metaphysical’ metaphors dotting his dialogues, drawn from mathematics, medicine, physiology and physiognomy. It is no less true that Webster can abruptly change pace and write for his characters exquisite dreamy songs, never sentimental, but full of terse pathos

8 9

Swinburne in SAS, 30. Webster is amply shown to be a forerunner of the theatre of the absurd, for instance by J. R. Mulryne, ‘Webster and the Uses of Tragicomedy’, in Morris 1970, 133–55. 10 Praz 1948 is full of them, seeing resemblances between Webster and painters of esoteric cult, and pre-mannerists such as Piero di Cosimo, Bacchiacca, Bartolomeo Veneto or Agostino Veneziano, the latter the painter of the ‘so-called Stregozzo’ (80–1). 11 As Webster boasts he did in the ‘note to the reader’ in The White Devil.

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and restrained, discreet lyricism. His theatre can rightly be called stern and hard, but with very important exceptions. That Webster lacked humour, and therefore dispensed with subplots, and because of this could not write good comedies, is disproved, as we shall see, by that supposed half-failure, The Devil’s Law Case.12 3. Webster was relegated to silence for two full centuries;13 he began to be revaluated with Lamb’s Notes to the oft-mentioned Specimens of 1808, brief jottings of summary impressionistic judgements that were sufficient to arouse attention. But the Victorians ignored him, apart from Kingsley who reproached Webster for indulging in the sensational and the horrific. William Archer (Ibsen’s ambassador to England) could not understand and pardon Webster’s supposed, and to him evident, lack of theatrical competence. At the beginning of the twentieth century Webster slowly began to be reappraised, as often happens, for the very reasons that had damned him. Recent reception has focused, as I mentioned, on the definition of his possible collaborations in plays by others, and on the obstinate search for his sources, taking for granted that he had put together mere mosaics of quotations, however reworked. It was thought certain that he had kept a never discovered notebook where he wrote down memorable speeches and phrases gleaned from his reading. The attention was subsequently polarized by the enigma of a Webster ‘scribbling’ the two tragedies and afterwards drained. One answers this conjecture by saying that there are several cases of unius libri writers, and that Webster’s vein might indeed have been sapped after two masterpieces that are symptomatically twin works. And yet another suggestion arises, that more masterpieces might be hidden among lost plays. Just as there is the category of poets’ poets, so Webster was a dramatist who inspired

12 13

Webster’s comic and humorous talent may be also detected in the collaborations with Dekker (§ 128. 6 n. 13). The lost Guise presumably followed Marlowe’s example in The Massacre at Paris. Baldini 1953 and Serpieri 1966, 39–75, furnish two very detailed excursus of critical attitudes and tendencies until their time, Serpieri adding many subtle and frank specifications.

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many successors, among them Tieck, Stendhal, Wilde and Swinburne.14 Browning is akin to Webster as an author of poems based on trials at the end of which one becomes conscious that truth cannot be ascertained and everything is relative.15 He may be accused, long before Browning, of sticking quite hastily gnomic, moralizing conclusions to his plots, hence of shutting a gaping abyss. Above all, Webster bequeaths to Browning the archetype of a Renaissance Italy steeped in blood, whose disturbed religion is often contradicted by unchecked ambition, envy and sexual excess. Browning’s ‘last duchess’ is a signal, evident remake of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, oppressed by male power and suspected of whorishness by a duke suffering from the same pathological disturbance as Ferdinand.16 The fantastic, volcanic potential is reduced in the picture of the duchess, who seems alive but of course no longer is.17 Also bewitched by Webster was T. S. Eliot, who as a critic seems to have left just a single pithy sentence, only three lines long, which ends by calling him a literary and dramatic genius ‘directed towards chaos’. However, Eliot the poet felt his presence: a couple of quatrains in ‘Whispers of Immortality’ see Webster as conscious of the close embrace between Eros and Thanatos, able to see the skull and the skeleton beneath the body, as if lit by a powerful source of X-rays. In the most important of the intertextual passages, at the end of section I in The Waste Land, Eliot changes the sign of Webster’s allusion to death, or rather takes it in the literal sense, since the dog, which as man’s traditional friend unearths the corpse and recharges its vital cycle, is kept at a distance and rejected (whereas in Webster the wolf is man’s enemy and profanes graves). In the last analysis, the single sentence of Eliot the critic tallies with Eliot’s 14 15 16 17

Swinburne’s drama might be defined Websterian, being historical and fond of sadism and blood. Serpieri 1966, 150, employs the eminently Browning-like adjective, ‘relativistic’. See in Volume 4, § 115.3, my observations on the possibility that the ‘last duchess’ was strangled, like Webster’s. Browning also wrote ‘The Flight of the Duchess’, showing he was fascinated and bewitched by this role. A sort of duchess subject to male power, also killed at the command of the psychotic Franceschini, is, as in a metamorphosis, Pompilia in The Ring and the Book. See a feminist parallel in Tosi 2001, 101. But as far as I know the way Browning reconsiders Webster is a field still to be explored.

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aphorism on the mythical method, where Webster’s chaos is redefined as the ‘futility’ and the ‘anarchy’ of the world in our time. 4. A study by R. H. Dent,18 and shortly after another by A. Serpieri, took up the question of Webster’s debt to sources, and of the extent (never documented before, but generally considered high) of his literal or paraphrased borrowings. Anyone who ventures along this path is, or should always be, conscious of the risk of debunking the intertextual author, except when he is thought to be bent on parody, which is not Webster’s case. If he is insecure, unable just to manage a plot, and one demonstrates that he is also a ‘formidable plagiarist’ as Serpieri defines him by hypothesis, there is hardly anything left in him worthy of praise and fame.19 It is important to clarify the question, which had already had, in a way, a summary empirical answer, negative from the very first: Webster is superb in arranging and personalizing. Serpieri in his book specified this far more accurately and in greater detail.20 Another dilemma is Webster’s gnomic habit: in other terms, why on earth does he so frequently put at the end of various speeches rhymed couplets, enunciating extremely trite aphorisms? Or why does he have his characters abruptly narrate Aesop-like fables? Was he making fun of his audience, or casting a sop, or making parodies? I have just ruled that out. I do not think it is necessary to assert that Webster feigned to

18 19

Dent 1960. Tosi 2001 completes Serpieri showing that Webster is also authentically self-intertextual, for he quotes lines from his first play in his second. 20 In Serpieri’s opinion Dent 1960 lacks the courage to interpret the data he has collected in an impressive taxonomy that makes him nevertheless the author of a book of great historical import. Serpieri’s no less painstaking, solitary investigation divides the borrowings into passive – mere padding fit to hide weariness or amnesia – and active, useful and personalized, with the further proviso that scenes and episodes of particular elevation and inspiration contain fewer borrowings than others, far weaker and flatter. On the one hand, then, passive quotations seem to abound in weak scenes, and be sparse in the stronger ones; on the other, the resulting idea is that of an unequal dramatic progression, contradicting Webster’s recognized unity and uniformity. In conclusion, the borrowings ‘do not constitute the significant structure of the two tragedies’ (Serpieri 1966, 127).

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echo the moralists of his time, or that these couplets sound archaic.21 My answer is that he himself put them there, trembling after he had suffered the wounds of his aporias. In the character’s economy, no longer that of its author, these couplets are also discordant voices, to be ascribed to a kind of external conscience born of his/her psychology. Aesthetically, the gnomic couplet causes a strong, sudden, really pre-Brechtian alienation. Webster’s dramatic language is habitually a tissue of short dialogues, only seldom expanding into long arias. In particular the unit of measurement is not usually hypotactic, nor is the metaphor extended. It is an open flux that the couplet stops. Thus it is surprising that an anti-classical playwright like Webster should look ahead and open the way to Dryden, teaching him how to smooth over and render neoclassical plays as ruptured as his own are. Such contraction is out of tune, strident and dissonant with the characters’ abrupt, dented, at times stream-of-consciousness-like language. To end a speech with couplets is most alien to a cynical pragmatic Machiavellian like, for instance, Flamineo.22 Then, on another level, the couplet enhances Webster’s jerky, ‘jumpy’ style. Today many would unanimously ask Webster to be read according to Foucaultian theories. He speaks of nothing but women forced and imprisoned by despotic male power; he studies and fantasizes his own version of the history of sexuality and sexual mores; he shows the effects of psychic terrorism and the ensuing mental disease, both in victim and torturer; he exemplifies the instrumental use of madness, and always, thereby, the historical systems of control and repression.23 § 125. Webster II: ‘The White Devil’ The notes preceding the printed editions of Webster’s three plays, not longer than a couple of pages, do not altogether invalidate my initial assertion that these dramas resemble flashes of lightning suddenly bursting out

21 22 23

Brooke 1916, 88. He is made to tell, in The White Devil, a delightful but also slushy story of the whale and the little bird. Bogard 1955, 53, uses the adjective ‘clinical’ to connote the break-up of psychic balance, adding that the tragedy reminded Edmund Wilson of the Nazi lagers. Another Websterian writer is George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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and then quenched in darkness. However, given their nature of avant-textes, they are precious documents, and the only ones where Webster speaks in the first person, without any dramatic projection, and hence univocal. The note to The White Devil24 (1612) is a prose preview of that abrupt, jerky style that governs Webster’s dramatic rhythm: it continuously mixes high and low, or better naïf, for instance recalling, through a thick web of showy Latin quotations bowing to convention, that the play was acted in unfavourable conditions, and that the premiere was unsuccessful because it was winter and the playhouse was badly lit! The proud, wilful dramatist does not hesitate to accuse, instead of himself, the prevalent ‘asinine’ taste, reminding the readers that after all he had collaborated with one of the great Elizabethan satirists, Marston. Such imbalance is immediately exemplified by the beginning of the play, which not only starts in medias res with a celebrated one-word line set out of context, a past participle,25 but also opens on a scene that is not even proleptic but quite extraneous: it centres in fact on a character, Count Ludovico, who after a long eclipse will interact again only at the end of Act III. And yet this is indeed in some way a proleptic scene: Ludovico has been banished, a very bland punishment given his crimes, because of the fact that he has been tried and judged according to his rank; nevertheless he hints that justice can be corrupted, that Duke Brachiano might have changed the verdict for but one kiss from his lover Vittoria. Yet the scene does not end on the note of his bitter spiteful mood, but with Webster’s typical habit of concluding a short speech with a gnomic, moralizing couplet: ‘Great men sell sheep, thus to be cut in pieces, / When first they have shorn them bare and sold their fleeces’. Such closing sentences sound merely dissonant, for nearly always – save when they are uttered by upright characters – they do not correspond

24 The title is an Elizabethan synonym for hypocrisy. A black devil is Zanche, the conniving black maid, protagonist of a vague subplot because in the flustered Act V she takes a fancy to Flamineo in his Moorish disguise, who plays up to her in order to use her for his own ends. But this is somehow a thread left hanging down. 25 ‘Banish’d?’; the term recurs also at the opening of Act III, Scene 5, in The Duchess, expressing the duchess’s astonishment at the measure taken by her brothers against her.

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to the spiritual physiognomy of the ironical, irreverent, mocking person enunciating them; and yet they also seem to come from a conscious and conscientious alter ego of his or her. 2. The suspicion of Webster’s scant inventiveness is confirmed by the fact that The White Devil is a historical play based on real, notorious events that took place in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. They involved Vittoria Accoramboni, Webster’s Corombona, the spouse of Cardinal Montalto’s nephew, and who, after meeting Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Brachiano, bewitched and induced him to plot the murder of his wife Isabella de’ Medici. Defying the Pope’s excommunication, the couple fled from Rome; Orsini was to die a natural death, while Vittoria was murdered by order of the Medicis. Few critics have perceived that this historical case shows impressive similarities and analogies with the ‘Roman murder case’ whose trial papers, casually read by Browning two and a half centuries later, inspired him to weave the tapestry of The Ring and the Book. The place is Rome in both works; the time nearly a century later, but the main ingredients are, in both, a nobleman’s jealousy, a trial for adultery, revenge, a conclave and the Pope’s decisive intervention. Actually, whereas Browning scrupulously derived his facts from voluminous trial acts, Webster certainly took many liberties in anglicizing names and changing features and factual data, though we do not know what oral and written sources he used. Instead of being simplified, the plot becomes more entangled, modelled on the current stereotypes of revenge tragedy, enriched with a whole range of sensational effects. So, in the final analysis it is not true that Webster lacked imagination. Isabella dies kissing a poisoned portrait of her husband; Camillo’s murder is mimed by a conjurer before the two lovers; Isabella’s ghost appears to Francisco and asks for revenge; Brachiano dies because his beaver hat, or helmet, has been sprinkled with poison, but he is given the coup de grâce by two killers who strangle him. The final act increases the suspense to an intolerable degree. The principal motor of the plot is Flamineo, who in the first two acts offers vague warnings about what is happening on stage, and in the meantime slyly tries to talk his sister Vittoria into giving in to Brachiano. Flamineo is one, or the only one, who clearly knows himself. He has been induced to serve Brachiano by his frustration, which is both sexual (secretly impotent, or disappointed, he broods on women’s barely veiled lust, bent on arousing but never satisfying passion),

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and economic (he comes of a poor family). He knows he is a failure – and has already adopted the role of pure and simple destroyer – out of a perverse, diabolical pleasure in subverting universally accepted values. Worn out, he lacks the strength to rise again. Vittoria Corombona is not the spiritual victim of any power; she subdues and allures. She persuades Brachiano to murder both his wife and her own husband Camillo, not explicitly but by telling him of a dream; and immediately after she rebuts her mother’s reproaches. But her greatest exploit lies in replying with systematic denials to a cardinal’s closing speech at her trial for adultery. Another superb scene occurs at the convent, when her disdain artfully tames the enraged Brachiano who wants to dishonour her in public. There are four pure characters in the play. Cornelia, the mother of the three Corombonas, rushes on stage appealing to the fear of God. Marcello is the opposite of his brother Flamineo. Brachiano’s little son Giovanni more than once comes in to utter pert naïve speeches, like certain children in Shakespeare, and in a very evocative scene wonders if there is life in the other world, and what it is like. Brachiano’s wife Isabella expresses a sort of nobleness that is not rigid or haughty, but capable of wit, irony and smiles. 3. Camillo is a husband who no longer sleeps with his wife Vittoria nor has sex with her; in the early scenes Flamineo urges him to be reconciled with her. Visibly echoing Iago, while seeming to appease Camillo’s jealousy he aims to excite it; Camillo is a fool easily manipulated by Flamineo, so that he sheepishly follows his absurd instructions. The human psyche is gradually revealed as discontinuous and precarious – a purpose just expressed can immediately be contradicted in the twinkling of an eye, and re-announced again equally quickly. This can be seen in the attempted, and immediately failed, reconciliation of Brachiano with Isabella,26 a pendant 26 Very effective, and crucial to understand Webster’s method, is the subliminal link created by the recurrence of the term ‘whirlwind’, the atmospheric vortex shaking the yew-tree, a branch of which falls on, and kills Camillo and Isabella, in the dream Vittoria relates to Brachiano; this is also the involuntary metaphor Brachiano uses in addressing Isabella (‘What humorous whirlwind hurried you to Rome’), with whom he would be reconciled if the design to get rid of her were not stronger inside him. Flamineo also unknowingly uses the term ‘whirlwind’ when the two lovers Vittoria and Brachiano are angry with each other, and exchange gusts or blasts of insults, in

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of the one merely planned between Camillo and Vittoria. Brachiano is the first or second example of a character that suddenly changes his mind: he approaches Isabella willing to make peace with her, and soon after leaves her, threatening divorce. The reasons for such behaviour are a mystery even to him; he questions and studies his mind but does not understand it well, or maybe not at all. Isabella is Webster’s first duchess, angry, yet honest, trying to save her marriage to Brachiano; she reacts hysterically, and is persecuted and poisoned like the duchess of Malfi. On the point of starting Act III Webster has already shown he is an efficient, even extraordinarily pithy dramatist, with the two dumb-shows that disclose, or rather suggest, the accomplishment of the two crimes plotted. At her trial Vittoria objects to the inquiry being held in Latin; but even when Monticelso speaks English his tortuous Latinate language is a token of Webster’s satire of legal language. Monticelso calls Vittoria an apple gone bad, handsome on the outside, rotten within; then, with a tour de force of examples, he proceeds to teach her what the term ‘whore’ is and means. Vittoria counters blow by blow, and the verdict remains doubtful. This is an element that again reminds one of Browning and the trial at the heart of The Ring and the Book, the classic poem on the relativity of truth, as well as of trials and sentences, with even more open and amused shots at the legal profession. Vittoria accepts the verdict that sends her to a convent of Convertites.27 4. At the beginning of Act IV no fewer than three revengers line up against Vittoria and Brachiano: Ludovico, Isabella’s secret lover (unknown to her, who, not loving him, preserved her chastity), with Francisco her brother and Cardinal Monticelso. The latter plays Iago to Francisco, who would prefer to forego vengeance. But once again there is a sudden change of mind, since Francisco listens to Monticelso and is persuaded to commit the crime. There is a whole chain of instantaneous volte-faces: at the convent Brachiano, deceived by a letter from Francisco, curses Vittoria, sighs for

27

Act IV at the Convertites’ convent. In this latter case the dramatist addresses the public asking them to catch the connection. Browning’s Pompilia is kept in a convent of the same monastic order while awaiting her trial.

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Isabella, and again implores and adores Vittoria. Ludovico is first induced by Monticelso, now Pope (he has much too easily been given the triple crown) to forego revenge, but then is won over by the diabolical Francisco. Earlier on, the conclave is certainly the worst, clumsiest, crudest and swiftest scene in the play, though it still obeys the economic principle of avoiding lengthiness and invests all the events with a kind of ghostly glow.28 Meanwhile it is implied that Vittoria, thanks to Webster’s psychological philosophy, has yielded to Brachiano’s persuasion and become his wife and duchess. The beginning of Act V is the only moment of stasis, if not paralysis, or of merely free-flowing chatter, between one and another phase of the spectacular machination which is going to destroy the two villains. Afterwards the action becomes chaotic and frantic, like a final concertato in the grand style, where the various counterpoints cannot easily blend. Ferocity alternates with pathos in the death of Marcello, stabbed by his own brother Flamineo, and Cornelia their mother who sings a dirge echoing Ophelia’s mad songs. Only at this point does Flamineo feel a shudder shaking his assurances, but soon after he resumes his search for nothingness. However, first he wants to organize a show and act in it, like Jonson’s Volpone: this is the moment of the coup de théâtre of the blank bullets that make Vittoria and Zanche think they have killed him. Webster, usually overly synthetic, draws out the action drop by drop. Finally the avengers burst onto the stage and carry out their vengeance. The last snapshot employs a trite device of the theatre of the time, with young Giovanni, symbolizing purity and strength, hastily announcing his determination to change things. § 126. Webster III: ‘The Duchess of Malfi’. The blood taboo It is true at first sight, somewhat less so on looking more closely, that The Duchess of Malfi (acted by the King’s Men in 1614 and printed in 1623)

28 We surely cannot comprehend why Webster deliberately made a gross historical mistake having Monticelso (really Montalto) become Pope as Paul IV instead of Sixtus V (1585–1590). ‘Possibilistic’ critics believe in an improbable throb of respect on Webster’s part for a not dishonourable Pope.

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is a twin and remake of The White Devil. The external setting is the same, the time-frame nearly one century earlier, and the source is a written one and easily identified: a novella by Bandello (the twenty-sixth in his collection), but derived from Belleforest in the translation by William Painter in The Palace of Pleasure. The evident difference is that The White Devil is the classic revenge tragedy, where one murder demands another, to be carried out by a relative, commissioned by the ghost of the murdered person. The Duchess of Malfi becomes a revenge play, and sui generis at that, only at the end, and is, instead, a tragedy of persecution. Webster very ably mixes and inverts roles, improving or, at any rate, altering, but also adding or suppressing, a number of links.29 The White Devil does not contain a really diabolical character. Vittoria is not one, being rather demonized by others and proving a magnet attracting all and in all arousing passion. The proverbial and metaphorical title itself diminishes the literal potential of the real demonic; among so many half-devils only Flamineo is desperate, broken and Mephistophelian. In the passage from the Devil to the Duchess, Flamineo becomes Bosola, a more human, less inflexible and impenetrable Flamineo, and, at the same time, melancholy, malcontent and amateurish. A complete and absolute change, in spite of the name, involves the cardinal, who in The Duchess is the kind of Catholic prelate that was to become fixed from then on in the Protestant imagination – corrupt, gloomy, lewd and troubled – and ever present in Browning and constantly recurring in his dramatic monologues. In The White Devil his metamorphosis, Monticelso, surprised and perplexed us. Here in The Duchess there is a duo of demonic hypostases in the Aragon brothers. Thus this drama signally lacks a Vittoria, and the duchess (here nameless, in Bandello, Giovanna d’Aragona) is a repeat of Isabella de’ Medici. Symmetrically contrasted to the diabolical villains is a duo of angelic goodies, so that the play becomes more oppositional, didactic and demonstrative. In between stands Bosola, torn between 29 The small subplot concerning Zanche, the black maid, is repeated in the slightly ampler one of Julia, the cardinal’s whore who in the last scenes of the play covets Bosola, who uses her to learn the cardinal’s responsibility in the murder of the duchess. The way Julia dies, kissing a poisoned Bible, also evokes Isabella’s death in The White Devil.

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the two forces. Browning was to love this formalization, too, and often elaborated in poems and dramas on the love of two pure beings, rare in their sublimating reciprocal devotion, but crushed under active external oppression. I have already mentioned the nexus linking Webster’s duchess with Browning’s, and we can see it clearly in the description Antonio gives in Act I Scene 2, an idealizing portrait of open-heartedness and a living example of unselfish benevolence, where, not by chance, several terms of ‘My Last Duchess’ recur, making us believe that Browning was directly inspired by Webster’s play. Following this parallel, we can add that in Webster the ‘Browning-like’ duke is not the duchess’s legitimate second husband, but her brother Ferdinand. He announces and anticipates, making them diegetic, many of the synchronic pathologies to be found in the Duke of Ferrara. Duke Ferdinand in fact says more or less what Browning’s duke says: this is my duchess. Feminist criticism, reading in Ferdinand’s veto on a new marriage a masked incestuous impulse of which he is unconscious, has failed to see that the pure couple simply exalts the crowning of conjugal life as a divine procreative gift (Antonio and the duchess engender three children), and the coherent and trustful answer to the biblical precept ‘increase and multiply’.30 For, according to Catholic doctrine, the spouses themselves are the ministers of their nuptial union. What does Ferdinand fear, then? As long as he is ignorant of who her sister’s husband is, he dreads

30

Feminism and new historicism have nevertheless often stressed that Bandello’s novella was suitable to the transposition of the English myth of a female sovereign like Elizabeth, implying a hint on the secret reasons of her self-imposed veto to marry, if not remarry: ‘Why should only I, / Of all the other princes in the world / Be cas’d up, like a holy relic? I have youth, / And a little beauty’; and her brother answers: ‘So you have some virgins, / That are witches’ (III.2.137–40). On the other hand, one can appreciate the repercussions on the play of the Jacobean anthropological prejudice – the taboo – surrounding the status of a remarried widow. The Duchess of Malfi is therefore an absolute and contingent, if not militant, moral fable, and at its beginning the Malfi courtiers descant on the rectitude and honesty reigning in French courts, at the same moment when Chapman had opened the eyes of his countrymen with Bussy D’Ambois. On this see, more amply, Bogard 1955, 19–21.

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contamination or infection of blood.31 He goes crazy: he feels he should kill the illegitimate child born from the union, but opts for a synecdoche and plans the murder of his sister. By killing her he will get rid of the object of his passion, if his was really an incestuous passion. At any rate he will come to realize that ‘It is some sin in us, Heaven doth revenge / By her’. Still, like Hamlet he lets time go by before taking his vengeance. How does this affect the ideological approach? Webster seems to have grown more flexible and more oriented towards a religious allegory. The crucial point appears to be that goodness is threatened: it may be rewarded in the afterlife, but meanwhile the devil triumphs, though with repercussions, regrets and remorse. The inattentive are warned that they may be caught in a vortex from which there is no release. 2. In the duchess and Antonio the other side of innocence is the ease and naïvety with which they fall into the nets of extremely able plotters. Bosola discovers the duchess’s pregnancy (it is immediately clear that the play will transgress the Aristotelian unities) with the device of the early apricots. Nor does she understand that Bosola is a spy: believing him a friend and ally of Antonio she tells him Antonio is her husband. They being dilettantes, their mere act of plotting produces tragic unwished-for results, and the duchess’s countermoves turn against her. Antonio and the servant maid jest in the bedroom with the duchess and leave her alone lost in fancies, so that, unaware of her brother’s entrance, she spontaneously reveals what she should conceal. Antonio is disoriented and more than once commits gross mistakes making himself co-responsible in the chain of bloody deeds. Act IV, with the duchess imprisoned and then murdered, is the most excruciating in Webster’s whole work and one of the most spasmodic in Jacobean drama. It is fraught with oneiric and surreal shows, hallucinations and terrifying visions: a most original and fantastic play within the play. Its director and actor is Bosola, bent on increasing if possible the duchess’s already keen sense of vanitas vanitatum, for in his 31

In later anthropological terms, it is miscegenation. A ‘descendant’ of Webster’s Ferdinand is the father of the Barrett sisters, who forbade his daughters and also Elizabeth to marry because in his vein ran bastard blood (Volume 4, § 62.2). Another Browning is here.

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various disguises he is the same unearthly spirit that in Marlowe comes to Faust and calls him to eternity, out of this world; but he cannot escape the task of the hangman. The elaborate, Baroque scene of a train of madmen gathering in front of the duchess, interrupted by her tender recommendation to give her son some syrup for his cough, shows how far the macabre mixes here with the grotesque and the pathetic. The duchess dies with the words and invocations of martyrs, and also almost literally echoing the silvery queries of the naïve Giovanni in The White Devil. Hardly less compact, after this seemingly definitive climax, is Act V. The result of his torture heightens, instead of curing, Ferdinand’s psychic disease, with whose devastating lycanthropy Webster lends a suggestion to Angela Carter.32 Paradoxically, it is at this very late point that a revenge tragedy may start; and in a way it is accomplished, but by indirect means, for the duchess lacks a real revenger. Antonio could be one, but is not, for he seeks to be peacefully reconciled to the two brothers. Indeed the persecution is not ended, for the cardinal orders Bosola to kill Antonio. The cardinal is not affected by the blood taboo obsessing his brother, and only intends to give his sister, whose death he ignores, a rich husband and a profitable marriage. The cardinal thus becomes the alter ego of Flamineo in The White Devil, as is evidenced by his sudden confession, saying that he wants to repent, but ‘the devil takes away my heart / For having any confidence in prayer’. Only in the last scene does the duchess’s revenger come to light and prepare to act. He is moved only by the need to make up for not having refused to act before: Bosola is, then, at once the duchess’s murderer and revenger. The two villains, with Bosola the ‘gerettet’ villain (if such he truly is), kill one another, confirming Webster’s demand for a radical clean-up.33

32 33

See Volume 8, § 181. See D. C. Gunby’s doubtless complex and acrobatic argument in ‘The Duchess of Malfi: A Theological Approach’, in Morris 1970, 181–204, aiming to demonstrate that this is an optimistic play, even a triumphant one, that it does not question divine providence, and that Bosola is the instrument of that.

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§ 127. Webster IV: ‘The Devil’s Law Case’ Anyone perusing this comedy34 (dated 1619 or 1620, by internal evidence certainly later than 1610,35 and printed in 1623) or induced to read it hastily and carelessly would be guilty of unforgivable negligence. It is easy to fall into this trap, because most critics have judged it severely, calling it inferior, clumsy and badly structured, and with a quite implausible conclusion. Though usually acknowledging it has lively satirical touches and occasional imaginative flashes, they have relegated it to the role of a poor cousin of the two tragedies. This play, instead, is a robust rebuttal of the claim that Webster could not write humorous or comic-satirical works, or mere entertainments. Here we have such a one, in itself a remarkable proof of Webster’s ability to ‘remake’ his own work, for in Act IV Webster gives an inverted, even intoxicatingly comic version of Vittoria Corombona’s trial in her tragedy, and, hence, a powerful satire of the legal world. This section of the play is, admittedly, extremely lengthy and protracted, positively interminable, but brimming with coups de théâtre. It also highlights the conceptual lines and psychological constants of Webster’s dramatic art. 2. At first sight the plot comes across as totally déjà vu. On the limelight there is a miser, Romelio, in a Neapolitan setting, but one of the same type as Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Jonson’s Jews of Milan and Venice, and Shakespeare’s Shylock had belonged to.36 Romelio’s ships are returning full of gold after unloading their goods, and on first coming onstage he boasts about it among other usurers and minor and dilettante misers. However, he is not the proverbial father of a single daughter, but the brother of an equally pure and headstrong Jolenta, coveted by Contarino, a penniless young aristocrat obviously ready to barter rank with dower. But Romelio prefers Ercole, the Spanish captain of a fleet at war with the Turks, while Contarino has the support of Leonora, the still attractive mother of the two siblings. Leonora, indeed, is fond of the young 34 I cannot concur with what some have suggested, that it may have been influenced by Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, or have influenced it. 35 No less certainly later that 1605 since (IV. 2. 294) it mentions the Gunpowder Plot. 36 Romelio at any rate disguises as a Jewish surgeon to extort Contarino’s testament.

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man, and would like to win him for herself.37 In this Spanish Neapolis Webster sets up a subplot similar to those he usually abstains from, where another Spaniard disguises in order to spy on his son’s pranks, almost as in Jonson’s first comedy of ‘humours’. The two suitors fight a duel nearly at the very moment it is heard that Romelio has undergone a loss of money he must make up for. Contarino is thought to be dying after the duel, and Romelio, longing to inherit, secretly stabs the wounded man, who instead of dying is healed. Meanwhile Romelio, whose hunger grows with eating, also strives to make Jolenta the heir of Ercole, by giving out that the son he is to have from a nun is the fruit of the loves of his sister and Ercole. Jolenta pretends to be pregnant, so she will be able to declare she has given birth to two twins.38 But with Webster’s characters’ proclivity to change their minds, she reveals her brother’s lie and ruins his plans. At the trial the mother reveals that Romelio is a bastard (as always, Webster’s women rebel against male exploitation). In this trial, indeed, Webster makes a woman the accuser instead of the defendant. Among the general astonishment, the judge at the trial is Romelio’s father, and this compels Leonora to admit her lie. In a second and final duel Contarino, who is still thought dead and is disguised, acts the second to his very rival fighting against Romelio; the duel is interrupted by a Capuchin friar, as well as by Romelio’s sudden repentance. The result is due to a spiral of intentionally gratuitous instances of ignorance or of lies, one leading to another. These are intentionally gratuitous, for their aim is to demonstrate Webster’s axiom that reality is chaotic and relative. The denouement comes in the shape of the almost single instance in Webster of a worthy Catholic priest. The Capuchin friar is the spokesman of divine truth, singularly echoing the monk closing Browning’s The Ring and the Book.39 Putting pressure on Romelio, he persuades him to confess. But that is the last, umpteenth lie of Romelio’s: he refuses to give up, and in fact shuts up in a room his

37 38 39

Of course Webster mixes corrupt and inexistent Italian names, like Jolenta, with those of familiar characters of the English ‘commedia dell’arte’, like the merry Winifrid. The dialogue of the really pregnant nun, with the sister falsely so, is tender and witty. Volume 4, §, 132.7.

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mother and the friar who are shouting that Contarino is alive. Romelio, first imprisoning then releasing the two good persons, unquestioningly emphasizes the unexplainable volubility of man. The play’s evident inconsistencies reflect Webster’s deep-seated idea of the human psyche: at any moment a person’s mind may change and even perhaps experience a kind of Pauline conversion. A judge enters and gives somewhat extravagant directions like those at the end of Volpone, among them the building of a monastery. More than in any of Webster’s tragedies, the ending is happy, but rather colourless and as a matter of form. 3. In The Devil’s Law Case an attempted murder miraculously turns into a cure; plotted deceptions and chains of projects prove harmless, do not destroy human life, and the centre of interest is at most a competition in shrewdness and bloodless revenges. Nor are there intermediaries between instigator and ‘victim’. The villain is no outsider – a helper or hired killer – but the protagonist himself who plots several Jonsonian frauds with the aim to make money. Nevertheless, as in the tragedies, Jolenta stands out as the firm, stubborn self-determined and revengeful woman; in a way a second hypostasis of the villain is Leonora, the classic sensual widow, who to satisfy her passions does not scruple to cite her son at law. This is the play where Webster shows himself a master of comedy, one at the same time splendidly realistic in portraying minor characters, and able to produce comic or humorous episodes that the spectator can recognize as such, halfway between plausible and fabulous. The Devil’s Law Case is, like many Shakespearean ones, a sexconscious comedy, which puts on the same level sensual desire and covetousness of gold, interacting in a symbolic and reciprocally symbiotic relation. There is hardly any speech that does not hint at or hide a sexual pun or double meaning. The language thrives on that equivalence, in a glass-house atmosphere as hot as that of Measure for Measure.40 A really exceptional scene is the third in Act III, where Romelio, like Flamineo,

40 Scott-Kilvert 1964, 40, notices another aspect of this similarity.

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tries to corrupt Jolenta in order to pass his bastard off as her son;41 but she retorts with a lie, saying she is already pregnant by Contarino (a condition that is not dishonourable since, by the same juridical-ecclesiastic quirk as used by Romelio, her pre-contract will be held as marriage thanks to a slight donation). Jolenta leaves this scene innocent and absolved, the only stainless one of Webster’s three main heroines. But hearing of her mother’s passion for Contarino she trembles in disgust. Now she must prefer Ercole, but of course ends by changing her mind and accepting to appear as the mother of the nun’s child. Romelio reacts erecting a pile of lies and stratagems too complex and precarious to hold up. On the other side, reality has become so strange and absurd that Ercole nobly proposes marriage to a Jolenta made pregnant by his rival! The trial in this comedy resembles that of Vittoria Corombona, but is a different kind of masterpiece: burlesque, with a peroration full of ridiculous bombast.42 The fact remains that the mother, overwhelmed by passion and vengefulness, chooses to appear as an adulteress precisely in order to damage her son, disinherit and ruin him by making him a bastard, that is to say an illegitimate son.43 At this point the prosecutor strips off his robe as a person that is involved in the case, as he himself appears to be Romelio’s father and Leonora’s adulterous lover. It is the umpteenth turnabout, and the witness Winifrid is disproved on the basis of the timeline. Leonora submits to her defeat and retires to a convent; now Ercole sheds his disguise, reveals he is living and denounces Romelio’s circumventions, while Contarino stands there quivering, but remains disguised and delays recognition.

41 Romelio uses a wonderful periphrasis describing Webster’s ‘nuclear’ transition, that is, how the nun’s blood fires up just after she has renounced the flesh by taking the veil. 42 A pithy definition, in particular, might have become the motto of Joyce’s Bloom: ‘No man alive more welcome to the husband / Than he that makes him cuckold’. 43 The fake adultery would have happened in the year of the battle of Lepanto, 1571.

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§ 128. Dekker* I: The brothel syndrome The dramatic art of Thomas Dekker1 (ca. 1570–1632) has unanimously found favour with all English playgoers, including the intelligentsia, for centuries. It still does, certainly not on the basis of critical misapprehension, but in the light of his three most accessible and popular comedies, usually read with rather indulgent eyes. Of course no one would dream of calling him a great or supreme dramatist, but several agreeable traits go a long way towards compensating for his undeniable shortcomings, like his poorly structured and technically mediocre plots. His popularity is due to the fact that with a few brush-strokes he can produce a credible, plausible character, and at the same time to those familiar, proverbial flashes of genius sufficient to save feeble or over-lengthy plays. What qualities, then, assure him timeless fame among the English? First of all he has humour and pathos; furthermore, he endorses a romantic, democratic, regenerative view of love, which is never promiscuous or mercenary; it is, rather, sublimated agape. He has also a fourth and a fifth quality: he speaks to the Englishmen of his time without berating them, his moralizing is mild, and he holds out to the metropolitan bourgeoisie – of his time, but the bourgeoisie does not grow old, nor does age wither it – a mirror reflecting a complacent face, though with some wrinkles. The sixth, ever welcome qual-

*

Dramatic Works, ed. F. Bowers and C. Hoy, 4 vols, Cambridge 1953–2009; The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 5 vols, London 1884–1886, New York 1963. A. C. Swinburne, ‘Thomas Dekker’, in SAS, 60–109; M. L. Hunt, Thomas Dekker: A Study, New York 1911; K. Gregg, Thomas Dekker: A Study in Economic and Social Backgrounds, Seattle, WA 1924; M.-T. Jones-Davies, Un peintre de la vie londonienne. Thomas Dekker (circa 1572–1632), 2 vols, Paris 1958 (a work from a bygone era, of spectacular erudition, on Dekker as ‘infatigable spectateur et peintre du mond’ [vol. II, 41], and a world that is typically that of London; on the whole, a series of densely taxonomic chapters); A. Maugeri, Studi su Thomas Dekker, Messina 1958; G. R. Price, Thomas Dekker, New York 1969; L. S. Champion, Thomas Dekker and the Traditions of English Drama, New York 1985; J. Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker, Oxford 1990; K. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists, New York 1993.

1

Owing to the countless references to Holland and the Dutch language, BAUGH, vol. II, 543, and many others, suggest that Dekker’s family came from Holland, and that he was related to Southwell’s Dutch biographer, Father John Dekkers.

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ity is humility. Dekker is a common Englishman, ‘one of us’, a self-taught man, a natural, genial writer, without university or legal education; not a proud, contemptuous intellectual giving himself airs. Ben Jonson, who as I mentioned was not liked by most, defined him condescendingly ‘a very simple honest fellow’, a judgement shared by few others (and Dekker served him back in Satiromastix, together with the other target of his criticism, Marston).2 If one sums up these data the resulting identikit is rather like that of Dickens. Many critics concur on this analogy, often adding the names of Chaucer and Goldsmith. Dekker and Dickens are in fact two eminent Londoners, much given to tireless walks through the capital, seeking out and probing the sights and scenes of streets and thoroughfares. Both were familiar with the debtors’ prison and authors of sketches.3 In Dekker’s two best comedies, The Shoemaker’s Holiday and The Honest Whore, a large part of the action takes place among honest, industrious, down-to-earth tradesmen, whose female counterparts are always treated with a touch of misogyny. Dekker is most at ease in shop banter, rich in colourful jokes exchanged by the apprentices with a variety of witticisms, idioms, interjections, gratuitous insults, which delay the development of the plot without this being noticed or resented. Like Dickens, and after him Joyce, Dekker derives supremely farcical effects from mangled idioms. In one scene, two memorable eccentrics speak, one in Dutch, the other in Irish, or, rather, parodic versions of both, with Gaelic inserts. Dekker decides to set a play in Italy only when he must denounce unpleasant, foolhardy deeds; but he apparently winks at the audience, and the papier-mâché Milan of The Honest Whore, with names out of the commedia dell’arte, is a stratagem no one believes in. In drawing this parallel we must finally mention his xenophobic and racist prejudice: Dekker often puts in his characters’ mouths prejudiced rants against Jews and Irishmen; a bit like an ante litteram fascist he also endorses awful, raving views on women.4 2 3 4

A conventional revenge plot was quickly and clumsily sewn up with a subplot where Dekker replied, but without much rancour, to Jonson’s Poetaster (§ 116.5), imagining Horace-Jonson tried and condemned. The tale of Fortunatus and his ever-filled bag is often told in Dickens (see for instance chapter XII in Book II of Our Mutual Friend). We might add a curiosity: the English have always loved Dekker because he is the typical friend of animals; he wrote a pamphlet condemning street fights of bears and

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2. To pursue the parallel with Dickens, Dekker, too, has a diurnal face and immediately after, or together, a nocturnal one. In Volume 5 I shall define Dickens as an expert on psychic pathologies, his own first of all. Both have a funereal, surreal, hallucinatory vein. If to the three popular comedies by Dekker we add other theatrical pieces, as well as collaborations with other dramatists (without bothering to discuss the extent of the collaboration), we are faced with a playwright who is far more open, if not apocalyptic, depicting a topsy-turvy society, albeit disguised and masked, that repeatedly shows schizoid, marred, villainous personalities. Despite this, everything turns out well in the end for the sake of convention. Dekker is not really concerned with politics, though he does attack the corrupt, bribe-ridden administration of justice. He is worried rather by a metaphysical principle, the devil’s mastery of the world. His five most important plays vehemently stress his fixed idea – sex, and consequently lust. As we have seen, at the end of the sixteenth century it was fashionable to present on the stage the figure of the ‘courtesan’, a euphemism originating in Marston. Dekker is more straightforward, and his plays, not only in the titles, positively declaim the term ‘whore’. This very word appears in the title of a play by him and in that of another by Ford. But it is in statistical terms, consulting a concordance, that we find it in Dekker far, far more than in any other contemporary dramatist. Dekker has a fixation, a morbid, paranoid obsession, with brothels. His most famous diptych presents a whore’s career. Here a prostitute is redeemed, but is always on the verge of crossing the line between chastity and prostitution. The play is filled with other, authentic whores and a crowd of panders. ‘Whore’ is the insult addressed to women, whether they are such or not. Continual disquisitions are made on the nature and the deeds of the whore, and that of Hippolito (made for persuasive aims) in The Honest Whore recalls, but is altogether stronger in purely pathological terms than Monticelso’s speech in Webster.5 If for Shakespeare all the world is a stage, for Dekker all the world is a brothel, and in the characters’ thoughts

5

dogs. After Lamb, he received the highest praise in a long, substantial essay (more than forty pages, in SAS) by Swinburne, who also dedicated to Dekker one of his sonnets on the ‘English dramatic poets’ and wrote a prologue for Old Fortunatus. § 125.3.

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and words such equivalence is magnetic and predominant. We can explain this obsession in two ways: either Dekker is a moralist, clear-minded and at the same time passionate, bent on uprooting the social and moral scourge of prostitution; or else, his crusade betrays his own mental disease, easy to deconstruct. It would be naïve to deny that this obsession can be perceived in many writers of all periods; think of the Victorian age, when moralism, religious propaganda and the sense of sin and eternal damnation weighed no less despotically (a good many Victorian novels deal with redeemed prostitutes). The other side of the coin in Dekker, again as in Dickens, is the homicidal impulse; in this light, The Shoemaker’s Holiday seems quite alien from The Witch of Edmonton, a dark, very modern thriller. 3. Before 1598, if we follow Henslowe’s diary, Dekker had written or collaborated on as many as forty plays. After 1600 his career seems to have gone at a slower pace, since he was working for various companies and some plays were unsuccessful, which led him to try his hand at prose; and between 1613 and 1616 he was in prison for default and consequently inactive. With the fairy-tale-like Old Fortunatus (perhaps conceived from 1596) the debutant Dekker brought the medieval morality up to date, teaching that wealth is not all,6 and that sooner or later covetousness meets with punishment. It was in fact derived from a German source, but it can also be seen as an autochthonous parody of Marlowe’s Faustus, since Fortuna tempts Fortunatus, hopeless and asleep in a wood, and Fortunatus weighs up the gifts offered him, in the end choosing the wrong one. Halfway through the play Fortuna comes to warn him that his time has come, and Fortunatus leaves the inexhaustible purse to his sons, who will face the same fate. One of them, the most covetous, will ceaselessly try to conquer a disdainful, man-eating Agrippina, the daughter of the English king Athelstane. After rather mechanical adventures the court misers, explicitly English so as to stress the allusion, are punished by Vice; as if this were not enough, the play ends with the panegyric of Elizabeth, sitting among the audience as in Peele’s boldest interlude.7 It is open to doubt whether the fairy-tale was 6 7

It is also the proverb in Dekker’s most popular single lyric, the one appearing in The Golden Treasure: ‘Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?’ § 94.2.

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Dekker’s most suitable genre, for nearly at the same time he found the realistic city comedy more congenial. The Shoemaker’s Holiday opens with the verbal exploits of Simon Eyre, the owner of a respectable and prosperous shoe-shop, shooting unnecessary interjections and expletives, seemingly reflecting a nervous condition, actually only bent on impressing and amusing the public.8 It is a mainly ‘linguistic’ play because the nobleman Lacy, who does not wish to go to war in France but lets others believe he has done so, also disguises as a Dutch shoemaking apprentice and delights the audience with intoxicating gobbledygook. In a little triumph of dramatic economy Dekker manages, with a few speeches, to present the situation, and also to set in motion the developments of two marriages, one threatening to break up but destined to heal,9 the other contrasted and then crowned. These marriages serve to prove what Dickens often demonstrates in his novels: no to rank privileges, unconditional yes to genuine love, more important than money interests and caste allegiance. The king in person is called on to ratify these principles. The play is enlivened by some of the finest and most memorable gags in Jacobean comedy: one is that of Ralph who, coming back lame from the war, is not recognized, and another is that of Lacy appearing as a Dutch artisan. In Eyre Dekker pays homage to the enterprising power of the new artisan class, while a pinch of misogyny can be felt in the portrait of Margery, the shoemaker’s wife. The Shoemaker’s Holiday is just agile and lively, but the next two plays are more ambitious, their stratified and overlapping plots betraying and transmitting a sense of surfeit and weariness. Indulging his verbal expertise Dekker seems to announce Browning’s unchecked prolixity when he gives some of his characters full liberty to talk and digress; he loves to hear them utter quips, chatter at pleasure, even beat about the bush. The escalation,

8 9

His ever-repeated interjection ‘by the life of Pharaoh!’ is a precious rejoinder to that of Jonson’s Bobadil (§ 115.1). This inner thread, related to the Ralph-Jane couple, is uncommonly likeable: the husband comes back from war battered, the wife believes him dead and is going to re-marry, until the shoemaker Ralph, having to make a new pair of shoes for the wedding, recognizes her shoe and finds her out. Of course the new marriage is prevented at the last moment, at the church door.

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however, is that the pleasant playwright of Shoemaker tries vainly, in The Honest Whore, to mask bitterness and disgust. 4. There is general agreement that, of the two parts of The Honest Whore (1604), Dekker’s masterpiece, the first is Dekker’s and Middleton’s joint product, while the second (1608) belongs to Dekker alone. In point of fact, a third playwright emerges between the lines: for, besides the militant motif of ‘virginity’ and ‘prostitution’, regularly recurring from one play to another, there are elements – like ‘humours’, disguises and above all tricks – which are typically Jonsonian.10 Dekker’s alone are the sketches with their verbal duels and skirmishes, such as those centring on Brian the Irish servant and his colourful but incomprehensible talk, as well as the recurrence of nearly identical shop-scenes – a kind of play within the play. They are justified by the fact that the patient haberdasher, Candido, must demonstrate his endless patience in putting up with all sorts of offences,11 and always willingly accepts pleasant and unpleasant practical jokes of all kinds, also, if not exclusively, devised by his shrewish wife. This secondary plot of the haberdasher, involving the boisterous presence of good-fornothing idle mockers, intertwines with the main one referred to in the title; this fusion – or friction more exactly – produces a tragicomedy. Part one ends with an emblematic scene in grand style, located in a ‘bedlam’ where many sane people have been sent by mistake, and three real madmen rave, so that the typical, Renaissance but also pre-absurd discordia concors turns upside down the usual sanity-folly relationship. In this epilogue Dekker appears as a utopian moralist, trusting in a possible redemption of man in spite of his awareness of the frailty of human intentions. Prostitution becomes an obsession, and Dekker proves little less than manic, for at the end of the second play he makes the Duke of Milan order the prostitutes

10

11

Jonsonian is after all the Duke of Milan’s idea of feigning, at the beginning, the death of his daughter Infelice (a clearly semantic name), and staging her funeral, while he has exiled her to Bergamo to save her from the importunate love of Hippolito, his enemy’s son. Hippolito, the scourge of Bellafront’s sin, will eventually become Infelice’s model husband, but in the second part of the play, succumbing to the strong temptation to lie with Bellafront, he wants the latter to be again a prostitute. Patient Grissel is the subject of one of Dekker’s co-authored plays.

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to be rounded up and arrested, in an attempt to cure one evil with another, wishing to prevent his son-in-law’s repeated, compulsive drive to yield to adultery and court the whore, Bellafront. 5. Bellafront who makes-up as a prostitute in front of her pimp before receiving clients is a novel picture in the drama of the time, and their verbal exchange sounds like the recording of a real dialogue. But after a few lines Bellafront, too, suddenly turns into a didactic example or a melodramatic hypostasis. Hippolito’s grand tirade against prostitution induces Bellafront to grasp the sword he has left in order to kill herself, but Hippolito prevents her. Subsequently Bellafront, who has truly repented, speaks the raving language of a female preacher and everybody thinks she is acting. Parallel to her drama, and forming a chiasmus, is Hippolito’s anguish. It is chiefly owing to him that Bellafront has repented, so he resolves never to look at women and Hamlet-like ponders on a skull. Bellafront, seeing him as her paladin, goes to him disguised as a page but is rejected. In part two she is tempted to return to prostitution, advised to do so by her husband Mateo, a good-for-nothing she is devoted and a slave to, and also by Hippolito whose matrimonial chastity has apparently disintegrated. Dekker’s ace in this second part is the introduction of a new character, Bellafront’s father Orlando Friscobaldo. Incognito, and disguised as the couple’s servant, Friscobaldo is the dramatist’s mouthpiece, severe in scourging vice but actively benevolent and even sentimental behind the scenes. From a purely theatrical viewpoint this is a contrived move, for it is not clear why this father should appear out of the blue now. At one point some people in the play know of his disguise and some do not, so that he is forced to go back and forth, now as Bellafront’s father now as Pacheco the servant. The flagging plot is revived when Infelice cleverly starts to inquire whether her husband is Bellafront’s lover as she has been falsely told. Infelice retorts, telling her husband the same lie, that she has betrayed him, and with their Irish servant too. We feel as if we were in the middle of a Restoration comedy skirmish when, as proof of her adultery, she gives Hippolito the very letter and ring he sent to Bellafront. This confrontation results in nothing, because in a later scene Hippolito again tempts Bellafront, telling her the history of human prostitution. On various pretexts, near the end of the play Dekker moves the whole set of characters to Bridewell prison,

§ 128. Dekker I: The brothel syndrome

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inexistent in Milan but well known to Londoners, where for the second time the duke listens to witnesses and defendants. The officers of the law have also, inadvertently, intercepted Candido for receiving stolen goods, and Bellafront, slandered by her own husband, for being a prostitute. As in Jonson the situation, far from gradually getting better, worsens, with the surreal, endless interrogation of three prostitutes; until Bellafront’s father heroically sheds his disguise and comes to his daughter’s support. Dekker’s generally excessive use of pathos is transferred to Bellafront, who asks for and obtains forgiveness for her rascally husband. 6. The Whore of Babylon12 (printed in 1607) had been conceived and performed some time before. It is Dekker’s first and only militant play, being a historical fresco ranging from Elizabeth’s ascent to the throne to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Written in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, like Peele’s Moorish play The Battle of Alcazar,13 it is a perfunctory work, like those that many playwrights felt obliged to write in order to support James’s unsteady monarchy. The genre was alien to Dekker’s abilities, he being one of the few Jacobean authors abstaining from anti-Catholic propaganda.14 After a five-year silence Dekker returned to the stage with If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil Is in It (1611). Weak and incoherent, it was savaged by Swinburne, but by virtue of its hint at devilry this play foreruns The Witch of Edmonton (performed in 1621 or 1623, printed only in 1658, the joint work of Dekker, Ford and Rowley). This is the fifth truly memorable play by Dekker, active again after nearly seven years of prison. Having started with the pageant or allegory of Fortuna, and moved on to the city comedy and perfected it with a militant and denouncing drama, 12 13

14

Once again a ‘whore’, and of Babylon, that is to say the Catholic Church. § 94.3 n. 6. A play now extant in fragments on Wyatt’s rebellion during Queen Mary’s reign was written in collaboration with Webster. Also by Dekker were a few scenes in Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, printed 1611, the epic of an Amazonian she-avenger whose deeds had been narrated in the chronicles (T. S. Eliot praises this as ‘the best comedy’, but by Middleton [ESE, 168]). On Dekker’s collaboration with Massinger in a play on St Dorothea see § 141.3. Hunt 1911, 146, is of the same opinion. Of the opposite idea is Gasper 1990, implausibly maintaining that Dekker was a fervent Protestant, in whose canon this historical drama is absolutely central.

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Dekker practically ended his career with this ominous tragicomedy on a recent criminal event, the execution of a witch condemned without evidence by the people’s blind rage. Suffice to say, it is a mystery story of the kind frequently found in the Victorian age, in the young George Eliot, in Dickens, Trollope, Stoker, even in the Powys brothers – as I also noticed concerning Arden of Feversham. At the end troubled waters are calmed, but the devil will go on walking about freely elsewhere, and the suburb’s corrupt justice will remain the same since the mayor is not sinless. In The Witch of Edmonton Dekker contrives the most unfailingly tense and inexorable plot in his whole canon, recovering and varying the tenets of his moral view of life. The mayor has seduced though not exactly deserted his servant Winnifred, another honest, that is, repentant whore, and is blackmailed by Frank, who has secretly married her and prepares to flee with her. But Frank’s father ignores this, and to pay pressing debts compels Frank to marry the rich Susan. Frank tells this second wife he must go on a long journey, with Winnifred disguised as a page. Just outside the town Frank kills Susan, who had accompanied him on the way. He stabs her to death not in a fit, but in cold blood, and symptomatically telling her she is his ‘whore’, that is his bigamous wife. The victim’s replies to all his arguments are supremely ironical. Soon after Frank pretends he has been assaulted by criminals and binds himself to a tree; found out, he accuses Susan’s previous suitors of the murder. Many of these actions are committed in the sight and with the ambiguous encouragement of a black dog, Tom, the devil’s Mephistophelian embodiment. He is therefore the ‘guardian devil’ of criminals. The dog had revealed itself in one of the first scenes to old ‘mother’ Sawyer, suspect to everybody only because she is old and dirty; meanwhile the dog had played bad tricks to a group of coarse local peasants.15 Dekker is excellent in the scenes featuring these rustics whose songs and dances, as in anticipation of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, mime diabolical rites, one of them kissing the cows’ buttocks. Only Frank,

15

T. S. Eliot considered one of these, Cuddie Banks (who knows the dog is a devil but loves him as a dog), a clown worthy of Shakespeare (quoted in Jones-Davies 1958, vol. II, 39, n. 108).

§ 129. Dekker II: The prose

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being found out, is sentenced to death, and the mayor, the child’s father, provides for his wife’s future. § 129. Dekker II: The prose Dekker’s first prose work, written in a genre temporarily more profitable than drama, was a 1604 record of the 1603 London plague, ‘The Wonderful Year’,16 whose purpose is above all to give a powerful, terrific chiaroscuro view of the effects of death. The register is therefore epic and apocalyptic, but with recurring intermittences and thus little, disquieting bathetic moments. The date is sure, but at times one seems to hear Donne’s insistent macabre sermonizing,17 for page after page Dekker goes on describing the sights of horror and putrescence, and harping on the sovereignty of the ‘worm’. But insensibly the style becomes grotesque as Dekker narrates episodes he has witnessed, among them the crucially Dekkerian one of the wife that dying of the plague confesses her infidelity to her husband, who like Candido in The Honest Whore does not recriminate. This is the germ of an unwritten comedy, since the wife recovers and cynically the healing is celebrated in a tavern. The truest vein of the misogynous playwright surfaces in ‘The Bachelor’s Banquet’,18 an early handbook that delights in showing ever-patient husbands continually harassed by ‘humoral’ wives, with dialogues dramatizing various situations of conjugal life. A 1609 pamphlet, ‘The Gull’s Horn-Book’, portrays in eight chapters a day in the life of a naïve beau just arrived in London – but to the non-initiate it might not be clear that he should behave in a way that is just the contrary of what the several precepts say. This is considered the best of Dekker’s pamphlets for its picture of a type never going out of fashion, and the review of accepted places and rites, like the stroll, the restaurant or the theatre, where affectation and pose, as well as folly and ill-breeding, are compulsory.19 Jonson

16 17 18 19

An ‘annus mirabilis’, the year when James succeeded Elizabeth. Apocalyptic allegory also marks a similarly hallucinated sermon on the seven deadly sins of London (1608) and a ‘report’ on hell by a messenger of the devil (1609). This is taken almost word for word from the French Quinze joyes de mariage. Confirming this, it derives from a sixteenth-century Latin Grobianus (the ‘rustic’) by Wedekind, a German.

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attacked, as a dramatist, the same target in his ‘humour’ plays; on the other hand, the pungent, foul-mouthed harshness of Hall’s, Marston’s and even Donne’s satires against hypocrisy and social climbing had never been totally silenced. But here Dekker is much more elegant, and the sketches hardly seem to come from the same hand as that of the author of comedies. It is a more detached and less vivid documentary, written with a finer pen, without the passion Dekker puts in his strenuous dramatic mouthpieces. This sententiousness can be seen as an amused parody of the many handbooks for good courtiers written half a century before; and the pamphlet looks ahead to Swift’s ‘Directions to Servants’. § 130. Middleton* I: A journeyman in Olympus The size of the dramatic oeuvre of Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) borders on the incredible, more so because a good third of his plays are of average, high and, at least in two or three cases, very high level.1 Bullen’s *

Works, ed. A. H. Bullen, 8 vols, London 1885–1886; Collected Works, ed. G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino, Oxford 2007 (a sumptuous, king-sized tome, with indispensable introduction and annotation, though with an excessive poststructuralist bias; it will be cited as Works 2007; associated with it is Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, ed. G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino, Oxford 2007). W. D. Dunkel, The Dramatic Technique of Thomas Middleton in his Comedies of London Life, Chicago 1925, New York 1967; S. Schoenbaum, Middleton’s Tragedies, New York 1955; R. H. Barker, Thomas Middleton, New York 1958; D. M. Holmes, The Art of Thomas Middleton, Oxford 1970; A. Covatta, Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies, Lewisburg, PA 1973; D. Farr, Thomas Middleton, Edinburgh 1973; D. J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays, Cambridge 1975; M. Corsani, Il linguaggio sociale di Thomas Middleton, Genova 1979; J. R. Mulryne, Thomas Middleton, London 1979; M. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge 1980; Thomas Middleton e il teatro barocco in Inghilterra, ed. F. Marenco, Genova 1983; M. White, Middleton and Tourneur, Basingstoke 1992, 1–142; S. Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton, Oxford 1996; H. J. Heller, Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies, Newark, DE 2000; M. O’Callaghan, Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist, Edinburgh 2009.

1

Thomas Heywood (§§ 147–8) doubtless vaunted a gross production four times as big, but his surviving plays are one half of Middleton’s. Beaumont and Fletcher’s canon is as thick as Middleton’s, but includes also collaborations with other playwrights.

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late nineteenth-century edition was in eight volumes, the 2007 Clarendon edition in a single volume, but more than 2,000 pages long and with texts printed in double columns. It presents sixty plays, including comedies, tragicomedies, tragedies, masques and sundry entertainments. It lumps everything together, however, not excepting, for instance, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, and other plays usually ascribed to different authors and only partly Middleton’s. One must adopt some strategy to tame such a tentacular Gorgon, and discuss Middleton without losing one’s bearings (or writing a catalogue, or a volume as thick as the one I have devoted to Shakespeare, whose works number just over half those of Middleton). The first step might be to separate from the opus the works and groups of works attributed with certainty to Middleton, leaving aside those where his collaboration was scant and marginal; but it is difficult, even impossible to come by reliable evidence on this matter. A second step could be to subdivide the whole opus into more and less relevant groups, given that a large portion of those sixty plays is made up of minor or incidental works. In this way one would reduce Middleton’s essential canon to two, three, four, five or at most six plays, one tenth of the whole. Anyone adopting this measure would unconsciously take his or her stand at the other extreme of Middleton’s present revival – which sees him as one of the greatest writers of the English Renaissance, second only to Shakespeare and relegating Jonson to the third place – and support the no less shocking opinion that Middleton is a mere ‘journeyman of the theatre’.2 This quandary – how to deal with Middleton without foundering – has indeed faced several scholars in recent decades, many of whom have countenanced new, more prudent and less dismissive arrangements of the canon. Kenneth Muir, the editor of Middleton’s three works generally considered fundamental,3 allows for instance that a ‘fully representative choice’ should require two more trios, although he does not specify which six other plays would complete the élite of Middleton’s nine masterpieces – the same number as the Muses, yet still one tenth of the whole. T. S. Eliot, more exacting, ascribed to Middleton six or seven

2 3

This (a ‘mestierante del teatro’) is the opinion put forward in PSL, 210–11, one of Praz’s few blunders. Three plays, ed. K. Muir, London 1975.

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‘great plays’.4 This is not an idle query, for reading his critics one finds works named that some overlook and others extol. More specifically, until Lamb and the early nineteenth century Middleton was just a name among many; some reappraisal occurred only with Dyce’s first complete edition in 1860. Afterwards, especially owing to Swinburne’s usual boost, Middleton gradually rose in the scale, mainly thanks to the fact that Jonson, greater in comedy, has almost nothing to boast of in tragedy. The increasing favour enjoyed by Middleton is witnessed by Eliot’s enthusiastic readings – he ranks The Changeling second only to Shakespeare’s tragedies – and by Muir’s. 2. It is actually easy to suppose that many readers, on their first contact with Middleton, experience a shock such as one would feel thrusting one’s fingers in a light socket. What, apart from his acknowledged pliancy, his faithful ‘photographic’ reproduction of London scenes (as Swinburne saw), especially of disreputable places like taverns and brothels, and from his wide understanding of women, makes this playwright so modern?5 He is often read as a dramatic sociologist: his plays are inquests on a changing England, where new classes are rising and social climbers recklessly equate sex with money. Jacobean society, for and in Middleton, is a labyrinth where one makes progress only by cynical slyness and presence of mind, elbowing one’s way through but also disposing of rivals as if with the tip of one’s rapier. The individual, to use the title of one of his plays, must ‘beware’, and always fear unexpected attacks. In such a situation the dramatist, rather than perceptibly moralizing, lets facts speak for themselves. In other words, he does not use the characters as camouflaged mouthpieces, and this lack of benevolence, geniality and ‘romanticism’ makes his collaboration with Dekker hardly credible. Jonson himself, as we have seen, keenly wished to show his viewpoint, and heavily interfered in his comedies. T. S. Eliot insisted that among Jacobean dramatists Middleton is the most impersonal, most coldly and impassibly objective: ‘He has no message; he is

4 5

Ten are also those included in the Mermaid Series, published at the end of the nineteenth century. On Middleton’s misogyny see however below, n. 16.

§ 130. Middleton I: A journeyman in Olympus

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merely a great recorder’.6 Even more impressively, Middleton is a student of the warped psyche, above all when a character judges himself or herself with two different weights and measures. He stands alone and perhaps excels everyone in his time as an architect of plots. He is indeed a glorious ‘journeyman’, supremely able to make the dramatic machine entertain, fascinate, astonish, and grip the reader in an emotional vice. He exercises his imagination especially in giving his works ineffably evocative and allusive titles. In turn, his plots have the virtue of immediate perspicuity, as shown by the fact that they can be narrated in a few words like the most effective jokes; and some comedies are just like ferocious jokes amplified and embellished. His contrivances resemble clock mechanisms where, as in Victorian multi-plot novels, sooner or later one event clicks with another, and the plots are shrewdly and portentously synchronized. A second plot is almost never parasitical, for it mirrors the first, or is a way of re-discussing it dialectically, or even its mise en abyme. But critics have often missed this connection, complaining of a manifest difference of value between the two, even wishing the second suppressed as a nuisance and a retarding element. Middleton might be criticized rather as being less infallible and more discontinuous when he concludes a play. He could also be defined a master of understatement: great, basic manoeuvres are often reported by the characters as if parenthetically. His verse is so purely functional that it seems slipshod, and, in this, has been compared, not without reason, with Donne’s rough diction: it is non-euphonic, insidious and never simplified, plain and flat, always allusive, above all full of sexual double entendres. This is why one cannot extract from Middleton’s plays many scenes, nor memorable lines and speeches suitable to be cited and recited; but, as we shall often notice, in the slow development of his plays we are suddenly caught by explosive scenes and dialectical conflicts between protagonists, of a formidable and rarely met intricacy.

6

ESE, 169.

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§ 131. Middleton II: Comedies set in the London gutter It is usually premised in critical discussions of Middleton that in his tragedies he left the comic parts, and the padding in general, to William Rowley (1585–1637); so that whenever parts of Middleton’s plays seem manifestly poor they must perforce have been authored by that collaborator. According to some, the collaboration turned into a helpful fusion and unity of purposes, producing better works. Rowley was an actor and play-reviser for several impresarios, as well as for dramatists like Fletcher; alone, he produced little, a tragedy and two comedies, plus a satirical prose piece on the Jacobean gold rush. He is frequently cited as a synonym for incompetence, especially as a versifier; but the parts of The Changeling ascribed to him are anything but despicable. The scant, fragmentary biographical information concerning both playwrights has no relationship with their dramatic work. Of Middleton, Eliot said what we have already found true of Webster (though Eliot denied it of Webster);7 that is, that his name collectively defines a number of plays we have received, where his personality is transfused. Like Dekker, Middleton began with satirical prose works in 1604, probably after writing his first comedies as early as 1602. I shall append few dates to his plays because, while those of printing are known (and they are somewhat late, around mid-century at times), those of the first performances are still debated and conjectural, save when they have an undoubted terminus a quo in inner evidence or allusion. The one assured division is between a first phase of city comedies followed by one of tragedies, tragicomedies and romantic comedies. The former were written at the same time as Jonson’s, along the lines of frauds and low shady tricks, and heavily exploiting the Plautine machinery of disguise. Omnipresent is the gull to be fleeced, above all if he is an old miser, as in the early and best Jonson (who tolerated no rival, and expressed a very contemptuous judgement on Middleton to Drummond of Hawthornden). The difference from Jonson is evident in the protagonists’ inventive English names, some of them immediately and wittily meaningful, without any Italian echoes; others are elaborately allegorical or comical (Lucre, Treasure, Whorehound,

7

ESE, 161.

§ 131. Middleton II: Comedies set in the London gutter

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Allwit, Harebrain, though also Succubus). Many of them are name variants of the noun ‘wit’, that is, sense, understanding, and especially the cunning by which one can take advantage of opportunities. The third recurring, invariable type is the ‘courtesan’, in no way inferior to males as to unscrupulous enterprising. The term is a euphemism for ‘whore’, implying also, but not only, that the body is an object for exchange and an atout for any self-promotional purpose. 2. Four or five of Middleton’s comedies claim to be their author’s masterpiece in their genre, one of them traditionally winning the palm, though by an extremely small margin. In Michaelmas Term8 (1604–1607) the gull is Easy, who comes from the province to the metropolis and, true to his name, squanders his wealth playing cards and ‘easily’ ends up in the hands of the merchant Quomodo, who instead of lending him cash sells him cloth that Easy can only sell again at a third of the paid price (and he sells it to Quomodo himself, whose aim is to deprive him of his lands too). The comedy could be said to be already finished at the end of Act IV, but goes on to show that, in a sense, he who laughs last laughs longest. Quomodo, like Jonson’s Volpone (or Pirandello’s Mattia Pascal, and dozens of other classic literary characters) has the mad, macabre idea of feigning himself dead, to see how his friends will administer the patrimony inherited and what remembrance they will have of him. He verifies in disguise their hypocrisy and avarice, and decides to go back to life. Through complex legal transactions at the end there is a simple return to the status quo,9 except that some shrewd people have really profited from the commotion. In A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605–1608) a cunning, heavily indebted dealer succeeds, with the help of a former mistress pretending to be a rich widow and legal cavils and snares, in getting back his mortgaged moneys and lands. So both the covetous old usurers compet8 9

The first of the traditional four quarters of the English school year. The secondary or parallel plot in a way recalls Dekker’s and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, for a disguised father spies on his daughter who comes to London lured by the ‘sweet life’ mirage. Thomasine, Quomodo’s wife, thwarts his daughter’s marriage with the Scottish Lethe for the same reason as, in Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case, Leonora prevents that of Jolenta, her daughter, with Contarino (§ 127). Lethe’s mother too is hot on the heels of her son, to stop him falling into corruption.

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ing for the ‘rich widow’ are put to shame, and the protagonist, having got on his feet again, and promising to turn a page, can contract what seems to be a love marriage. In A Mad World, My Masters (1605–7–8), rich in no less spicy than farcical episodes, and a carrousel of reckless villainies, a penniless and dissolute viveur surrounded by a court of rascals plans to go in disguise to his grandfather, who refuses him even a few pounds for his fancies, and with a series of tricks manages to gain a fine sum of money. In a parallel plot another adventurer seduces the wife of a rich burgher with the help of a ‘courtesan’ disguised as the woman’s duenna. The two plots converge since the ‘courtesan’ is courted by the old country landowner. In Act IV Middleton displays a comic anticipation of the climactic mechanism of his tragedies, for Penitent, as the seducer is called, is visited by a ghost from hell, and swears in terror never to meet his mistress again. On the other hand the viveur must prevent his grandfather’s marriage to the courtesan and the loss of his fortune; by pure chance he falls in love with her without knowing who she is, and straightaway marries her. Even Act V is a forecast of the epilogue of Middleton’s tragedies, in the form of a show within the show, but with no real murder onstage, that is by simply removing the confines between reality and fiction. A few seconds before the end the grandson seems to have got all of his grandfather’s wealth, but in Middleton there are neither conquerors nor conquered, and the grandson ignored he had married a ‘courtesan’. 3. A test of Middleton’s stature as a comedian is A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611), held to be, with a couple of others, his masterpiece among the city comedies. A goldsmith and his wife promise their daughter to a rich ‘whorehunter’ (his name Whorehound is unequivocal);10 but the girl chooses another suitor and adventurously succeeds in marrying him. In the parallel plot her brother is engaged to marry a ‘wealthy Welshwoman’ who turns out to be the mistress of the daughter’s suitor; by this double strategy Whorehound means to get hold of the large fortune of the goldsmith, who looks forward to parading in the garments of the nobility. It is the classic theme of a nobleman coveting riches and young flesh, and trying to swindle 10

A gross, self-evident kind of onomastics, then, but elsewhere shrewd, as in Allwit, which inverting the syllables becomes wittol.

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the representatives of the rising class, as proverbially goldsmiths were in the drama of the time;11 and he comes very close to making it. Middleton impassively documents the Jacobean double moral standard: the goldsmith, at first surprised on learning that his future son-in-law has a mistress already, then remembers his own past transgressions and placidly acquiesces. It is again the preannouncement of a situation that Middleton’s tragic heroes will also experience. The intricate plot resembles an ingenious house of cards, standing upright for a time until, one card falling, the whole construction suddenly collapses. There is, strictly speaking, no single character in the play that does not serve a specific purpose in the plot. The pivot is Touchwood, a man affected by a sort of priapism, who impregnates a sterile lady, with no objection on the part of her credulous husband, destroys Sir Walter Whorehound’s expectations and causes a chain-reaction. Middleton even seems to be in a hurry to complete a course of five acts which are even shorter and more concise than usual, and refrains from exploiting sketches that, if developed, might have been inebriatingly comical. The neophyte entering Middleton’s corpus through this door would find a plot that he must construe and organize without any knowledge of previous facts: a plot carried forward by dint of winks and hints left in mid-air, and with characters on stage uttering brusque dialogues made of idiomatic, proverbial sentences, in a slang of their own, and thick with references to recent news items.12 Entrances and exits are made in a rush, Middleton leaving us to guess, often just hinting at things. Act III ends with a fade-out, as in a film, before a sexual encounter previously alluded to with ambiguous, reticent turns of phrases; and it is a second preannouncement. The only insistent sketch is that of the latinorum used by the B.A. fresh from college to the bride-to-be, who cannot understand a word of it. This has that touch of improbabi­ lity, exaggeration and fantasy, which is proper to farce. Everything goes slowly, until the surprise and the unforeseen event suddenly flare up. Some colourless roles are routine, but two or three succeed in the impossible, 11 12

See for Marston § 107.1, where other analogies will be found between the plots of the two plays. It is, for instance, a play set during Lent, as appears from a few incidental scenes, Cheapside being traditionally the area of the meat market.

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and prove memorable in that practically infinite gallery of types which is Jacobean comedy: they are, especially, Tim, with his inimitable gaffes, and Whorehound himself, notably in the scene of the testament, a testament heaping abuses onto those who expected generous gifts. § 132. Middleton III: The romantic comedies Written and staged in the period of the tragedies (between 1614 and 1619), More Dissemblers Besides Women shows Middleton moving from the city comedy to the genre of romantic comedy, which in less than a decade was to become most fashionable. Though giving up the city’s feverish toing and froing that make the first plays so chaotic, Middleton’s frantic mind succeeds in creating an equally impetuous swirl out of a plot that begins unusually smoothly and neatly. There are at any rate very clear similarities, or nearly a case of self-parody, with Woman Beware Women, given the conventional Italianate setting and the chief role of a lady (or rather: Bianca Cappello will be a middle-class woman). This noblewoman, suddenly caught by hesitation, goes back on a just made and solemnized vow of fidelity; at her side stands a cardinal equally ready to change his mind, whose moral authority is therefore far more doubtful. The comedy has an additional anthropological concern, like many in its time, with the ticklish subject of the widow’s status in Jacobean society, and the related taboo on new nuptials, which we saw recurring and prominent in Chapman and Webster.13 Here the comic genre itself is no longer pure, because of various elaborate, incidental scenes pivoting on unending sexual puns, such as those centred on the libidinous eccentric Dondolo, a servant. The parade of soldiers returning from war nearly turns into a masque with Cupid’s descent; and a company of gypsies enters onstage bringing a gust of colourful exoticism and uttering short speeches in an inexistent language, though with some macaronic bungling, as in Dekker’s nicest intermezzos in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. The dancing lesson of the page, from the first scene a disguised woman, ends with her going into labour and seemingly about to deliver onstage. The plot of this play, unequivocally damned at

13

§ 126, where Middleton’s echoes from Webster’s tragedy are apparent.

§ 132. Middleton III: The romantic comedies

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the time, moves from the imprudent, prurient decision of the cardinal to test the Duchess of Milan by various temptations, in order to fortify her vow of widowhood. As a result the duchess falls in love with a general, Andrugio, who does not love her. On the other side Middleton devises a proverbially impossible situation. Lactantio, the cardinal’s nephew, must manage and at the same time quickly conclude his difficult relationships with no less than three mistresses, one of whom is the ‘page’ he has got with child; another is Aurelia, destined by her father for another husband, and a third the duchess herself, who feigns she wants to marry him, but actually wants Andrugio. This excessively improbable stratagem is meant to impress a further turn on this whirling plot. In the final act the duchess loves (unknowing) Andrugio, who loves Aurelia engaged to Lactantio, who in turn has got with child the ‘page’ about to give birth. As in some previous comedies by Middleton the epilogue guides and brings the character’s efforts – bent on unhinging the order of things by following unreasonable instinct – to the status quo of the most natural dispositions; and the duchess turns back and confirms her vow of chastity. Andrugio marries Aurelia, and Lactantio the ‘page’. 2. The Witch was not printed until 1778, but became then famous just because two songs (only a dozen lines) were partially, and mysteriously, incorporated in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; but since the witch of the title has a son who is also her incestuous lover and throws around unceasing jests, one should rather compare it with The Tempest. Actually the plot was derived both from Machiavelli and Bandello, and gives rise once more to a comedy with an Italianate setting. For all that, it reflects for the umpteenth time the lurid fantastic lights of the Overbury affair, since the witch in the play doles out magic potions to be used for healing but also for causing impotence.14 Spread over ample scenes, the witch’s intermezzos, with her chorus, rites and fantastic evolutions, bear supreme witness to Middleton’s pliancy and versatility. As for the rest, the fixed ingredients of the London comedy are transferred to a mannered fifteenth-century context, becoming the pawns of a game never so full of devilries and inventions. The Witch is 14

Those opposing the divorce accused Lady Howard of having made the Earl of Essex impotent by magical arts. On this notorious Overbury affair see also § 67.1 n. 3.

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perhaps Middleton’s play richest in ploys, stratagems, disguises, seeming coups de théâtre, feigned deaths followed by resurrections, poisonings without effects owing to miraculous contingencies and chains of substituted identities: a frantic Catherine wheel handled by an intoxicated author who at the same time coldly challenges himself to exceed his own ability. Funny reversals take place as the witch’s philtres absent-mindedly end up in other than the expected hands. In one of these quid pro quos the duchess instigates or blackmails a courtier to kill the duke, one of the many deeds that seem to, but do not achieve, their aim. But there is also the disguised lover’s plan to have a husband catch his discontented, disappointed woman in flagrante, hoping by that stratagem to reconquer her.15 At the end the whole puzzle is made clear to the ignorant ones; only the villain really dies, and with a great deal of absolutions and compromises, accepted by everybody, calm returns.16 § 133. Middleton IV: ‘Women Beware Women’. Conjugal fidelity checkmated The distressing, gripping yet velvet-soft tragedy Women Beware Women, of uncertain date, probably written and staged in 1623–1624, was freely inspired by the story of Bianca Cappello, mistress to Francesco 15

16

The extremely complex plan Sebastian uses in Act IV, in order to lie with Isabel, is very like that of Musidorus trying to seduce Pamela and neutralize Dametas in Sidney’s Arcadia (§ 52.1) The issue is tragic because the impotent husband, a prey to a homicidal fit, kills the concubine he believes his unfaithful wife to be, and also the servant taking part in the deception. Then he swallows poison, and discovers that luckily another servant had changed it with a harmless drink. But all the supposed dead are, it turns out, merely wounded! A piquant, incestuous story derived from Giambattista Della Porta (1584) was transposed from Venice to London and dramatized in the second plot of No Wit/Help Like a Woman (the title of the first edition printed in 1657), concerning an Englishman who brings home a woman he has secretly married, passing her off as his sister, until she actually proves such. In the other, far less sensational and more conventional plot, a woman in man’s disguise courts and marries a rich widow to get hold of her fortune. One easily recognizes echoes of Jonson’s later comedies. In this, as in other later comedies, Middleton’s misogyny is glaring from their very titles, yet at the same time partly ironical.

§ 133. Middleton IV: ‘Women Beware Women’. Conjugal fidelity checkmated

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de’ Medici.17 It is a perverse game between a few naïve players, easily entrapped but able to react once they have perceived the deception, and subtle and resourceful architects. Eager to see who shall win, sooner or later they fatally make the wrong move and are checkmated. As we shall see, the chess metaphor is quite literally true.18 But the dramatist, nearly in extremis, feels obliged to decide that no one can win this destructive, indeed self-destroying game, and hastens to apply a moral lesson, albeit resigned and nihilistic. Hence the game progresses and develops with inexorable Greek fatalism, one aspect of which is that any firm conviction crumbles away almost as soon as it is enunciated, as in the two tangible instances of Bianca and Isabella; but ultimately also in a third and fourth, those of Leantio and the Duke of Florence. The Elizabethan stage proves spectacularly apt for a scene expressly devised to exploit its potentialities, as in Act II Scene 2, where the ardent bride Bianca is seduced by the Duke of Florence on the high balcony, with – we might say – the camera moving from a real chess-game played below – a half-conscious background to the plot – to the erotic match played above. Still in cinematic terms, a fade-out (and Middleton is a master in this art) closes the seduction, and in the scene immediately after we see Bianca, uncomfortable, upset and disgusted, and we hear the cynical comment by Livia, the bawd that has set up the encounter. Act III Scene 1 probably contains the most modern dialogue in Jacobean drama; were it in prose one could mistake it for a tranche of nineteenth-century naturalistic drama, say a Joycean Exiles, for the topics of discussion between two spouses who torment and heap bitter accusations on each other. Indeed Shakespeare’s Othello is not very 17

18

This umpteenth example of notorious Italian historical events furnishing matter to drama reminds one particularly of Webster’s The White Devil, for its Florentine setting and the Florentine revenger Francisco, backed up by a cardinal (§ 125). Many of Middleton’s names recur in contemporary dramas, or are ingeniously adapted: Bianca and Isabella appear in Shakespeare, and Middleton’s Leantio seems suggested by Shakespeare’s Leontes, though he becomes a different character. Sordido is a programmatic name, like some of Jonson’s ‘humours’. One Hippolito is a character in Dekker (§ 128.4–5). No need to remark that Browning, bewitched and inspired by this play, was to write ‘The Statue and the Bust’ (Volume 4, § 120.5). Several stage productions have exploited this equation (Works 2007, 1488).

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distant in its general mood, though here we watch a husband’s reaction to a real instance of infidelity, or at least one more likely than that which Desdemona does not commit. Iago? In Middleton’s play Livia is the deus ex machina, the chief schemer. Leantio, however, is pitied and even approved – an exception in Middleton, who hardly ever takes sides – in his weaknesses, if only because throughout the play, while he lives, he strenuously though vainly monitors his psyche, in the form of a second inner voice trying to observe and diagnose his state of mind. One cannot think of any other character in the play free from cunning and grim Machiavellian attitudes. Yet the emotional climax arrives too soon, and Act III, rather than IV or V, remains one of the peaks of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, Shakespeare included. The sequel, with one exception, is weaker, especially Livia’s sly, sudden wooing of Leantio whom she has already made alert, Iago-like, to his wife’s suspected, indeed ascertained infidelity. This is the third move of the diabolical schemer, but it is also the only fault committed by Middleton in an otherwise perfect tragedy: the swiftness, the really unexplainable rapture, that is, that makes Livia fall for Leantio, whom she herself has just voluntarily hurt. Is it the irrational spiral of evil, irresistible even for so alert, careful and reasoning a character? The chess metaphor is more plausible and functional, since for a short time the game is played between Livia and Leantio; afterwards the duke enters the field and fills the now vacant place previously occupied by Leantio. Rather anonymous on his first entrance, the duke proves a real protagonist, indeed a player in the chess game that is played, from mid-Act IV, where with a new stage surprise a veritable turnabout takes place. The duke could not but be a Machiavel in the city of the Florentine Secretary, and does indeed make a move worthy of him, as he has it both ways; that is, he repents having seduced a married woman but only when she is no longer so, because he will almost immediately and legitimately enjoy the prize – Bianca herself – which he repents having got, urged to this by the cardinal, his brother. 2. It is not true, then, that all women are unreasonable, and the conclusion of the play is dictated by very cold reasoning producing murderous plans, due, however, especially to women. In her small way Isabella is a gamester too, though at the play’s beginning she is only a female that dourly refuses to be forced to marry a rich young idiot (capable, with the

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occasional lucid moments of the insane, to utter disconcerting truths), and stubbornly defends her erotic passion for a really unreasonable man, her uncle, who later is discovered to be not her uncle, her real father being another man, and this had been kept from her. Apart from this fluid situation the play opens on a radiant state of quiet, that of the just ratified marriage of Leantio to the beautiful Venetian, Bianca. Leantio is ready to swear on her fidelity, although his judicious, wary mother ominously insists that Bianca might be tempted and cuckold him. Leantio is like Othello, wavering mainly because his job compels him to depart immediately; but as a mature person he checks and disciplines his instincts, and, though reluctantly, delays erotic gratification. This law holds true, he says to himself, for the state too – an unconsciously proleptic metaphor, for a governor, the Duke of Florence, will show the tragic irony of that assertion, losing the light of reason and giving in to instincts. The suggestion of jealousy à la Othello arises without an Iago, by immediate, swift deduction: the duke sends Leantio, on his very return, a messenger inviting Bianca to a banquet; from this Leantio suspects the intrigue. A desperate reasoner, this hero in an unusual fit of rage threatens to segregate his wife. At the duke’s banquet he is the witness of unmistakable flirtations, but is silenced with a minor military appointment. The duke, unconsciously intending to become Bianca’s legitimate husband, plans to instigate Livia’s brother to kill the man trying to compromise his honour. If the human field is divided between schemers and instinct-followers, Hippolito soon falls into the net, and hearing that Leantio is his sister’s lover, rushes to wreak revenge. Shakespeare alone could have thought of and written the duke’s monologue of feigned, or real Jesuitical repentance, stimulated by the cardinal’s fiery words, well knowing that the next day he will be able to lie with Bianca (no longer a whore but a widow), thanks to her husband’s death, which he, before repenting, has ordered. This happens, and in the duel Hippolito stabs Leantio. In Act V the newly married couple watch a masque recited by various characters in the drama, with a parody of the play within the play, as in The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd, that distant master, since the actors get out of their characters and really do what the characters should feign, in other words proceed to a Kyd-like massacre. One of them summarizes the meaning of it all: ‘Lust and forgetfulness has been amongst us, / And we are brought to nothing’.

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§ 134. Middleton V: ‘The Changeling’. Woman is voluble, and so is man In Alicante19 Beatrice, the daughter of the castellan, engages the courtier De Flores to kill Alonzo, the man to whom her father has promised her, so that she can marry her beloved Alsemero; but the killer, having carried out his task, blackmails her into granting him her maidenhead. In a parallel plot, a certain Antonio feigns madness in order to court Isabella, the wife of the bedlam director. The plot of The Changeling (1622–1653) can be compressed into two very concise verbal strings, only seemingly banal, repetitive and insipid, the better to demonstrate Middleton’s20 skill in ‘fleshing out’ an initial idea. The first query posed by critics is how far the second plot is unrelated to or, even worse, damages the first. The title has often been translated into Italian as The Lunatics instead of The Lunatic (or literally The Changed Child) by way of stressing the themes of volubility and inconstancy in the protagonists of both plots.21 The parallelism is clear when in two neighbouring scenes a ‘misshapen fool’ (as Antonio calls himself, however disguised) courts Isabella, and Isabella threatens with death the guardian Lollio when he attempts to kiss her. At first there are two seemingly independent plays, challenging the author to find a link between them sooner or later. Incidentally, the second plot throws open a documentary window on psychiatric practices in Jacobean times, when madmen were threatened with the scourge and, prodded like circus animals, were left free to rave, thus providing a source of amusement and laughter. Isabella is entertained by their performances. In this play by Middleton madmen have indeed the privilege of being able to act on a double level of consciousness, synchronically and without censure, being institutionally mad, as Isabella remarks, whereas those who are called sane must entrust their Orwellian ‘double-thinking’ to asides. Without

19

The play is vaguely set at the time of the truce, by then about to be abrogated, between Protestant Holland and Catholic Spain (1609). The range of references to issues of English politics, and the extravagant conjectures that have been made by some critics on the basis of them, are discussed in the introduction to the play in Works 2007, 1634–1635. 20 Fully accepted is by now the co-authorship with Rowley, responsible for the bedlam plot and the opening and closing scenes. 21 See the statistics on verbal occurrences in Works 2007, 1635.

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any polemical insistence, Middleton redoubles patriarchal repression, for on one hand Beatrice is driven to extreme remedies that, worse than her complaints, act like boomerangs on her; on the other, Isabella is kept segregated at home by her jealous husband, and the irony is that she does not reject, but is even gratified by, the false madmen’s wooing. Both are instances of implosion ready to burst the chains. Therefore a connecting thread, or a serial element, consists in the sudden change of mind of characters hitherto static. Alsemero is about to leave when the curtain rises; he has second thoughts, and Beatrice regrets having just accepted Alonzo. As she says herself, man may be capricious, and not everybody likes or dislikes the same thing. The mechanism under inspection is the way in which absent-mindedness, or momentary insight, unhinges slow and firm reason and weighs upon the psyche. One of Middleton’s typical dramatic devices demonstrates this quite clearly: the obsessive, compressed rhythm of the asides, self-diagnostic as well as functional, conveying to the audience the characters’ secret intentions, quite in conflict with those they express. 2. The critical debate on which of the two major tragedies is Middleton’s masterpiece has not yet reached an agreement. Doubtless, until halfway through the two plays, judgement clearly favours Women Beware Women. The Changeling starts in a low key, with less matter for analysis and an artfully slow progress; this is immediately noticeable and is confirmed by the short, hesitating first two acts, made up of only two scenes. Middleton seems to have realized that in Women Beware Women the climax came too early and that that had been a mistake; hence here he delays and puts it off. Moreover, in this first part of The Changeling the hues are lighter, not as bleak and sinister as in the corresponding section of Women Beware Women. But in fact the tension rises at once when Beatrice and Alsemero, almost of a sudden, propose to get rid of Alonzo. The Changeling reaches the heights of Women Beware Women when, at the end of Act III, the umpteenth of those chess-game scenes, of which Middleton is a consummate master, occurs. Only here do we perceive that a precise, cunning move has previously been made in this direction. Beatrice has gone too far indeed with her nasty, sadistic insults to De Flores, her secret adorer; so in a sense it is fated that the crescendo, after an unbearable implosion, should explode. There is even an echo of Caliban’s self-awareness in the passion (for beautiful

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Beatrice, who is almost a literal synonym for Miranda) of the uncouth De Flores, the antonym for everything flowery, clean, virginal, but at the same time darkly forecasting defloration. Above all here in The Changeling Middleton’s interest, more than in any other of his tragedies, centres on a mental process followed from its inception to its final, complete reversal. So Beatrice, initially self-assured and contemptuous, will finally become a wreck adrift, defeated and tortured by remorse and hallucinations, and psychically dependant on De Flores, now appearing to her in a totally different light as her saviour. Middleton, more than any playwright capable of giving a character’s psychological features a complete turnabout in the course of a dramatic unit, impassively makes us realize that his judgement on Beatrice has changed as the play develops; at the end Alsemero, too, speaks a far different language than at the play’s opening, the language of bitterness consequent on the discovery of the intrigue. 3. Act III closes on De Flores’ report to Beatrice that Alonzo’s murder has been committed (while Alsemero has been kept in the dark); De Flores shows her the finger of the dead man he has cut off, still circled with the diamond ring, as if recalling and quoting Webster.22 At this moment De Flores is about to overtake Beatrice and beat her in a belated chess-game. In his rhetoric he imitates Iago, feigning to temporize and repeating her very words as questions, as if wishing to lead her to spell out and discover for herself what his argument is driving at. He suggests she must pay a far higher price for his service, a price that must make up for his eternal damnation, since by killing he has deserved hell. De Flores cunningly exploits a religious frame of mind he has carelessly violated with his murder. No mere money reward can be contemplated. In terms of moral conscience Beatrice and De Flores are equal, irrespective of their social class. Beatrice is pressed and threatened with disclosure of her order to murder. It is a sort of parody of the devil’s temptations, but the devil is, ironically, Beatrice, kneeling before an ambiguously Christ-like De Flores. As in Women Beware Women the sexual consummation is alluded to with a fade-out ending Act III and with the bitter opening of Act IV. After this climax the play appears to go off track and fizzle out, but it is only catching its breath. Act V of The 22

§ 125.2.

§ 135. Middleton VI: Other tragedies and tragicomedies

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Changeling, hinging on an effective use of chiasmus, is far more incisive than the corresponding act in Women Beware Women, mainly due to the clash between Alsemero and Beatrice, and to the confession she can no longer help making. The search for the culprit is amateurish, ineffectual; the truth fades away, the inquiries are deviated, and the victim’s brother is falsely told that the two ‘counterfeit fools’ are suspected. These presumed murderers have a counterpart in Beatrice and De Flores, whom at last Alsemero exposes. The murderous plans are fully revealed, and De Flores confesses his guilt and stabs himself with a penknife,23 imitated by Beatrice. No figure appears from above to expound the moral from a non-relativistic position of accepted authority; more pessimistic, Middleton contemplates no wholly redeemed person. Indeed, the epilogue laments that suffering ‘rather multiplies’, though one may be relieved by the dramatic catharsis and by the adage that everything, so to speak, has been ‘theatre’, and the very play acted, just fiction. § 135. Middleton VI: Other tragedies and tragicomedies A Fair Quarrel,24 written and acted before 1617, is properly speaking a tragicomedy built on a plan among the most symmetrical and linear to be found in Middleton.25 Its outline is one of the easiest to sum up in his whole theatre: the fiery captain Ager ponders if he should revenge an offence against his mother, the most universally traditional offence, instinctively hurled at him by a colonel. Ager verifies with her that it is pure slander. Yet the mother, wishing to prevent duel and bloodshed, pleads guilty just of being a ‘whore’; this too is a chess game, but far less serious. The colonel offends Ager again calling him a coward; the duel is fought and the colonel seriously wounded. This first and main plot is linked with a second, where Ager’s cousin Jane is going to have a

23 Here the end of The Spanish Tragedy (§ 93.3) is blatantly echoed. 24 Parts of which are traditionally ascribed to Rowley. 25 The comic parts are especially that of the intermezzos of Act IV, when the suitor of Ager’s cousin tries to learn to ‘roar’, that is, speak the soldiers’ thunderous language, and the conventional parody of the physicians’ technicalities in the scene of their visit to Francesca in her pregnancy.

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baby from a man to whom she has promised herself,26 while her father tries to make her marry a simpleton. But her marriage will be ratified, giving the lie to the physician who accused her of being a dishonoured woman. Towards the end Middleton, in a pre-Dickensian mood, makes the colonel believe he is dying and pardons his injurer, giving him his sister for a wife, so this marriage too is celebrated. The English chronicle-play theme of treason, fused with a farcical subplot, was attempted by Middleton only in Hengist, King of Kent, or The Mayor of Quinborough, a poorly thoughtout and not very successful tragedy, written between 1615 and 1620, and an allusive description of the progressive instability of King James’s reign, when public opinion had recently been upset by the notorious Overbury affair. 2. Probably written in 1623, The Spanish Gipsy27 was Middleton’s most popular drama thanks to its Spanish setting, and also to a late, enigmatic, didactic and moralistic approach perhaps due to its co-authors;28 so it enjoyed greater fame and approval than other plays of his, save the last, until the late nineteenth century. In the main plot, echoing Cervantes and anticipating the Donjuanesque dramatic tradition, a knight bearing the Shakespearean name of Roderigo, meets a girl at night in the outskirts of Madrid, and with the help of two friends throws her parents off the scent and in his apartment straightaway rapes her. But the resisting girl steals a crucifix that will lead to the discovery of the culprit, while representing at the same time the religious faith that glows in the victim. The rapist’s repentance is achieved during an umpteenth play within the play, where he enacts his role in life, in the gypsy camp where the rake has fled under an assumed name. The Spanish Gipsy shows us an unusual, apparently serene Middleton giving up the paraphernalia of the moral dirtiness of the city comedy, and carving the noble, passionate portrait of Clara, the rape’s victim. The whole of Act II and various scenes of the next romantically idealize gypsy life as a communistic anarchy ruled by wholesome ethical norms. 26

These are militant allusions to controversial points of the current legislation, like the marriage called de praesenti. 27 The gypsy is Pretiosa, niece of a homicide banished from Spain, visiting incognito the gypsy community as her ‘father’. 28 The authorship is divided among Middleton, Rowley, Dekker and Ford, with Middleton directing his collaborators (see Works 2007, 1829).

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§ 136. Middleton VII: ‘A Game at Chess’ At the end of this discussion we can find in Middleton’s comedies only the pardonable defect imputable to all authors of a large corpus, that is frequent repetitions of roles and events, transactions and situations, though every turn of the kaleidoscope releases fresh combinations. A Game at Chess (1624) is however an exception. It is not only quite unique in his canon, but an absolute flash of genius, unequalled in contemporary theatre. It is a specimen of scenic mathematics and a dramatic theorem which makes one exclaim that Middleton is a forerunner of a Samuel Beckett, who alone will be able, though in a quite different spirit, to conceive and execute largely pantomimic plays implying scenic movements based on fixed serial modules, though at least partially wordless.29 In discussing Middleton, I have often referred to his plays as ‘games of chess’, so we would expect his dramatic oeuvre to close with such a title and with such a grand finale. Although this finale really registers a chess game, that is, an unrelenting, spasmodic, dialectic confrontation between two characters, as in one or more scenes of his tragedies, here the metaphor is appropriate in a totally different sense. Middleton himself offers the key beforehand, giving his pawns and other chess-pieces a historical identity, and then miming a series of moves, or encounters between members of either array, to start the manoeuvres meant to win the game. Moreover Middleton, the author of satires and farces on mores, but never outstanding as a politicized dramatist, clarifies his position beyond any doubt that might have arisen from The Spanish Gipsy concerning his possible Catholic leanings or sympathies. There is no ambiguity here: asked for a public avowal, the playwright exhibits his Protestant loyalty. The main historical event behind this play is the suggested, attempted and finally forestalled marriage of Prince Charles to the Spanish Infanta Maria, the keystone of the Catholic, missionary and Jesuitical strategy meant to bring England back to the sheepfold and create a ‘universal monarchy’. There are various symbolic nuances in the attribution of the white pieces to the English royal family and the black to the Spanish, the most elementary one identifying black as the colour of

29 Lewis Carroll, no dramatist, also exploited chess in Alice.

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the devil and of the Jesuits’ gowns,30 and white as the snowy garments of the elect in Revelation. With A Game at Chess Middleton knew he was imperilling his career. This indeed was, according to convention, his last play. It openly violated what we term today the law of privacy, as he cited by name and surname, or by very transparent allusions, well-known political personages and ecclesiastics. The Master of the Revels granted his permit, perhaps in a situation when many thought and even desired that England and Spain should fight a second war. As a result, predictably, the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, ridiculed in the play,31 demanded it to be withdrawn and the performances stopped. 2. Unbelievably intricate is the textual question, reputed the most complex in early modern drama. A Game at Chess has come down to us in nine versions, six of them manuscripts (one holograph), and three printed. The ‘induction’ seems to respond point by point to Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave: satanic Ignatius of Loyola, athirst for the spiritual mastery of the world, covets England supported by faithful Error (that is to say Heresy). The play is thus at the same time a parody of the medieval ‘dream’, for this Spenser-like personification organizes and shows him in a vision the game at chess. The actual enactment of the play is fatally quite other from what the brilliant idea aimed at. The risk is monotony, and to this drawback there is added the fact that A Game at Chess is today a cult play, intended most exclusively for specialists of early seventeenth-century English history, since its allusions have lost the thrill of topicality, and the single verbal duels are not timeless expressions of elementary universal feelings, such as Eliot sought and found in Middleton, but extemporary debates offered to an already informed audience.32 The blacks conduct a tactics of repeated appeals to ‘conversion’ that the whites repulse. One of the emerging areas of allusion is obviously sex, with the metaphor within metaphor of power

30 Middleton invents ‘she-Jesuits’, and thus an order of ‘female Jesuits’. 31 The list of characters says he is ill with an anal fistula and can move only in a special bitter. Throughout the play it is said he had ordered the ‘pawn of the white bishop’, that is, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to be castrated. 32 On the extraordinary success in merely nine days of performances see Works 2007, 1825.

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as sexual advances and the libidinous plans hidden behind political projects and religious propaganda. Act III Scene 2 is astonishing – and was omitted in the later manuscripts – as employing from beginning to end allusions to anal sex. The monotony relents only thanks to the ‘black bishop’, a shameless viveur looking ahead to Browning’s Catholic bishops. However a real, decisive ‘chess game’ is played, as I was saying, after many preliminary moves, in Act V, miming the Gospel episode of Christ tempted in the desert, for the black Knight offers the white Knight sex and power, as if to say ‘all this I offer you, Charles, if you come to my side’. Middleton also puts in the mouth of Catholic prelates atrocious hyperboles concerning the lust of monks and nuns. Charles has just pretended to listen to the black Knight, but rejects him like Christ, and the white array wins the game.33 We are not told how Loyola, who in the ‘induction’ hoped the dream would be promising, reacts to this conclusion. § 137. Beaumont and Fletcher* I: The pliable centaur This heading refers to the perfect amalgam that came into being between Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625), so perfect that it is impossible to distinguish parasite from host or establish 33

The whole line of blacks is sent ‘to the bag’, a euphemism for hell, as in Donne’s Conclave.

*

The Works, ed. A. Glower and A. R. Waller, 10 vols, Cambridge 1905–1912; Dramatic Works, ed. F. S. Bowers, 10 vols, Cambridge 1966–2008. A. C. Sprague, Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage, London 1926; E. H. C. Oliphant, Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others, London 1927; B. Maxwell, Studies in Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger, Chapel Hill, NC 1939; L. B. Wallis, Fletcher, Beaumont and Company: Entertainers to the Jacobean Gentry, New York 1947; E. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher, New Haven, CT 1952; W. W. Appleton, Beaumont and Fletcher: A Critical Study, London 1956; L. Sanna, ‘Sweet Deceiving’: le strategie della finzione in una commedia di Francis Beaumont, Pisa 1983; L. Bliss, Francis Beaumont, Boston, MA 1987; D. Finkenpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Princeton, NJ 1990; S. Clark, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: Sexual Themes and Dramatic Representation, New York 1994; G. MacMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher, Amherst, MA 1995.

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a hierarchic order, except the alphabetical one usually giving priority to Beaumont. Actually, microscopic metrical tests have allegedly made it possible to identify the respective authorships, since Fletcher habitually writes end-stopped lines, and favours feminine or proparoxitone endings, which should provide a sort of litmus test.1 But this is not the place to open or reopen a textual and philological question that polarized the attention of critics and readers in the past, or for me to try to divide, allot, or date plays or parts of them. Tradition ascribes to Beaumont the centaur’s head and to Fletcher the legs. Beaumont is the organizing mind and the inventive power (his bent was more classical, he had formed himself on Shakespeare and Jonson, who, according to Dryden, submitted all his writings to his judgement); while Fletcher possessed an exuberance that needed checking and curbing. The Beaumont–Fletcher canon of more than fifty plays, however, comprises a large number of different collaborations and combinations, whose basic element, Fletcher, mixes not only with Beaumont, his statistically prevalent partner, but also and above all with Massinger, as well as Shakespeare, Rowley and others. The Folio edition of the two dramatists’ works was printed in 1647, and enlarged in 1679. 2. The temporal fulcrum of Beaumont and Fletcher necessarily goes from 1610 to 1616, but the two had started independently before; and in the next decade Fletcher alone reinforced his fame with other assistants and reserve cards. Their audience was primarily the court, the aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie, with refined and now also frivolous tastes, who attended the private houses. The best way to define Beaumont and Fletcher is therefore, perhaps, ‘mediators’, a term that can radiate in several directions and contain various subspecialties. What happens to Beaumont and Fletcher in this phase of seventeenth-century drama is akin to what was to happen two centuries later with the post-Romantics: a ‘taming’ takes place, much as Romanticism dwindles into the Biedermeier; everything is downgraded, levels of intensity are lowered, and sweetness, softness and vagueness increase. The two dramatists realize that they are lagging behind, that they can but write and stage parodies and remakes,

1

BAUGH, vol. II, 574, ventures on a percentage: 90 per cent end-stopped lines, 70 per cent ‘double and treble endings’.

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or weave citations from the still developing Jacobean repertory. They provide imitations, allusions, adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet above all, or even sequels, like The Woman’s Prize with respect to The Taming of the Shrew. Fletcher, in his small way, was already a Dryden. They do not merely borrow figures, comic characters, situations, displacing or varying the dramatic schemes; they literally remould famous lines, proverbial phrases immediately recognizable to the average reader today, let alone to contemporary spectators. The most evident proof of mediation is the lack of élan and clear direction of their dramatic efforts. In the range of their drama the two authors go from flower to flower, from genre to genre, from one historical time to another, with all the intermediate nuances; they approach all options and never repeat them. It is no coincidence that Beaumont and Fletcher’s personal, patented genre, their unassailable domain, is tragicomedy. Fletcher gave a very material and even naïve definition of it in the preface to The Faithful Shepherdess: a dramatic form that is neither tragedy nor comedy, and lies ‘in the middle’. Their dramaturgy therefore lacks real definition in the photographic sense of the word. Nor can theirs be drama à thèse. They rigorously abstain from siding with this or that protagonist, who after all, neither philosophizes on stage nor debates abstract themes. So Beaumont and Fletcher have no ideology or view of things to embody in a play. Believers or not as they may have been, they do not usually present ecclesiastics among the characters, nor do they show at the end a cardinal or a morally authoritative figure resolving pending conflicts, offering themselves as guarantors of the re-established order, which after all has never been really upset. Their plots turn upon action rather than upon psychological motivation: they are adventurous, improbable and artificial, rich in awkward and insolublelooking deadlocks, arbitrary whims, simmering and brooding passions, cunning against cunning. A recurring situation is that of the marriage night and the ensuing coup de théâtre of the bride who is no virgin or of the sexual impotence of the husband. In Thierry and Theodoret one of the two protagonists is going to sacrifice his wife, unknowingly, in order to recover his fertility, as he believes, when the woman takes off her veil, revealing herself as his wife. Charles Lamb thought this Fletcher’s finest scene, but soon after the play gets palpably worse and accumulates a string of bleak horrors worthy of Webster.

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3. Placed against the background of the succession of cultural atmospheres, Beaumont and Fletcher’s drama can be defined mannerist rather than Baroque, in the sense that in mannerism sudden changes and reversals are not occasional, foreseeable occurrences but constant, ceaseless and arbitrary ones. This is precisely the reason why the two authors, at any rate Fletcher alone, kept their appeal even after the closing of the theatres and largely survived (that is, their plays were performed) when they reopened. After 1660 audiences still enjoyed their anticipations of effervescent Frenchified comedy, with beaux, gallants and courtiers on stage, such as had its peak in The Wild Goose Chase,2 which Farquhar, significantly, was to imitate. But the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned their back on them. The categories T. S. Eliot fleetingly uses for the two dramatists in his essay on Jonson are opposites like depth and surface, death and life. He uses the metaphor of the lymph and the tree: the greater Jacobeans are trees where the lymph runs up to the top; Beaumont and Fletcher are flowers that are deprived of their stems and soon wither.3 But this was hardly new, for George Darley in the nineteenth century had already diagnosed their superficiality. In Beaumont and Fletcher, then, mediation also means an ability to bring out a product guaranteed to be decorous, of high professional quality, with very few flops. Their canon has been sifted and sieved in various ways in order to identify the best plays, whose appeal today is mainly to academics, and whose revivals are extremely rare. Some critics fish out of the mass and extol plays that others ignore, or even damn. § 138. Beaumont and Fletcher II: Independent plays Beaumont and Fletcher, one the son of a judge and the other of a bishop, were both born outside London, where they came as young men from college, entering the Inner Temple and thence the theatre entourage. Jonson was their trait d’union. After independent beginnings they lived and 2

3

This proverbial phrase might be changed, paying homage to the climate of the Restoration, into The Coveted Bachelor. Act II, Scene 1, is an anticipation of the ‘catalogue’ scene in the Donjuanesque plots, for Mirabel shows Oriana a booklet where his various conquests are recorded. ESE, 155–6.

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worked together, sharing home and even mistresses, until Beaumont got married and could afford to retire from the stage. For more than five years, Shakespeare being no longer active, Beaumont and Fletcher were the chief authors for the King’s Men who operated in their ideal and symbolic premises, the Blackfriars playhouse. Beaumont died forty days after Shakespeare, Fletcher surviving them for nine years; only the plague forbade him, a fortyfive-year-old man, to pursue for at least two decades a career that would in all likeliness have multiplied the already high number of his works. It is difficult to get oriented with Beaumont and Fletcher, and the only way to arrange their production is purely chronological, and that is uncertain too, because it is hard to date first performances, publishing dates signify little, and attribution of whole works to a single hand is barely conjectural. Perhaps the still independent exordium of the two dramatists (according to other critics already co-workers) occurred with three plays that could not have been more distant, as if on opposite poles of the compass: a conventional nowhere-like Milan, the noisy London of contemporary trades, the timelessness of pastoral drama. This cacophony betrays the search for some direction, hence also a kind of market investigation. The Woman Hater4 (1607), presumably by Beaumont alone, pleasantly turns on the cunning classic equation of food with sex.5 The widowed Gondarino, a close relation of the protagonist of Jonson’s Epicoene, hates all women because his recently dead wife cuckolded him; the young and chaste Oriana seeking shelter from a storm enters his house, tries to tease him and angers him, so Gondarino escapes the siege telling the duke the lie that she is a prostitute; but she is innocent and the accuser is scorned. The appeal of the play lies, however, in the subsidiary plot, exquisitely funny and even nonsensical. Lazarello is a gourmet that from his first entrance sings the pleasures of the palate while going in search of the imaginary head of the fish ‘umbrana’, a delicacy that is a transparent synecdoche of female sex and of virginity itself. Pursued from hand to hand, the head of the umbrana never comes

4 5

A second woman-hater belongs to the subplot of The Captain, a comedy probably written by both in 1612, also with an Italian setting (Venice). Oriana rhymes with umbrana.

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into those of Lazarello, who emblematically seeking it enters a brothel, and at the play’s end has not yet cooked and tasted that savoury titbit. 2. The Knight of the Burning Pestle (almost certainly written in 1606 and printed in 1613, long thought to be only by Beaumont)6 is a very funny play and one that still makes audiences and readers smile and laugh aloud. In its metatheatrical sophistication this comedy comes irresistibly close, in the scale of absolute values, to Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. The audience enters the play, sits among the actors and talks to them, apostrophizes, even harangues them foreshadowing Pirandello and Stoppard; so it has rightly been said that The Knight of the Burning Pestle seems to have been written yesterday, or even today. The dramatic actions, owing to these encapsulations, are essentially four. The first is the usual one consisting of an audience and every audience attending a theatre performance of Beaumont’s drama bearing that title. But the very drama the audience watches (or, if a future one, reads) is a play performed before the eyes of the grocer George and Nell his wife, who sit on the rim of the stage according to Elizabethan usage. However, the title and cast of the play are negotiated in the prologue with the grocer, thus modifying the original script; in other words, the subject of the play is chosen by the grocer, who loudly imposes as the protagonist his apprentice Ralph, an aspiring actor. The latter does recite a few scenes where, acting as ‘the knight of the burning pestle’ in fitting bombastic style, he accomplishes farcical, muddled deeds inspired by the adventures of Don Quixote, already known to the English at least by hearsay at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In its last Chinese box7 another conventional plot concerns another apprentice, slyly meditating eloping with his master’s daughter, Luce, destined by her father to marry a beau she does not love. So at the heart of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in the symbolic space of the forest, these two plots, that of the knight of

6

7

The setting that makes this play seem mostly by Fletcher is, in Acts II and III, the labyrinthine forest of Waltham. The challenge of giant Barbaroso, who is revealed to be a mere barber, reinforces the naïve element and recalls phases of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Sanna 1983, 142. This well-read essay inquires into the many aspects of the play’s metatheatricality.

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the burning pestle and the other of the three lovers, intertwine. The first metatheatrical occurrence emerges in the counterpoint formed by the frequent and noisy interruptions by the two first onlookers, the grocer and his wife. The most original, curious and impulsive comments, the first things that come to mind, dot the course of the ‘play within the play within the play’, coming above all from the grocer’s garrulous wife. The other spectators’ speeches, sometimes only half-said, or their murmured chatter, are of great value in that they illustrate the mental horizons of a class and vividly render its idiolect, informing us today of events chronicled at the time, and of the ideas of the average Jacobean citizen in that historical moment. These are also self-satirizing in the display of retrograde tastes, mean prejudices, class antipathies, and petty bourgeois ways of various kinds. But there is no rancour. The play is exceptionally anticipatory, for it creates an internal interpretation with which the later, cultivated reader does not agree, in that the two shopkeepers side with the wrong persons – the beau or Luce’s father – and grossly misunderstand what happens on stage, blindly relying on sympathetic identification.8 An excellent ‘stereophonic’ scene is Act III Scene 2, when Nell, grossly deluded, thinks that morning has come, and Ralph must face the landlord’s request to pay the bill, and she actually hands him the shillings needed. The whole show thrives on this cacophonic mix-up of the two internal plots, with the inner spectators feigning and miming the external ones. Finally Ralph sheds his disguise and says things linked to his identity as an actor, not to his role as a character: he already has a fiancée, and is a London apprentice. He takes leave by ‘dying’, and the Jasper-Luce story ends happily, too. 3. The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher’s debuting play staged around 1610, echoes in its title Jonson’s last play and follows the pastoral tradition of Tasso and Guarini, and even more of Spenser.9 But it gives the 8

9

The grocers watch the play of another grocer, Luce’s father, and approve what they would do themselves should they have a daughter: they would force her to accept a good match and pay homage to petit bourgeois honour. One Jasper, the son of a drunkard, and living hand-to-mouth, during the whole play does nothing but sing at the top of his lungs songs in praise of wine. This was duly stressed by the poet George Darley, one of the first editors of Beaumont and Fletcher’s works (1840).

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impression of being a clever mixture of elements from various ancient and modern canons, and already displays the nature of a remake. The heroine is shepherdess Clorin, who has lost and buried her beloved shepherd, keeps faithful to him and devotes herself only to curing, with her knowledge of medicinal herbs, the follies of other shepherds and shepherdesses living around her in a stylized, indistinct clearing. It is a marquetry of well turned, euphonic, smooth verse, of remarkable metrical variety, and substantially a series of separate eclogues woven together, and dialogues in rhyme between shepherds and shepherdesses promising each other love, but also tempting each other to be unfaithful. This happens under the influence of an evil spirit, the ‘sad shepherd’ that sadistically enjoys trapping them into bad spells and witcheries. The contrast between the incorruptible virgin, steadily resisting temptation, and the evil spirit tempting and deflowering, suggests that Fletcher’s operetta is a derivation, indeed a miniature, of the Faerie Queene, whose myth of the virgin queen and of tempted virginity it revives, displaying various instances of lust, uncontrolled desire, and cunning attempts to satisfy it.10 The events concern parallel Ariosto-like stories of shepherds trying to seduce shrewd shepherdesses well aware of this, and of other shepherdesses trying to steal their friends’ fiancés in order to gratify their lust. As in Spenser there is a touch of misogyny, the shepherdesses being sly and the shepherds naïve, wary, and angry at the shameless girls. The night forest is the classical labyrinth. But it is all a game, and the teasing coquettes come to wisdom before it is too late, and before the poor shepherds hurt themselves. Thanks to Clorin the play ends in a general purification, exorcising lust. And even the diabolical, satanic sad shepherd, after all his manoeuvres to reap Amarillis’ maidenhead, is conquered. § 139. Beaumont and Fletcher III: Co-authored plays If Philaster was staged in 1610, then scholars must deduce that Webster’s two tragedies and Shakespeare’s last romantic plays derived from it, instead of the other way round. The geographical context is 10

The subject at the centre is the contrasted love of Perigot and Amoret, the latter a feminine, by definition Spenserian, name.

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Sicilian-Calabrian,11 but at least initially the thematic groove is that of Hamlet, though the comparison is by definition unequal, and the atmosphere quite different. No ghost incites Philaster, whose father has been usurped, to revenge him, even though the young man is believed to be mad and the populace supports and eggs him on against the usurper; nor does Philaster deceive and reject an Ophelia, but loves and is loved by Arethusa, who however is promised to a Spanish prince. If at first the play is rather tame and anonymous, later it comes to life with Philaster’s famous récit, in which he tells Arethusa how, out hunting, he found Bellario, a page who is really Euphrasia, and a girl no less passionate than chaste, who has assumed this disguise out of love for the prince himself, as the play’s last scene will reveal. No one knows who that page really is, and Philaster takes Bellario as his intermediary for his chaste courtship of Arethusa. The Spanish prince Pharamond is a hot-blooded libertine who tempts court ladies, one in particular; he gives rise to a series of skirmishes that result in piquant scenes of explicit carnal temptation. Warned of this, the king impatiently knocks at the door to catch the prince and his mistress in bed, and the lady surprised in flagrante replies, as in Byron’s Don Juan, with a slander, saying that Arethusa flirts with the page. In this the timorous courtiers read a political message, indeed a judgement of the gods that have taken from one, indeed two usurpers, the realm belonging to Philaster. Like Hamlet, Philaster believes the rumour and in a bitter masochistic mood wonders what is going on between Arethusa and the page; but more than Hamlet’s bitterness he feels Othello’s obsession. Young Bellario is, however, willing to justify himself and answer Philaster’s morbid questions. In Act III the drama is already rising to its climax, with a barrage of dialogues full of painful misunderstandings, most wounding when they should be reassuring. Philaster is not tormented by the idea of murder, but rather of suicide, and does not make Arethusa a Desdemona. The last two acts show the consequences of the authors’ intention to abstain as far as possible from any tragic epilogue. The king calls Pharamond’s guilt ‘venial’, having also sent Bellario away. Inevitably Act IV is set in Fletcher’s labyrinthine forest,

11

On the historical sources see Waith 1969, 15–16.

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where Arethusa has disappeared during the hunt, and Philaster, already a prey to real madness and bent on suicide, wounds his supposed betrayer. This melodramatic scene is luckily countered and thwarted by the entrance of a peasant who, without realizing what is going on, manages to bring the two lovers to their senses. But we are soon immersed again in a Tasso-like sensual, melodramatic atmosphere of tenderness when Philaster wounds Bellario with his sword, believing him a rival and unaware that beneath the cuirass a female breast pants for him. In Act V Philaster is brought to trial and the people rise against the Spaniard; we can just imagine how resoundingly the seventeenth-century London audience applauded this. But the hubbub calms down, and in the epilogue there is no inkling of tragedy; the king is again benevolent and repentant, conscious he has been the cause of everything that has happened; and a final attempt at slander is thwarted. Bellario, revealed at last as Euphrasia, exits as a sublime example of devotion, vowing herself to virginity after she has silently served her beloved, now about to marry princess Arethusa. A pardon is also given to the shameless mistress of the Spanish prince, who is granted a safe return to his country.12 2. The Maid’s Tragedy, written in 1611, respects the unity of time almost perfectly, the action taking place between a first and a second night, which results in a sort of sober, Middletonian rigour, reinforced by a concise, hasty rhythm, though on the other hand retarded by various lengthy, even slightly verbose scenes. Likewise, long monologues alternate with frequent exchanges of short, curt speeches, in a very modern tone, an often acknowledged quality in Beaumont and Fletcher. The drama is ready to spring forward from the start, and presents no moments of stasis. Anyone who calls it classical just because it is set in Rhodes is mistaken; the main story is in fact a transposition, one like many in Jonson and Middleton, where women ambitious to become the mistresses of great men are ready to marry tolerant husbands. The man of honour here is Melantius, an ideally 12

The plot of this tragicomedy was repeated again with substantial variations in 1624 in A Wife for a Month: another Neapolitan usurper, ‘unnatural and libidinous’, tries to seduce Evanthe who loves Valerio, and above all to eliminate his brother, the rightful heir to the throne.

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Roman character, brother to Evadne, the king’s dishonoured concubine; he feels obliged, as in the end does the sister herself, to defend the family honour, by shedding blood if necessary. His correlative is strong, selfsacrificing Aspatia, who, throughout the play, exudes bitterness, discontent and even cynicism.13 Her swoons, her mental rambles, her sad fantasies, her dream-like rhapsodies (as in Act II Scene 2, where she dwells with a sort of stream of consciousness on her maids’ embroidery of Theseus deserting Ariadne) make her stand out among other characters in the play, themselves outstanding in the canon of the two authors. These characters give their best in short, curious, intimate scenes and bold, harsh, fiery quarrels, as well as in spectacular virtues and instances of abnegation.14 Amintor’s marriage to Evadne is celebrated with a masque whose mediocre text is reproduced in its entirety. The next scene, when the bride Evadne is being undressed, is at once painful and witty, with her maid’s saucy, somewhat lewd allusions to the impending sexual encounter; while Aspatia abandons herself more and more to sarcasm and a death-wish. The scene might lead the unwitting spectator to believe and admire the bride’s discretion, her chaste, immaculate candour – until, with a sudden twist, Evadne tells the bridegroom she will never be his. The mystery is revealed – Beaumont and Fletcher are also great masters of suspense – bit by bit, with astute delay, and at the end of this quite osé scene we apprehend the truth: Evadne is the king’s mistress and has agreed to marry Amintor just to save appearances. Here the two spouses light on a Pirandellian strategy: the next morning they will behave like happy newlyweds who have just consummated their marriage.15 In the showdown of Act III the analogy

13 14

15

This ‘tragedy’ is normally understood as Aspatia’s, though it might reasonably be, at the same time, Evadne’s. A paroxysmal climax of love folly is found in Fletcher’s The Mad Lover, where general Memnon says he is willing to tear out his heart to show Calis how fondly he loves her; for this bloodcurdling detail the drama has been often compared to Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Amintor’s submission to the king, and such an abject one, led Coleridge to say that the two authors were ‘servile jure divino royalists’, a famous but often dispraised judgement.

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and the family resemblance with the cynical, shallow view of life, especially London life, of other Jacobean dramatists, becomes glaringly obvious when the king openly confronts the honest, serious Amintor, telling him he can do nothing but live as a happy cuckold and pimp to his own wife – a scene of moral squalor worthy of Middleton, set in ancient times but with clear contemporary allusions. Soon the situation proves unbearable, and the honourable Amintor explodes. The act ends on an accusation that in the drama of the time might have come across as slanderous, and yet is true and confirmed: Evadne is the king’s concubine, and her brother must swallow this. From here on, the play turns into a revenge tragedy, with Melantius seemingly ready to take action as head of the family. At the end of a longdrawn-out interrogation Evadne, initially reluctant, is persuaded to kill the king. The murder in bed – vaguely recalling the cruel murder of Duncan in Macbeth – has nothing of that tremendous brutishness of which we know ex post; it is not immediate but gradual. The end brings back on stage the forgotten Aspatia who, disguised as her presumed brother, wants to induce Amintor to kill her. It is a masochistic, sentimental yearning that leads to another spectacular scene, for Aspatia might after all have killed herself: Amintor himself realizes she does not fight and just wants to be wounded. All three die, the two spouses by suicide, and Amintor to demonstrate that heaven reserves for ‘lustful Kings / Unlookt for sudden deaths’. 3. The nearly contemporary A King and No King (1611) is in the general opinion, which is also my own, the weakest of the three major plays written in collaboration by the two playwrights around that magic moment. Doubtless it is the most conscious of being belated, addressed as never before to a sophisticated audience able to recognize at once quotations from the grand dramatic repertory, and identify elements of parody. It comes however as a surprise that this is not a historical tragedy, but a mockheroic farce and even a burlesque, though mid-way in its development it takes on a really tragic turn, as the Iberian king Arbaces becomes aware of an uncontrollable, blameful passion for his sister Panthea. Until this bolt out of the blue, with its further consequences, in the first two acts A King and No King is a disjointed and unimpressive play, though striving to spin sketches that are sometimes far from unpleasant. Often switching from verse to prose, it mainly exploits the quips of the cowardly Bessus, as good as Falstaff at running away from the enemy. In the long run, however, the

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jesting interludes and the series of absurdist repartees result in mere, tiresome padding. Bessus, though, immediately became a proverbial name and with Falstaff and Jonson’s Bobadil entered the gallery of immortal braggarts. But even Arbaces at the beginning speaks blatantly bombastic language no one really listens to, and his very soldiers scoff at him. He is, in short, Tamburlaine’s diminished stand-in, since he grandly offers the defeated Tigranes honourable peace terms, giving him his own sister as a wife. Military laws are violated in this false mock-heroic world, imitating the unreal, exquisite courtesy of chivalric poems with their fake rages, harmless punishments and bearable imprisonments. As Arbaces returns home after long years of war, followed by the enemy king, Tigranes (and his promised bride Spaconia disguised as a page), and feels the incestuous passion start and mount in his heart, A King and No King strives to become an unusual, courageous exploration of a sinful inclination anticipating Ford’s classic masterpiece.16 Arbaces pours his incestuous passion into palpitating lines, and then reveals it to a faithful companion in reticent, monosyllabic phrases. Indeed, as this case confirms, a mark of Beaumont and Fletcher is the frequency of the slow, gradual, spasmodic discovery of a character’s unnameable passion through lengthy interrogations. Finally the truth is out, in Act III Scene 3, the best until then. Bessus declares he is ready to serve Arbaces even if, unable to contain himself, he should want to lie with his own mother. Inclining to jealous madness Arbaces, like Philaster, thinks Panthea is using Spaconia in order to court Tigranes. But as usual potential tragedy is avoided, and two steps away from the consummation of incest the confrontation of Arbaces and Panthea melts into elegy. As in classical comedies the unnatural passion is explained in a final récit, the story of the old childless king and the stratagem of the substituted child, Arbaces. Arbaces marries Panthea but is no longer a king, only the husband of the legitimate queen. § 140. Beaumont and Fletcher IV: Plays by Fletcher alone Connecting internal cues and hints we have evidence that Valentinian was first performed between 1610 and 1614, though it was printed much

16

§ 144.

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later in the 1647 Folio. Browsing through the historian Procopius, Fletcher hit on the despot so named, who had badly governed an already fragmented Roman empire, devastated by plunder, vice and rebellion. The virtuous Lucina – the name Luce already figured in Beaumont’s The Woman Hater – is raped by Valentinian and kills herself; her husband Maximus, a brave soldier, spurs himself on to revenge, vainly exhorted by another upright soldier to abstain. The revenge is accomplished with the tyrant’s atrocious death by poison. The play thus centres on an exceptional case of historical chastity, whose violation at the hands of power entails tragic consequences.17 Was this, then, a parallel action? Was the ‘declining’ Roman Empire a metaphor for the Jacobean realm, in which Fletcher was studying the subtle, subterranean threats of moral decay? His audience was never insensitive to the umpteenth case of a Tarquin’s power attacking and raping a new Lucrece. The revenger, nevertheless, is caught in the coils of rapacious, untameable corruption, and, as soon as he becomes emperor, is eliminated in his turn by Valentinian’s widow; so history seems to be doomed, unable to invert its course. The danger Fletcher does not avoid here is that of all wide-ranging historical dramas, a tendency to paraphrase. Lucina preaches too much to her sly maids, while Maximus is given far too many soliloquies on the decline of the ancient Roman temper. A mild satire of power is in Valentinian’s speeches wishing his mistress to live again. Delightful songs, of the kind Fletcher excels in, had prompted him to pick the flower or gather the fruit at the erotic meeting Lucina had been lured to. 2. Taken from Tacitus, and performed in 1613, Bonduca, in a patriotic perspective, but with no fanaticism, deals with the rebellion headed by the British queen, Bonduca (Boadicea) and put down in 60–61 AD by the Roman troops. Its deviations and patent reinventions, as well as historical anachronisms, could easily be proved; but, if it undeniably belongs to the genre of the chronicle, this drama moves and fluctuates among many subgenres, and touches on comedy, farce, satire, parody and sentimental drama; equally variable is the linguistic register, ranging from solemn declamation, 17

This plot, based on the temptation of female chastity by a powerful person, was repeated by Fletcher in The Humorous Lieutenant, with a blatant, comedic variation at the end: Celia rejects the courtship and makes King Antigonus repent, and is then recognized to be a king’s daughter. Her virtuous beloved is Antigonus’ own son.

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in Fletcher’s typical hypermetrical verse, to dry, low-style stretches of even stichomythic lines. Consequently, grandiloquent, rhetorical, rapt addresses are continually interrupted by dissonant, bare, telegraphic speeches, not infrequently rough and obscene into the bargain. An early example of this occurs in Act I Scene 2, where a captain abruptly tells his comrade he knows why the other is sad: he clearly needs a whore. The stylistic divergence is often between the lofty, majestic, hieratic language of the Britons’ camp, and that of the Romans, concrete, cutting, sarcastic and snappish; also between the speech of the officers and that of the ordinary soldier, often without a uniform. Fletcher insulates the final episode of the rebellion selecting or reinventing history with a sparkling liveliness that makes this one of his subtlest and finest works. His satire is not wounding but double-edged: he is not hard on the Romans, though many of them yield to low appetites (often simply to hunger) and are cynical, inept rascals or braggarts, or make empty boasts of greatness.18 On the other hand he distinguishes, in his own ancient and remote countrymen, between treasonable cunning, and noble, even extreme idealism, on one hand, and a primitive cult of the island’s ideals on the other. The dramatist seems to have made a balanced choice, shifting from one camp to the other in the first two acts, scarcely impressive for scenic action because they tend to sketch ‘humours’ that stand out for psychological traits and idiosyncrasies, and also for true or fake military virtues. Bonduca wants to attack and Caractacus plays for time; among the Romans are the melancholy Junius, the impatient and irreverent Petillius, and the conceited general Penius. Farce appears in Act II Scene 2, when a few Roman soldiers hunting for food are caught by the Britons, and instead of being hanged are hosted and fed by Caractacus, and then released with the promise that next day they will be brave in battle. But then a letter by one of Bonduca’s daughters (signing herself with a name whose implications only Italians or Italian-speakers could grasp, Bonvica,19 and knowing that Junius is in love with her) lays a trap for the Roman, saying that she and her mother will give themselves up after the

18 19

General Penius charges himself with cowardice and ponders at length which of many possible ways he could choose to die. ‘vica’ adumbrates ‘fica’, the vulgar Italian word for the female sexual organ.

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battle. When the deluded Junius is caught, he is treated to the recitation of a kind of parody of Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’. Humour – a gift usually denied to Fletcher – grows and mounts when Caractacus, an honest but also absurd idealist, orders Bonduca’s daughters, who have used deception instead of loyalty, to release the prisoners.20 In the epilogue history, pathos and theatricality meld insolubly. Lest they fall prisoners to the conquerors Bonduca and her daughters sacrifice themselves, but one of them arouses love in a stoic Roman soldier who had always despised love. On the historical plane, when the curtain falls Fletcher stresses the pathetic but firm naïvety of the uncle, general Caractacus, and of his nephew, now pursued by the Romans. One of the two melancholy Roman captains, desperate at the loss of Bonduca’s daughter, in his unbending Roman coherence asks his friend, who has already felt and conquered that melancholy, to stab him. But tragedy is avoided, and Caractacus, after his nephew is killed, is captured with a mean trick and transported to Rome. § 141. Massinger* I: Necessity and apology of self-sacrifice Born in Salisbury, Philip Massinger (1583–1640), whose father had been the right-hand man of the Herberts in their Wilton mansion, left Oxford University without taking a degree, and went to London, where 20 There is also the pathetic scene, perhaps reminiscent of those in which Giovanni figures in Webster (§ 125.2), when young Hengo (an invention of Fletcher’s) naïvely asks his uncle about life in the afterworld (IV.2): these are very relevant questions, for immediately after some menacing Romans arrive, but are defied and repulsed by the youth himself. Yet, as I say, death comes in the final scene. *

The Plays of Philip Massinger, ed. P. Edwards and C. Gibson, 5 vols, London 1976; Selected Plays, ed. C. Gibson, Cambridge 1978. A. H. Cruickshank, Philip Massinger, Oxford 1920, 1971; M. Chelli, Le drame de Massinger, Lyons 1924; B. Maxwell, Studies in Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger, Chapel Hill, NC 1939; T. A. Dunn, Philip Massinger: The Man and the Playwright, Edinburgh 1957; D. S. Lawless, Philip Massinger and His Associates, Muncie, IN 1967; J. G. McManaway, Philip Massinger and the Restoration Drama, Philadelphia, PA 1977; Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment, ed. H. Douglas, Cambridge 1985; D. R. Adler, Philip Massinger, Boston, MA 1987; CRHE, ed. M. Garrett, London 1991; I. Clark, The Moral Art of Philip Massinger, Lewisburg, PA 1993.

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he made a name for himself in the theatre, rather later than usual, after 1614.1 After Beaumont retired he became, as we saw, Fletcher’s principal, though half-concealed, partner from 1620 to 1625; from 1625 to the end of his career he signed as chief author2 about forty plays, only a half of which have survived. These plays place him today, in the general estimation of the fifteen years of his working career (and excluding the late Jonson), slightly below Fletcher and nearly on a par with Ford, but above Shirley (an evaluation which I shall try later on to disprove) and, a fortiori, Heywood. He was then justly and completely revalued after the damning verdicts passed on him in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those for instance of a Leslie Stephen, or a Symons who, exceedingly harsh, found his verse prosaic, his plots artificial and unreal and his characterization clumsy;

1

2

We ignore what he did between 1606 and 1614, when he was already thirty. He often uses Latin proverbial phrases, but is uncertain and inaccurate in Italian geography and quotations. Pienza for instance becomes Faenza, and Siena seems to be just a stone’s throw away from Palermo. It is now accepted that in A Very Woman, perhaps dating back to the early 1620s, Massinger rewrote a previous play written by himself, or by Fletcher, of by both. It is a light, romantic and colourful entertainment centring on a prince from Taranto vainly courting Almira, the daughter of a Palermo viceroy (a setting later re-used, see 141.4). The duel between her two suitors, without being fatal, leaves behind mental unbalances but also beneficial influences, for the reluctant girl softens and repents. In the second half the repulsed suitor does not give up and reappears disguised as a Turkish slave to court Almira, this time successfully. A minimal part of The Old Law (presumably dated 1616; the context makes it clear that the title is to be understood as ‘the law on old age’) is normally ascribed to Massinger, the bulk being by Middleton, Rowley and Heywood; but it is relevant that it should be a paradoxical play concerning a contemporary and also future problem, euthanasia. The duke of an imaginary Epirus orders in fact all octogenarians to be thrown from a rock into the sea. The edict leads some young people to feign their fathers’ funeral, others to hide them, still others to weep crocodile tears, and many oldsters to blacken their hair, or appear younger by other devices. A few moments from the end, however, the edict is proved to be a hoax, or a scenic trick played to the spectators and also to the characters, because no old man has been killed, and the duke merely wanted to establish a council of wise men to start a moral reform.

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or even of a T. S. Eliot.3 Yet Massinger remains almost a cult playwright, popular only with academics, the object of rare specialized studies, and only occasionally staged. It is almost impossible to deal with his production in a chronological order, because the dates of his plays are anything but certain, and moreover Massinger answered and reacted to incidental solicitations; nevertheless, a definite general purpose can always be discovered behind them. The surprising, unexpected fact concerning his canon is that Massinger does comment on his basic English context; he takes sides for or against specific ideological issues; he sketches, or more exactly, quite clearly delineates his moral picture, but places it in a different historical and geographical setting. He felt duty bound to do so, but, often defying censorship, he fell a victim to it.4 Only two of his comedies are set in England, and only one in London. In other words, seventeen out of nineteen plays are set outside England: five in Greek-Roman antiquity, in late imperial 3

4

Preface by A. Symons to the Mermaid edition, 2 vols, London 1887–1889. The author of the chapter on Massinger in CHI, vol. VI, 153 and 164, seemed to reply point by point to Symons by praising Massinger’s ‘great constructive power’, particularly due to the almost total abolition of subplots (something widely applauded since then) and the fine, vigorous style (162), which, natural and hardly ever alliterating, is endowed with a remarkably modern dramatic flexibility. In 1920 T. S. Eliot himself, in one of his least impressive essays (ESE, 205–20), judged Massinger’s linguistic gift inadequate – because he no longer had the intellect on the tips of his senses – and his characterization weak. Strangely enough, Eliot seems finally to complain that we know too little about Massinger, and that little does not establish him as ‘a great man’ (220), so that we can only analyse his plays, none of which, however, Eliot discusses thoroughly. The most obvious case is Believe As You List (1613), a transposition of the recent dethroning of Sebastian, King of Portugal, by Philip II of Spain. A first version, with no changed names or backdating, was vetoed by the English censors, and Massinger rewrote it renaming Sebastian as Antiochus, King of southern Asia, defeated by the Romans and compelled to wander from court to court in the company of a stoic philosopher. Always famed as an impostor, this king has been frequently associated with Ford’s Warbeck (§ 146.2) and more plausibly with Marlowe’s heroes, for the play perceptibly fades into melancholy elegy. It is also a patent example of Massinger’s habit to heavily manipulate historical truth with imaginary additions. The play’s manuscript (ruined and partly unreadable owing to damp spots) was found and published only in the mid-nineteenth century.

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times save in one case; as many as six in contemporary, conventional or imaginary Italian duchies (Milan, Palermo); six take place in various places in contemporary Europe (Dijon, Paris, Marseille; Hungary, Bohemia, Constantinople, Tunis – in short within quite a wide radius). The first thematic thread in Massinger is that, like Ford, he creates and presents on stage a pure, sublimating woman, capable of stunning, unheard-of inner transformations, while at the same time he cannot ignore the reality of the carnal, greedily passionate woman.5 A nostalgic, spiritualist revanche made its appearance, as if loudly demanded by the deteriorating mores of James’s and Charles’s reigns. 2. Massinger debuted with a decidedly ambitious theatrical project. From the whole of his canon we can immediately pick The Roman Actor (1626–1629) and discuss it first for a number of reasons: not only because, together with one of the two English comedies, is it his masterpiece, his most finished, complex and powerful work, but because it encloses a founding charter of his art and aesthetics. It is not a Catholic, or crypto-Catholic or hagiographic play (though one could trace some such aspects), but simply a didactic one; and while being worthy of appraisal for its intrinsic value, at the same time it provides an orientation and a key for the whole of Massinger’s dramatic production. Two elements join and intertwine in it: the transposed metaphor of the self-induced implosion of all political despotism, with implicit support for a just, democratic government; and the educational and reforming function of the theatre. Its exceptional ingeniousness lies in its unique degree (apart from Fletcher) of metatheatricality. In its first aspect – the decay of late Imperial Roman civilization, a theme the Jacobeans, Jonson and Fletcher among them, had frequently illustrated – The Roman Actor follows Emperor Domitian’s degeneration. The latter comes on stage like an absurd, simpering puppet, yet he is also quite dangerous, for if anyone dares to disagree with him he has him beheaded. Domitian’s sumptuous, capricious, sickening triumph occupies a whole, long scene in Act I. This petty tyrant is the only one who does not know that his mistress and new empress Domitia is in love with the 5

See the ample parallel of the two playwrights made by Huebert 1977 (see Ford’s bibliography, § 144), 163–70.

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actor, Paris; informed of it, he surprises the two lovers, but kills the reporter of the woman’s betrayal. He then acts as a player in a scene with Paris, stabs him – the umpteenth case of this pandemic stratagem – and then gives him a solemn funeral. At the end of the tragedy Domitian completes his psychological portrait and becomes one of Massinger’s few rounded characters, exhibiting a pale resemblance to a great Shakespearean hero: in the night, like Macbeth, he is harassed by visions and nightmares, and sees the ghosts of the stoical Romans he has sent to death. The nemesis is inexorable, and Domitian is obsessed by omens and stabbed by those that once idolized him. At the beginning, the co-protagonist, the actor Paris, declares he acts at a historical moment when interest in drama and its vogue are declining, and the theatre is denied freedom of speech and threatened with censorship. He then gives an ex abrupto definition of a dramatic aesthetics whose end is to honour virtue and condemn vice, but concludes by saying that he is summoned to the Senate, where he shall have to refute the consul’s charges. Through Paris, Massinger states the objectives of his own work: to correct mores, give an example, and constitute a deterrent. He lauds the educational function, more effective than cold philosophy, of a theatre that far from corrupting the young – echoing the well-known attacks on Socrates – always rewards virtue and never vice. But the theatre cannot root out evil from human nature: it is innate, and free will remains unassailable. His apology therefore lists, one by one, and with the refrain ‘we cannot help it’, several flaws which are intrinsic to the theatre. As if to demonstrate this truth Paris, echoing his namesake, is so very vain and contradictory as to flatter his emperor, who has just plainly shown how prone he is to excessive boasting, and of what ferocious misdeeds he is capable. There are as many as three ‘plays within the play’, making The Roman Actor the second most metatheatrical Jacobean work. The first of these, of which we see one representative scene acted, is performed at court in order to show, as is believed, how drama helps the spectator to attain awareness of his own failings and be cured of them; but the outcome is ironically ineffective. The point is rather that this educational performance – intended to cure a miser, and thus fight against a classic, timeless vice, avarice – makes Domitia fall in love with Paris at first sight, and become his mistress. Domitia, as the spectator that loses all interest in the character and desires the actor, suggests the absolute, ultimate ineffectiveness of drama.

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When Domitian wavers, and wonders at the courageous resistance of the Roman Stoics dying under torture, the latter at bottom correspond to St Dorothea and the other earthly saints – who, ecstatic with joy in the face of death, madden their chastisers with their insensibility to pain – soon to appear in Massinger’s drama. For once Domitian utters an intelligent line, wondering if these pseudo-martyrs are so totally bodiless as to be exempted from feeling pain, jubilant at the parting of their souls from their bodies. 3. Massinger never lost faith in the educational and reforming purpose of drama, nor did he cease to suggest and devise phenomenologies of consistency and firmness of mind usque ad mortem if necessary, or at any rate vicarious forms of it. The Virgin Martyr, on the martyrdom of St Dorothea, was printed in 1622, and may have been Massinger’s first play; written in collaboration with Dekker, the latter is considered responsible for the little worth to be found in it, or for some critics for its utter worthlessness. Its facile primacy lies in being, after the medieval moralities, the first and only major play to that date on saints and martyrs, and martyrs who cannot for this reason be termed ‘Catholic’ as opposed to Protestant. Ignoring who Massinger was, what he thought or believed, we grope in the dark; some deny he actually approved of the saint, and see the tale of her martyrdom as just a means to provide sensational effects. To support this idea they point out, not without reason, that, had it been perceived as pro-Catholic, the play would not have passed the scrutiny of royal censorship. Actually St Dorothea was to become long after, when English Catholicism put down roots again, one of the saints dearest to Victorian Catholics like Hopkins; and a novel by Newman, Callista, also deals with the theme of martyrdom.6 The survival of the morality is suggested by the presence of two rascally, merry, clever blasphemers and drunkards, servants to Dorothea and urged on by an Angelo, in name and in essence, who vainly prompts them to obey Dorothea’s philanthropic instructions, thus openly contrasting their crass abjection and likeable ribaldry with her purest and most ethereal devotion. These two servants, emblematically named Spungius and Hircius, have a double function in that, hungry and thirsty for sex, they are meant to

6

This is also the name of one of Theophilus’ daughters. Kingsley, an enemy to Catholicism, also wrote the martyrological novel Hypatia.

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make the audience of the time laugh or smile at their somewhat outdated quips. The Roman pagans spy on Antoninus as he woos Dorothea, who has been entrusted to Theophilus’ daughters; but, instead of being converted, she converts them. The name of the Christian God is never uttered in the play, nor is that of Christ, and Act III consists mainly of a debate on pagan mythology. In the light of this, Dorothea might even be listed as one of the ‘witches’ described by contemporary playwrights like Webster and Middleton. For the Romans, she is a disguised prostitute, to be offered to Antoninus as a medicine for his disease. However, he recoils and abstains from rape as if paralysed by magic, arousing the father’s dramatically splendid tirade against his sexually flaccid son. Even more effective is the scene where a British slave – and ‘none comes near / The Briton for true whoring’ – is ordered to rape Dorothea. But Massinger exempts and redeems him, and he snarls in self-assertion, as if to say: ‘you do that, Roman, I am a man, not a beast’. At this point we witness the intervention of a really Baroque device, though Massinger is hardly ever considered linked to that artistic sensibility.7 In front of the gallows the servant Angelo comes on stage as a really angelic spirit, hence invisible to everybody but Dorothea, and defeats and makes his counterpart, the malignant Harpax, flee and vanish into vapour. Dorothea’s farewell, as she rises, a ‘pure and innocent soul to joys eternal’, looks forward to future poems exalting martyrdom, Hopkins’s in particular. Theophilus has parodied the Roman soldiers scoffing at Christ on the cross; now the angel re-appears bringing him some of those fruits he sarcastically wanted to taste, and he changes his mind and does justice to his name;8 he undergoes torture, and the more painful the punishment, the more he delights in it. 4. The Maid of Honour,9 staged in the early 1620s and published in 1632, is only at first sight like dozens of plays with an Italian setting written around that time (and also with others by Massinger as we shall see), and even makes one suspect that the study of religious and romantically

7 8 9

See what Huebert 1977 (quoted above, n. 5), 168–9, has to say relating to this. One is reminded of the ‘basket lined with grass’ and full of fruits and flowers, in Hopkins’s short lyric ‘For a Picture of St Dorothea’. It can also be interpreted as The Honoured Maid.

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self-sacrificing womanhood (two women having the best in persuading rather weak males) prevails over the stereotypes of that popular genre. But it is not certain, for this theme might have been used in order to achieve spectacular and merely sensational effects. At the beginning the play exhibits a remarkably neat design, sculpting the protagonists with terse, marked traits, though the minor characters are sloppy and cloying.10 As it goes on it gets even worse, and becomes altogether a collection of rather unprepared and unmotivated coups de théâtre, until the real exploit of the final scene. The political framework is as evanescent as ever, concerning the expedition of a troop of soldiers from Palermo in aid of the Duke of Urbino besieging Siena and its reluctant duchess, where Bertoldo, aspiring to the hand of the noblewoman Camiola in Palermo, is defeated and taken prisoner. Massinger’s intentions appear ambiguous from the moment Bertoldo, the head of the troop of unruly Sicilians, is heard to promote the cause of unbridled warmongering as a reason and a philosophy of life.11 Above all one wonders how Camiola, a beautiful, chaste and judicious heiress, among her many suitors favours just such a braggart. Bertoldo’s farewell to Camiola, nevertheless, reveals, in swift, ethereal and sonorous lines, Massinger’s very rare lyrical gift, as well as preparing and preannouncing the dilemma of renunciation and sublimation of passion, for love is destined not to be fulfilled owing to Bertoldo’s vow of chastity, he being a knight of Malta. After Bertoldo’s departure for Siena Camiola easily, wittily and firmly holds at bay her somewhat awkward suitors, even when one of them boasts he can someday make her a queen. In the parallel plot Bertoldo is made a prisoner by the Sienese but treated chivalrously. Massinger is indeed even too generous, and there are no satanic and Machiavellian villains plotting in his Tuscany and his Palermo. Besides, Camiola, with another bold move, persuades a suitor of hers, who for her sake accepts the task, to bear the Sienese the ransom 10 Courtier Sylli, seemingly an Italian name, is ‘silly’ in name and in essence, always boringly reciting and posing at the heels of Camiola who cannot get rid of him. He is the fool believing he is clever, exceptionally depicted with a touch of the asperity of a Jonson (in one of whose plays appears his namesake) and Middleton. 11 Massinger cleverly has this peroration supported by a comparison between Sicily and another island, England.

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for the prisoner (hamming in his cell and comparing himself to Seneca) on condition that he marries her on his return to Palermo. There is a touch of witty humorous mysticism in the fact that the prisoner thinks this messenger an angelic deliverer descending from heaven. This ‘angel’ is the umpteenth example of noble disinterested sacrifice, for the additional reason that soon after he tells himself that suicide is cowardly and will be condemned at heaven’s tribunal. After this moment the play proves psychologically artificial. The Duchess of Siena immediately falls incontinently in love with her former prisoner and annuls his ransom, and Bertoldo, who has just sworn eternal love to Camiola, is seized with love for her too. Camiola’s indictment of the betrayer rouses consensus and admiration in Palermo’s royal council; a friar is summoned to celebrate a marriage, but it is a ‘heavenly’ marriage, and to the amazement of all Camiola announces her will to enter a convent. She sings the joys of spiritual life with Dorothea’s very tones, but it is not clear if hers is a compensatory fit, a whim, or a really noble gesture of renunciation. 5. The Renegado cannot be dated earlier than 1615 because it is drawn from Cervantes, nor later than 1624 when it was printed. A recent reading of it, which claims that between the lines Massinger gave a negative comment on and disapproved of the Duke of Buckingham’s proposal to the Spanish Infanta on behalf of King James’s son, is in my opinion unconvincing. More probably it aimed to suggest that England could not help widening its relationships not only with the Continent but also with Muslim North Africa, and should accept not only a double but a triple confrontation of faiths. However, serious realism melts into fairy-tale, or even chivalric parody (since after all a Saracen girl is converted and marries a Christian), or exotic and Gothic parody (since the Muslim viceroy imprisons a Christian virgin, but cannot and will not rape her, for she is protected by an amulet). Francisco, the Jesuit that comforts, counsels and confesses the Tunis Christians, and brings back under the wings of the Church the once sacrilegious renegade, has been loudly proclaimed by the critics a sure proof of Massinger’s Counter-Reformation Catholicism. In my view he is just a conventional cast of the ‘friar’ seen in so many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italianate plays, as mild, benign and helpful, as his antithesis, the ‘Cardinal’, is sinister and cruel. It remains true that Francisco wisely directs, from behind the wings, this little but glorious missionary

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episode; that the renegade redeems himself by bringing back to Italy all the freed prisoners of the Muslims (so he deserves to be the titular hero of the play); and that the Venetian ‘merchant’ shows exceptional strength of mind in accepting torture, and in being ready to die a martyr’s death with the bride he has converted. § 142. Massinger II: Satires of pretentiousness We can easily consider Massinger as the first to explore, in drama, the theme, later central to the works of Dickens and Thackeray, of the critique of social climbing in the merchant middle class. It must be stressed that it is English pretentiousness, in a dramatist strenuously intent on commenting mores, yet working by metaphors. This is the object of the most popular and best known, and most often performed, but not intrinsically most successful, of Massinger’s comedies, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625–1633). The landowner Sir Giles Overreach,12 bent on erecting a small economic empire in the Nottingham area, having failed to marry a rich widow, favours her marriage to his nephew Wellborn, whom he has previously drained of his fortune, with the aim of getting his hands on the widow’s dowry; his daughter, who as often happens, is not talis pater, marries the chaste Allworth, while Sir Giles had intended to increase his wealth by giving her to a lord. In Act IV Sir Giles flaunts a pitiless effrontery worthy of Browning’s Duke of Ferrara – sinister, resolute and explicit in pursuing his aims. But he, the swindler, will end up by being swindled and scorned by the uncorrupted forces of the young. He hires a curate who is to marry, so he believes, his daughter to the lord, but the deception turns against him, and when he sees bride and groom returning from the church, and the husband is not the expected one, he goes mad. The target is evident; but at the same time Massinger absolves the aristocracy, represented by Lord Lovell, who ends up departing for the wars out of love for his country. The plot is however too complicated and artificial, and the play is paradoxically remembered for the intermezzos of a small company of servants and extras, occasionally managing to concoct new gags. In Sir Giles’s little court a lanky, skinny judge bears for instance the 12

Modelled on a contemporary man, famous for his extortions.

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name Greedy, being a gourmet, a cook and taster of luscious, refined food at all hours of day, and proverbially unable to speak to the purpose. In Act III a refined dialogue involving Sir Giles is interrupted by this glutton’s quips, which are totally out of context, so that he is repeatedly sent to the devil. Massinger’s comic-satiric masterpiece is however The City Madam (1632–1658), a frenetic divertissement full of surreal, fanciful, oneiric tricks and of sparklingly eccentric numbers. This is actually an eminently narrative script,13 pivoting on a recurrent human stereotype of satire, the good, healthy, wise but henpecked husband, oppressed by a domineering wife. With Sir John Frugal there lives his dissolute brother Luke, just out of prison and willing to turn over a new leaf, but meanwhile obliged to be on the trot all day and to be a servant. John is honest, desires to advance and enrich himself but without extortion; he is charitable, lends money and harasses no one. By contrast, Luke is a hypocrite (though Massinger prefers not to say why), and leads his brother’s apprentices and servants astray. In a long Act I Massinger masterfully delineates the contrasts between the main characters and makes antecedents emerge quite naturally. The pompous whims of wife and daughters are satirized by means of the introduction of an astrologer, reminiscent of Jonson’s alchemist, patently imitating the incomprehensible jargon employed to dupe gulls. The lessons of Sir Frugal’s two daughters to their suitors are secretly meant to encourage them but have the contrary effect, and the suitors back away, honestly fearing the prospect of marriage. When Frugal announces his retirement to a monastery (in Catholic Louvain, be it noted) – in truth, too suddenly and surreally to be plausible – Luke takes his place as the firm’s manager. Will he behave like his brother? He solemnly promises to, but immediately starts posing like a toff, and a Volpone, holding the keys of the safe. Luke is in a way the pitiless master who in the Gospel exacts payment of the whole debt without delay, a prey to a real hubris of avarice. Even at home his rule is draconian, so his sister-in-law and nieces have a hard time of it. He seeks only his own interest, indirectly punishes their previous pretensions, and also puts inert John in a bad light. The comic sketch of the three Virginians

13

See on this Coleridge and Leslie Stephen, quoted in Cruickshank 1920, 76–7 and n. 3.

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could have been hugely successful, but at first little is made of it. Sir John Frugal and two friends come in fact to Luke disguised as Virginians, bent on playing a practical joke, in the spirit of an umpteenth play within the play of the revenge type, but quite bloodless and comic. In the final analysis, Massinger is always sure that a theatrical action can produce tangible and active results. The joke is brought to an end in Act V by means of a stratagem, the widespread belief that American Indians adored the devil. Asked in fact to choose three women to be sent to Virginia for the ritual sacrifice, Luke unhesitatingly points at his sister-in-law and nieces, saying, with a cynicism worthy of Jonson, or of Middleton’s characters: ‘they are burdensome to me, / And eat too much’. The grand finale brings indeed to mind The Alchemist as well as Shakespeare’s Prospero, because Sir John Frugal, abandoning his disguise, forgives wife and daughters – admonishing bourgeois women not to ape courtesans – but punishes his brother with transportation to Virginia. § 143. Massinger III: Caroline compromises It has been surmised that, once Charles was on the throne and the court was under the aegis of Henrietta Maria, Massinger felt obliged to tone down his plays’ ethical rigour and their celebration of unworldly choices. This view is disproved or corrected by the fact that a similar attenuation can be witnessed even before 1625, as if Massinger had perceived that a new atmosphere was looming. Several plays seem to contradict the approval of glorious self-sacrifice, and, lacking that, of the apotheosis of unbending coherence, admitting with resigned complicity the predominance of human volubility and frailty, and the tendency to evil rather than good. So we no longer have heroes and heroines sublime in their capacity of renunciation and firmness; these are replaced by others, more ordinary and subject to worldly passions. If this is so, Massinger is an authentic man of the theatre and first of all a realist, able to portray at the same time, in the late 1620s, different sets of phenomena, as contradictory as life itself. In this sense The Duke of Milan, written and printed between 1621 and 1623, is a transitional play. Patently the work of a playwright emulating Middleton, Webster and Tourneur, it seems to adopt the easiest, least original formula of the tragedy of revenge, jealousy and disease, in an over-exploited Italianate setting. The plot was devised by Massinger by making a variegated collage of ancient and

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contemporary sources, among them the English translation of Guicciardini’s History of Italy; but it is miraculously agile, clean, perfectly outlined, a set of cogs turning smoothly and naturally. While Duke Sforza is far from Milan his duchess Marcella is courted without success by his favourite, Francisco, Massinger’s first striking creation of an Elizabethan villain. The final scene of Act II cannot but evoke similar ones in Middleton’s two tragedies, but only because the attempted seductions have opposite results. Middleton presents the recurrent struggle between chastity and the surrender to lust, the first option usually losing, owing also to various forms of blackmail. Yet Massinger’s Francisco is softer and slyer than Middleton’s Duke of Florence or De Flores; above all, the duchess reacts dourly to his advances, like Massinger’s other heroines: ‘Nor will I part with innocence, because / He is found guilty’.14 Back in Milan, Sforza is tormented by the suspicion that his ‘saintly’ wife is no longer a saint, and overcome with jealousy kills her. The question of why Francisco was so bent on revenge is answered by the astutely delayed revelation that Sforza had loved and then deserted Francisco’s sister. At the end the atmosphere is dense with Baroque melodramatic undertones; Francisco, exposed, and sought everywhere, arrives at court disguised as a Jewish surgeon, and makes up Marcella’s dead body so that the duke will think her alive and kiss her poisoned lips, dying as a result, with an unmistakeable allusion to Webster’s The White Devil. This is the parody of a resurrection, and at the same time the most fantastic and allusive scenic fragment in the whole of Massinger. Francisco will meet his impending death by fire with sacrilegious, sinister, sarcastic joy; but the play has proved that ‘There’s no trust / In a foundation that is built on lust’. 2. Several of Massinger’s other plays portray, with varying degrees of seriousness and different dramatic registers, a man and a woman feeling the drive to adultery, or even morbidly masking it, suggesting possible ways to discipline and check lust. The curve of the results shows barely attained success, but at times downright failure. The Fatal Dowry, written

14 Duke Sforza has indeed made Francisco swear to kill his wife in case he does not come back alive from his mission at the emperor’s.

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with Nathaniel Field (1587–1620),15 is an early adventurous and very bitter minuet of French cuckoldries. In the extremely controversial, disputed and fragmentary The Parliament of Love (1624?) – a tourbillon of real or reputed adulteries at the French court of Charles VIII – the swift, diversified intrigue prevails over the theme in question. In The Picture (later than 1623, the date of its source) the fall into adultery is barely avoided, but the fantastic, fairy-tale-like background, unusual in Massinger, suggests Fletcher’s collaboration. In this play the Bohemian soldier Mathias, who going to the war says farewell to his wife Sophia, is given by an astrologer a portrait that, Dorian Gray style, will remain white if she is chaste, become yellow if tempted, and black if unfaithful. But the unexpected happens. Mathias is coveted and sequestered by Queen Honoria, and owing to a series of quid pro quos Sophia believes her husband unfaithful and is tempted, and the yellowing portrait leads Mathias to accept Honoria’s advances. Various hesitations and delays prevent however the double and mutual adulteries. Honoria had wanted Sophia to fall and had sent men to tempt her, and the Bohemian couple is reunited after they clarify the situation. The Emperor of the East (1631–1632) shows Theodosius, disguised as his wife’s confessor, hearing her confession and being reassured of her fidelity; the theme is still chastity in man and wife. In The Great Duke of Florence (1627 or earlier-1636) Massinger had already scraped away all residues of the problematic drama on a spiritual, wilful heroine. Bowing perhaps to the new queen’s demands for a more frivolous, light and superficial drama, he opted for the most easily available solution, that of a Florentine plot filled, again, with humorous quid pro quos. Its protagonists are a quite imaginary Duke Cosimo and his nephew Giovanni who believes his widowed uncle wishes to steal the girl he loves. The ups and downs leading to the happy ending were not quite congenial to Massinger, never a specialist in light comedy, and the work is decent but superficial and flat. At Naples, in The Guardian, a comedy dating back to the 1630s, two wooers fight a duel about Calista, but this story intermixes with a series of erotic affairs and 15

The son of a Puritan reverend, guided by Jonson in his early theatrical career, Field became an excellent and requested actor and authored alone two risqué comedies with a London setting. He also occasionally collaborated with Beaumont and Fletcher.

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of adventures among typical Southern bandits, with intoxicating turns resembling those of Jonson’s late farces. The Bashful Lover, the last drama ascribed to Massinger, who wrote it three years before his death, exploits the fashion and popularity of Don Quixote (as Beaumont did earlier on) parodying the figure of a pale wandering knight. This choice also suited the new Caroline atmosphere, reviving the feeling of renunciation, although lighter, more stylized, conventional and anonymous, of Massinger’s first spiritualist plays, as well as those then being written by Ford. The fantastic evolutions, rich with surprises and gender inversions, lead to the unusual ease with which Matilda grants her hand to Ortensio, who is not very warlike but has distinguished himself in petty intestine squabbles among the duchies, and is himself a duke incognito. Quite exceptional is, indeed, the wooers’ fair play. 3. At least a couple of plays confirm the courage of Massinger’s ideas, and show familiarity with theatrical practice as theorized in The Roman Actor. The Unnatural Combat (1623–1624) is a third famous example, along with those by Fletcher and Ford, of an incest play. At Marseilles an admiral, Malefort, kills his pirate son in a duel and mutilates his body. This father is guilty of some unspecified, loathsome crime his son has charged him with before the duel. Gradually, it emerges that the admiral is sexually attracted to his daughter, Theocrine, who is about to marry the son of the governor of Marseilles. The old man strives against his impure second self, and asks an accomplice (whose mistress was the mother of the son the admiral has killed) to keep him away from his daughter. Here the play risks sliding into melodrama, especially in the excruciating, high-sounding monologues of the father accusing himself of an unnatural feeling. The action turns into something of a revenge play when the accomplice takes Theocrine into custody, but rapes her in revenge for her refusal to let him marry her. Theocrine dies heartbroken, like a Fordian heroine. The epilogue is in Baroque style, with lightning striking Malefort, who has just had a hallucination showing him his son and his first wife. The villain undergoes a punishment which he accepts with the same satanic hubris as Francisco in The Duke of Milan. Politically, Massinger was a revolutionary conservative and a protesting dissident, and his drama fights against royal absolutism and all forms of moral corruption, supporting order and even equality. His strongest political play, after The Roman Actor, is The Bondman (early

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1620s), written when his mystical and utopian ‘socialism’ was still intact. This is the story of a slave revolt in ancient Syracuse, repressed by the rulers, who however establish a new order and a more democratic regime. § 144. Ford* I: The focus on incest The scarcity of biographical information concerning John Ford (1586– 1639, the latter being the year in which we lose all traces of him, some dating his death to as late as 1655) is anything but a novelty at this point of our survey of ‘Elizabethan’ dramatists. But in his case, it is particularly regrettable and counter-productive because, did we know more, we could confirm or question many false images of him, and correct real misunderstandings and conflicting evaluations and interpretations which have characterized the critical debate from Lamb’s time to our own days. To speak more frankly, Ford’s criticism is dominated by disagreement on questions like the comprehensive, intrinsic value of his drama (is he an excellent, mediocre or even poor dramatist?), the world-view he holds and puts forward (does Ford believe or not? If he does, what does he believe in? What does he aim to demonstrate?). The most arduous questions, however, are where to place *

Works, ed. W. Gifford and A. Dyce, 3 vols, London 1869, 1895 (revised by A. H. Bullen); The Non-Dramatic Works of John Ford, ed. L. E. Stock, Bighamton 1991, both replaced by The Collected Works of John Ford, ed. G. Monsarrat, B. Vickers and R. I. C. Watt, in 3 projected vols, Oxford 2012–, the first of which published in 2014. A. C. Swinburne, ‘John Ford’, in Essays and Studies, London 1875, 276–313; M. J. Sargeaunt, John Ford, Oxford 1935; G. F. Sensabaugh, The Tragic Muse of John Ford, Palo Alto, CA 1944, New York 1965, North Stratford 1994; R. Davril, Le drame de John Ford, Paris 1954; H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford, Carlton 1955; C. Leech, John Ford and the Drama of his Time, London 1957, and John Ford, London 1964; N. Rocco-Bergera, John Ford, Trieste 1952; M. Stavig, John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order, Madison, WI 1968; A. Lombardo, ‘Il teatro di John Ford’, in N. D’Agostino, G. Melchiori and A. Lombardo, Teatro elisabettiano. Marlowe-Webster-Ford, Vicenza 1975, 45–65; R. Huebert, John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist, Montreal and London 1977; D. M. Farr, John Ford and the Caroline Theatre, London 1979; I. Robson, The Moral World of John Ford’s Drama, Salzburg 1983; R. Manzini, L’immagine anomala: ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ nel teatro di John Ford, Firenze 1988; John Ford: Critical Re-visions, ed. M. Neill, Cambridge 1988; L. Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre, Manchester 1994; R. D’Avascio, La scena crudele: performance dell’eccesso nel teatro di John Ford, Napoli 2011.

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him, what literary milieu he belongs to, in what relation he stands to his precursors – and which of these influenced him – so as to align him with possible matrixes and lines of development. Save for Romanticism and, perhaps, the postmodern, Ford has seemed akin to nearly every sensibility of his and later times: he has been called Jacobean and Caroline, Baroque and neoclassical, Decadent and modern. Stendhal and Flaubert, Hardy and Ibsen, O’Neill, Anouilh, Sartre, Camus and Osborne are some of those he is said to have anticipated. Ford, we conclude, is the typical, polymorphous, many-faceted writer easily suggesting unwary, eccentric and sometimes improbable associations. He was born, not in London but in Devon, into a family of civil servants; he studied at Oxford, where he seems to have sown his wild oats, then at the Middle Temple where he obtained a licence but did not embrace the legal profession. He began by writing atypical, learned, verbose, insignificant verse and prose encomia, but also, if it is really his, a prophetic religious poem (on which more below). On entering the theatrical arena, Ford collaborated with others in plays in which he seems to have been employed as a simple, anonymous provider of words, which have a quite a different fingerprint than his, until in the late 1620s he began to compose on his own for a decade. He was no theatrical machine like Jonson or Middleton, and even considering his lost plays (some of them burned in the so called ‘Warburton’s cook’s fire’)1 he cannot have written more than a score. Three of them, conceived in a fit of exceptional, sudden inspiration, make up a sort of trilogy and were printed in 1633; before and after this exploit, as with Webster, there is silence. 2. Approximately, as far as the critical milestones are concerned, historical judgements on Ford begin with Lamb, who enthusiastically averred: ‘Ford was of the first order of poets’. Only half a century later Swinburne objected that his verse was rather stilted, lacking aerial fluidity; and while praising two of Ford’s great plays he savaged the third. T. S. Eliot’s essay in 1932 expressed already a contrary judgement, observing that Ford’s drama 1

John Warburton, an antiquarian that died in 1759, possessed rare Elizabethan and Jacobean manuscripts and copies of several plays, some of them, it is believed, by Shakespeare. This precious heirloom was lost when his cook, Betsy Baker, used some of those manuscripts to light the fire and line the bottom of her pots!

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was ‘of the surface’ and devoid of ‘essential poetry’. English mid-nineteenthcentury criticism had had no patience with Ford’s morbid exasperation verging on the apology of crime, and accused him besides of being quite unable to devise and develop any comic or marginal subplot. Maeterlinck, who inverted the trend writing an adaptation of Ford’s masterpiece in 1895, nevertheless suppressed its two secondary plots considering them ‘illisibles’. Is there any middle road? Not one of Ford’s great works is set in London, and the scene turns from a stylized ancient Greece to fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury stereotyped little Italian states, with the small compensation of a play which in effect is English but historical. Ford wrote no comedy (or none surviving), but only tragedies whose frames and skeletons are still Jacobean, though the flesh on them has changed. A serious plot, instinct with enervating pathos, is surrounded with commedia dell’arte eccentrics. There are still such paraphernalia and conventions as man-woman disguises, Iago-like informers, Senecan horror and bloodshed, and the revenge tragedy model. Ford is in dialogue, and engages with, other colleagues, but even this evident truth is contested. For Swinburne, Ford had learned nothing from anyone. Eliot in him smelt Shakespeare, others Fletcher and before him Middleton.2 3. Coming to the second controversial point, Ford’s debut has been repeatedly explained by the elementary fact that in the late 1630s authors and spectators were close to saturation and nearly surfeited; hence, genuine natural passions were no longer sufficient to interest and grip the audience, and recourse must be had to unnatural, taboo subjects. At the same time, people of all social classes were offered a coarse, rough, decaying drama, while Ford addressed aristocrats and intellectuals. Ford’s second peculiarity, documented by patent internal evidence, is his being the second writer since Donne’s times (not so distant, however) to ‘depend’ upon external sources and theoretical foundations. Not only did Ford, like Shirley, work after Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s plays had first been printed; he was also deeply impressed by Robert Burton’s vast case study on passions.3 Burton had systematized in a pseudo-scientific way a phenomenology and pathology

2 3

Leech 1964, 8–9, and passim. See the very ample documentation on their relationships in Sensabaugh 1965, 13–93.

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already described empirically and intuitively by Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, Shakespeare in primis. Ford translates that Burtonian system into drama, and does not hesitate to quote from it; but, as in the case of Donne with the Aristotelian paraphernalia, the reproach that drama has been subordinated to theory does not concern him. However, this shows Ford’s strong link with contemporary science and pseudo-science, though Burton expounds an innovating, revolutionary, radically empirical, rather than metaphysical and aprioristic, view of human behaviour. From this point on the labels attached to Ford no longer correspond to the succeeding cultural sensibilities that match them, but follow, as will be seen, diverse cultural promptings and infatuations; some of these labels, mutually irreconcilable, have been applied to him at different historical times, showing at any rate the polyhedral nature of his theatre, or the arbitrariness with which specific clues may be interpreted. For a certain critical current, that is, Ford is a Caroline dramatist who absorbed the neo-Platonism of Henrietta Maria’s court and the love code elaborated in France by Honoré D’Urfé, a love that can and must be fulfilled, but must not be consummated.4 Shakespeare does not envisage only adulterous and lustful women in his theatre, but almost all Middleton’s women are voluble. Jonson conceives of life as a competition between gulls and knaves. Ford’s very new distinctive mark is vice versa the possibility of pure and constant characters, although threatened and likely to succumb. This feature of his main plots is contradicted by the moral trash confined to the marginal and secondary ones, with figures of libertines and serial seducers, and of women ready to fall.5 However, Ford came back into favour at the end of the nineteenth century, to vanish after hardly a score of years, owing to a different, suggestive facet which was brought to light. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, his most famous and proverbial play, and long held shockingly heretic, was rediscovered and venerated by late Romantics and Decadents because it seemed not to condemn a morbid, extreme, shocking passion between brother and sister; on the contrary it extolled it, exempting it from

4 5

See the reconstruction in Sensabaugh 1965, 94–173. Significantly Ford has Ferentes, the lady-killer in Love’s Sacrifice, say appreciatively: ‘for a chaste wife, or a mother that never stept awry, are wonders, wonders in Italy’.

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all condemnation. In their opinion the play dwelt on the ruinous effect of conventional taboos. The scene most morbidly acclaimed of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore was that of Giovanni bringing to the nuptial banquet, on the point of his dagger, the bleeding heart torn from his sister’s breast6 – a scene producing the same imaginary thrill as that attributed to Wilde’s Salome seeing the old, purulent flesh and truncated head of Jokanaan. A third reason for the Decadents’ favour is the way certain of Ford’s scenes keep dripping with prolonged pathos. Whole acts in his tragedies are devoted to lovers describing to each other their miserable conditions and insoluble dilemmas, which condemn them in this life to unspeakable pains, and are sources of unending pity and spasmodic laments. 4. No, a pre-Decadent Ford is a bizarre, absurd idea; in fact he is the Baroque dramatist par excellence. This is Ronald Huebert’s strongly argued thesis going against all the preceding bibliography, put forward in 1977 in an extremely elegant and readable book, full of precious inter-artistic suggestions, but not entirely convincing. Instinctively one would hardly apply the Baroque label to Ford, whom the critic submits to a kind of Procrustean bed. Some useful clues are double-edged, others far from probative. Is not Ford’s theatre objectively as cold as marble, controlled, never dynamic and spiralling, nor impetuous as Baroque aesthetics demands? The mixture of eroticism and mysticism, the ecstatic language deifying the beloved, are indeed traits no less Baroque than Decadent. Huebert’s diagnosis would seem to fail completely on the exquisitely tropological level; and yet it does not, he says: we were all led astray by Lamb’s, Swinburne’s and Eliot’s dry peremptory judgements, which asserted that Ford’s idiolect is tropically neutral, lacking poetry, that the solemnity of its rhythm is wooden, rigid, cold and detached, with no lyrical élan or pure imagination. On the contrary Ford is allegedly as sensorial, sensual and sensuous as Crashaw, whose typical rhetorical figures he also employs. If one espouses, though with reservations, the thesis of a Baroque Ford, one must also suspect or be convinced that Ford was or became a Catholic,7 and reject those that 6 7

Praz never tired of recalling how the heart of a sheep, which Decadent productions of the play had tried to use onstage, seemed a sham, and was replaced with a fake one of red cloth. As D’Avascio 2011 claims in a book based on this very view.

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make him a negative or atheistic existentialist ante litteram. Of course a comparison between Ford and the great phenomenon of continental, Counter-Reformation, Jesuitical Baroque theatre, is out of the question, nor does Huebert try to make this comparison. In 1975, not by chance, in an essay echoing the critical concerns of its day, Agostino Lombardo described Ford as a ‘despairing’ nihilist believing only in phantoms and appearances.8 The serenity ascribed to him, suggesting unconvincing parallels with Racine, does not exist, or merely concerns forms; his drama is claustrophobic in its concentration, and clearly disdains open spaces: a Kammerspiel. Various critics had averred that Ford judges his protagonists sternly, and didactically allots them exemplary punishments, first of all to the siblings of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. On the contrary, Lombardo goes on, Ford is not immoral but amoral; that is, he ignores the question of good or evil, and rather maintains that everything is ambiguous, that his individual gropes in the midst of a ‘void’ seeking values, and can only strive for stoic ‘dignity’ in the face of death. He is therefore isolated, and caught in his isolation, with no kind of social relationship, able to find only in death a deliverance from the circle enclosing him. This is why Ford stresses so much the rituals of death, and his characters act the rites of their own immolation. If so the Calvinism, or the tortured Catholicism of the poem ‘Christ’s Bloody Sweat’, ascribed to Ford in 1935,9 and close to Donne’s ‘holy’ sonnets, or to the ‘terrible’ ones of another great poet, was evidently overcome and reabsorbed. In the very years Lombardo was writing, and occasionally afterwards, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore was read as a precocious protest against Catholic dogmas by anarchic theatre- and film-directors titillated by the myth of blasphemous heresy, like Artaud,10 Visconti,11 Patroni Griffi and Greenaway. The resounding title enhanced the appeal, for unluckily it

8 9 10 11

Lombardo 1975. Sargeaunt 1935, 8. See Huebert 1977, 215, 231 n. 22. I refer to the adaptation Dommage qu’elle soit une putaine, staged in Paris in 1961. The red thread of incest runs through Visconti’s films, as can be seen especially in Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa.

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seems to wink at voyeurs, making everyone forget that Ford, in that title, was not stressing ‘whore’ but rather ‘pity’.12 5. My own view is that Ford’s tragedy is based on the same deterministic laws as ancient and neoclassical tragedy, so that the names of Corneille and Racine can rightly be associated with it, especially as far as The Broken Heart is concerned. The individual is subject to fate or to human laws that punish, or do not contemplate, passions, at least none so incandescent; or else, he believes he can control and suppress them, but feels rent apart by renunciation. Ford’s tragic characters therefore always yearn for selfdissolution, and asymptotically court death: they are all suicidal at heart, slowly approaching death step by step. They are also predominantly female characters, melancholy heroines fixed on voluntarily chosen but regretted decisions, dictated by inflexible willpower and idealistic rigour, and ending in maddening, implosive dilemmas. Though he keeps to dramatic objectivity, Ford clearly suggests where his sympathies lie by eloquent titles and by the protagonists’ names: Eroclea, Annabella, Bianca, Penthea, Calantha. To come, at last, to my heading in this section, incest is Ford’s ‘focus’, in the sense of a thematic centre on which three or four of his tragedies converge; but it also alludes to the fire and the violence of the passion’s manifestations, in some cases burning or flickering, hardly perceptible ‘under a bushel’, in others furiously flaring up, without periphrases or ambiguities. Incest, however, is after all passion tout court, and Ford is the analyst of incoercible passion, both because it is an instinct that reason does not choke or repress, and because the artist questions whether it could and should be tamed, since it is redeemed by that very extreme intensity that has stirred it. Ford of course did not know Freud, only Burton, so he neither explains nor speculates on the genetic and psychic origin of incest (let alone its anthropological roots); he merely registers the eruption of this desire, and after showing how it can remain latent, lets it explode in the most explicit way in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.13 Ford the dramatist is 12 13

The title is also the last line in the play, and the cardinal’s summary, mocking diagnosis, showing that he has completely misunderstood the events. A similar study of incestuous desire flaring up is in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which recurs to the escamotage of making Heathcliff a foundling, and so a step-brother of Catherine’s.

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the observer of exasperated, paroxysmal, spasmodic, incurable emotions, often if not almost always self-destructive: ‘physic yet hath never found / A remedy to cure a lover’s wound’. § 145. Ford II: Heroines of firmness The Lover’s Melancholy (1629) turns on the recognition of Eroclea, who appears to her Cyprian relatives that believed her dead as Partenophil, a name we have already found in Barnabe Barnes.14 At the end past wrongs and moral violence, like an attempted rape, are redressed; for the rapist’s son at first suffers like an Amfortas, then finds again the lost love his father wanted to take from him. Thus, another father can enjoy a tender reunion with a daughter he thought lost. But to this we come by very slow little steps, for the father to the last refuses to believe; only when he embraces her is he cured of his madness. The first image of melancholy is Menaphon, back from a one-year exile; having accepted this exile as a cure, he returns to other melancholics, especially the young prince of Cyprus, who is even apathetic and catatonic. The climax of the first scene is Menaphon’s récit, telling in fluent ethereal verse how in a wood he found a lutenist in musical competition with a nightingale (also melancholy!), and how the nightingale, having lost, died of a broken heart. The lutenist is taken to the Cyprus court. The emerging events of the past justify and diagnose the widespread pathologies affecting the characters. Thamasta loves Menaphon, but falls in love at first sight with Partenophil, well knowing that when you fight for your freedom you are caught in your own bonds. Palador, Prince of Cyprus, enters the scene with a book in his hand, mentally absent, not to be shaken out of his torpor; this has a political side-effect, for people whisper that no one is at the helm of the state, and a small rebellion is simmering. Meleander, Eroclea’s father, lies in a painful state of dementia, takes no food, sits on a chair with a very long and shaggy beard, raves and laments and calls his daughter’s name. Palador was and is in love with her, her portrait hanging on his neck. Partenophil, or Eroclea disguised, makes everybody ill, and in particular Kala, Thamasta’s maid, to whom

14

§ 70.3.

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she should clear the way; by another misunderstanding Menaphon must watch Thamasta vainly wooing Partenophil and think he has a rival in her, so that his melancholy grows worse instead of being cured. References to melancholy become explicit, and result in a short lecture which consists of paraphrases of passages from Burton’s Anatomy. Melancholy is precisely a commotion in the mind, a mixture of sorrows and fears emanating from the heart, and has manifold expressions; it is an anguish of the mind whose cause is not known, and hardly curable. A doctor, Corax, wants to heal the pathology and even the actual effects of melancholy.15 Once Thamasta seems to have learned that Parthenophil is a woman, the court sets up a show, in homage to a trite stylistic habit in seventeenth-century drama. This show is a masque representing melancholy, limited however to bringing onstage four personifications of that condition (one of them, lycanthropy, recalls Webster).16 Meleander’s madness reaches such a paroxysmal peak that at this point we also realize the influence King Lear had on Ford;17 by his side sits his patient, sorrowful daughter Cleophila, Ford’s first heroine, who for his sake is sacrificing her love (as, in Shakespeare, Kent and Edgar). This father is undergoing a painful ordeal, owing to the loss of his daughter and the threats he has suffered. But he is also soothed, tamed and healed by Burton’s alter ego, that doctor Corax who represents various medical doctrines of the time, and is one of the few sane people amidst a crowd of melancholics. As nearly always happens, the play within the play is the resolving therapy, and the prince wakes up and asks for young Partenophil who, having disappeared, cannot be found. Time is ripe for Palador’s recognition of Eroclea, but the scene is one of the clumsiest and least successful 15 16

17

Significantly other minor dramas by Ford also deal with ways of curing the lovesickness of a melancholy person, like Malfato in The Lady’s Trial, or Alphonso, healed by Muretto in The Queen, or the jealous Secco in The Fancies. The actors feign to be mad, and at any rate speak in a rambling, disjointed and hallucinated style, confirming that, as Webster and Middleton also prove, in James’s time madmen were made to recite for the pleasure of court nobles. During the show prince Palador has a book, or a script, in his hand, like the spectators of the play within the play in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (§ 93.3 n. 11). A gap in the script means the lovemelancholy which Partenophil herself has been asked to represent as if in a mime. Sargeaunt 1935, 119–20.

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in the play. Act V completes the various cures, so that the play is a series of sicknesses healed by medicines that are recognitions. The epilogue, with Meleander cured of his folly by the physician, diffuses in all directions an excessively cloying and blatantly sentimental pathos. 2. The Broken Heart, a compact play exceptionally rising to its climax with no subplot or intermezzo, is set in Sparta, where a counsellor’s son, Orgilus, is betrothed to Penthea with the approval of her father, but not of her brother Ithocles. The latter departs for exile (or so it seems), while Penthea is compelled by Ithocles to marry wealthy Bassanes in a loveless union. Ford is unlike nearly all other cynical dramatists of the time in admitting that a pure passion can coexist in a woman with a scrupulous respect for conjugal chastity; he does not indiscriminately condemn everyone to weakness of character. Rather, he describes the opposite, a consistency so extreme as to make Penthea’s grief implode in her, and Orgilus go into voluntary exile. Ithocles, the victorious general, is in turn betrothed to the king’s daughter Calantha, and while all laud his nobility of mind Orgilus has just spoken bitterly of him. However, as if in a counterpoint, some précieuses tease and entice two eager, rather foolish warriors, keeping them at a distance with feminine cunning, as if to point out that Penthea and Calantha are exceptions. Orgilus has remained at court incognito, to spy from the wings what happens at Sparta in his absence. But he too is caught in flagrant contradiction for, having protested when Penthea was compelled to marry Bassanes, he likewise forbids his sister Euphranea to marry without his permission. Meanwhile he pretends to be a lunatic, and acts as a go-between for his sister and her suitor. Bassanes is sick with jealousy and sees all women as faithless whores; nevertheless he wants his wife to show up at court bejewelled. Though gasping with jealousy, he still exalts the joys of marriage. It is remarkable that in his sinister jealousy he is afraid even of his wife’s brother. Penthea, Spartan in name and fact, withdraws into her sorrow. In Act II she faces the man she had been betrothed to, and resists him at the cost of unspeakable pain. She also resists and draws back from Orgilus when no longer disguised. Her pathology emerges from her constant use of images evoking wounds, with her frequent references to rape and with the most classic self-definition along with its morbid psychic and pathological distortions: ‘a ravished wife / Widowed by lawless marriage’. Unshakeable, stoical, saint-like, she dies

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of a broken heart, expressing her dematerialized condition with accents unheard of save in Shakespeare, or with the voice of Jonson’s tragic heroines, in violent contrast with those of Middleton. The scene in which the two siblings foresee their death is one of those Ford likes to indulge in and linger on. And yet at the same time he releases a flash of ambiguously incestuous erotic desire, since Penthea yearns to die with her brother to attain and recover, in death, their primitive purity, or that purity they possessed before the present, bitter dilemma sullied it. Discovering them together Bassanes raves and brandishes a dagger, actually showing thereby that his incestuous suspicions were not entirely wrong after all. The question arising from the very beginning was indeed why Orgilus hinders his sister, forbidding and delaying her marriage. The answer is again a secret incestuous passion. Another infinitely poignant scene is Penthea’s confrontation with Calantha, the latter a Salome who will be the cause of Ithocles’ death if she rejects him. Too late has Orgilus been forgiven, too late has Ithocles repented, and too late has Bassanes been cured of his jealousy, if he has. The situation becomes more entangled because the spiral, instead of rising towards the recovery of sanity, degenerates into further folly: now Bassanes masochistically asks to be made to suffer more, by way of compensation; and Penthea has lost her reason. Another scene of prolonged exasperation occurs at this point, with Penthea ranting and Bassanes heartbroken before Ithocles. Orgilus imprisons Ithocles in a mechanical chair and stabs him. But doing so he condemns the twin-siblings, or rather gives them, so to speak, the prize of an eternal embrace in death, speeding up the process of their longedfor union-reunion. Act V registers the famous, much praised scene of Calantha dancing at the marriage of Euphranea and Prophilus. Calantha bears witness to the moral temperament of Ford’s heroines, when she continues to dance while the news of the deaths of the other heroes is whispered into her ear. Orgilus too makes a show of his death: he cuts his veins and lets life leave him drop by drop, measuring his death throes for the others with keen pleasure. Calantha, too, as soon as she is a queen dies of a broken heart, and her dirge contains the meaningful line: ‘Love only reigns in death’. 3. In ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore the incest theme, as I said, is discussed more technically: Giovanni, a theology and philosophy student, at least twice

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confronts an official representative of orthodoxy, and pleads the lawfulness of incest against the dogmatic friar, who condemns it though he wishes to absolve the sinful woman; failing in this, he advises how to cover the sin by marrying Annabella to an unknowing suitor. Giovanni seems to echo Donne when in Act I Scene 1 he tries by means of Aristotelian syllogisms to prove to the friar that his love for his sister is consequential. The two siblings share soul, flesh, love, heart: ‘Nearness in birth and blood doth but persuade / A nearer nearness in affection’. Some caustic comments, nevertheless, are directed at the Church. The friar is intransigent, but solicitous and pragmatic; it is rather the ‘Cardinal’ that makes a very bad impression, since in the end he confiscates on behalf of the Church all the possessions of the bereaved family, and utters a misinformed, brutal, insensitive judgement on the events. His diagnosis, on which all the play’s characters save the two siblings agree, is quite the opposite of truth. Annabella at most has ‘sinned’ by incest; in her pure devotion to her brother she is anything but a whore, rather a saint. The two lovers’ duets and ecstatic addresses sound no doubt like imitations of Euphuism,18 moments of suspension and even linguistic ecstasy inserted into a web of gross comedy or of blatant, obtuse materiality.19 Just as she rejects a suitor (her father having left her freedom to choose) Annabella swoons because she is pregnant, and the false doctor diagnoses a ‘fullness of her blood’, meaning menstruation, the opposite of what is happening. The friar, such is the power of religious dread, gives the young woman a stupendous, hyperbolic picture of hell, making her tremble and wish to repent. The haughty, austere Cardinal is first seen cursing the city’s burghers knocking at his palace to hear news on the murderer

18 19

This stylistic element, and the friar and the loquacious nurse, have reminded some critics of an influence of Romeo and Juliet, actually rather inconsistent. The spiral towards tragedy is often suspended by incidental scenes where Annabella’s rival suitors brag and banter with speeches at times full of extravagant wit, providing a foil to the high theme. One of them at a certain point quotes Sannazaro and a famous ‘epigram’ of his on Venice. One Hippolita has killed her husband for the sake of Soranzo who refuses her, but her husband is alive and reappears disguised as a doctor. A murder is committed by mistake with the poisonous point of a sword, and its victim is one of Annabella’s wooers.

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Grimaldi, who has taken refuge there with the prelate’s interested approval; this casts doubt on the friar’s moral rectitude. The masque celebrating Annabella’s wedding with Soranzo is spoiled by a murder, for his former fiancée, wanting to poison him, drinks the poisoned cup herself. Soranzo finds out that his wife Annabella is pregnant and charges her with being a whore; Annabella defies him and refuses to name the child’s father; he threatens her with death but she does not care, since such supreme, sublime and pure devotion cannot be bartered nor sold. She is the crowning example of Ford’s typical, feminine firmness, though now endangered and alone in fighting conventions. But it is of a different type from Penthea’s. Eventually Soranzo calms down and forgives; in fact he is just pretending. It is the nurse20 that tells one of Soranzo’s servants that the child’s father is Giovanni. The servant has her kidnapped and blinded, thereby getting rid of the only witness. But here Annabella seems to waver and distrust passion, and withdraws from the firmness hitherto shown. Giovanni on the contrary is firm to the end in the ‘heresy’ of his incestuous love, which he proclaims and exalts for the last time to the friar.21 Giovanni, as if intoxicated, rushes to his death; the friar, having tried everything, departs. Meanwhile Soranzo ponders on revenge, once he has been told by his servant the name of the ‘culprit’. The two will be caught in flagrante. In her nuptial chamber Annabella suddenly becomes pragmatic, while Giovanni in defiant mood scoffs at his sister’s fear of damnation. Here Ford stresses the predictable awakening of current moral values – of decorum, repentance of forbidden passion, error and foul sin – in Annabella, who now pleads and prays to be allowed to live, whereas Giovanni yearns for death to perpetuate the union, conscious that only death will keep it intact. Thereby, like a blasphemous heretic, he denies all otherworldly life. At last he decides to make his sister immortal like an innocent saint in heaven, the heaven he has just 20 Conniving with the two siblings’ loves, the nurse is called by Ford, who mimetically writes some speeches in excellent Italian, Putana, a whore. This is in itself a little onomastic stroke of genius, as this name acquires positive implications, being the same quite mistakenly applied to Annabella. 21 Annabella’s letter to her brother is written with blood, like that of Bellimperia in The Spanish Tragedy (§ 93.2).

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said does not exist. He at once beseeches pity and approval for a love that will be censured, knowing how intense it is. The Cardinal, as said above, will complete the falsification, commanding the nurse to be executed and her body burnt to ashes. § 146. Ford III: ‘Unity is no sin’ In Love’s Sacrifice (1633) Duchess Bianca cannot but recall the protagonist of Middleton’s Women Beware Women, also a duchess, being partly like her, although, as will be seen, quite unlike her, too. Formally it is still a play pivoting on a couple of siblings, but with no shadow of incestuous attraction. The widow Fiormonda, sister to Philippo, the Duke of Pavia whose bride is Bianca, longs for the duke’s favourite, Fernando, who ignores her. A possible transgression might be represented by Fernando’s veiled homosexual attachment to the duke, a scarcely masculine figure; but then it becomes clear that Fernando does not care for Fiormonda because he secretly loves Bianca. At first Bianca is Ford’s classic heroine that firmly rejects Fernando’s insistent courtship; but she thinks it over and yields, though for the moment envisaging only a platonic, rather than carnal relationship. The Iago-like counsellor D’Avolos (a name clearly alluding to the Devil) discovers the object of Fernando’s pains and sighs by showing him a Browninguesque painted duchess, that is, a portrait of Bianca, at which sight he winces. There is an explicit echo of Middleton in the game at chess Bianca plays with Fernando, masking her acceptance of Fernando’s wooing that she had four times rejected. During this game Fernando makes the woman a new Petrarchan promise of chaste and pure love, containing various commonplaces of that poetical idiolect, but also quoting Burton and the idea that love pains cannot be cured by any medicine. But for the moment Bianca answers like Penthea, firmly refusing to ‘prostitute [her] blood’. Hearing these words Fernando immediately draws back, but warning her that if after his death his heart is opened her name will be found carved there ‘in bloody lines’. The coup de théâtre is that on that very night the duchess enters the room of sleeping Fernando and piquantly slips into his bed almost naked. It is a first high-voltage scene. In a way Bianca is redeemed by her self-blackmail. She sets so high a price to the satisfaction of her erotic desire that she is sure that her chastity will be preserved: she promises in fact to punish herself for the sin

§ 146. Ford III: ‘Unity is no sin’

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that another untameable part of her, her body, longs for. By saying and doing so she causes a crisis in her lover, who must choose whether to demand her body, and thereby make her die by suicide – two self-torturing heroes, who on the verge of the abyss are heroic enough to withdraw: ‘I’ll master passion’. This scene of starry, sublime purity is contradicted by a dissonance, with the arrival of a proverbially dissolute courtier who has made two young girls pregnant promising marriage to both; and a third one is about to fall into his grasp.22 Fiormonda, a sex-starved, Marlovian woman, achieves her possessive wish to dominate the duke her brother by making him – always sleepy, lazy, melancholy, a little tardy – thirsty for vengeance. Now the duke falls even more seriously ill, and begins to rave and harbour ideas of bloodshed. The two lovers, Fernando and Bianca, firmly believe that sin, being a way to achieve greater ‘unity’, is justified. There is no sin in unity. The duke catches the two lovers red-handed pondering whether to commit adultery or not, and the reader is left doubting if they would have verified in fact that ‘unity is no sin’. According to Ford’s law of the indissoluble unity of passion the two lovers must die together, and they ask and beg for such a death. After Bianca has been stabbed Fernando refuses to fight with the duke, precisely because he yearns to die. The last scene is eerie: Fernando emerges from the shadows like a ghost guarding Bianca’s funeral monument, before he poisons himself. Thus, Bianca and Fernando might well be the two speakers of John Donne’s ‘The Relique’ and ‘The Funeral’. Fiormonda rejoices having now obtained mastery on the duchy, and order is quickly, fictively re-established. 2. At first sight Perkin Warbeck (1634), a historical play on the quenched rebellions that might have brought to the throne, instead of Henry VII, the eponymous pretender, is a total stranger in Ford’s dramatic oeuvre. One wonders who asked him to write it and, if he did so of his own free will, what prompted him to. It also roused the classic debate between critics praising it, even declaring it Ford’s masterpiece (as T. S. Eliot thought),

22 This Ferentes might derive from Middleton’s Touchwood (§ 131.3), but positively without his humanity. In the court masque the three courtesans seduced by him form an alliance, and as happens very often in Jacobean plays the actresses get out of their characters and really stab the guilty man.

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and others demolishing, or just condescending to it. Nevertheless, one can eventually detect in it Ford’s most typical marks.23 His first objective is the celebration of the far-sighted, gentle and mild justice of Henry VII, his care for the peace of the realm, and his ability to quench, but without cruelty, autonomist and divisive hotbeds. With Ford’s Henry VII the code of melancholy is obviously defeated, but unity, Ford’s existential virtue par excellence, has political consequences, for the Scots, who at first support Warbeck, desert him through the mediation of a Spanish emissary. Before the end of the fifteenth century there was not yet open enmity with Spain, but the episode could only estrange the 1633 audience that surely must have clamoured during the performance of the play. In itself the new-made England-Spain alliance salutes the birth of a dynastic line that was to bring the Scottish Stuarts to the English throne, and this was the public aim of Perkin Warbeck. Not for nothing does Scots James marry Henry VII’s daughter. Perkin Warbeck remains a Fordian drama, in that Katherine, the Scotch pretender’s wife, stays with him when he wins as well as when he is defeated in the battle of Exeter. When she is in prison, on the one hand Henry shows her the highest honours and the deepest respect, and on the other Katherine imitates her husband in refusing all temptation to compromise and even abjuration. Ford immortalizes an umpteenth couple of lovers united usque ad mortem. The reader supposes, and expects, that if Warbeck dies, as a consequence and through an implicit law of Ford’s theatre, his wife Katherine will too. With his last words Warbeck pronounces her high encomium. History obliged Ford to keep her alive, and Francis Bacon, his source, had added that the woman was going to remarry: in the play she promises ‘to die a faithful widow’24 in her bed, though still remaining a bright example of conjugal chastity.

23

Those who contend that Ford is a Baroque dramatist make much of the reality/ appearance paradigm as basic to this play, while I deem it specious and generic (Warbeck pretends to be, and for some people is, the lawful king), and devote long and diffuse analyses to it. 24 This is not the only discrepancy between the historical sources and Ford’s text.

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§ 147. Thomas Heywood* I: ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness’ There is no collected and complete edition available to date, nor is one being announced and prepared, of the dramatic works of Thomas Heywood (1570–1641), although his most famous, classic tragicomedy, A Woman Killed with Kindness, has been reprinted and edited several times recently, as well as, though less frequently, some of his other works. The only complete edition usually referred to is still that of 1874 with the old spelling, listed below in the bibliography; five of his plays were anthologized in the Mermaid Series, edited by J. A. Symonds, in 1888. In other words, English and American publishers specializing today in critical editions of the major English authors have so far remained sceptical of the old assertions by Lamb (according to whom Heywood was the first of all the Elizabethans deserving to be reprinted), and Swinburne, who in The Age of Shakespeare (1908) devoted a substantial chapter, more than fifty pages long, to this dramatist, praised with a whole gamut of superlatives. What is disconcerting is not only the paucity of the critical bibliography (mainly revolving around questions of attribution rather than interpretation), but the fact that in several surveys he receives extremely antithetic judgements, some scholars dedicating to him ample space and favourable assessments, others cold or merely condescending ones, still others simply ignoring him. So any discussion of Heywood must start with a survey of his critical reception, also taking stock of the historical editions of his works. 2. The name of Lincolnshire-born Heywood appears in Henslowe’s ‘diary’ in the last years of the sixteenth century. He had come to London *

Dramatic Works, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 6 vols, London 1874, New York 1964; Thomas Heywood (five plays), ed. J. A. Symonds, London 1888. A. C. Swinburne, ‘Thomas Heywood’, in SAS, 197–251; O. Cromwell, Thomas Heywood: A Study in the Elizabethan Drama of Everyday Life, New Haven, CT and London 1928; A. M. Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist, Oxford 1931 (reviewed and discussed by T. S. Eliot in ESE, 171–81), New York 1958; F. S. Boas, Thomas Heywood, London 1950; M. Grivelet, Thomas Heywood et le drame domestique élizabéthain, Paris 1957; M. L. Johnson, Images of Women in the Works of Thomas Heywood, Salzburg 1974; B. J. Baines, Thomas Heywood, Boston, MA 1984; R. Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflict, Farnham 2010.

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probably after studying at Cambridge, where he had absorbed a classical education that did not become a dead letter, but was employed in translations from Latin and in a large compilation of English history, from the times of the legendary Trojan Brutus to his own days. Engaged as an actor and shareholder by the King’s Men, and later by other companies, he proved as enterprising as Fletcher, and had a hand in more than 200 comedies, of which only about a score survive, having been printed. A reduction of such enormous proportions is normally explained by the systems and the printing habits of the time, and one naturally refers to Shakespeare’s example, since Heywood, like his near-contemporary, did not care what happened to his works, looked on them with typical sprezzatura, and indeed scoffed at Jonson for having narcissistically printed his opera omnia. Not in metatheatrical form, but in a separate pamphlet (which provides precious information on the life of theatre in his time, and shows his distance from Puritan hostility) Heywood expressed the same ideas as Massinger: that the theatre had an educational end, taught illiterates their country’s history and kept them faithful to the king by taming or preventing insurrections. We must then suppose that the mere twenty-four printed plays, out of the 200 odd composed and performed, were chosen on the basis of their aesthetic value: they were thought the best by his contemporaries, in other words, and the most successful. In 1888 Symonds performed a parallel operation by extracting from Heywood’s available oeuvre its quintessence, according to later aesthetic taste, and offering it to the learned, implicitly relegating the rest to obsolescence. Compared to the 1876 edition the available corpus was smaller by one fifth. As a measure of how much this reductive approach prevailed one can cite Grierson and Smith, who in 1944 authoritatively declared that of Heywood’s seventeen (sic) plays ‘sixteen [are] too many’.1 Symonds’s anthology likewise confirmed a general consensus that Heywood was a rather eclectic dramatist, well aware of the tastes of a semi-plebeian audience, and that his dramas were to be divided into four essential sections, in each of which it was easy to identify the best and most

1

GSM, 133.

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representative play.2 Disregarding the chronology, undoubtedly unsure, and only relying on a scale of values, two of the five available places were assigned to the ‘city’ comedy, one to the historical-patriotic drama with an injection of robust and even bombastic romance, one to the suburban farce or burlesque with surreal touches, and one to the classical Roman tragedy with echoes of and allusions to the historical present. 3. Heywood’s two chief, ageless tragicomedies 3 seek and find alternatives to the duty, almost always felt by the betrayed character (and by the playwright), to exact vengeance, and thus to the code itself of bloody revenge; in this lies their historical relevance. They point to the ideal of a more reflective man, who experiences the same murderous impulses, in the face of betrayal and deception committed against him by his wife or his promised bride, but can reason on them, and eventually abstain and restrain himself. He is the wise hero that obtains the same effects as his bloody predecessors, without shedding blood. Heywood inaugurates this variant long before the new Caroline court trends made Senecan horrors go out of fashion. His two acknowledged masterpieces prove it possible to achieve the same results without penal consequences, by means of what might appear to be, but is not, a more or less voluntary neo-Machiavellism: contempt for the culprit is as murderous as a dagger. At the same time we glimpse as if in nuce the advent of eighteenth-century and Victorian sentimental novels, with their melodramatic plots, morbid intrigues and psychic conflicts. Heywood’s second successful play is almost a script ready to be used by Wilkie Collins and Trollope.4 Heywood is, however, less 2

This partition into four was also accepted by Swinburne, and adopted by BAUGH, vol. II, 543–7. 3 T. S. Eliot, who in ESE, 171–81, calls Heywood the most ‘faded’ dramatist in his time, after all quotes as evidence (to discuss or deny whether Heywood’s be really an oeuvre) four of the five plays included in the Mermaid edition; and he limits to two (179) the plays worth remembering. 4 Concerning A Woman Killed with Kindness some descendants have been somewhat boldly mentioned: Ibsen (PSL, 212, obviously echoing Clark 1931), Richardson for his comédie larmoyante, Tolstoy for the sorrow of Anna Karenina’s husband. Like Trollope, Heywood was in the habit of writing at least one page a day (Symonds 1888, ix).

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courageous and modern in structuring his plots. Massinger is almost the only Jacobean playwright who abolishes the secondary plot, as not even Ford, indeed especially Ford, had been so bold and determined to do. In Heywood the subplots become detached, autonomous half-plays only remotely and vaguely linked to the main plots, and end up being a great hindrance to them. In A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603–1607), to which Symonds gave pride of place, the well-to-do Frankford, a few hours from his wedding is already unknowingly and fatalistically presaging his tragedy as he joyfully praises his bride’s modesty and faithfulness. But the climax is delayed by various long scenes in which local gentlemen excitedly compete in flying their falcons high: however, suddenly these get carried away, and two gentlemen start fighting, and are killed by two attendants of Sir Francis, perhaps thus signifying that fury and passion’s urge can very soon deprive men of the light of reason. Heywood’s structuring method will nearly always be precisely this, an alternation of scenes from the two plots, presented in small segments. While Sir Charles, the falcon-game murderer, is released from prison after paying a substantial bail, Frankford receives as his guest Wendoll, an impoverished friend who, initially an eccentric, takes on extempore tragic or pseudo-tragic attitudes and holds forth in a lofty, pompously declamatory monologue on his budding passion for Frankford’s wife. Here Jacobean audiences must have clapped their hands at Nick, the honest, shocked servant who, overhearing Wendoll, counterbalances the sighing, rhetorical tirades of the other, exposing them – having already, before everybody else, smelt a rat. In the other, parallel plot Sir Francis dogs Sir Charles, ogles his sister, and, like Wendoll, is overwhelmed by lust. This action serves above all to gauge and stress the violation of the unity of time. We can also detect Marlowe’s influence in this comedy or tragicomedy by Heywood,5 as Wendoll watches and rhetorically comments on his own reactions, embellishing the description of his state of mind with hyperbolical images and metaphors. It is also true that with a sudden change of register we pass to shorter, telegraphic, dry speeches, of a very undistinguished flavour. Anyone who has in mind the very different diction of Middleton or Massinger (the latter the diametrical opposite of Marlowe) finds these 5

It is a moot point whether (see ESE, 173–4) Heywood, when very young, collaborated on The Jew of Malta.

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soliloquies in Heywood rather obsolete. They are filled with poetic licenses like frequent noun-adjective inversions and unnatural syntactic constructions; they are speeches often closed by or dotted with rhymed couplets, and the iambic rhythm is very strongly stressed. The basic events unfold in the course of ordinary daily actions in an undefined place ‘in the north of England’: the table is laid, crumbs are brushed from the cloth, since it is windy a warmer nightgown is put on; or people play cards (but the dialogue is laced with double meanings, with the husband winking at adultery and neither wife nor lover perceiving it, but only the spectators). The play starts at slow speed, but from Act III it changes gear, and the elegiac Act V is really touching. Here Heywood handles pathos as only Shakespeare before him could (so Lamb’s dictum that Heywood is a prose Shakespeare is true enough). The now adulterous wife pretends she does not want Frankford to depart, though she knows that his absence will grant her another night of passion with her lover, and solicitously offers to wake him up early next morning, as in one of Hitchcock’s thrillers. Ingeniously Heywood makes Wendoll run a great risk by offering to accompany Frankford in the pretended journey the latter has invented; perhaps Wendoll is sincere, perhaps he is sure that Frankford, supposedly ignorant of the intrigue, will refuse. In the dead of night Frankford, preparing to break into the house and surprise the guilty ones in the act, talks to his servant in Hamlet-like tones: he has refrained from stabbing them lest he should send them to hell laden with foul sins. Indeed, we only see him whimper outside the room after he has seen and heard. Why has Anne betrayed him? She had everything, so there is no answer – all very modern. A long time has gone by since the beginning of the play, for the children are allowed to come on stage by the father to point out to their mother the heinousness of her deed. Frankford takes time and decides to punish his wife by shutting her up in a lonely manor-house, though granting her all her creature comforts. The tragedy fades into an elegy when Frankford, finding the lute in the house, sends it to her already on the way. Occasionally Heywood proves a cultured, sophisticated dramatist, and ‘the broken lute’ seems a clear quotation from Wyatt.6 Frankford’s wife punishes herself deciding she will starve herself to death, a self-sacrificial heroine like Ford’s and Massinger’s future 6

§ 42.5 n. 15.

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creations. The final scene – Frankford forgiving the weeping woman at her bedstead – reminds one of Shakespeare, and perhaps also looks ahead to Goethe. 4. Heywood quotes Chaucer in The English Traveller (1633), having the clown say to the two gentlemen, Delavil and Geraldine, that young Mrs Wincott seems May with Januarius, being married to an old man. And the effeminate Geraldine, sexually hardly active, has the name of Surrey’s imaginary beloved,7 a female name, often given to women. The young ‘wife’ has no proper name, as if she embodied a type; Delavil’s is much too expressive, containing ‘devil’ and ‘evil’. Almost thirty years separate this remake from A Woman Killed with Kindness, and during the lapse hardly calculable stylistic progresses have matured. The language no longer registers declamations in frequent rhymed couplets, Marlowe’s rhetorical eloquence is assuaged, and the tone is more colloquial, though still cold, rigid, polite. But Heywood still keeps the habit of dividing the play into two plots, proceeding in short parallel segments. Here one could even doubt, paradoxically, which of the two is to be considered the main one and which the secondary, such a large space being devoted to a very long and therefore boring Plautine farce8 based on the deceptions and tricks played on a candid merchant returning to London from his travels. A self-enclosed section of great linguistic virtuosity, clearly emulating Shakespeare, is the account of a gargantuan banquet recited by the clown, a resurrected Elizabethan fool who has granted him even excessive, overflowing verbal freedom. Such linguistic exploits make the main plot appear faded and tiresome, at least until the climactic scene reintroduces the two former lovers who make a decision vaguely similar to that of Ford’s Bianca and Fernando,9 that is, to throw water on passion’s fire. Can an overwhelming love such as that still binding Geraldine to old Wincott’s wife be tamed? Can its consummation be put off until the husband’s possible death, perhaps in the hope it will happen very soon? And why, then, has the ‘wife’ sentenced herself to this Chaucerian marriage? For the second time, however, the Arden of 7 8 9

§ 43.3. Swinburne’s opinion in SAS, 236, is the opposite. § 146.1.

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Feversham code is violated, wisely giving up the readiest solution, a thousand times practised, to get rid of the husband and enjoy sexual pleasure immediately. Paradoxically, it is the woman who exacts from the man an oath of absolute fidelity during the period of waiting. But Delavil uses Iago’s weapon, telling and not telling Geraldine’s father the slander that the two are lovers. A gentlemanly but firm discussion between father and son makes the latter promise no longer to frequent the woman’s home. With a very indiscreet gesture, or an unwitting fit of madness, Geraldine, becoming suspicious, decides to visit the woman in her bedroom, where he does not find her – like Frankford – in bed with a lover, but merely overhears the adulterers’ voices, without entering. It is a remarkable detail – of an involuntary or perhaps tragic irony – that Geraldine, apathetic as he always is, manages to cool his wrath by remembering that he has left his sword in the antechamber. Still, he reproaches the adulteress and publicly accuses her, showing his talons at last. The woman’s repentance, like that of Frankford’s wife, is immediate, and she dies of heartbreak, like Ford’s Calantha and Massinger’s Marcella. § 148. Thomas Heywood II: Other plays A remaker of myths and classical stories,10 Heywood, on the other hand, flatly rejects already old and hackneyed materials, like the Italian settings proliferating in Webster, Middleton, Ford and Massinger. This stereotype is moribund. Heywood is instead steeped in the English reality, of London or the provinces, and he is one of the first realists even in the ‘Dutch’ accuracy of his stage directions, in the choice of internal settings and of privileged scenic moments, like those of meals. Much of the appreciation he still enjoys is due to this minute picture or photography of daily life in specific London boroughs and sights, which is the reason why, as a comic dramatist, he is frequently associated with Dekker. In The Four Prentices of London (1615) – on the vicissitudes of four apprentices, fond readers of chivalrous stories, who respond to a recruiting campaign and rush to 10

See the imposing pentalogy (sic) The Four Ages, highly praised by Swinburne who summarizes and discusses it in his essay (210–18) and points to its analogies with The Earthly Paradise by Morris.

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Jerusalem, whence they return having each honoured his guild – there is no shadow of the parody and biting satire that Beaumont directed at him in The Knight of the Burning Pestle.11 The farce The Wise Woman of Hogsdon12 (perhaps 1604, published 1638) is based on the familiar motif of the bigamous braggart, who having promised marriage to three women is exposed with the help of a witch; but this happens after Heywood has tried to entertain his audience with the Latinate rigmaroles, always rather flat, of a Shakespearean, comical ‘primary school-teacher’. The play amply makes amends in the final scene, which resembles the predicament of a boxer in the ring having to deal with one adversary and meanwhile parry the attacks of some others. The right marriages are underway, with the rascal’s due repentance. But until this happy end, a truly irresolvable chaos, recalling Jonson, has prevailed. 2. The Fair Maid of the West13 (in two parts, the first ca. 1600, the second ca. 1630, both published 1631) is the best and most praised of Heywood’s patriotic comedies. It is a play of sea and port, developing with proverbially swift movements, and pivoting on merely sketched characters, as if it were the translation of a whirling seafaring ballad or of a glorious heroic feat. Especially part one resounds with the anti-Spanish animus that blossomed and survived for a long time after the defeat of the Armada. It might therefore be the theatrical pendant to Donne’s two poems ‘The Calm’ and ‘The Storm’, being ideally inspired by the Cadiz expedition against the Spaniards in 1597. Bess the tavern-keeper is in her very name an Elizabethan replica,14 or one of the ‘roaring girl’ of a previous anonymous play;15 and the present braggart flees like Falstaff, while behind the person exposing him we clearly see Henry V. The transposition to Morocco was an exotic variant already fashionable at the time of Massinger and Fletcher. After 11 12 13 14 15

§ 138.2. An ironical epithet, as we shall see. The ‘fair maid’ was at the time a stereotype figuring in the titles of various plays. Chronicles, focusing however on events of everyday life (BAUGH, vol. II, 545), was dedicated by Heywood to Edward IV (in two parts, 1599) and to Queen Elizabeth (also in two parts, 1605). § 128.6 n. 13.

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several adventures in Italy (in Florence the umpteenth duke falls in love with Bess), the English company returns home having kept their country’s honour high. 3. The Rape of Lucrece (1608) is indeed an enigmatic tragedy, perhaps at least partially parodic, since the much used metaphor of punished tyranny is continually weakened by the goliardic chorus of the conspirators that, while the action flags, intone pleasant and even bold ditties – one even in contemporary Dutch – like as many Elizabethan gentlemen. As a consequence empathy, the pillar of Heywood’s dramatic aesthetics, collapses. The source is Livy, and Lucrece’s self-immolation seems to melt into a fast-running historical narrative, reaching as far as Mucius Scaevola, Horatius Cocles’ heroism and the advent of the republic. § 149. Shirley* I: Elegant ‘causeries’ The historical judgement on James Shirley (1596–1666) seems to me, as I anticipated,1 to need revision, or at least a closer inspection, first of all in view of the fact that a modern publisher has determined to invest massively in a new edition of his works (as shown below in the bibliography), nearly 200 years after the first and only complete one. Shirley has often been described as an unoriginal epigone, and an imitator without a specific character of his own. In fact, if he has a peculiar quality it is that in his *

Dramatic Works and Poems, ed. W. Gifford with addenda by A. Dyce, 6 vols, London 1833, New York 1966; James Shirley (six plays), ed. E. Gosse, London 1888; Poems, ed. R. L. Armstrong, New York 1941. A complete edition in 10 vols is being prepared for Oxford U. P. R. S. Forsythe, The Relations of  Shirley’s Plays to the Elizabethan Drama, New York 1914; A. H. Nason, James Shirley, Dramatist, New York 1915, 1967; A. C. Swinburne, ‘James Shirley’, in Contemporaries of Shakespeare, London 1919, 277–308 (a rancorous slating with rare reservations); S. J. Radtke, James Shirley: His Catholic Philosophy of Life, Washington 1929; A. M. Crinò, James Shirley drammaturgo di corte, Verona 1968; R. K. Zimmer, James Shirley: A Reference Guide, Boston, MA 1980; B. Lucow, James Shirley, Boston, MA 1981; S. A. Burner, James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-century England, Lanham, MD and London 1988; I. Clark, Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome, Lexington, KT 1992.

1

§ 141. 1.

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plays no weariness is perceptible, revealing as they do, on the contrary, a constant creative, or at least re-creative, urge. He does not close an age, but opens a new one. The comparison with Heywood is misleading,2 and their proverbial joint mention unacceptable, for if Heywood may please for his primitive, gushing pathos, Shirley shows far finer taste and better mastery of plots, some of which are extremely complex contrivances, not simplified by casting off the subplot but further complicated by the addition of a third, originating in the best of cases a fusion and a polyphonic structure that is Shirley’s trademark. He has so far come close to being relegated to the category of optional, minor authors, those only worthy to be almost anonymously comprised in a list; or, even more often, to that of the proverbial, ‘umpteenth’ Restoration dramatists. He is classified as the author of the usual romantic comedies set in Italian Renaissance duchies, deformed, as the English saw them, according to a recipe already tested and tried for half a century; or of the umpteenth revenge tragedies, the umpteenth city comedies. As with Fletcher, with Heywood, and with Shakespeare himself, the English, inclined to an atomistic approach, have long been in the habit of plucking from Shirley’s plays occasional songs, like fresh flowers growing in a large withered garden, moving and wonderful especially when light-hearted or loftily sententious. It has often been said that, even if his plays had been lost, his songs would assure him immortality.3 It is a very subtle alibi, for it clearly implies annoyance that about forty of his plays should have survived – too many for a critic and a historian, let alone the average cultured reader, to read and sift through one by one. But English scholars themselves note that all too often Shirley has been judged without his plays having been really read; that, necessarily, out of prejudice or haste, ideological sympathies or a priori antipathy, Shirley is either extolled or undervalued and abused. Boring, monotonous, neutral, faded: these are gradations of the same shortcomings Eliot used to charge Heywood with. Shirley’s handicap has always 2 3

See for instance the debatable chapter on Shirley in CHI, vol. VI, 196–209. Two were included in the Golden Treasury. A curious example of this fame comes from Orwell, for whom the Elizabethan dramatic heritage was a hermetically sealed safe, and who nevertheless quoted by heart the last couplet of the best known of those songs (OCE, vol. IV, 181).

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been the comparison – regularly unfavourable – with his predecessors. The historical judgement is ultimately that he is engaging and professional, has comic and architectural gifts, and is a master of unblemished verse; balanced and wary, he is never unduly obscene, and never wallows in scenes of violence and bloodshed. 2. The closing of the theatres in 1642 was paradoxically propitious at least in one respect, for, if living authors were forbidden to have their plays performed and so produced, they were at least allowed to print them, so that the usual negative balance, between staged and surviving plays for Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, is almost evened out in the case of Shirley, whose canon of thirty-one plays plus six masques4 may be held to represent 90 per cent of the actual one. This is not the only reason why it is easy to classify Shirley’s oeuvre, and to find and apply to him clear distributive criteria that do not fit Heywood. His themes, genres and times are far less diverse, though his dramas can still be divided into three sections. He avoids chronicle plays but writes comedies, tragicomedies and tragedies; his city comedies ignore the craftsmen and labourers that Dekker and Heywood favour; his usual dramatis personae are aristocrats and the upper middle class, and the ordinary people most often portrayed are loafers busy only with gossip, flirts, betrayals, boasts, games – in short, idlers. No wonder that, after not even twenty years of suspension of theatrical activity, dramatists like Shirley had already started the cycle of the Restoration comedy of manners, full of frivolous and animated dialogues. Shirley’s libertine is a Jacobean stock figure; at the same time his woman is a masochist to the point of risking

4

The Triumph of Peace, offered to the Royal Couple by the four lawyers’ colleges of London in 1634, was considered the most sumptuous masque ever presented at court (maybe also the costliest: £21,000). It used Inigo Jones’s scenery and S. Ives and W. Lawes’s music, played by continental musicians. A member of those colleges was William Prynne, the author of Histriomastix, a 1632 Puritan diatribe against the theatre. Since Prynne’s indirect target was the queen, some form of official dissociation was expected from the colleges themselves, and the task was entrusted to Shirley. Any masque begins with a long description of the various allegorical and human figures involved in the parade, and of the changing scenes alternating once the parade has ended. The Triumph of Peace is inherently anything but memorable, and it ends with several songs extolling the royal persons.

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spinsterhood, and a sadist to her suitor, submitted to absurd ordeals before he can obtain her hand. The aesthetic codes of the Caroline court insisted on the necessity of seeing some clear and distinct ethical norms realized and verified; but meanwhile, for all of four acts, the playwright plays with fire. Besides, can one really believe in Shirley’s last-minute repentance? With him one always senses that the inevitable didactic ending is merely opportunistic, that all he cares for is the entertainment enjoyed and furnished in deploying the jests and delightful fooleries that form the texture of most of his plays. His dialogues, systematically enlivened by demands for explanations and specifications, and punctuated by recurrent periphrases, implications and allusions, suggest that his comedy is in a precise sense ‘linguistic’ and focuses on communication. As a result the characters often misunderstand each other, and while comedy by definition thrives on quid pro quo, these are deleterious and distressing in a tragedy. 3. Shirley was forty-six when he had to stop his activities as a dramatist; he was at the time the youngest of the highest ranked authors for the stage. Having attended the London Merchant Taylors’ School, like dozens of men of letters, and especially Spenser and Kyd, and later the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, in 1618 he graduated and after taking Anglican orders he became a parish incumbent, then schoolmaster and dean at St Albans. In 1625, after converting to Catholicism, perhaps only to please Queen Henrietta Maria,5 he moved with his family to London where he started his theatrical career.6 On the basis of the year when he began to write for the stage, though not of that of his birth, Shirley is one of the few dramatists who are neither Elizabethan nor Jacobean, but merely Caroline, both before and after 1649: that is, a subject of the Commonwealth and of the restored monarchy. From 1636 to 1640 he worked in Dublin in the first resident theatre outside London, but of course this was no sign of an Irish cultural revival, since it had to cater for the entertainment of the 5

6

Shirley’s Catholicism, on which we have no certain information, has often been questioned, and is still a proverbially worrying issue for the English. See the latest discussion, with fresh documentary evidence, but with tortuous conclusions, in TLS, 2 April 2010, 14–15. A neo-Ovidian Narcissus is among his very first works, echoing Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.

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iron governor Strafford’s entourage. Having sided with the Cavaliers in the Civil War, Shirley fought with the Earl of Newcastle, fled to France after the battle of Marston Moor, and having come back home clandestinely he resumed his teaching in a private school, without suffering any reprisal. He wrote grammar handbooks and also poetry but no plays, though he edited an edition of his own and Fletcher’s. He died, with his wife, struck by terror during the Great Fire of London in 1666. 4. There is no need to review all of Shirley’s production – little less large than Middleton’s – and doing so would be a waste of time, both because its ingredients are repeated with limited variations, and because such a discussion would result in a mere list of plot summaries such as can already be found, with many details not at all easy to remember, in the massive critical studies dedicated to him. The overlapping of plots, very much like one another, becomes more evident with the recurrence of the same names (Contarini, Depazzi, Foscari, etc.). The comic repository is the largest of the three partitions mentioned above. Shirley’s comedy arose and flourished in the shadow of Jonson’s, as shown by the graceful symmetrical taste, by the smooth and clean diction, by the care over the smallest details, and, last but not least, by the choice of expressive, well-chosen nicknames, not so blatant perhaps, but subtly allusive. The fixed roles involved are often members of families – the father, derived from the iratus senex, usually on a collision course with marriageable daughters rebelling against paternal will and determined to choose on their own who to marry; on the other side there are suitors, often rivals to each other. Or we find widowers and cunning merry widows (there is a little gallery of these) keeping their suitors at bay. Among these some are clever and intelligent, others big fools, often unjustly rich. One step above is the so-called fashionable society, surrounded by cunning servants, malicious soubrettes with almost central roles, maids and pages. Not surprisingly, the title of The Wedding (1626–1629), one of Shirley’s first comedies, could imply and (also in the plural) apply to many others. The plot starts from an imposed marriage which is rejected with abrupt or astute ruses, like the betrothed’s fleeing from home to take refuge in a wood.7 Or a marriage agreed upon may be called off after the 7

So does Selina in Love Tricks (1625–1631). Shirley’s canon comprises an Arcadia (1632–1640), loosely based on Sidney’s romance.

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discovery, often false, that the promised bride is no virgin. Sometimes Shirley does not abstain from the worn-out, piquant ‘bed-trick’ device of which the audiences of the time never tired: husband and wife believe they have lain with each other’s lovers or mistresses, perhaps in the dark, and then find out theirs have been regular and legitimate sexual encounters. Shirley does not too often or gratuitously stage real adulteries, or feigned and believed ones, but there are exceptions. Seldom has the action a single focus; on the contrary Shirley’s plots, like Jonson’s, are much too thickened by intrigues based on the chain ‘a character loves a woman who loves another man who loves another woman’, a puzzle resolved only two steps from the end. Or else he works by fitting into the main plot a subplot that may have its own autonomous development. A good indicator of a play’s adequacy is normally to measure how clear and concise its skeleton proves in a summary, how far it is organized like a medley of separate tableaux, or like an organic flow of scenes. But one can no doubt recognize in Shirley the hackneyed devices of Plautine and ipso facto Jonsonian comedy – pre-eminently disguise, mistaken and doubtful identity, usurped, concealed and finally revealed. The ending is then due to one or more recognitions, and a series of weddings of the right people once all misunderstandings have been cleared. Shirley prizes most both the small entertainment within the comedy and the coup de théâtre, often consisting in a sensational pageant (like the arrival on stage of a coffin that, once opened, produces, not dead but living, a different person from the one expected), as a visual, Baroque or manneristic demonstration which is more effective than words. 5. In his third London comedy, The Witty Fair One (1628–1633), an old knight wants a foolish gentleman to marry his daughter Violetta, who wants instead a poorer man of her choice. With the help of her zealous maid the marriage is avoided and the two lovers secretly get married while the gentleman, scorned and duped, is unknowingly married to the servant maid disguised as her mistress. In an only nominally secondary plot Violetta’s cousin captures a libertine by means of a sort of Baroque funerary pageant of the type mentioned above, which makes him totally confused. It is rumoured that he has died and his funeral is prepared; everybody pretends not to see him, so that he is amazed and feels like a ghost, until the aim of his moral reform is achieved, and a eulogium made of nature against

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forced compliance, and presence of mind against foolishness. Everything is quite expected in this Plautine and Jonsonian farce, but everything is also remade and imitated with grace and exquisite taste, with smoothly running and lively sketches that spotlight the various ‘humours’ – the foolish gallant, the honest youth, the altogether pretentious ladies’ man, the stubborn self-assured girl. The only structural shortcoming is perhaps the funeral stratagem, frankly too long. In short the comedy has the virtue of well-made dramas, the necessary if not sufficient one of a plot easily summed up and clearly and symmetrically moving from a proposed object – or two, reduplicating and echoing one another according to the rule – to its realization, after a certain number of manoeuvres and cunning devices. Shirley does not yet carry on two plots at once, but nearly so. The ambiguity of the title – in other words: who is the witty fair one? – is justified, as the skirmishes of the minor plot increasingly gain ground, and even get the upper hand over the main plot, so that at the end they are on an even keel. 6. In Hyde Park (1632–1637) Shirley takes in hand three concurrent, rather similar plots that involve a variety of happily ending courtships, although the three couples make every effort to create obstacles for themselves and risk the adverse consequences. The characters are made to walk a tightrope, as it were, in stories which are full of paradoxical plans and acrobatic whims. A man is bent on arousing a woman’s love by asking her to exclude him from her presence; another invites a libertine to court his mistress, who reforms the latter and temporarily chooses him instead of the former; in the third plot we find what will come to be known as the ‘Enoch Arden motif ’ (from a poem by Tennyson), in which a woman who has promised her husband on his going to sea that she will remarry only if in seven years he has not returned, sees him come back on the very day she has married another man. Hyde Park is a Jacobean-Caroline drama unique of its kind: the three plots are not consecutive but interweave with one another, and thus are simultaneous and stereophonic. It may bore – as Shirley is often accused of doing – owing to lengthy stretches of merely futile verbal skirmishes. But the question is this: is there in fact a plot, are there any real plots? Shirley’s comedy follows an almost invisible thread, and as we proceed we realize we are watching an updating of Jonson’s earliest plots, that for instance of the first Every Man, where the stage is a mere arena for free verbiage, fancies, slander, badinages, bad moods, whims,

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without anything actually happening on it. The fragmentation and inanity of the dialogues, jumping from one subject to another to the point of becoming incomprehensible, reach a peak in the seamless sequence of Acts III and IV, which take place against a backcloth of races of men and horses at Hyde Park. Furthermore, this London park is a labyrinth similar to the space of the action in Bartholomew Fair, and gives us the same impression of a hurly-burly where just about anything can happen, the communicative chaos reaching a climax when the stage directions are barely sufficient to tell us who is talking to whom. When in Act V, after all these fireworks, the play comes back to earth, one is almost disappointed and sorry to hear the old, worn-out eloquent precepts of conjugal and sexual morality echoed once more in long, diffuse orations. Libertines are preached to, and marriages are combined or put straight.8 The Lady of Pleasure (1635) seems therefore a step back to a more traditional plan and to a firmer and more intelligible dramatic rhythm, but for this very reason it proves less lively, original and varied, as well as improbable (though historical judgement considers this, rather than the one just now discussed, Shirley’s comic masterpiece). But this is so because, as in the Jonson of the ‘humours’, the stage is only the necessary gathering, entry and exit point for characters passing their time in pleasantries, jests, witticisms and fantasies in a world of their own, homogeneous but abstract, and utterly detached from reality. Symptomatically, this is more than ever a play to be read, like a musical oratorio, with little scenic effect. A lord tries to check the adulterous whims and urges of his worldly wife (named Aretina perhaps after the infamous Pietro Aretino), and to make her jealous by pretending interest in a young widow (after many comical vicissitudes he will succeed in taming her); in a second, separate plot a university student comes to his uncle and aunt well steeped in academic learning, but sets this aside very quickly to adapt 8

The Ball (1632) repeats this disconnected, plotless sequel of parallel scenes and actions, though still staging a group of suitors courting a single woman. The brilliant The Gamester (1633–1637) tells of a libertine husband who decides to pay a game-debt by offering the creditor, whose name is not casually Hazard, the body of his wife’s cousin. He just means to cheat him, but his own wife beats him to the punch and spends the night with the guest thinking he is her husband; the latter, so to speak, must countenance this.

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to the moral, or rather, immoral, codes of the time, and degenerates in the twinkling of an eye. So a kind of inverted etiquette of Henrietta Maria’s court, and of the frivolous, nonchalant Caroline mores, is suggested. But the situation is Wildean ante litteram, since from such a disoriented, vacuous world one Celestina rises up to moralize and catechize.9 7. In Shirley the label ‘romantic comedy’ more or less signifies a comedy set in exotic Italian or Mediterranean courts, having a complicated political and erotic intrigue, with a serious plot combined in various ways with a comic or lighter one. Shirley is here the forerunner of that novelistic diegesis that two centuries later will be called multiplot novel, in that his plots are not separate but progressively embedded into one another until they fuse at the end. This procedure is even more impressive because the novel can spread out ad libitum, while drama has a set and limited space, and by so doing at times develops linearly and at others is overloaded. Apart from the geographical settings, Shirley’s fourteen romantic comedies scarcely differ from the English ones as to roles, ingredients, themes, situations, structural mechanisms and devices. Massinger had already chosen locations in Urbino, Parma, Mantua, Venice, Naples and Sicily (and both dramatists wrote at least one romantic comedy set in Epirus). And once again libertines alternate with honest men, noblewomen with lustful virgins, modest with proud ones: the stratagems used to win, survive, or plot, are disguises, changed identities, pretended deaths and resurrections. Libertines issue from the ordeal by fire redeemed, pious courtiers resort to disguises for the sake of duchesses desired by more than one suitor; suspicions of adultery are believed in and then cleared up, cases of virtual concubinage go on until they are brusquely ended. A husband is wretched like ‘the gentleman of Venice’ of the eponymous play (1655), as being impotent he entrusts his wife to an Englishman to make her pregnant, but at the end it is revealed that the two ‘sinners’ have spent the time not having sex but in prayer. The amusement is an end in itself, with sketches stemming one from the other as if by magic; but now and again Shirley feels in duty bound to teach the

9

Never produced, The Constant Maid (1661) recalls Webster’s tragicomedy The Devil’s Law Case (§ 127): a widow aims to marry her daughter’s suitor, the latter consenting to be near his fiancée, and she almost succeeds.

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libertine a stern lesson, and dismiss him reformed. His imagination, while occasionally based on sources only partly identified, is fervid but altogether normal, compared to a slightly less refined rival such as Massinger. A very ingenious fantastic plot is however that of The Bird in the Cage (1632–1633). In it Filentius manages to inspire love in the paranoiac Duke of Mantua’s daughter, shut in a palace by her father who insists on marrying her only to a man of royal blood, by secretly entering the palace hidden in an aviary. The king decides to have him beheaded, but Filentius survives thanks to the same devices – but with a happy end – as in the tragedy The Cardinal, discussed below. § 150. Shirley II: The demise of Elizabethan tragedy Anyone who thinks Shirley a mere comedian, congenitally unable to write tragedies, can do so only by presupposing a chameleon-like metamorphosis; and he will survey his seven tragedies with suspicion and prejudice, prepared to verify and possibly question the received opinion – that here, in tragedy, lies Shirley’s greatness – and that two of them, or one at least, must be given masterpiece status. The key motor for tragedy in Shirley is revenge, craved as a form of compensation for actions that have damaged the avenger. The responsibility lies in an initial, unreasonable decision, often taken by the father or relative of a marriageable woman. In short, Shirley’s tragedies and tragicomedies follow a parallel course, up to a point where they take two diverging directions. A mere nothing, a simple whim is enough to cause a tragicomedy with a happy end to turn into a tragedy inevitably ending with a general massacre. The Traitor (1631–1635) is a case in point. It confirms that the comedian’s hand is in action, that the horror is softened and is not frightening, but feigned, blunted and varnished. Shirley the tragedian neither has, nor wishes to have, Marlowe’s gift of fatal suddenness; his characters prepare their crimes without being seized by homicidal fits, nor do they, either before or after, rave or pompously declaim. Nevertheless, after some practice, his tragedy becomes a good tragedy, though preserving some unmistakable Shirleyan traits and being at the same time a tragicomedy. An elementary alienation prevents the sixteenth-century Florentines of The Traitor from being real and realistic, and turns them into the same Caroline courtiers as in the comedies, but this time in disguise. They run contrary to the aesthetics of tragedy in that they are tireless talkers, very

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little given to action. Their talking goes on, fed by misunderstandings and subsequent explanations – or also, and mostly, of muddled up, hesitating and reticent circumlocutions. The Traitor starts with one of the worst theatrical scenes Shirley ever wrote, two characters taking up as many as three pages of dialogue before it becomes clear that one of them no longer loves his own fiancée but that of his friend. Alessandro de’ Medici is a naïve duke that Lorenzo manipulates at will, first by strongly and convincingly denying he is conspiring against him.10 Sciarrha11 wants to persuade Lorenzo to join his faction, to make him a Catilina or a lay Savonarola, the leader of popular rebellion against a duke who is also lascivious. Sciarrha’s sister Amidea is horrified at the idea of giving in to the duke’s lust as a way to lure him into a murderous trap. These are ‘comic’ phases precisely because they are recited by courtiers conscious that life is also a game, and that one can tell the truth just as easily as a lie; it is symptomatic that Amidea believes her brother is joking when he proposes she trade her body. Oriana, too, abandoned by Cosmo, neither protests nor loses her calm, well knowing that love is just a series of voluble flirtations. One perceives there is hardly any tension in the drama when Act III begins with a dilatory scene which however reveals this atmosphere of a consciously tragic game: Depazzi, a court dignitary, provokes his page into taking part in an imaginary trial where he, Depazzi, is accused of high treason, and the two play the parts of plaintiff and defendant with absolute seriousness and total identification.12 The climax of the act is the fine, dramatic (at last) scene of the duke’s attempted seduction in Amidea’s bedroom, with her two brothers ready, behind the arras like Polonius with Hamlet and the queen, to come out and help her. But this is not needed. Here, on one hand, recourse is made

10

11 12

In Act IV, Scene 1, Lorenzo distinctly echoes ‘Some politician / That is not wise but by a precedent’, that is, Machiavelli, and so he is a belated, sui generis Machiavelli and a Machiavellian not found in the catalogues on the fortune of this figure in England. A professed and self-declared Machiavellian is on the contrary Gotharus of Norway – another remarkable fantastic creation – in the tragedy The Politician (1639), whose superficial similarities to Hamlet everyone has noticed. By and large the only mistake in Shirley’s Italian onomastics. Equally effective is Depazzi (IV. 1) beseeching Lorenzo to let him free of wishing to become again honest, or almost honest.

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to the typical coup de théâtre in Shirley’s comedies – the libertine’s sudden, unhoped-for repentance – and on the other an umpteenth exploit of style and register is inserted, for the two characters sing a sort of opera duet of exquisite lyrical inspiration. With her noble rhetoric, Amidea converts the duke, and blunts his erotic urge, brandishing a dagger with which she already has made her arm bleed. Opportunistic Sciarrha, assured, as he believes, that the duke has also been converted to political reforms and will be a tyrant no longer, denounces Lorenzo as conniving with him; but Lorenzo feigns ignorance, does not fall into the traps and plays dumb. So, everything must begin again. Lorenzo devises another plan and the duke once more covets Amidea. Sciarrha kills Pisano for deserting his betrothed; Lorenzo suggests Sciarrha’s impunity should again cost his sister’s virginity. Sciarrha kills Amidea owing to yet another tragic ‘Caroline’ trick, after she has told him she agrees to yield to the duke. In Shirley tragedy itself, and physical survival too, depend on wit and how far a double entendre is understood: in other words, the cause of violent death may be a misunderstanding, even a pun. The last two acts fail because they necessarily end in slaughter, partly demanded by history, which however Shirley the tragedian does not fail to alter. 2. The unoriginality of The Cardinal (1641–1652) would seem even blatantly obvious, both from the title evoking for us, and more so for the audience of the time, previous notorious appearances of a negative Elizabethan archetype, a nameless (for obvious reasons),13 dark, grim figure representing the exact opposite of the values he should embody as an eminent minister of the Catholic Church, such as piety, integrity, spirituality, gentleness, and care for souls. On the contrary he is, predictably, a loathsome, repressed sinner, yearning for temporal power as well as, 13

From the dawn of history there are lots of English cardinals of proverbial worldliness and corruption, so I would be inclined to minimize the hypothesis that Shirley’s cardinal alludes to Laud (an archbishop and not a cardinal) or to Wolsey, given the recurrence of a purely literary and cultural figure. It is true that Anthony à Wood, Shirley’s first biographer, says that Laud, a professor at Oxford, advised Shirley not to take orders because his left cheek had a big, unpleasant-looking mole, invisible however in his original portraits.

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sometimes, female flesh; he is also the right arm of tyrannical absolutism. Seen from the outside, Shirley’s tragedy invites one to expect a sum differing, or perhaps not, from the addenda found in Middleton, Webster and Ford. And so it is. It is confirmed right from the start that The Cardinal is a tragedy running unusually smoothly for Shirley’s rhythms, without lengthy dialogues, or pointlessly dilatory, self-pleasing idle chatter: in fact, it is probably the shortest of his canon. Yet even in this relatively short play Shirley succeeds in cramming a complex, articulate, extremely consequential action, a real chain of sensational twists and turns. The dramatic language is lucid and smooth, functional, without much merely residual ornamentation. Gradually, we come to realize that once more Shirley aims at cool-blooded parody of the Elizabethan model of the revenge tragedy, and wishes the audience to become aware of this. The acknowledged merit of this work lies, in short, in the achievement of the marble-like paleness of a copy of Webster’s tragedies, thanks to a spectacular, virtuoso, daring plot where everything has a place and function and no secondary figure is superfluous. The starting event is of a kind that might be called routine, or run-of-the-mill: the marriage imposed by the King of Navarre and by the Cardinal on Duchess Rosaura, who rebels against them since she loves and is loved by Count Alvarez. The duchess cleverly feigns sorrow as Columbo leaves for the war, but her duplicity is needed for the aim she has in mind. On the battlefield Columbo receives a letter telling him the duchess refuses to marry him, and is upset and angry; but immediately afterwards he believes the letter to be an indirect invitation of the duchess’s to join her as soon as possible for the wedding. It is characteristic of Shirley that all the following sequence of misdeeds starts from an equivocation, and that the drama draws to an end on the basis of deceits not deciphered or wrongly interpreted. Columbo in turn writes another no less oblique letter, renouncing marriage to the duchess, a letter itself subjected to different interpretations, and an ambiguous sign, as the Cardinal conjectures. Columbo, who has misunderstood the first letter’s literalness, has then sent a false one, and goes to court in order to kill Alvarez on his wedding day. The murder occurs offstage as in a mime: Columbo enters with the body of the murdered man in his arms during the recital of an augural performance. What follows is a searing, or perhaps compassionate dethronement of heroic

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tragedy itself. Shirley’s impartiality here is flawed, for he actually sides with the duchess against the corrupt Cardinal who, faced with the event, pretends to be neutral, but is in fact disquietingly conniving. Columbo reveals he has erroneously deciphered the letter thinking it a ‘stratagem’ to end the war quickly, or a ‘proof ’ of love. Above all, equivocation has now taken on a legal meaning: the real culprit is the duchess, says the king, at his wit’s end how to cope. The question is whether Columbo is as guilty as she. The king condemns him, but at the beginning of Act V Columbo feels free to do what he likes, having raped the duchess and proclaimed he will kill any man she marries. He has regained complete freedom of movement, and not satisfied with killing his rival now persecutes the duchess. Of course one smiles at this pompous, naïve warrior so blind with rage. Actually there are two intersecting revenges, the second being Rosaura’s against Columbo, which becomes a coalition because a colonel, whom Columbo has deprived of his command, is resentful, offers himself as her champion and kills Columbo in a duel. The epilogue presents an acrobatic series of astonishing, fantastic coups de théâtre, in the context of an unreal and surreal kaleidoscope diluted and attenuated by comic effects, like the awkward flirtation of the duchess’s maid with the lustful ducal secretary. The colonel, predictably issuing from behind an arras, stabs the Cardinal who intended to rape the duchess, who has been entrusted to him and who now feigns madness (he boldly caresses her in public). Before he dies the Cardinal has just enough breath to repent, and reveals he has just poisoned the duchess; to show his repentance he offers her a vial containing a powerful antidote, and samples it himself. Showing presence of mind the duchess, who ‘find[s] her brain returned’, wonders how can she ‘owe [her] life to him, whose death / Was [her] ambition’. The last coup is that the vial does in fact contain poison, so the Cardinal dies an even blacker soul. With tragic irony the surgeon assures him his wound could have been healed. So he has killed himself by poison, and has poisoned. That this is all a game, a fantasy or an entertainment, is proclaimed by the dramatist himself; in order to avoid further misunderstandings, he in fact has an Epilogue, one Master Pollard, enter the scene of the slaughter, and ask the public not to grudge the ritual applause.

Part V 

The Beginnings of Narrative Prose

§ 151. The first eclectic writers This fifth part will deal with writers that might have gone into the two preceding ones, for it should not be forgotten they are contemporaries of, or in some instances even earlier than those I have so far discussed. This short section on the dawning of narrative prose can and must be detached because in the last fifteen years of Elizabeth’s reign there is, side by side with drama, a burgeoning of prose production that is not a short-lived phenomenon, but the fruit of an organized, coordinated and harmonic group of practically coeval practitioners. In some cases the date of the passing of some of these writers coincides with that of the queen, with the transition to the next century, and the accession of the new king and the new dynasty; or others by that date stop writing and inaugurate a different career. From the viewpoint of the evolution of genres there is not a start, but only an anticipation of a consistent and self-conscious school of English fiction; nor is there an immediate continuation of prose fiction during the reign of James, who as we saw favoured and promoted other genres, like the masque; and 1642 cuts across all promising developments. More precisely, Lyly, Greene, Lodge, Nashe and Deloney play so to speak a target-shooting game, since each of them tries and even discovers at least some basic element of the novel-form, such as will begin at the end of the seventeenth and in the course of the eighteenth century; but none of them as yet writes a true novel. Nashe is the only one that comes close to a modern, and even postmodern idea of fiction; the others merely essay this or that technique of psychological analysis, and devise enthralling plots, or plots aiming at realistic pictures of life. There is no official inauguration of the form. A second consideration essentially concerns literary sociology. Statistically these first examples of narrative prose, in their unprecedented continuity and dimensions, came, apart from rare exceptions, from the ‘university wits’, brilliant Oxford and Cambridge unemployed graduates migrating to London in their early twenties to seek a living in the literary market.1 Anyone who settled in London knew he could live, or rather survive, only by writing for the theatre. Scholars have ascertained that dramatic authors 1

Prevalently the sons of artisans, they modified the figure of the writer, until then a nobleman writing for pleasure or pastime.

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earned little money and were exploited, and no one could become rich by playwriting; a living could be made only by working desperately hard. The market was glutted despite the voracious demand by court and private houses, and this imbalance between supply and demand could be exploited only by means of ceaseless production of new texts, inevitably in a regime of collaboration. Those who could not cope with this frantic rhythm had to try other kinds of entertaining or recreational work: hence the rising publication of lyrics, poems and prose texts. This activity might even be as fruitful as the theatre if one touched the right chord. But even by so doing one normally never got rich, and all prose-writers, with no exceptions, lived a chronically poor and uncertain life, though, or in fact because, they were prodigals who never set a penny aside. Consequently, at the end of the sixteenth century more and more writers adopted a mixed regimen, that is to say, moved from writing plays to prose fiction, poetry, pamphlets and diatribes. Nearly all the writers discussed below were also dramatists and poets, but I have chosen to study them primarily as a group of prose writers, and to consider them as authors of prose but also of (sometimes excellent) plays and poems, both standalone or inserted in tales and plays in the form of songs. The label ‘the beginnings of narrative prose’ is, finally, inexact and incomplete, for narrative prose is first flanked and then outrun by controversial prose, or prose concerning current affairs and theological and doctrinal issues, as can be expected in the epoch of the rise of Puritanism and of its propagation, with the diatribes that ensued. § 152. Lyly* I: The Euphues romances Having reached this point in a comprehensive discussion of sixteenth-century literature we can conclude that by the end of that century 1

*

Complete Works, ed. R. W. Bond, 3 vols, London 1902, 1967, 1992. Euphues, ed. M. W. Croll and H. Clemons, London 1916 (with rich annotation); Plays, ed. C. A. Daniel, Lewisburg, PA 1988; a new edition is being prepared by D. Bevington, G. K. Hunter et al., for Manchester U. P. J. Dover Wilson, John Lyly, Cambridge 1905, 1969; A. Feuillerat, John Lyly, Cambridge 1910; V. M. Jeffery, John Lyly and the Italian Renaissance, Paris 1928; G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: the Humanist as Courtier, London 1902, and ‘John Lyly’, in Lyly and Peele, London 1968; P. Saccio, The Court Comedies of John Lyly, Princeton, NJ 1969; J. W. Houppert, John Lyly, Boston, MA 1975; M. Pincombe, The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza, Manchester 1996.

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and the beginning of the seventeenth there were four or five schools and stylistic forms exerting an immediate, militant influence – and even constituting an organic and self-conscious movement – and radiating at a greater distance and thus with a less defined impact, and little or no reference to the original source. Three are schools of poetry, two of prose; four are more or less contemporary; only two are incompatible with each other, so that all but one are gradations of the same phenomenon.1 They are Spenser’s archaism, Donne’s Metaphysical style and Jonson’s stark classicism – if we enlarge the field of observation by a few decades; in prose, there was Sidney’s flowery, ornate diction and the Euphuism of John Lyly (1554–1605). The historical graph of Euphuism registers a peak between 1580 and 1600, when it had a notable influence on Shakespeare’s early romantic comedies; later it was to be imitated mainly for parodic purposes;2 but together with the Metaphysical style it became, more than the other three, enormously fashionable, a timeless,3 however vague, stylistic vein. To define Euphuism it is sufficient to open Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit at random: there we find the essence of a discursive mode uninterruptedly based, whether in parallel or contrast, on the same syntactic pattern of a prevalently but not exclusively binary type (except when a climax is resorted to). The single members of the phrase, it will be seen, are reinforced by alliteration, a procedure accompanied by mythological exempla or by others taken from everyday reality, psychology, physics and metaphysics,4 or even by the proverbs of a hand-to-mouth philosophy, listed by way of support, with or without a form of simile, such is their obvious truth.5 Euphuism, of course,

1 2 3 4 5

The new sciences furnish matter for metaphors and similes both to Lyly and Donne (PSL, 72). By contrast Jonson, as a poet, bans imagery as far as possible. See for instance the parody of ‘camomile’ in Henry IV, 1.4. Such, that is timeless, it could be for Walter Pater in Marius the Epicurean (Volume 6, § 177). In a word, from the ‘unnatural natural history’, as the saying goes, harking back to Pliny and the medieval bestiaries. The following is an example of Euphuism brilliantly quoted and discussed by Dover Wilson 1905, 15–16, with the alliterations marked by italics: ‘Although hitherto Euphues and I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shunne thee hereafter as a trothless foe, and although I cannot see in thee less wit than I was

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was not born overnight. It reflected the way academics spoke and debated at Oxford University, which Lyly had attended. Foreshadowings of it can be found in the prose translators of a few decades before, Lord Berners, Pettie and Watson, who in turn were influenced by the prose of Boccaccio and of Italian and above all Spanish humanists.6 In practice, Euphuism offered the English a linguistic and behavioural etiquette, suggesting empty models, argumentative skeletons, rhetorical formulas, demonstrative procedures, protocols of elocutio, as well as subjects for abstract, elevated discussion. The two Euphues books represented the umpteenth English conduct-book for the courtier and a courtly rhetoric brought up to date. Its tangible result was confirmed in the introduction to the 1632 edition of Lyly’s dramas, asserting that Lyly’s style had by then come into favour with court ladies. As said above, Euphuism had a durable effect. It is the kind of language that can seep through not only to literary art but also to literary criticism, as is witnessed by a distinguished posthumous euphuist, the critic George Saintsbury. No less natural and historically proven is the capacity of Euphuism to inspire intolerance and aversion. The two genres of Lyly’s activity must be reduced to only one, as they are communicating vessels to be examined in their single purpose, irrespective of my intention not to separate the overall production of an author working in two different genres. The elephantine Euphuism of Lyly’s two romances and of his prose becomes, condensed and stripped down in his theatre, a pliable loom and a viable kind of elocution until the Restoration and after.

6

wont, yet do I find less honesty. I perceive at the last (although being deceived it be too late) that musk though it be sweet in the smell is sour in the smack, that the leaf of the cedar tree though it be fair to be seen, yet the syrup depriveth sight – that friendship though it be plighted by shaking of the hand, yet it is shaken by the fraud of the heart. But thou hast not much to boast of, for as thou hast won a fickle lady, so hast thou lost a faithful friend’. The complex genetic debate, about whether Euphuism came from the familiarity of the English with the Spanish romances of the early and mid-sixteenth century (above all with Guevara’s Libro áureo), or was autochthonous, came recently to its conclusion by adhering to the second hypothesis. Praz, however, found its seeds (it is his idée fixe) even in Guittone d’Arezzo and at any rate in Serafino Aquilano.

§ 152. Lyly I: The Euphues romances

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2. Lyly’s euphuistic books of 1578 and 1580, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England, are also, from a political viewpoint, two manifestos for the conservation and preservation of consensus by means of a disguise that is all too transparent, not to call it a geographic allegory enhanced by the Greek-Latin etymology of the names. It is also agreed that Lyly transfigured and objectified his own autobiography.7 In the first book Euphues, the man of wit, migrates from Athens to Naples, that is, London, and becomes the friend of the Italian Philautus, the self-lover, whose coquettish Lucilla he conquers. Having made peace with Philautus he teaches him moral precepts. In the second book the two friends leave Italy for England where they establish relationships with the worldly London society. Euphues, now more mature and almost a philosopher, once more must teach and guide his impulsive friend, trapped in an overwhelming but unrequited passion. Between one book and the other the perspective is altered, or rather inverted, in that London, first criticized as Italianate and corrupt, is now eulogized and praised as a heaven at whose centre is Queen Elizabeth. Platonism, like Aristotelianism almost at that very same time pulverized by Donne, was almost extinguished, but its ideological picture of erotic passion, checked by an extreme effort to locate the affections in the heart, in feelings, in reason, rather than in animal impulses, resisted. The Euphues books are therefore a last recourse to that kind of didactic action bent on safeguarding the young from undisciplined sensuality, and entrusting them to the control of reason, helping them to become upright and efficient state officials. This was a much debated subject from Elyot’s Governor and Ascham’s Schoolmaster on. The Platonic crusade was about to be defeated, and to limit ourselves to the testimony of literary works,

7

Of Kentish origins, the grandson of a grammarian (§ 36.2), a student at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Lyly got his two degrees and settled in London where for a time he was a member of Parliament, but not, as he desired, Master of the Revels. During his life, like many contemporaries, he was disappointed by Elizabeth’s political favouritism, and wrote to her two unheeded petitions. In 1589 he coaxed the Anglican clergy with a treatise against the Puritans and favouring the bishops, in the context of the Marprelate controversy (§ 159). He died in relative poverty.

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the profligate, reckless Oxford student was soon going to be a theatrical stereotype, probably until his last appearance in Shirley’s comedies. 3. In the course of the narration Euphues’ Euphuism becomes aware of its antidote and begins to use it and put it in practice; the cloying excess of syntactic repetitions sensibly abates, and nearly vanishes in the second book, or at least becomes far less conspicuous. Lyly, therefore, also becomes antieuphuistic. From the viewpoint of narrative technique the first Euphues is a standard-sized story, the plot itself being atrophic and very poor. Euphues, a gifted young Athenian, somewhat naïve and impulsive, despite the warnings of an old wise man, presumes he can avoid the temptations and dangers of life. Deaf to the admonition that fleeing from dangers is better than repenting after falling, he succumbs to the erotic snare and in Naples falls in love with Lucilla. He steals her from Philautus, reminding him that love obeys no rules. Even too soon, Curio arrives and steals Lucilla from the two friends, who make peace. The narrative is mimetically addressed to some ‘gentlemen’, and its narrator, as in a chivalric poem, moves from one side to the other, often admitting he is digressing and admonishing himself to return to his subject. There is no chapter division, only gaps in the text. Anyone asking if the foundation of the English novel lies in Euphues must give a Solomonic response: it is negative because of the lack of any sense of spatiality; nor is there a sense of time, for Athens and Naples are only partly, or perhaps not at all, the towns they were at that time. There are no outdoor scenes, and the narrating voice does describe, but being mostly interested in hearing the characters talk. The divergence in focus is colossal: one would wish to hear concise and even compressed dialogues, and to see incidents described.8 The other drawback is that there is as yet no idea of modern and realistic narrative dialogue. Instead of quick short speeches in succession, there are long forensic disquisitions, seemingly modelled on the neat accuracy of written discourse, apart from dramatic and even interior monologues which however lack mimetic force and are heavily melodramatic. Still, a second exception may be that Euphues preludes epistolary fiction. The evidence in favour includes the fact that

8

In the second book, Lyly or his narrator says he will skip the stages of travel and all inconveniences of the crossing, as they would be boring.

§ 152. Lyly I: The Euphues romances

803

this prose form, which hardly seems like the novel about to take its first steps a century later, will actually be resumed, revised and remade in the so-called ‘conversation piece’, a genre widely practised at the beginning (Peacock) and the middle of the nineteenth century (Mallock and others). The first Euphues closes on a self-assured Euphues who having completed his philosophical studies is regenerated and enabled to offer wisdom and truth. Equal space is thus devoted to open letters, lists of maxims and precepts fit for the education of children and youths, parts which are largely translated or derivative. A short treatise on love addressed by Euphues to Philautus is a dress rehearsal and anticipation of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This substantial concluding miscellany – this farrago – shifts and modifies the definition of the book, making it a satura or a sort of primitive Sartor Resartus. We hear the repeated advice to study the ancient Hellenic philosophy and lore, but fused at least – thus acquiring a subaltern status, as Matthew Arnold was to assert – with the Bible, therefore linking Hellenism with Hebraism. 4. The beginning of the second Euphues is exasperatingly slow and prolix, and continues along the lines of a static sequence of issues of Platonic etiquette, and of rhetorically polished letters between the two protagonists. Again long discourses are entirely reproduced, with very scant description or detailing of events. Lucilla has died, the two friends are sailing to England, and during the long weeks at sea Euphues, now the tutor of a torpid Philautus, narrates ancient fables in order to teach him the virtue of temperance. The hospitable Kentish bee-keeper, emblematically named Fidus, describes to them the bees’ life suggesting at the same time a model for a good monarchy; he then narrates his own life, saying that he too had been wounded by Cupid’s arrow, and how he was cured of it. This tale goes on for as many as eighty pages, breathing at moments the suspended atmosphere shortly afterwards created in Sidney’s Arcadia, or found earlier on in Malory’s chivalric tales. Lyly’s fictional technique is confirmed in the swift fadeout between this episode and the arrival of the couple in London and Philautus’ falling in love with Camilla (who prefers to him a Surius met at a ball). Euphues leaves his friend a lengthy farewell letter crammed with mythological exempla, which confirm once more the two Euphues as Burton’s antecedents. Living far from each other the two friends exchange letters that complete the identikit of English ladies, pious and

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chaste compared to the sensually coquettish Italian women. Unsuccessful in his love, Philautus courts Violetta, another noblewoman. In the substantial material of the ‘appendix’, a ‘mirror’ stands out, where Euphues, and behind him Lyly, lavishes praises on the English civilization under Elizabeth. § 153. Lyly II: The comedies Lyly’s contemporaries held in great esteem the ten or so comedies by him, as is witnessed by the well-known Palladis Tamia of 1598, in whose hierarchic list of playwrights the ‘eloquent and witty’ Lyly stands out, while others, and Shakespeare himself, are given no adjective or qualitative evaluation. In the next two centuries, Lyly the playwright received no less flattering judgements, although often pondered and anodyne; it must be admitted, though, that he never became fashionable or popular as a playwright. To put him in the right perspective we must return to where we left drama in 1642, and look at him as a stage in its development. If his dramas were successful with an élite, it was thanks to the resources at his disposal, the companies performing them, and the audience he targeted. In the early 1580s Marlowe had yet to make his debut, but his ‘powerful style’ soon exhausted itself, while Lyly’s graceful, light and pliant comedies knew a new lease of life, as I have mentioned, in the Restoration. They still partake of the interlude, the pastoral drama and the masque; written for a cultured audience they were staged by the Children of St Paul’s, first at Blackfriars and then for the queen. Thanks to its pure storytelling vein, the splendid simplicity of its diction, the anticipation of several motifs, types, archetypes, Lyly’s theatre occupies a far higher position than his prose. It was Dover Wilson, his first modern critic, who defined Lyly not only the inventor of English prose, not only the author of the first novel ‘of manners’, but also and above all the father of English comedy. The division between prose and poetry (an eight-to-one proportion) is in fact to be replaced by a triple division, although rather uneven. A single historical comedy serves as a vestibule to a rich series of dramatized mythological fables; the last is a classical, that is, Plautine-Terentian comedy, a typical university-wit production. Lyly is therefore an able adapter of promptings from the ancient poets, thus providing a refined interplay of allusions to the courtiers and the queen herself in the form of variations and reinventions. He produces

§ 153. Lyly II: The comedies

805

a delicate suspension of disbelief while making the pagan soul emanate its childish wonders. It takes a bookish memory and sensibility to appreciate such eminently poetic canvases, but Lyly softens and disenchants mythology by inserting verbal gags and repartees of always controlled plebeian wit, as in the Chaucerian braggart Sir Thopas in Endimion. Mythology is an old subject dear to the first enthusiastic humanists, so Lyly’s may seem a mechanical transposition, an end in itself. But, well in advance of his times, he prepares an instrument to reinforce the power and the consensus of the monarchy, precociously dedicating himself to the masque, whose raison d’être – in Jonson or Heywood – is precisely encomiastic celebration. With striking regularity he remakes episodes where a king or a queen undergoes the temptation of self-love, and finally conquers it without distressing consequences, thereby showing many if not all the virtues inherent in responsibility and wisdom. His comedies are ‘mirrors’ reflecting Queen Elizabeth, and at the same time mirrors inviting Elizabeth to see herself in them, to verify that the image is her own. Endimion, like almost all of Lyly’s comedies, poses the problem of the two values to be put on the scales, one of which demands that the other, inferior in degree,9 be renounced. Unselfishness and sacrifice prevail over the satisfaction of one’s interest (this is why Philautus is so named in Euphues); and reason and responsibility win over the egotistical impulse. Endimion is exemplary just like Sapho and Phao: the lover, saved and unpunished, can only worship the unattainable goddess. In their small, quiet way Lyly’s mythological tales, precociously breathing the enchanted atmospheres of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, are repeated acts and rites of a personality cult akin to religious worship; they were also antiphons ad usum delphini, addressed to a queen feigning to be deaf to such signals. Critics have gone wild in assigning allegorical ‘keys’ and historical personifications (like the Earl of Leicester or Mary, Queen of Scots) to the several roles. Reading between the lines one finds in Midas (1591–1592) an allusion to the defeat of the Armada and to Philip II, made an ass by his own riches. Here the forgiving monarch

9

In the most pathetic scene of Lyly’s theatre, where Eumenides before Apollo’s oracle chooses to ask for his friend’s health, rather than Semele’s love.

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is the god Apollo himself, whom Midas beseeches to take from him the shame of his long asinine ears.10 2. Campaspe (1584) already has a freshly and smoothly running pace, quite different from the heaviness of Lyly’s romances, of which, however, it re-proposes the basic mentor-disciple dialectics. Ephestion is in fact the double of Euphues when he advises Alexander not to love the beautiful slave the painter Apelles11 is portraying. Here we see the early apparition of the motif of prohibition, or the danger of love on account of the duties of a state governor. This comedy also demonstrates the restraint and the habitual pace in drama of an author unable to avoid prolixity in prose. A barrage of witty salacious phrases is fired off in the episodes involving servants and especially in those of that kind of Elizabethan fool ante litteram that Diogenes is, the dissident never stooping to flattery of the mighty, but constantly reminding them of their duties. The Sapho of Sapho and Phao (1584) is the Syracusan queen adumbrating a new image of Elizabeth. Venus travelling to Syracuse endows Phao the bargeman with extraordinary beauty, but condemns him to immunity to love; at the same time Sapho is wounded by an arrow because her chastity annoys Venus. Yet the two immune ones fall victims to love for each other. Venus herself falls in love with Phao, although she saves Sapho from death; and Cupid finds in Sapho his adoptive mother. Contemporaries recognized in Phao, compelled to flee, the (proverbially ugly) Duke of Alençon, sent home after vainly courting and proposing marriage to Elizabeth. Casting aside time congruence and perhaps also allegory, in Gallathea (1588–1592) Lyly shifts the mythological episode to a Lincolnshire site, imagining that Neptune every fifth year exacts, under threat of a flood, the sacrifice of a virgin. A father disguises his two daughters as males, lest they should be chosen (a very easy deception, since female roles were acted by boys); the girls fall in love with each other, each thinking the other a male, before Venus works the prodigy of trans-sexualizing one of them. 3. A confirmation that Lyly’s drama should be studied chronologically comes from Love’s Metamorphosis, a somewhat bitter comedy printed 10 Lyly ingeniously has Apollo say that Midas in punishment will be halved, that is from a Mid-as (half an ass) he will become a whole ass. 11 Apelles appears in both romances, as Dover Wilson 1905, 99, also notices, though inexplicably he denies the presence of an allegory here.

§ 153. Lyly II: The comedies

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in 1601, perhaps never acted at court, already suggesting the world of Shakespeare’s Pericles. It hinges on the transformations imposed by Cupid on three nymphs who have rejected the love of three shepherds; they are then re-transformed to nymphs, probably still perplexed as to the quality of the love of the three men. The motif is reinforced by the alternative plot of a shepherd who in his rage truncates a tree, which is a metamorphosed nymph; his daughter, sold to a merchant, is saved by her appeal to Neptune. As can be seen it is an exceedingly intricate virtuosic plot (some scholars say it is not wholly by Lyly), for additionally the daughter returns disguised as Ulysses’ ghost to rescue her beloved from a siren. In short Lyly was by then treading new paths, and The Woman in the Moon, staged in 1593 and printed in 1597, the only one in verse, was wrongly thought to be his earliest work, while it is probably his last or last but one, and a new start. It opens with a rare, magical afflatus, like a Genesis fable where a goddess descends on earth (indeed, on Utopia itself ) and, answering the prayer of four shepherds, makes a statue come alive; thus the first woman is created from the mixed gifts and limbs of planets, that is, of personified pagan godheads. A misogynous satire takes over when the play describes Pandora’s metamorphic degeneration according to the succeeding deities that moulded her, ending with her state as a ‘moon woman’, that is, lunatic (with something like a taunt at Cynthia, the up to then stainless Elizabeth!). It is the second case in Lyly of fantastic and magic interferences with human life, and of gods mixing with men in a fairy-tale-like context. Also unprecedented is Mother Bombie (first staging uncertain, printed in 1594), which we are tempted to consider Lyly’s very last comedy. Set at Rochester, without mythological trappings, its plot is extremely unlike the diaphanous, simple and smooth ones of the previous plays. The names of the characters are mostly Latin, but more than elsewhere Lyly depends on no ascertained sources. Four fathers have two sons and two daughters; they want to marry against the wishes of their parents, who for variously opportunistic reasons plot for them marriages which go against the children’s intentions. This cold and schematic arrangement of marriages anticipates the symmetric patterns of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and the cases of the quartet of lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the development, indeed rather clumsy and confused, the tenacity of the children ends up having the better of the tricks of the four fathers, but on the eve of the two marriages an old nurse announces

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that a couple of the betrothed are actually her children, and that they are thus brother and sister; at the same time the legitimate children of their two fathers, who had resisted the love that had blossomed between them, fearing an incestuous passion (the precious link, the preannouncement of a theme much exploited at the beginning of the seventeenth century), can now get married. Mother Bombie is the white witch the inner characters turn to in order to know their future, once more a type destined to appear repeatedly (in the witches of Edmonton12 and of Heywood),13 and a real Jacobean deus ex machina. § 154. Lodge* The fame of Thomas Lodge (1558–1625), like Kyd’s, is incidental and reflected, since his most famous title is the pastoral novel Rosalynde (1590), whose principal merit is that it provided Shakespeare with the plot for As You Like It. He is therefore a writer usually mentioned and remembered in a list, and one whose name emerges in the panorama of the late sixteenth-century genres; or at most he is the object of short separate discussions in handbooks, as if not deserving a single unified treatment. He was indeed en eclectic writer who left works nearly in all genres. Pitiless critics list the number of his works written for money, and label him a hack-writer in the worst sense of the term. However, reconsidering his oeuvre, one can see it connected with a quantity of masterpieces or at least works of higher standing than his own. It is no small merit to have been leaven, not only for Shakespeare. In short, having a touch of genius, now and then he produced something like a high note. This silhouette agrees with the unquiet personality of an ante litteram bohemian, struck on several roads to Damascus, in search of 12 13

§ 128.6. § 148.1.

*

Complete Works, ed. E. Gosse, 4 vols, Glasgow 1883, New York 1967; N. B. Paradise, Thomas Lodge: The History of an Elizabethan, New Haven, CT 1931; Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, ed. C. J. Sissons, Cambridge 1933; E. A. Tenney, Thomas Lodge, Ithaca, NY 1935, 1969; P. M. Ryan, Thomas Lodge, Gentleman, Camden 1959; W. D. Rae, Thomas Lodge, Boston, MA 1967; Thomas Lodge, ed. C. C. Whitney, Farnham 2011.

§ 154. Lodge

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ever-different, magnetic heart-changes. His work repeatedly confirms a missionary vocation. The son of a ‘Dekkerian’ mayor of London (a grocer, in other words), he attended the same school as Kyd and Spenser, then Oxford, and was a student of Lincoln’s Inns, that inexhaustible melting pot of poets and dramatists at the end of the sixteenth century. But he quitted these studies for a life of dissolution, got in debt, and went to sea on an expedition to the Canary Islands, and with the seafarer Cavendish he sailed as far as Brazil and the Strait of Magellan (1591–1593). In 1596 he converted to Catholicism and in 1600 took a physician’s degree at Avignon. He died a heroic death assisting people stricken with the plague. After 1602, practising in London and in Holland, he authored no more creative works of his own, but only translations, from Seneca among others. 2. His bibliography is fragmentary and confused. He debuted in 1580 with a short treatise on dramatic art against the first Puritan attacks, and notably against Gosson, who elicited Sidney’s far better known ‘Defence’.1 This was followed by other prose writings, among them a tale against usury, a euphuistic romance and a book of satires.2 A libeller, polemist and pamphleteer, his Wits Miserie of 1596 is a sermon on the seven deadly sins which, having started with medieval allegorical personifications moves to a small gallery of living types, caught in their idiosyncrasies. His two surviving plays are unanimously condemned and bear witness to his innate ineptitude for drama, as well as to his moralizing aim. The first, written with Greene on a Biblical subject, sets London on the same plane as ancient Nineveh, where a Faustian tyrant, self-deifying and challenging divine warnings, is finally intimidated and converted by Jonah.3 The second deals with the equally symbolic rivalry between Marius and Sulla,4 with Marlowe-like admonitions, such as that conveyed by Sulla’s triumphal car trained by ‘four Moors’, echoed from Tamburlaine. Phyllis (1593) is an umpteenth sonnet sequence (forty) derived and remoulded from a group of continental Petrarchists. It is a clever, sometimes very skilful and 1 2 3 4

§ 54. A Fig for Momus (1594), which disputes to the satires of Hall, Marston and Donne the birth-right of the genre, is a much more anodyne, milder and less piquant work. A Looking Glass for London and England (1594). The Wounds of Civil War (1594).

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very flowing collection of poeticalities, covering a wide prosodic range – eclogues and other lyrics in quatrains, as well as sonnets. Nothing, or very little had been written before that was so harmonious and melodic, as Edmund Gosse remarked (and so little opulent, disagreeing with Gosse’s opinion). Scylla’s Metamorphosis (1589, on Glaucus’ mythic story) may even have suggested to Shakespeare the metrical form of the rhyming six-line stanza of Lucrece. Lodge delights in dwelling on the swoons of the sea god rejected, then healed and braced, by Scylla. Many gems of this exquisite songster were included in England’s Helicon. 3. Lodge’s narrative prose, along with some of his pamphlets, is erratically punctuated with euphuistic elements, suggesting that the immediate vogue of Euphuism lasted even less than the decade optimists ascribe to it. Rosalynde (written at sea during the Canary Islands expedition, and related with Chaucer’s apocryphal The Tale of Gamelyn),5 appears right from its sub-heading as a continuation or reverberation of Euphues. Indeed, here the two chief prose models of the end of the century dovetail, Lyly fusing with Sidney in a romance at least Arcadian and euphuistic, which implicitly proves that the two writers – Sidney and Lyly – were not one another’s opposite but could coexist. In the forest of Arden the exiled king Gerismond welcomes Rosader, the younger brother of Saladyne, who is trying to deprive and even eliminate him. Rosalynde comes there disguised as a page called Ganymede, with her cousin Alinda, the daughter of the usurping King of France. Disguised, Rosalynde advises Rosader how to conquer herself. With exquisite nobility, Rosader forgives Saladyne, even saving him from a lion’s grasp (in a scene recalling Sidney). The narrative style and some details are taken from Lyly,6 but the diction is free from euphuistic traits and in a way neutralized, while the diegetic plan inclines rather towards Sidney, with its disguises and frequent lyrical interludes. The pastoral poetic contest between Rosalynde and Rosader is a kind of play 5 6

§ 21.2. In particular Saladyne, like Euphues to Philautus, gives ‘a cooling card’ to his cadet, trying to subdue him. The romance opens with old John of Bordeaux advising his sons and warning them against the snares of love. As in Euphues, introspection is provided by the various characters’ dramatic monologues. Shakespeare might have also taken a cue for King Lear, since the father does not equably divide his wealth among the three brothers, and the eldest feels defrauded.

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within the play in verse, for they play at courting and enjoy impersonating other figures. And yet some illustrious historical readers of A Margarite of America, which Lodge said he had taken from a book in a Brazilian Jesuits’ library, liked it so much that they suspected it was not by Lodge, or was at least largely co-authored.7 The fable-like plot proceeds by mere inertia, narrated without any conviction or participation, and describing the chain of gratuitous horrors enacted by the Machiavellian Anarchus at the simple-minded court of Moscovia. § 155. Greene* I: From the Arcadian euphuist to the Defoe-like realist Elizabethan scholarship has assured us in recent years that Robert Greene (1558–1592) is a sort of ghost-writer, and that nearly all the works long ascribed to him should in fact be attributed to Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, whose dummy Greene was.1 Greene has been robbed, in particular, of two of his most famous works, The Repentance of Robert

7

Praz (PSL, 230 n. 1) seems blindly to trust C. S. Lewis (ELS, 424), whose words – Lodge’s ‘best romance’ – he repeats verbatim, without explaining the reason for this judgement.

*

The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse, ed. A. B. Grosart, 15 vols, London 1881–1886, New York 1964; Plays and Poems, ed. C. C. Collins, 2 vols, Oxford 1905; J. C. Jordan, Robert Greene, New York 1915, 1965; R. Pruvost, Robert Greene et ses romans, Paris 1938; F. Ferrara, L’opera narrativa di Robert Greene, Venezia 1957 (a rigorously sequential examination, with useful résumés, finely commented and beautifully written); C. W. Crupi, Robert Greene, Boston, MA 1986; Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer, ed. K. Melnikoff and E. Gieskes, Farnham 2008; Robert Greene, ed. K. Melnikoff, Farnham 2011.

1

See the website , which usefully transcribes in modernized spelling works always ascribed to Greene giving his name between inverted commas. My reply to this hypothesis is the same I gave to that concerning the authorship of Tourneur’s tragedies (§ 123), that is, I shall not take a stand since the present History concentrates on the works that have come down to us, whoever wrote them; I shall act, so to speak, as if by simulation. The situation, however, is so entangled that even the philological ‘detectives’ advise caution, and that attributions are and remain ‘highly suspicious’. The last critical study on Greene, written in 2011, seems to ignore this diatribe.

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Greene and A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance,2 printed posthumously, and containing the famous allusion to Shakespeare the ‘shakescene’; both are apocryphal or, at any rate, thought to contain interpolations by the printer Henry Chettle. If we keep denying his authorship at this rate we lend credence to the disquieting hypothesis that Robert Greene, an author historically discussed for four centuries, is nothing but the result of an enormous literary hoax, concocted and directed from the wings by an unknown demiurge. The scarcity of archival documents unequivocally linking one Robert Greene to that other Robert Greene (both name and surname were and are very common, like those of John Ford) is, however, inversely proportional to the influence that, even in his time, the myth of that most dissipated and maudit university wit exerted. Greene might have been aware of, and even have fostered it. In other words, his friends, or foes, or various jackals, speculated on this strange figure; and at his death concocted a romance, according to which he, a holy drinker and a sinner, repented and asked to be forgiven. The relative precocity with which vaguely allusive autobiographical narratives by a writer who died at only thirty-four appeared might confirm this hypothesis. In Never too Late (1590), in A Groatsworth of Wit and in The Repentance of Robert Greene, Greene portrays himself as an upright, honourable Englishman with a bent for drama, married to a chaste gentlewoman (which might have been true) and temporarily seduced by courtesans, but feeling at least the desire for redemption.3 Usually reliable witnesses4 narrate the writer’s piteous, or at any rate touching death. There are many unresolved mysteries in Greene’s

2 3

4

This is an appeal to Marlowe, Peele and Nashe inviting them to repent, where many incongruities can be found from the little we know of Greene’s life, apart from the differences in style and manner. The disguise is very or perhaps even too transparent. In the first tale the protagonist’s name is Francis (like the saint), though he is English (in the Frenchified temporal transposition London is still Troynovant); in the second he is called Robert. The sorceresses have the somewhat allusive names of Infida and Lamilia. The husband’s letter to his wife asking forgiveness appears with slight changes in the second and third of these texts. Chiefly Gabriel Harvey (§ 57.1), in letters immediately printed, where Greene was said to have lived as a cohabiter with the sister of a criminal hanged at Tyburn, the mother of his bastard son.

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life. Who financed his studies, allowing him to take not one but three degrees, so that he could present himself as Academiae utriusque in Artibus Magister, if he did come of a plebeian family, and his father was a saddler, or a shoemaker or an inn-keeper? Why did his father, if such he truly was, disinherit him? Did Greene really travel or merely boast he had travelled all over Europe, including Poland and Denmark? The prose pieces printed in the early 1580s, and then reprinted to satisfy the demands of the market, were nevertheless ascribed by all to a spendthrift profligate writer, who had deserted wife and children to associate with players, thieves, cheats, prostitutes and tavern-keepers, yet magically found time to isolate himself when he wrote, so as to deserve the sobriquet of ‘Women’s Homer’.5 He died penniless and, as subsequently the tale went, after an epical binge, having drunk too much Rhenish wine and salted herrings in company with Nashe at a tavern: a romanticized, euphemistic if not euphuistic explanation, since others diagnose hepatic cirrhosis caused by syphilis and alcoholism.6 2. Greene’s prose works (or those ascribed to him), amassed in nine feverish if not frantic years, could perhaps be termed an apprenticeship, had his career not been prematurely cut off. A panoramic view shows Greene to be an author relying too much, and often parasitically, on his sources, despite being an elegant, or even an anonymous and also anaemic adapter. The range of his stories is quite varied, comprising the euphuistic, the pseudo-biblical, the Castiglionesque,7 the mythological, the Ovidian, the Sidneyan-Arcadian and the Roman-historical genres.8 Perhaps death seized him just when he was ready to take flight. Those first or last independent wing-beats led to a small set of realistic sketches that turn on a custom and a figure proverbially tied to Greene’s name: the ‘conny catching’ and the ‘conny-catcher’, that is, the gull-fleecer in the ‘Monster City’ of the end of the century, which Greene must have had knowledge of first-hand, rather than through written texts. He was prevented by his

5 6 7 8

Therefore many of these writings were expressly issued as ‘by Greene’, to prevent imitations, as is done today. Ferrara 1957, 348. Morando, the Tritameron of Love (1587). Ciceronis Amor (1589), by some reputed Greene’s best euphuistic novella (see BAUGH, vol. II, 423), romanticizes Cicero’s youthful love for one Terentia.

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early death from refining the techniques and the morphology of narrative, which might have made of him yet another of the forerunners of the English novel. C. S. Lewis9 was the first to suggest that a separate reading and a chronological analysis of Greene’s prose canon does no justice to the author, embarrasses the analyst and disorients the reader. Greene’s novellas accumulate in fact without an organizing principle, jumping from one theme to another while still repeating the same variety of motifs and intricate and improbable plots. So they look like synopses of those plays which would presently be serially written, by Massinger and Shirley, and also, though radically remoulded, by Shakespeare. Lewis wisely advises placing the single items of Greene’s canon in a hierarchical order and reversing their chronology, that is beginning from the tail instead of the head. I shall myself therefore follow a selective course, inevitably starting from Mamillia (in two parts, 1580 and 1593),10 an early romance or long novella, useful to exemplify the first of three or four succeeding phases of Greene’s career as a playwright. The declared theme is female constancy resisting attacks on virginity. Mamillia’s father chooses as her husband a young man from Padua, who is then found courting another woman and flees to Sicily; after his rehabilitation he weds Mamillia. The story is told by an extra-diegetic narrator alternating his glosses with dialogues resembling long-winded neoclassical academic orations rather than modelled on informal speech; introspection is entrusted to monologues, expanding to become generous and sentimental like operatic arias; but when the characters are far from one another they exchange over-elaborate letters. In short we can see here an imitation of Euphues, even though dialogues and epistles no longer consist of purely theoretical diatribes. Greene conducts this plot in an impalpable, blatantly unreal aura. Anachronism and inexactness are patent, the Po flows in Padua, and Saragoza is the capital of Sicily – we suspect intentional nonchalance on Greene’s part. There is nothing here of the novel and its future canonical form, except perhaps a hint of Richardson, for if we get rid of the narrator’s interlinear glosses, and suppress the external narrator, we have an epistolary novel exactly 9 10

ELS, 401–4. The second one is more indebted to Italian novellas (Ferrara 1957, 51, 65).

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centred on a kind of re-incarnation of Mamillia: in other words, Richardson’s Pamela, besieged by a libertine, by then become an institution. Virginity under threat becomes Greene’s morbid and obsessive theme, for instance in the story of Susannah and the old men,11 or in that of Philomela (1592), with further repercussions in his drama. The subsequent development of Greene’s prose may be summed up as the gradual adoption of different models that eschew, or perfect by accepting, previous ones, the first of them to be exorcized being Euphuism. Gwydonius, or the Card of Fancy (1584), the longest romance Greene ever wrote, is a kind of parody of popular chivalric tales. The chief variants in Arbasto (1584) lie in the adoption of a framework within which to develop the tale, with the related one of the first-person narrative. Something more romantic and fantastic emanates here from the titular hero, the old Danish king met by the narrator, who, disguised as a repentant hermit, tells him his story of loves and hatreds, sadly conflicting and therefore unhappy, and their related repressions and implosions. 3. Whether or not Greene visited Italy and learnt Italian well, from 1585 on he proved to have absorbed, and to keep ready for use, the varied legacy of the Italian novella. As far as results are concerned his novellas rightly deserve the name, being shorter and swifter in the action, and with dialogues losing some degree, if not all, of their academic flavour. For about three years Greene depends on a triad of sources: Bandello, Giraldi Cynthio and Boccaccio. He even earns the reputation of being Boccaccio’s real English heir after Chaucer’s controversial relationship with him, so many are the hints and promptings that Greene put to use. It is no less true that in this second phase of his trajectory Greene acts too carelessly and mechanically. As an able manager he follows ways already trodden with minimal, at times camouflaged variants. Planetomachia (1585) unites in an astrological framework three tales of horror (parricide in the first, childmurder in the second, a heart cruelly torn from a non-loving lover in the third). These ‘tragedies’ are imagined to be told by the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology as personifications of the planets. Farewell to Folly (1584)

11

A Mirror for Modesty (1584).

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apes Boccaccio’s framework, for some young men and women of Florence flee from the civil wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines to narrate three novellas or moralizing exempla. Penelope’s Web (1587) is the title of another group of three novellas told by Penelope to her maids, about unnatural or wrong marriages leading to misfortune. Homeric themes are echoed in Euphues His Censure to Philautus (1587), tales written by warriors for teaching purposes, in this case too paraphrased or even copied from Bandello, and others on themes of revenge, betrayal and unchecked female lust. The kinship with coeval and even later playwriting does not surprise us. 4. Pandosto (1588) was received with great acclaim at its appearance, and remained in print for a long time (it was also translated and imitated). The reader will no doubt remember the fact, significant in itself, that Shakespeare drew The Winter’s Tale from it. Among Greene’s tales it is the neatest, most balanced and factual, the one that keeps melodramatic sentiment and digressions well under control; irrational and impulsive passion makes Pandosto the most profound character in all of Greene’s fiction.12 Menaphon (1589, reprinted in 1599 as Greene’s Arcadia), in turn confirms that Greene was influenced by the atmosphere of Sidney’s pastoral romance, unprinted as yet but probably circulating in manuscript; indeed the action is punctuated by the most exquisite lyrics, later much anthologized. The plot is his most artificial and abstruse, with Menaphon the shepherd who, struck by Cupid’s arrow, falls in love with a shipwrecked woman accompanied by a child; afterwards, however, she is courted, at a country festival, by a man she does not recognize, who turns out to be the husband she left years before. A series of coincidences worthy of Wilkie Collins occurs when the heroine,13 a decade later, is wooed by three suitors, her father, her husband and her son. Before 1590 Greene had never written

12 13

See the incisive inverted parallelism: Pandosto accuses his wife of imaginary lust, later to fall victim of real lust, but for his own daughter. ‘now at least forty years old, but well preserved’ (Ferrara 1957, 251). The comedy of errors is happily resolved with a device increasing the improbability and artificiality of the whole story.

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of anything happening in England, or that was not derived from sources but directly based on reality. His tales of the London underworld began in 1591 with A Notable Discovery of Coosnage, describing cardsharpers, tricks of courtesans and merchants’ frauds, the first of two more parts related to cony-catching (a slang term I have already mentioned)14 in a diorama of figures, places and theatres of action. Greene displays an ambiguous didacticism, since he seems to say that it is mainly the gulls’ own fault if they are duped; above all, these tales might both discourage and encourage crime; nor do they conceal the narrator’s delight in describing what he must or should disapprove. There is for example a ‘disputation’ on the very act of cheating, where two delinquents complain they have been damaged by Greene’s pamphlets. A Defence of Cony-Catching, where Greene presents himself as one Cuthbert espousing the contrary cause, is either a patent show of inconsistency or else a subtle form of advertising ante litteram, and precisely because of this it was considered spurious.15 With Mourning Garment (1590), an unsuccessful paraphrase of the prodigal son parable, Greene created a certain cacophony or stereophony, as the cony-catching sketches in the space of two years (1590–1592) overlaid those, partly treated above, of repentance. The not too original link between the two series is the resurrected medieval motif or leitmotif of the sleeper having a vision on a bright April or May morning (‘a vision’, and ‘written at the instant of death’ is the title of a 1590 pamphlet where Chaucer and Gower show the dreamer what poetry really is).16 A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) boasts all the clumsiest allegorical trappings of the medieval dream, based 14 Greene’s historical predecessor here is the country esquire Thomas Harman, the author of sketches of London life in the mid-1560s; an increase in crimes had also occurred in Greene’s times owing to the presence of soldiers dismissed from Drake’s sea enterprises. 15 The Black Book’s Messenger (1592) is the confession of Ned Browne, a criminal going to be hanged, ‘that in attitude and style reminds us of Browning’s dramatic monologues’ (Ferrara 1957, 345). 16 There are premonitions in Orpharion (1588), in whose frame the author seems to wander as far as Mount Erice, where a shepherd with his flute plays him to sleep, and shows him in a dream the gods debating (on whether woman is man’s ruin or solace); in the debate various tales attributed to Orpheus and Arion are embedded. Ferrara

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on an odd dispute between ‘velvet breeches’ and ‘cloth breeches’; it creates, furthermore, yet another Chaucerian panorama of contemporary trades, reflected in as many lively cameos. § 156. Greene II: The dramatist While still writing prose, in 1587 Greene had unsuccessfully debuted as a dramatist with Alphonsus, an imitation of Marlowe, and blatantly adapted Ariosto in Orlando Furioso; but two years after he wrote his best play and indeed his masterpiece with Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. We should not forget that on account of its date this play is still an Elizabethan incunabulum, therefore with no division into acts and scenes but constructed in a series of unnumbered tableaux; nevertheless it shows, as it proceeds, that it is no insignificant, unpretentious, slight and careless work but a sophisticated tissue of parodies. The verse is neither doggerel nor entirely dramatic, and has an uncertain, pedestrian prosody, no enjambments, and a marked iambic rhythm; on the other hand it is uncommonly fluent, even so light and immaterial that it makes one think of a libretto just like those Gilbert was to write for Sullivan at the end of the nineteenth century. No later than the fourth tableau we find a parody of Marlowe’s sculptured, stentorian, bombastic verse; from then on the characters regularly fly off at the same tangent embellishing their speeches with mythological embroideries, and now and again echoing Marlowe’s congenital syntactic structure, ‘if what is impossible became possible, then only could I do what you ask of me’ (i.e. never). With miraculous freshness Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay begins on the right foot, Greene showing he can indeed start an action with no delays. The melancholy Prince Edward, bewitched during a hunting party17 by the chaste beauty of the young peasant Margaret, wonders how he can declare himself and obtains the help of Bacon, the magician friar from Oxford. The latter is a comic anticipation of Jonson’s alchemist, although closer to Marlowe’s Faust, even if it is not sure which

17

1957, 215, connects this tale to Alcida, of the same year, as examples of a ‘misogynist campaign’. See Ferrara 1957, 174–5, on the analogies with the situation found in the second novella of Penelope’s Web, Cratyna’s story.

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play came earlier;18 black magic, which Nashe too will ridicule, is mostly satirized in the friar’s many technical epithets aiming at parodic and macaronic effects. At Oxford Bacon shows Prince Edward, through his crystal sphere, that the presumed mouthpiece of his love, Lacy, is personally wooing Margaret, and that she is pleased. This too is a device exploiting the Elizabethan stage’s possibility to shift the scene back and forth from one action to another, until Friar Bungay, who is about to celebrate the wedding between Lacy and Margaret, is left as if paralysed, motionless and rigid by Bacon, the illusionist puppeteer and director. Bacon shows off his magic power setting up a sumptuous banquet at Oxford for the emperor, after winning a competition in magic and making a German rival disappear. But the play has nearly exhausted its élan, and little flavour is added by the thoughtless courtship two foolish nobles pay to Margaret, once Edward has been obliged to leave his plan and marry Eleanor of Castile; or by Lacy’s unexpected desertion of Margaret, merely aimed at testing her constancy. Hence Margaret, just after singing her peaceful renunciation of sensual pleasures and desiring the fire of mystic life, like Verdi’s Leonora in Trovatore is stolen from the convent by her lover. In a second phantasmagoria, in the crystal sphere Friar Bacon shows two sons their fathers vainly fighting and killing each other for Margaret’s sake, and then realizes this vision has led them to a mortal duel. Thereafter, like Prospero, he gives up magic, persuaded that it is better to rely on limited human knowledge. Nashe too attacks superstition, but in a far less light and allusive manner than Greene in this play. 2. James the Fourth19 (1589 or 1590) adopts the familiar, fictional solution of a framework imagined to enclose the actual play. An embittered

18

19

In his plot as a magician Bacon, whose servant Miles contributes his jests, is engrossed in the ‘superhuman’ task (at which one can laugh even as at Faust’s pranks in Marlowe’s play) of forging a brass head that some day will speak to him as an oracle’s voice; but Bacon falls asleep on the very night when the head utters seven words, quite enigmatic and at any rate heard by the servant alone. As is proved by the development of the plot, Greene drew upon a novella by Giraldi Cinthio, and adapted it with some fairy-tale elements, nonchalantly making fun of historical truth.

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Scots misanthrope, here mimes, like a ventriloquist, the accents and dialectal marks of his idiom, then he offers Oberon a show that should represent the unreliable, perverse world of the courts, and man’s proclivity – the stronger the more he should master it – to lust; at the end of each act the spectator is reminded of the framework by a few speeches. In this less inspired and less original work the plot is hackneyed and the funny interludes mostly stale; unsuccessful, because too patent and insistent, are the attempts to create linguistic sketches, by adding to the Scotticisms of the framework the rather flat French-English speeches of Jaques the killer. Shakespeare would have often hit this target, but one is reminded of him mainly because James IV is a Scottish king who, unlike Macbeth, plots to kill the queen (the King of England’s daughter) in order to conquer the beautiful but unbending Scottish noblewoman he has fallen in love with during his very wedding.20 The lady, Ida, resists seduction according to the usual Elizabethan-Jacobean game of chance, whereas many other great and renowned dramatic figures in Elizabethan drama yield their virginity to win power. The second part of the play turns on the fact that the queen, who fled from court disguised as a page and in the company of a dwarf, is thought dead, while she is only wounded and recovers health. By contrast, the king suffers from remorse, having also lost his beloved, who has married an honest suitor. The war between England and Scotland is prevented by the reappearance of the queen who was thought to be dead. She never doubted the king her husband, although she knew of his betrayal; that is why it is plausible to think that this drama inspired John Ford to write Perkin Warbeck.21

20 The organization of the murderous plot is entrusted to his right arm Ateukin, expressly indicated – nothing new in that – as a Machiavellian. 21 § 146.2.

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§ 157. Nashe* Browsing in, and sorting out the five volumes of the standard edition of Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), we realize that 80 per cent of his printed works have an occasional, hybrid and militant character. That being so, Nashe would stand axiomatically outside any literary history, or, at most, at its borders. He is ‘militant’ since historians agree in labelling him a ‘journalist’, and hybrid because his journalistic essays abound in prophetic homiletics, apocalyptic tirades and ad personam invectives. Nashe was, besides, the author of a sui generis allegorical-pastoral play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament1 (ca. 1592–1600), although of his most famous, or rather notorious dramatic work, written in collaboration with the young Jonson, immediately censored and never performed,2 we only know the title. As a poet he left occasional but exquisite songs dotting that surviving * Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols, Oxford 1904–1910, revised by F. P. Wilson, Oxford 1958 (monumental, unanimously praised); Selected Works, ed. S. Wells, London 1964; The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane, Harmondsworth 1972, 1984. G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction, London 1962; D. McGinn, Thomas Nashe, Boston, MA 1981; J. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship, Baltimore, MD 1982; C. Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe, London 1984; S. S. Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe, Lincoln, NE 1986; L. Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, Oxford 1989; J. Nielson, Unread Herrings: Thomas Nashe and the Prosaics of the Real, New York 1993; Thomas Nashe, ed. G. Brown, Farnham 2012. 1

2

The title plays on the meanings of the terms ‘will’ and ‘summer’. Will Summer, who had been the court fool of Henry VIII, is the pivot of the dramatic action; but Summer is also the dying summer king, calling to himself and to account (to make a ‘will’) his kingdom’s officials and ministers, as well as a number of other extras, mythological figures and personifications of the seasons; the latter animate episodes of lively dialogue, song, dance and pantomime. It was commissioned to and staged by amateur players in the palace of Archbishop Whitgift at Croydon; undivided into acts, it preannounces the seventeenth-century masque. The play, written in 1597 with the title The Isle of Dogs, was considered seditious, and Nashe fled from London to Yarmouth to avoid being arrested. Never was an exile more fortunate, for there Lenten Stuff was written. The enemy of the day before could become tomorrow’s collaborator, and Nashe, who had attacked the grandiloquence of Marlowe’s decasyllable, had perhaps written small sections of Marlowe’s Dido.

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play, as well as an explicit, daring erotic poem,3 where his alter ego visits a brothel but offers only a rather inglorious sexual performance. In the hectic years between 1590 and 1600 he proved above all a ruthless doctrinal and political fighter, and in that field he mainly exchanged barbs with the brothers Gabriel and Richard Harvey. Gabriel Harvey (who had been Spenser’s close friend)4 was a pedant and an enemy to Greene, Nashe’s trusted mentor. From 1589 to 1592, the two exchanged attacks and repartees garnished with the most colourful epithets. Nashe’s last thrust was given in 1596, and the dispute officially ended when Archbishop Whitgift ordered that any book by the two disputants, wherever found, should be sequestered, and forbade any new book of theirs to be printed. In 1588 Nashe had left Cambridge, where perhaps he intended to take holy orders – he was the son of a Suffolk clergyman – before receiving his master’s degree, also because his college, St John’s, had already become a Puritan stronghold, and he, an anti-Puritan and anti-Ramist, since 1590 had also been secretly enrolled as an anti-Martinist in the Marprelate controversy.5 According to his main critics6 the fulcrum of his short career is to be identified with this large mass of militant fragments, a puzzle put together in all its pieces with morbidly painstaking care. It is well known that the English delight in doctrinal polemics in instalments, rife with insults and shameless hyperboles; so they must have enjoyed such libels no less than the mid-Victorian readers did the Kingsley-Newman diatribe. If we judge Nashe objectively from this corpus we would inevitably consider him a minor, presumptuous, exhibitionist writer, unreadable because of his irritating use of Baroque imagery, excessive embellishments and rhetorical circumlocutions – his circuitous and delaying periphrases, and that oxymoronic form of aphasia that is verbal excess.7 More seriously, as a polemicist and preacher Nashe seems conceptually inadequate 3 4 5 6 7

It remained in manuscript up to 1899. § 57.1. An Almond for a Parrot. See especially the opinion of the editor McKerrow, quoted in McGinn 1981, 104. This was practically the negative judgement Harvey expressed on Nashe, causing their hot dissension. It seems now certain that Nashe was reflected in the character of Moth, the page in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

§ 157. Nashe

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and lets style prevail over, and even compromise, meaning. But obviously this is not all, and leaving aside these topical and ephemeral texts we are left with The Unfortunate Traveller and Lenten Stuff, two extravaganzas, two capricious acrobatic texts with which Nashe gloriously asks for and achieves citizenship in the famous, transversal, category of English ‘eccentrics’. Nashe’s eccentricity is, in fact, stylistic. In the Elizabethan panorama his school is practically one with a single adept. He boasted that his vein ‘had no other father in England but himself ’. Before him in England there had only been Dunbar and Skelton, and outside England Rabelais, Aretino, Berni and Villon; after him Sterne, Lamb, Thackeray and Joyce. The Unfortunate Traveller is emphatically not a novel, and whoever measures it by this standard will be disappointed. His shortcomings as a novelist (for instance the inability to sound the depths of characters or connect events with one another) are, however, the same that would exclude Sterne, to mention only one, from a history of the genre. 2. Having arrived in London at the age of twenty-two, Nashe immediately astonished the ‘university wits’ already resident there with his innate and exuberant chameleon-like flair, also noticed by the pirate publishers of Astrophel and Stella, for which he wrote a short preface, removed in succeeding editions. As a token of esteem Greene asked him for one for his Menaphon, which however turned out to be a little too arrogant. Nashe’s first printed work (though not the first he wrote) was the pamphlet An Anatomy of Absurdity, upholding a Sidney-like conception of poetry as knowledge through images, and teaching wisdom by means of tropes. Its target is the pedestrian poetry of fifteenth-century epics, cheaply derived from second-rate sources. Nashe is even able to interpret Ovid’s mythology as prefiguring the Scriptures (for example, Pyrrha’s flood). But for the moment his style imitates Lyly’s antitheses and parallelisms. Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil (1592) is a forerunner of The Unfortunate Traveller in that Nashe seeks and finds a persona, a mask to wear, and affects to be a penitent complaining and cursing his sin. Those who see traces of Langland in the previous ‘anatomy’ find this confirmed by the protagonist’s allusive name. Nevertheless Piers remains a useless, atrophic objectification, good only for an indictment of the degenerate times. But there is a shadow of narrative, for Piers seeks a Mephistopheles to entrust with his petition

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to the devil, and asks him to describe hell.8 Nashe wrote more fantasies like this, the longest and worst being Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593), opening with Christ’s lengthy apostrophe, continuing with a turgid description of Jerusalem’s fall prophesied by Jesus (Luke 19, 41–44, a favourite subject of contemporary sermons), and concluding with an appeal to the plague-besieged Londoners to repent. The perceptibly Baroque kitsch of this work has justly led to suspect in Nashe a tendency to sympathize with Catholics. The Terrors of the Night (1594) is, by contrast, a surprisingly and happily more concise rhapsody from its very opening, and a pensive evocation of night; but it turns into a series of paradoxical, inarticulate arguments, some purporting that necromancers and soothsayers are wizards, that dreams are caused by bad digestion, and that it is then folly to interpret them.9 3. Nashe’s career registers a very clear, substantial change of direction with The Unfortunate Traveller (1594); before that he had written like an intemperate, ornamental Baroque euphuist, a digressive preacher, a polemical satirist, an apocalyptic scourge of the vices and vogues of London life. His imagination, which he had previously employed very sparingly, now suddenly rises to its zenith. It is also true that it was, owing to the short gap between the time of its writing and that of its plot, a historical novel, one of the few or the only one to romanticize the reign of Henry VIII. After Henry’s death English exoticism had glutted itself on South American voyages, circumnavigations, pirates’ feats, sea and surprise attacks against the Spaniards; under Elizabeth there had been no more continental wars for the English, unlike in Henry’s times. Only Arthurian chivalric epics were fashionable. Nashe invented and established an autochthonous epic for the English to draw on, but it could only be mock-heroic. At the same time he used the model of the educational travel, the European grand tour also inclusive of Italy, indeed above all Italy, a tour both documentary and fantastic, re-invented or hypothetical, following faintly real or just probable 8 9

On Marlowe’s Faust being printed at that very time, see Nicholl 1984, 94–7. Perhaps he polemically alludes to the ‘night’ poems of Chapman and other adherents of the ‘School of Night’ (see Hibbard 1962, 118–22, who at any rate denies any connection).

§ 157. Nashe

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traces. The imaginary page Jack Wilton meets historical characters actually living while he is wandering, such as More, Erasmus or Pietro Aretino. The influence of the picaresque genre born in Spain is obviously reflected, if only by hearsay; but just as obviously what distinguishes The Unfortunate Traveller is the creation of a macaronic style once more in fashion after the waning of the English Middle Ages, with a gap of more than one century. It is macaronic not just because now and again we come across a Latin proverb or motto, but because of the frequent coining of new terms, the use of obsolete words, long circumlocutions making the thread of discourse dissolve into thin air – along with preciousness, digressions, feigned muddles, parodies of other languages and bathos.10 All these elements look ahead not so much to Defoe, but far more directly to Smollett and Fielding; and they create a link with Joyce, for they evoke the rhetorical, solemn and parodic insertions punctuating the fluency of the Citizen’s episode, or certain passages of ‘Eumaeus’, in Ulysses. We surely can also recognize a middle link in the early Thackeray – not for its idiom, though in Barry Lyndon Thackeray exhibits his mastery in ventriloquism, but because a later, falsely naïve Englishman once again wanders in Europe, amidst a firework of erotic and warlike adventures. In narratological terms, The Unfortunate Traveller represents a huge jump ahead, being perhaps the first case of an English prose-writer toying with the narrative first person. Nashe, or the external narrating ‘I’, both merges with the page Wilton and emerges from him, as can be seen from the fact that for nearly the first time we see a narrative text divided into chapters. With malicious prowess Nashe indulges in digressions but always keeps them under control, since the narrator, after making them, calls himself back to order and closes them quickly, or expresses a fear of boring the reader and decides to cut them off. In short, he knows how to manage the narrative pace, how to enlarge, slow down, curb and finally stop; always diffuse, if he orders himself to tell facts he quickly becomes masterful. But he does so only to begin once more to digress, plunging into a farrago of lucubrations thick with words picked from no one knows where, and with mannerisms and gargles. The

10

‘I was at Pontius Pilate’s house, and pissed against it’.

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Unfortunate Traveller, written in 1593 and published in 1594, is coeval with The Faerie Queene. So, unlike for instance Sidney’s Arcadia, it must be read, and every time republished, rigorously in its old spelling as an integral part of its stylistic effect. In this work by Nashe the flavour and the coating are even more archaic than in Spenser’s, as if Nashe had added a further dose of archaisms, using alternate spellings for the same word, and orthographic anachronisms of all kinds. In the Italian section of Wilton’s European travels Nashe had the bright idea of supposing that the page met with the Earl of Surrey, entered his service, and accompanied him to the Florentine tournament he won in honour of his Lady Geraldine. The mock-heroic feats of the knights, described in their fantastic and preposterous armours, give one the impression of the same kind of chivalric irony as pervades Spenser’s poem. The Roman scene is fraught with bandits, killers, popes with concubines, summary trials, and effected or failed poisonings. The author’s voice emerges at the end, with the stuck-up moral that it is useless to travel on the Continent, especially in Italy, where one can learn only vice and corruption. The final chapter (where a Veronese shoemaker, deaf to entreaties and appeals revenges the killing of his brother) might be seen as Nashe’s challenge to the revenge tragedy writers of his time: it is in fact a concise, tense paraphrase of Marlowe’s and Kyd’s plots. 4. Lenten Stuff (1597), a panegyric on red herrings,11 the glory of the Yarmouth seas, is a second exceptional tour de force, keeping the reader’s attention focused for as many as eighty pages on a subject so inconsistent as to approach absolute zero. Therefore Nashe has literally to catch at straws to carry on, and to digress or deviate from his main object, the virtue of this poor, scarcely valued food. The work belongs once more to the subgenre of mock-heroic panegyrics (or the family of the likes of the Homeric Batrachomiomachiae) in praise of scarcely noteworthy things or of humilia alien to panegyrics. Lamb was to emulate, but not beat Nashe on the linguistic ground, with his dissertation upon roast pig. Stylistically Lenten Stuff is another oratio feigning to be improvised and even more to be addressed: that is, it also belongs to the later genre of dramatic monologues, 11

Since critics have often imagined that Joyce had in part derived his style from Nashe, one can recall the pun on this ambiguous expression – ‘bay herrings’ – at the conclusion of Joyce’s play Exiles (see my Joyce, Roma 2013, 184).

§ 158. Deloney

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especially Browning’s – except that it is in prose. There are obvious aural and phatic marks, appeals and apostrophes to listeners and interlocutors, hence metadiscursive elements abound, together with the most various and overused mannerisms. The speaker, aware he is on a tribune or stage, prepares for a long recital or one-man show. He does not hesitate to follow one digression with another, for the matter if left to itself is scant, and every time he declares what he is doing, and quickly – or not so quickly – calls himself back to order. Nashe wants to translate into words the foretaste of herrings, and offer a dish of words equivalent to the taste of fish. Remembering the cause of his exile in Yarmouth he provides an excursus on the geography and history of this port, in the tone of a tourist guide, but with a lot of flourishes, queer turns of speech, idiomatic and sophisticated explanations and circumlocutions, now plebeian, now contemptuous, now trivializing, now erudite, with recondite and today inevitably lost allusions. To magnify the herring, nearing the end he builds a castle of digressions and fancies, some splendid though disconnected, some strident. The herring is personified and involved in humorous comparisons, even with Helen of Troy. There are incidental anecdotes, the most memorable on a legendary king who compelled four subjects to eat meat, and who felt nauseated whereas the herring leaves one’s belly light, and does not satiate; another, sacrilegious and anti-Catholic one is about an English fishmonger coming to Rome with three by then half-rotten herrings. An exceptional mock-heroic exploit is the macaronic re-reading of the story of Hero and Leander, metamorphosed into a whiting and a herring. The inexhaustible list of fantasy pieces and cameos goes on until the end, one of them telling the birds’ revenge on the dogfish that has eaten a hawk. That skirmish or war resulted in the herring being elected King of the seas. § 158. Deloney The works of Thomas Deloney1 (1560–1600) cannot be called novels but only ‘prose’, though they forerun the novel as much as, or even more than Nashe’s and Greene’s, and reach nearer to us, to the regional mid1

Works, ed. F. O. Mann, Oxford 1912. The novels alone are edited by M. Lawlis, Bloomington, IN 1961.

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nineteenth-century novel and to that devoted to guilds and trades. This is not the only reason why he and his works present aspects new to us, save one, as he came from the fertile, lively area of South-Eastern England, and was born in Norwich, like his older countryman Greene. The latter and the other ‘university wits’ kept him at a distance, and occasionally made his slovenly style and lack of erudition the objects of biting criticism. Deloney had been a self-taught silk-weaver and a peddler up to 1586; then for some reason he had moved to London, where he achieved some repute as the composer of some fifty frank and rather coarse ballads, celebratory and above all militant, which lost no occasion to intervene against minor and great injustices inflicted on the lower classes. A journalist and short story writer, he then abandoned the ballads, and we shall see why (or more exactly he incorporated them in his fiction), for the ‘novel’, with his bestknown works, Jack of Newbury, Thomas of Reading, and especially The Gentle Craft. He attended to them presumably during the last years of his life, without attempting to write drama, in which his effervescent dialogues show he might have done well. The little incident of a ballad that caused the queen’s disapproval gave an inkling of his projects and led him to change his medium; for he had denounced the scarcity of wheat, as the Victorian rioters or the Chartists were to do much later. The merchant class and the artisans seemed to have found their spokesman, and his ballads to breathe the ancient resentment of the protesting Lollards. A Marxist’s possible sympathy for Deloney soon dissolves, however, because the defence of the lower classes does not prevent loyal support of the sovereign’s power. Deloney does not sow revolutionary seeds, but just reconstructs the historical formative process of a precious rib of the nation, more exactly a reliable class of craftsmen, whose young sap enriches the country’s economy and helps the Crown (even in the material, prosaic terms of providing the military forces essential for checking inner attempts to divide the country, and for the wars on the Continent). Deloney never doubts the state is a pyramid with the monarch at the top. So the most crucial change in him is his characters’ provenance: they are from the peripheries, not from the London courtly aristocracy, and are also and above all the best representatives of the classes generating those ‘university wits’ that scoffed at him, classes proverbial for their industry, honesty, and especially mirth and joy

§ 158. Deloney

829

to live. This little father of the popular novel centring on the guilds does build a bridge towards that big future container, ‘the condition of England novel’ of Disraeli, Kingsley, Gaskell and George Eliot, and even towards Arnold Bennett’s novel ‘of the five towns’, and of the cloth and earthenware merchants. Like Bennett, Deloney is a historian of the English guilds, and the single plot of the titular heroes lives in symbiosis with the reconstruction of the first steps of their ‘art’, which may even overshadow it. In one case the story is dated back to Henry I’s time, in another to Henry VIII’s. The Gentle Craft starts as early as the dawning of Christianized England to paint a symbolic fresco of the evolution of shoe-making, whose craftsmen resemble mutual-aid knights without investiture. Deloney’s academic inflections and rhetorical diction diminish along the way, but without disappearing, while the marks of spoken language, drawn from his daily experience, increase. It has been said he is a euphuist – but if so maybe ironically and parodistically, to stress the artificiality of that style – whenever he tells of old times’ somewhat bombastic passions; but he is colloquial and coarse when he reproduces the speeches of working men. I have spoken above of journalistic prose because the story of a single character is often functional to a documentary purpose, and the intrinsic suspense of the plot is therefore rather modest. When he uses the skewer form Deloney is above all unable to conclude his tales effectually. This is why The Gentle Craft is quite another thing, and one would naturally tend to put a dividing temporal gap between it and the other ‘novels’, in which his art had grown much riper. 2. Jack of Newbury is the Berkshire weaver John Winchcomb, who, starting as a weaver’s apprentice, marries his master’s widow, increases the firm’s sales, becomes what would later be called a captain of industry, and is publicly honoured by King Henry VIII. His laboratory has 200 looms, each operated by a workman plus an assistant. A ballad which is sung describes the technique and practice of weaving, especially the immense energy it generates, making the workers proud of their labour. Jack sends 250 of them to fight the Scots at the battle of Flodden, where they do themselves honour. Here Deloney appears much more aware of coeval literature than would appear; the king is not at Flodden because he is engaged in France, exactly at the siege of ‘Turney’ and ‘Turwin’, where another Jack, Nashe’s,

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operates; and the widow of the owner of the weaving firm meets her suitors at a Jonsonian Bartholomew Fair. One chapter deals with the merry pranks played in Newbury on Will Sommers (sic), also appearing in Nashe’s single play or masque. In Newbury the king listens to the craftsmen’s petition for protectionist and protective measures, but the steps he promises to take are delayed by Cardinal Wolsey, which reveals, beyond what official history says, the popular antipathy surrounding that figure. Jack is in fact mistaken for a Lutheran. After half a century, Elizabeth’s aged subjects were already nostalgic for those times. Choral scenes and intermezzos exude an aura of fairy-tales and ancient fabliaux: the widow marries Jack, the honest firm manager, by means of a slightly unexpected stratagem; we are reminded of Chaucer by the bawdy jests and dirty tricks, the most outrageous one being played on an Italian philanderer made to go to bed with a sow; and also by a chapter where two wives debate whether it is better to be sumptuously dressed and bejewelled, or go in simple attire. Thomas of Reading is written in praise of Henry I’s cloth-makers, six of them being chosen as emblems; so it too documents the birth of the guild and the successive agreements on its statutes; somewhat slack in its narrative phases, it does not fail to look with pleasant but occasionally biting satire at the first manifestations of feminine self-importance. The Gentle Craft, in two parts, turns on the ‘gentle’ art of shoemaking, described in six examples starting from the dawn of English civilization. The symmetry of three tales in each part, linked with the evolution in time and with the shoemaking motif, is a novelty; as is also the fine, elegant and fluent prose, not at all inferior to Greene’s mature style. This is Deloney’s masterpiece, although in the first three tales he is not so realistic and direct as in his other two books. The euphuistic-romantic story of St Hugh’s bitter rejected love for a Welsh girl, soon to become a martyr at the pagans’ hands (Winifred, later a theme for Hopkins), is told with a delicate, ably tuned Euphuism. Today, however, what we most appreciate are the sketches of contemporary life, like the fourth, where the narrating voice and the dialogues, echoing the prose speeches of Massinger’s and Shirley’s later comedies, are already finely balanced. The third sketch of Part one, concerning the irresistible ascent of the shoemaker Simon Eyre, inspired Dekker to follow it closely in writing The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

§ 159. The ‘Marprelate Tracts’

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§ 159. The ‘Marprelate Tracts’ The birth of a ‘flexible’ English prose, as it is defined, was due to the first, late sixteenth-century creative authors hitherto mentioned, and perhaps even more to the instrumental and incidental writings in the sphere of religious diatribe, such as the polemical Martinist prose of the authors, or author, of the Marprelate Tracts before 1600, and the theological prose of Richard Hooker. They formed two separate evolutions, one of satire and the other of argumentation, later to develop along parallel lines though sometimes in a state of fusion. And they existed antithetically one thanks to the other: the Martinists’ was instinctive, hot, extemporary, duly militant, tied to contingent facts; Hooker’s cool, filtered and objectified, aiming at defining absolute principles, now and then fiery and reactive, but overall majestic, classical, controlled. The seven extant Marprelate libels date from 1588 and 1589,1 while Hooker’s treatise was completed in its first version in 1594 as a reply to the attack of those libels, but not at all an immediate, or a timely and bellicose one. Both, and especially the second, are by all means material for the literary historian, and not to be confined to the history of religions or religious sects, or to be considered a minor, limited and parochial ecclesiastical war. The literary relevance of the Marprelate libels is evident from the title itself, linking Luther’s name – would it not have more been more logical to mention Calvin?2 – to the Mar-Prelate pun. The relative or systematic novelty lay in applying the whole discursive gamut of satire to an object that so far had usually required a neutral or specific language. In the Marprelate diatribes frankness and impudence join with jeering and carnivalesque humour, as well as with phonetic tricks and the most various tactics in order to avoid euphemisms. The Martinists simply felt that no abstract language would do, and that only in the way they acted could their argument be voiced. Consciously or unconsciously the man hiding behind Martin Marprelate operated against official Puritanism, the latter being the enemy of comic literature and perhaps literature itself; these libels were therefore eventually criticized by co-religionists, but meanwhile they

1 2

Complete modernized edition by J. L. Black, Cambridge 2011. The fifth libel, however, bears the allusive title Theses Martinianae.

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had produced considerable effects. It is said that this insulting verve also struck Shakespeare, and the Marprelate figure was at the centre of some plays of the time, which were duly resumed and reprinted in the early 1640s. 2. We must at least acknowledge that Martinist Puritans made the printing of prose, for the first time since the Middle Ages or the earliest Renaissance, address the debate of ideas. The Tracts represent the first English ‘battle of the books’ concerning questions at that time burning, though now and forever quenched. In confirmation of the abovementioned, insatiable English interest in doctrinal matters, 300 years later the future Cardinal Newman would promote a similar campaign with his Tracts for the Times, neither anonymous nor pseudonymous, rather having a collective authorship, but in a sense with a contrary trend. Actually the 1588–1589 campaign was a preparatory skirmish or guerrilla warfare, for which an appropriate parallel has been found in David’s sling launching stones at Goliath – for the additional reason that Church authorities realized that to beat Martin it was necessary to face him with the same weapons. After the first onslaught had failed, mere academic weapons having been employed, the English bishops had Lyly, Nashe, Greene, and the Harvey brothers enter the fray. These aped Martin’s inventions and invectives3 in their libels’ colourful titles and in their choice of pseudonyms. ‘Guerrilla’ implies clandestinity, and Martinist libels made use of printers and printing presses that could show up and print here today and there tomorrow. The printer Waldegrave is a co-author of the seven libels as much as the phantom real writer, who is almost unanimously identified with the Welsh Puritan John Penry (though other suspects are Job Throckmorton and Sir Richard Knightley). Formally, the last libels were signed by Martin Junior and by Martin Senior, Martin’s sons.4 3 4

Significantly, the title of the first reply of that kind contained the pugilistic term ‘countercuff ’. It was the remnants of Romanism surviving in the Anglican statutes that sparked the Martinist libels. Several times Parliament and Crown had received, under the form of ‘warnings’, requests that internal hierarchies and the bishops’ role be abolished, and vestments in religious ceremonies be forbidden; and the queen, fearing lest England might follow the example of Scotland, asked the Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift, installed in 1583, to intervene. In 1588 canon John Udall’s Diotrephes – a

§ 160. Hooker

833

§ 160. Hooker Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity by Richard Hooker (1554–1600), in five books licensed by the author (1594–1597), plus three posthumous ones remodelled and revised,1 is normally defined the apology of Anglicanism or Episcopalianism, although it obviously conquered Puritanism only temporarily, unlike Catholicism. It is also a timeless masterpiece of argumentative and apologetic English prose, a miracle of balance and elegance that was to hold out far longer than Euphuism, and one of those grand syntheses representing, in the fields of literature and science, the symbolic climaxes of an age. It has therefore been easy to place it on the same level as The Faerie Queene by the nearly coeval Spenser, since treatise and poem pivot on the personal, historical and constitutional figure of Queen Elizabeth. For we must not forget that Hooker’s mind was formed in the years following the reign of Catholic Mary; and that he was familiar with the strenuous religious dissenters who, after the end of that reign, came back from Geneva as sympathizers of Calvinism. Born into a poor family near Exeter, Hooker, whose biography became almost immediately known thanks to Walton’s Lives,2 studied Holy Scriptures and Hebrew at Oxford. dialogue between a Puritan and an Episcopalian – elicited an interminable reply from the Dean of Salisbury. Thereafter Whitgift had a bill approved that authorized the bishops to censor writings before they were printed. The archbishop sent Penry and Udall to prison, and the former was executed in 1592, while the latter died in prison. Whitgift sequestered Robert Waldegrave’s press, but printing went on with the help of sympathizers. After Waldegrave retired the new printer Hoskins was arrested and tortured by Whitgift; but he managed to publish the seventh and last libel. In 1593 Parliament approved an anti-Puritan statute punishing with exile or death whoever attacked the established Church of England. The prophesied abolition of bishops occurred later on, in 1645, when Laud was sentenced to death. 1 2

The whole work was concluded in 1662 and 1666, by two editors with opposite ideas on the authenticity of the last three books. Walton dwelt particularly on the family ménage of Hooker who, he said, bore with Christian patience with his shrewish wife; but later biographers disproved this. Walton’s biography is also contextual and accurately describes the work of Whitgift – the ‘queen’s black-robed husband’ – and the climate of the Martinist controversies. Finally he invests Hooker, more aptly than Donne, with the cliché of sanctity and of

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He then became dean of the Temple, the London lawyers’ school, where his mildly but firmly anti-Puritan3 ideas were further defined by a dialectic duel with the preacher Walter Travers. The queen herself had granted him church sinecures through Archbishop Whitgift, to enable Hooker to comfortably write the theoretic summa he had in mind; and he finished the first part, as said above, in a quiet parish near Salisbury. ‘Judicious Hooker’ was one of the three authors Charles I read before dying on the scaffold; he infused above all meekness and temperance into the religious poetry of the first half of the seventeenth century; even Pope Clement VIII – according to Izaak Walton – considered the first book of the Laws, read to him in the Latin translation – a point of reference for all theology to come. 2. Hooker’s first axiom is that the Elizabethan state was equally distant from Catholicism and Puritanism, and pivoted on the queen, at once queen by divine right and by parliamentary appointment. Hence the state was the Church and the Church was the state, as James I was later to sum up in his famous boutade, ‘No bishops, no king’. Elizabethan political playwrights felt the same urgency. God had imposed ab aeterno an order on the world, fixing laws that, whether divine or natural, did not conflict, since Nature was God’s right arm in despite of Fortune. This world picture was clear to Shakespeare, and Hooker lies behind Ulysses’ speech on ‘degree’ in Troilus and Cressida. Historically Anglicanism was founded on the Bible, the Church, and Reason. Wherever the Bible had not given an indisputable judgement, tradition came to one’s help, and whenever neither Bible nor tradition succoured help came from reason enlightened by God. Practically, in the diatribe on vestments and on ritual, ceremonial forms were the object of free local deliberation. Tradition and/or freedom was a dilemma going back to Boethius, and which the English were painstakingly

3

a mystic, hermit-like faith that would become once more fashionable with Victorian Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholicism. Not for nothing was John Keble the editor of Hooker’s works in 1841. Lewis (ELS, 451–2) regrets that he must overlook Hooker’s ‘minor works’, and limits himself to select significant sentences (revealing very open-minded views) from a 1585 sermon on ‘justification’.

§ 161. Travel literature and historical compilations

835

studying guided by his De Consolatione: on this theme Hooker enounces the luminous aphorism that ‘the general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself ’, but he makes a distinction between natural and ‘positive’ laws, by stressing, that is, the human faculty to dictate different statutes for the state. Nevertheless the weak point of this perfect organic plan is that Hooker on the one hand asserted the sovereign’s supremacy, and on the other foresaw the ‘social contract’; so he would be eventually cited both by the theoreticians of absolute monarchy and by the partisans of the commonwealth.4 § 161. Travel literature and historical compilations My last section concerns prose writers who, unlike many others, do not deserve to be casually cited, or confined to a footnote, though the importance of their works may be scant and relative, instrumental and contextual, and their literary interest limited, though with some exceptions.1 There are two subgenres to explore, once we have dealt with prose fiction and with polemical treatises on religion and theology: travel literature and historiography. Hardly cultivated before the sixteenth century, they now enjoy a kind of boom. This type of prose feeds on three mutations in the episteme: it is purely concerned with knowledge, is linked to changed mores and customs, and tends explicitly to celebrate Elizabeth’s monarchy. Historiographers are ready to make history itself teleological, or even partisan, and to see it develop ab aeterno as a progress reaching its goal in Elizabeth. The link between historiography and travel literature lies in the glorification of the model of the English Protestant state, no longer the vassal or satellite of any power, and, now aware of its entelechy, reaching out towards faraway worlds, aiming to implant colonies dedicated to the queen and to exploit 4

The treatise’s articulation is as follows: Book I deals with laws and their kinds, and on the universe governed by either divine or natural laws; Book II concerns the Scripture; Books III to V (the last longer than the first four together) consider the rituals and ceremonies of the Anglican Church; Books VI to VIII deal with legitimate and illegitimate church offices.

1

See § 35.4 for Stow, Speed and Leland, and § 34.6 n. 10 for Harrison. For Elizabethan translations see § 36.6 n. 6.

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their natural and mineral resources. Elizabethan historiography is the first, self-conscious monument of the political prestige England had achieved, and, in deliberate antithesis to Catholic historiography, it is written with an explicitly Protestant imperialistic aim. For this very reason it is founded on the biblical idea of exploration and colonization as a guided, rather than casual, ‘pilgrimage’. The heroes of both historiography and travel literature are kings and great state officials, as well as fearless seamen, captains and sailors. Sociology, on the other hand, reminds us that by the mid-sixteenth century travelling had become faster, thanks to the progress in the means of communications and to new instruments for navigation, so that it was easier to cover distances once affrighting. One could now reach not only continental Europe, but the whole world. Noblemen and rich citizens were not the only travellers, but travelling had gradually become a democratic fever spread by discoveries and explorations; and travellers, once back, wrote reports or told tales that were collected and rewritten. A special branch of English navigation consists now in the East and West ‘passages’, which made it faster to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back, by an ocean route reaching India through the Arctic Circle. England was quick to bridge a fifty-year gap during which Spanish and Portuguese navigators had published their early reports on the Americas; but they were at least translated, to encourage the English to do the same. The wave of travel literature that swelled in mid-sixteenth-century England gave rise to a genre ready to undergo a huge expansion in the future. Sea-adventures and travel memoirs will impregnate English and American literatures. A role that began to be shaped was that of the traveller and memoirist writer (up to Doughty and the two Lawrences), or that of the expatriate. While the Romantics will absorb this precocious travel literature, historiography constitutes an unending reservoir of subjects and promptings for the authors of historical plays. 2. Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616), a student at Oxford, determined not to deem extraneous to his nature anything pertaining to geography, had studied this discipline (on which he later gave public lectures) ever since, as a child, he was dazzled by the sight of maps, charts, globes and cosmography books. These were shown to him by a cousin, a member of the Middle Temple, accompanied with the reading of Psalm 107, and the verse on the people that

§ 161. Travel literature and historical compilations

837

go to sea and ‘see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep’. On that day he made up his mind to give the lie to the French, who called the English lazy stay-at-homes, and also to Richard Eden, the historian of seamanship, who had passively praised only foreigners. He became an Anglican priest, and an official and ambassador for the Crown, on whose behalf he compiled research and projects. Hakluyt collected all available geographic reports and news of explorations hitherto achieved ‘by the English nation’ – more than 100 of them, transcribed, translated, arranged or directly commissioned – under the title The Principal Navigations, in 1589 (enlarged in 1600). This was a work that at the end of the nineteenth century the historian Froude defined a prose epic of modern England. Hakluyt had an assistant and continuator in Samuel Purchas (1577–1626), the vicar of an Essex parish and then of another near the mouth of the Thames, where he collected from their very lips seamen’s stories. These were then condensed in the new, enlarged 1625 edition of Navigations, under the title Hakluytus Posthumous or Purchas his Pilgrim in four volumes, an even more fortunate encyclopaedia destined to inspire Coleridge2 (who fell asleep reading it and dreamed of Kubla Khan) and Wordsworth. Here the English could read almost 1,500 stories, pleasantly written, of sailors returning mainly – unlike in Hakluyt – from Eastern seas and ports, bringing news on the customs, cultures and religious faiths of those peoples.3 3. The still immature English historiography of the sixteenth century, lacking a historical perspective, still moved by an urge to celebrate, is inordinately fond of the portentous. But with Raphael Holinshed (1529–1580) and his Chronicles (1577, revised 1587) we see the first sparkle of a modern work of history, not least because that was the very substantial and detailed enterprise of a team. The printer Wolfe had ambitiously collected descriptive and graphic material with the intention to compile a universal history, but he died in 1573, and the project was passed on to Holinshed, who wisely determined to restrict the panorama to the British Isles. William Harrison

2 3

Coleridge probably read the shortened 1613 edition, Purchas his Pilgrimage. The historian William Strachey’s letter of 1610, on the shipwreck of an English ship sailing to the Bermudas, seems literally echoed in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

838

part v  the beginnings of narrative prose

made, as seen above, a ‘description of England’, and both the future Jesuit Edmund Campion and a John Hooker, unrelated to but a contemporary and countryman of the author of the Laws, gave one of Ireland.4 Holinshed, who personally dealt with English history in compelling narratives, is of course universally and proverbially known to all readers of Shakespeare, who made the freest use of his writings, as of all other sources; he is also renowned for the insight that made him enrol and include Harrison, always a great favourite with the English.

4

Authoritative historians (see CHI, vol. III, 319) strangely mistake this John (in Holinshed the translator of Giraldus Cambrensis, and better known as John Vowell) for Richard Hooker.

Index of names (In this and in the Thematic index, references, including those to names and topics appearing in footnotes, will be to section and sub-section numbers.) À Wood, Anthony  150.2. Abbott, C. C.  47.1. Abel 6.2. Abraham 14.5. Accoramboni, Vittoria  125.2; 125.3; 127.1; 127.3. Achilles  6.2; 110.1; 110.3; 111.3. Acteon 69.2. Adam  5.2; 11.4; 12.2; 12.4; 12.5; 14.5; 20.3; 27.2; 40.5; 48.2; 60.1; 70.2; 82. Addison, Joseph  84.3. Adonis  47.3; 60.3; 60.4. Ælfric  3.4. Ælla of Northumbria  4.1. Aeneas  9.1; 9.2; 10.2; 15.2; 17.3; 17.5; 18.2; 95.1; 95.4; 96.1; 96.2; 116.5. Aeolus  17.3; 17.4. Aers, D.  14.3. Aesculapius 115.1. Aesop  25.2; 25.3; 57.1. Æthelwold  3.4; 28.2. Agostino Veneziano  124.2. Alamanni, Luigi  43.1. Albertanus of Brescia  19.5. Alboin 5.1. Alcott, Louisa May  100.5. Alcuin 2.7. Aldhelm  4.2. Alexander the Macedon  5.1; 8.3; 13.3; 69.3; 101.3. Alexander III, King of Scotland  24.2. Alexander VI, Pope  70.3. Alexander de’ Medici  150.1. Alfred the Great  2.1; 3.4; 8.5; 40.2.

Alighieri, Dante  7.1; 10.2; 11.1; 12.2; 12.3; 13.3; 14.1; 14.3; 14.4; 15.1; 15.2; 17.2; 17.3; 17.4; 19.5; 22.1; 22.2; 23.6; 40.1; 44.2; 50.1; 59.2; 60.2; 61.1; 61.3; 61.6; 65.1; 81.1; 93.2; 103.2; 111.3; 114.2. Alleyn, Edward  93.1. Alpers, P.  56.1. Altichiero da Verona  20.2. Andreasen, N. J. C.  76.1. Aneirin 9.1. Anne of Bohemia  12.3. Anne of Denmark  69.1. Antoninus Pius  3.2. Apelles 153.2. Apollo  6.2; 100.3; 153.1. Apollonius 100.3. Arber, E.  84.1. Archer, William  124.3. Archibald, E.  32.1; 32.3. Arden, John  26.1; 26.2. Aretino, Pietro  157.1; 157.3. Ariosto, Ludovico  20.3; 24.3; 36.6; 45.2; 52.1; 52.4; 59.2; 60.1; 87.2; 97.2; 138.3; 156.1. Aristotle  7.1; 13.3; 21.2; 29.1; 29.2; 36.5; 36.6; 40.2; 54.2; 54.4; 73.2; 75.2; 91.1. Arnold, Matthew  2.3; 9.1; 15.4; 21.2; 23.4; 37.1; 40.4; 40.6; 43.4; 54.2; 59.2; 69.2; 110.1; 152.3. Arnold, Thomas  40.4. Artaud, Antonin  123.2; 144.4. Arthur, King  2.2; 6.1; 8.3; 9.1; 9.2; 12.4; 12.5; 15.2; 18.2; 21.4; 24.2; 31.2; 32.1; 32.3; 32.4; 32.5; 33.1; 33.2; 34.2; 57.1; 57.3;

840 59.1; 59.2; 60.1; 60.2; 61.2; 61.3; 61.4; 61.6; 61.7; 61.8; 90.2; 116.4; 157.3. Arthur Tudor  34.3. Ascensius, Badius  25.1. Ascham, Roger  32.1; 40.1; 40.2; 40.5; 43.4; 51.4; 56.3; 69.3; 152.2. Ashby, George  21.4. Aubrey, John  49.1. Auden, Wystan Hugh  6.3; 23.2; 23.3; 23.4; 57.4. Augustine of Canterbury see St Augustine of Canterbury. Augustus (Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus) 116.5. Bacchiacca, Francesco  124.2. Bacchus  23.6; 61.4. Bacon, Francis  36.5; 37.1; 55.3; 83.1; 110.4. Bacon, Roger  7.1; 8.6; 70.2. Bailey, Philip  100.5. Baines, Richard  95.3. Bajetta, C.  66.3; 66.4. Baker, Betsy  144.1. Baker, D. J.  56.3. Bakhtin, Mikhail  15.3; 19.3. Baldi, S.  27.2; 42.3. Baldini, G.  2.2; 8.4; 14.3; 15.1; 18.1; 43.1; 59.4; 124.3. Bale, John  26.2; 89; 90.2. Bamborough, J. B.  119.4. Bandello, Matteo  36.6; 45.2; 126.1; 132.2; 155.3. Barbour, John  24.2. Barclay, Alexander  22; 23.4; 23.5; 31.2; 43.5; 46. Barksted, William  109.1. Barnes, Barnabe  50.1; 70.3; 71.3; 145.1. Barnfield, Richard  70.1. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth  18.2; 21.4; 23.4; 43.3; 126.1. Barrie, J. M.  115.5.

Index of names Bartoli, Daniello  66.4. Bartolomeo Veneto  124.2. Barton, A.  116.2. Battenhouse, R. W.  97.1. Baudelaire, Charles  100.5. Baugh, A. C.  2.6; 2.7; 12.4; 44.1; 45.1; 69.2; 85.2; 93.1; 128.1; 137.1; 147.2; 148.2; 155.2. Beaufort, Joan  24.3. Beaumont, Francis  130.1; 137–140; 141.1; 143.2; 148.1. Becket, Thomas  7.3; 19.1; 35.2. Beckett, Samuel  13.1; 39.2; 136.1. Beckford, William  100.5. Bede, the Venerable  3.3; 3.4; 4.1; 5.2; 6.2; 9.2. Bedford, Countess see Russell, Lucy. Beeching, H. C.  68.1. Bell, I.  73.4. Bellarmino, Roberto  74.1. Belleforest, François  126.1. Bembo, Pietro  41.1. Benivieni, Girolamo  65.2. Bennett, Arnold  158.1. Bennett, J. A. W.  32.2; 32.3; 32.5. Benson, Edward Frederic  30.2. Beowulf  2.3; 2.6; 3.3; 5.2; 5.3; 6; 8.3; 9.1; 9.2; 12.4; 12.5; 21.4. Bergonzi, B.  56.1. Bernadette of Lourdes (Marie-Bernarde Soubirous) 8.4. Bernard André of Toulouse  21.1. Berni, Francesco  157.1. Bigliazzi, S.  75.1; 75.3; 76.1. Blake, N. F.  31.2. Blake, William  9.2; 25.1. Blom, E.  38.2. Boadicea  3.2; 140.2. Boas, F. S.  101.1; 115.2. Boccaccio, Giovanni  12.2; 13.3; 15.1; 15.4; 18.1; 19.1; 19.3; 19.4; 19.5; 20.6; 21.3;

Index of names 23.6; 40.1; 40.3; 44.1; 51.2; 59.2; 77.1; 87.3; 101.1; 106.3; 152.1; 155.3. Bodel, Jean  8.3. Boethius, Severinus  3.4; 15.2; 15.3; 18.2; 25.3; 59.3; 62.1; 87.3; 115.3; 160.2. Bogard, T.  124.4; 126.1. Boitani, P.  12.1; 18.1. Bokenham, Osbern  21.4. Boleyn, Anne  34.3; 34.4; 41.2; 42.2; 42.3; 43.3; 88. Boleyn, George  41.2. Bolingbroke, Henry  7.4. Bolt, R.  39.1. Bond, Edward  91.2. Borges, Jorge Luis  57.2; 74.2. Bosch, Hyeronimus  14.4. Bothwell, Count ( James Hepburn)  34.6. Botticelli, Sandro  25.5. Bourchier, John, Lord Berners  29.1; 31.2; 39.2; 152.1. Bower, Richard  87.3. Bowers, M.  12.3. Boyle, Elizabeth  63.2; 64.1. Bradshaw, Henry  21.4. Bradwardine, Thomas  15.2. Brant (or Brandt), Sebastian  22.2. Brecht, Bertolt  26.2; 91.1; 95.1; 95.2; 99.1; 118.5. Breton, Nicholas  45.1; 70.2; 72.3. Brewer, D. S.  10.1; 12.5; 15.2; 20.7; 32.1; 32.2. Bridges, Robert  84.3; 159.2. Brockett, O. G.  86.2. Brody, S. N.  12.5. Brome, Richard  115.1. Brontë, Emily  19.3; 144.5. Brooke, Christopher  79.1. Brooke, Elizabeth  42.3. Brooke, R.  124.1; 124.4. Brooks, Peter  26.2. Browne, Sir Thomas  69.1; 73.3. Browne, William  69.1.

841 Browning, Robert  2.3; 6.3; 15.3; 19.3; 19.5; 20.6; 23.1; 23.3; 23.5; 23.6; 39.5; 44.2; 48.3; 68.2; 69.2; 69.3; 72.2; 73.3; 77.1; 92.2; 95.2; 100.2; 100.5; 103.2; 106.3; 112.3; 124.3; 125.2; 125.3; 126.1; 127.2; 128.3; 133.1; 136.2; 142; 146.1; 155.4; 157.4. Bruce, Edward  24.2. Bruce, Robert  7.3; 24.2. Bruckner, Anton  53.1. Bruegel, Pieter (the Elder)  14.4. Bruno, Giordano  53.1; 54.2; 55.3; 62.1; 95.2; 101.3. Brutus of Troy  9.1; 9.2. Bryan, Sir Francis  41.2. Bryant (or Briant), Alexander  47.1. Buchanan, George  87.2. Buckingham, First Duke of (George Villiers) 141.5. Buckingham, Second Duke of (Henry Stafford) 44.2. Bullen, A. H.  94.1; 103.2; 130.1. Bullokar, W.  36.2. Bullough, G.  55.1. Bunyan, John  11.2; 14.3; 26.1; 26.2; 119.4. Buonaccorso da Montemagno  28.4. Burbage, Richard  86.2. Burckhardt, Jacob  37.2; 37.4. Burgh, Benet or Benedict  21.4. Burne-Jones, Sir Edward  32.1; 49.1. Burns, Robert  8.5; 25.1. Burrow, J. A.  10.1; 10.2; 12.4. Burton, Robert  11.4; 13.2; 14.2; 40.3; 71.1; 115.4; 144.3; 144.5; 145.1; 146.1; 152.3; 152.4. Bush, B.  67.1; 71.2. But, John  14.1. Butler, E. M.  100.2; 100.3. Butler, Samuel  39.7. Buxton, J.  51.1; 54.2. Byrd, William  38.2; 48.2; 67.2.

842 Byron, George Gordon, Lord  2.3; 18.2; 59.4; 95.2; 100.5; 139.1. Cabot, John  34.3. Cade, Jack  7.4. Cædmon 2.6; 5.2; 5.4. Caesar, Gaius Julius  2.1; 3.2; 44.2; 92.2; 114.2; 117.2; 117.3. Cagidemetrio, A.  100.5. Cain  6.1; 6.2; 100.5. Calì, P.  14.1; 14.3. Calvin, John  35.1; 35.2; 37.3; 48.2; 73.2; 159.1. Cambrensis, Giraldus  161.3. Camden, William  35.4; 68.3; 116.1. Campion, Edmund  47.1; 47.2; 56.1; 67.1; 161.3. Campion, Thomas  38.2; 50.3; 67; 69.2; 70.3; 84.1; 85.1. Camus, Albert  144.1. Canute  2.6; 8.2. Capella, Martianus  21.4. Capgrave, John  29.3. Cappello, Bianca  133.1. Caputi, A. F.  103.2; 104.2. Caractacus 3.2. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi)  60.2. Carew, Thomas  75.2; 120.3. Carey, J.  73.2; 73.3; 73.4; 74.1; 74.2. Carlyle, Thomas  2.2; 2.5; 2.6; 3.3; 6.3; 8.6; 21.3; 23.3; 29.2; 37.1; 78.1; 80.1; 110.4; 116.1; 119.4; 152.3. Caro, Annibal  43.1. Carr, Robert  77.2. Carroll, Lewis  6.3; 23.3; 23.5; 136.1. Carter, Angela  8.3; 126.2. Cary, Elizabeth  36.6. Casady, E.  43.2. Castiglione, Baldassarre  11.3; 13.3; 34.1; 36.6; 61.7; 66.1; 155.2. Catherine of Aragon  34.3; 34.4; 42.3; 43.2.

Index of names Catherine de’ Medici  99.2; 112.1. Catiline  117.2; 117.3; 150.1. Cato, Marcus Porcius, Uticensis  110.3; 114.2. Cattaneo, A.  43.1. Catullus, Gaius Valerius  23.5; 67.2; 68.3. Cavalcanti, Guido  50.2. Cavendish, Thomas  154.1. Caxton, William  13.2; 19.1; 23.1; 25.1; 31; 32.2; 32.3; 33.2; 85.2. Cazamian, L.  2.2; 13.2. Cecil, Sir Edward  123.1. Cecil, William (Lord Burghley)  34.5; 48.2; 58.2; 66.2; 84.2. Cely, English dynasty  30.1. Cervantes, Miguel de  68.3; 138.2; 141.5; 143.2. Ceyx 17.2. Chambers, E. K.  28.2; 28.4; 86.2. Chamisso, Adelbert  100.4. Champaigne, Cecily  16.2. Chapman, George  36.6; 42.5; 72.1; 87.3; 95.1; 96.2; 99.2; 102.2; 107.1; 110– 114; 115.1; 126.1; 132.1; 157.2. Charles I Stuart, King of England  38.1; 74.2; 115.1; 120.1; 121; 141.1; 143.1; 160.1. Charles II Stuart, King of England  25.4. Charles V of Habsburg, Emperor  34.3; 34.4; 40.6; 42.3; 101.3. Charles VIII of Valois, King of France  143.2. Charles of Valois-Orléans  24.3. Charles the Great, or Charlemagne  2.7; 3.4; 8.3; 24.2. Chatterton, Thomas  30.1. Chaucer, Geoffrey  2.1; 2.2; 8.2; 8.3; 10.1; 10.2; 11.1; 11.2; 11.3; 11.4; 12.1; 12.2; 12.5; 12.6; 13.1; 13.2; 14.2; 14.3; 15–20; 21.1; 21.2; 21.3; 21.4; 22.1; 22.2; 23.1; 23.3; 23.5; 23.6; 24.2; 24.3; 25.1; 25.2; 25.3; 25.4; 26.2; 28.3; 31.2;

843

Index of names 32.1; 34.3; 36.5; 39.2; 39.4; 41.1; 42.1; 43.4; 44.1; 44.2; 48.3; 52.2; 54.4; 55.2; 56.1; 56.2; 57.2; 58.1; 59.1; 59.3; 60.3; 61.2; 64.3; 66.2; 68.3; 72.3; 73.5; 77.1; 83.1; 84.2; 84.3; 85.2; 102.2; 103.1; 106.3; 128.1; 147.4; 153.1; 155.3; 155.4; 158.2. Chaucer, Thomas  21.3. Cheke, Sir John  40.1. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith  12.4; 15.4. Chettle, Henry  155.1. Chiarini, P.  95.1. Child, J. F.  27.2. Chrétien de Troyes  9.1; 9.2; 12.5; 53.2. Churchyard, Thomas  44.1. Chute, M.  115.4. Cicero  15.2; 19.5; 36.5; 37.3; 41.2; 90.2; 115.3; 117.2; 155.2. Cicognini, Giacinto Andrea  100.5. Cino da Pistoia  41.1. Ciriacus, Bishop  5.4. Clark, G.  147.3. Claudius 3.2. Clement VIII, Pope  160.1. Cleopatra  17.5; 69.3; 77.1; 96.2. Cleveland, John  73.3; 120.3. Clough, Arthur Hugh  100.5. Coghill, N.  14.1. Coldwell, D. F. C.  25.1; 25.1. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  2.2; 2.3; 8.3; 8.6; 12.3; 12.5; 21.3; 22.1; 23.4; 27.2; 37.1; 43.3; 56.1; 69.1; 69.2; 71.2; 79.1; 139.2; 161.2. Colet, John  36.2; 39.1. Colledge, E.  8.4. Collins, Wilkie  147.3; 155.4. Colonna, Egidio  21.2. Conrad, Joseph  2.1. Constable, Henry  47.3; 50.1. Constans, King of Britain  9.1. Constantine, Roman Emperor  5.4.

Conti, Natale  111.1. Contini, G.  11.1; 123.2. Copernicus, Nicolaus  36.5; 37.3; 83.1. Corneille, Pierre  108; 144.5. Cornish, William  87.3. Corti, C.  34.1; 36.3; 157.4. Coryate, Thomas  78.1. Cotton, Sir Robert  6.3. Coulton, G. G.  16.2; 19.5. Courthope, W. J.  43.3. Coverdale, Miles  35.3; 36.2. Cowley, Abraham  73.3; 75.2. Crabbe, George  15.4; 19.5. Cranmer, Thomas  34.3; 35.2; 35.4; 36.2; 85.2. Crashaw, Richard  5.3; 47.2; 51.3; 73.3; 73.5; 81.3; 144.4. Crassus, Licinius  13.2. Creontes 20.3. Crew, Thomas  75.2. Croce, Benedetto  42.1. Croesus 11.4. Cromwell, Oliver  56.3; 85.1. Cromwell, Thomas  34.3; 89.1; 90.1. Crotch, W. J. B.  31.2. Crowley, Richard  14.1. Cuchulain 8.6. Cumberland, Lady Eleanor Brandon, Countess  36.6; 69.2. Cupid  11.2; 11.3; 41.2; 50.3; 52.4; 60.3; 60.4; 61.2; 61.8; 61.9; 63.3; 65.4; 68.2; 91.2; 96.2; 116.4; 132.1; 153.2; 153.3; 155.4. Curtius, E. R.  2.1; 2.2; 3.4; 4.1; 4.2; 8.3; 8.6; 10.2; 21.3; 21.4; 37.4. Cynewulf  5.2; 5.3; 5.4. D’Amico, M.  24.3. D’Avascio, R.  144.4. D’Urfé, Honoré  144.3. D’Urfey, Thomas  113.1. Da Ponte, Lorenzo  112.4.

844 Damian, John  25.5. Daniel, Samuel  67.1; 68.1; 69; 70.3; 85.1; 87.2; 87.3. Dares 8.3. Darley, George  137.3; 138.3. Darrell, Elizabeth  42.3. Darwin, Charles  80.1; 123.5. Davenport, A.  12.2; 72.1; 72.3; 103.1; 104.1. Davidson, P.  47.2. Davies, John (of Hereford)  37.4; 71.1; 71.3; 72.1; 103.2; 122.2. Davies, Sir John  71.1; 71.2; 71.3; 72.1; 103.2. Davis, John (sailor)  71.1. Davis, N.  30.1. De’ Ciminelli, Serafino see Serafino Aquilano. De Deguileville, Guillaume  14.1; 21.3. De Lorris, Guillaume  8.3; 15.1; 18.2. De la Mare, Walter  23.5. De’ Medici, Ippolito  43.1. De Meun, Jean  8.3; 11.4; 15.1. De Mortimer, Roger  7.4; 68.3. De la Pole, William, Duke of Suffolk  7.4. De Pontoux, Claude  68.2. De Quincey, Thomas  2.2; 37.1. De Rojas, Fernando  85.2. De Sainte-More, Benoît  8.3; 18.1. De Selincourt, E.  59.3; 59.5. De Vere, Lady Frances  43.2. De Vere, Lord Edward  48.2; 155.1. De Vinsauf, Geoffrey  15.1. De Worde, Wynkyn  31.2. Defoe, Daniel  157.3. Dekker, Thomas  68.2; 110.2; 115.1; 124.1; 124.2; 128; 130.2; 131.1; 131.2; 132.1; 133.1; 135.2; 141.3; 148.1; 149.2; 154.1; 158.2. Dekkers, Father John  128.1. Della Mirandola, Pico  34.1; 39.2; 74.1. Della Porta, Giambattista  132.2. Delle Colonne, Guido  8.3; 18.1; 21.3. Deloney, Thomas  151; 158.

Index of names Dent, R. H.  124.4. Deschamps, Eustache  15.1; 15.2. Despenser, Hugh  7.3. Devereux, Penelope (Lady Rich)  50.1. Devlin, Christopher  47.2. Diana  20.3; 21.1; 42.5; 60.4; 62.2; 94.2. Dickens, Charles  15.4; 21.2; 30.1; 48.2; 91.2; 107.1; 115.1; 116.1; 119.1; 119.4; 120.1; 120.3; 128.1; 128.2; 128.6; 135.1; 142. Dictys 8.3. Dido  15.2; 17.2; 17.3; 18.2; 95.1; 96.2; 116.5. Digby, Kenelm  122.1. Diodorus Siculus  23.1. Diomedes 25.3. Disraeli, Benjamin  158.1. Dobell, Sydney Thompson  100.5. Domitianus 141.2. Don Giovanni  100.5. Donne, John  8.5; 21.2; 23.2; 42.1; 42.5; 43.4; 61.4; 63.1; 66.2; 66.4; 66.5; 67.2; 68.2; 72.1; 73–83; 85.2; 88; 90.2; 95.3; 101.3; 102.2; 110.2; 111.2; 111.3; 112.1; 114.2; 115.1; 115.2; 115.4; 122.1; 122.2; 122.3; 124.2; 129; 130.2; 136.2; 140.2; 144.3; 144.4; 145.3; 146.1; 148.1; 152.1; 152.2; 154.2; 160.1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich  110.2. Doughty, Charles Montagu  29.2; 40.1; 161.1. Douglas, Gavin  17.5; 25.1; 28.4; 31.2; 43.1. Douglas, Sir James  24.2. Dowland, John  38.2; 67.2; 121. Drake, Sir Francis  34.4; 34.6; 48.2; 155.4. Drayton, Michael  43.3; 68; 69.1; 69.2; 95.2. Drummond of Hawthornden  24.3; 116.1; 120.1; 131.1. Drury, Elizabeth  76.1; 80.1; 80.2. Drury, Sir Robert  74.2; 76.3; 80.2. Dryden, John  15.4; 21.1; 25.1; 37.3; 40.6; 73.3; 73.4; 94.3; 104.2; 110.2; 115.1; 115.3; 115.4; 124.4; 137.1; 137.2.

Index of names Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste  36.6; 71.3. Du Bellay, Joachim  50.1; 57.1; 58.1. Dudley, John, Duke of Northumberland 34.4. Dudley, Robert (Earl of Leicester)  48.2; 48.3; 59.1; 66.2; 87.2; 153.1. Dunbar, William  11.1; 21.1; 25.1; 25.4–5; 26.1; 32.5; 49.2; 75.1; 157.1. Duncan-Jones, K.  48.2. Dunstan 3.4. Dürer, Albrecht  37.2. Dürrenmatt, Friedrich  116.5. Dyce, Alexander  23.1; 130.1. Dyer, Edward  48.2; 48.3. Eden, Richard  161.2. Edward, the Confessor  2.6; 3.4; 7.2. Edward I, King of England  7.1; 7.3. Edward II, King of England  7.2; 7.3; 68.3; 99.1; 102.2. Edward III, King of England  7.4; 16.1; 22.1; 99.1. Edward IV, King of England  7.4; 29.3; 31.2; 44.1; 148.2. Edward VI, King of England  34.1; 34.3; 34.4; 35.2; 40.1; 85.2; 89.1; 92.1. Edward of Woodstock,  the Black Prince 7.4. Edwards, A. S. G.  23.1; 23.5; 23.6; 32.1; 32.3. Edwards, Richard  41.2; 87.3. Edwin, king of Northumbria  3.3. Egerton, Sir Thomas  74.1; 78.1. Eleanor of Aquitaine  7.3. Eleanor of Castille  156.1. Elgar, Sir Edward William  3.2. Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans)  20.7; 30.2; 36.1; 128.6; 158.1. Eliot, Thomas Stearns  2.3; 8.4; 9.1; 12.2; 23.4; 32.1; 34.6; 40.3; 40.4; 48.3; 56.2; 64.3; 69.2; 73.4; 73.5; 87.3; 104.1; 106.2; 110.1; 110.2; 111.1; 113.1;

845 115.1; 115.4; 123.2; 124.3; 128.6; 130.1; 130.2; 131.1; 136.1; 137.3; 141.1; 144.2; 144.4; 146.2; 147.3; 149.1. Elizabeth I Tudor  7.1; 22.1; 34.1; 34.4; 34.5; 34.6; 35.4; 36.5; 38.1; 38.2; 39.2; 40.5; 41.1; 45.1; 47.3; 48.1; 48.2; 49.2; 54.2; 55.2; 58.2; 58.3; 59.1; 61.2; 61.3; 61.6; 66.1; 66.2; 68.1; 70.1; 71.2; 72.1; 78.2; 84.2; 85.1; 85.2; 86.1; 86.2; 87.2; 89.1; 90.1; 90.2; 92.1; 94.2; 94.3; 95.3; 111.1; 112.1; 116.4; 126.1; 128.3; 128.6; 129; 148.2; 151; 152.2; 152.4; 153.1; 153.2; 153.3; 157.3; 158.2; 160.1; 161.1. Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia  66.5; 110.2. Elliott, C.  25.2. Ellis-Fermor, U.  55.1; 124.1. Elton, O.  68.1. Elyot, Sir Thomas  39.4; 40.1; 40.2; 40.3–4; 40.5; 40.6; 42.3; 43.4; 44.1; 59.4; 55.3; 69.2; 71.2; 84.1; 84.3; 91.1; 115.3; 152.2. Emerson, Ralph Waldo  2.7. Empson, William  37.4; 99.1. Epictetus  103.2; 110.4. Erasmus of Rotterdam  23.1; 36.2; 38.1; 39.2; 39.3; 39.4; 85.2; 88; 157.3. Erastus, Thomas  35.3. Esau 88. Essex, Countess of (Frances Howard)  77.2; 132.2. Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux)  34.6; 66.2; 66.5; 74.1; 78.2; 79.1; 110.3; 132.2. Estienne, Henri  54.2. Ethelbert, King of Kent  3.3. Euripides 87.3. Eurydice  8.3; 25.2; 25.3. Evans, B. Ifor  2.2. Eve  5.2; 36.6; 60.1; 78.2; 80.1. Evesham, Epiphanius  38.2.

846 Faral, Edmond  9.1. Farmer, J. S.  85.2; 89.1. Fastolf, English dynasty  30.1. Faust, Georg  100.2. Faust, Johann  100.2. Fenton, George  36.6. Ferrabosco, Alfonso  67.2; 121. Ferrara, F.  34.6; 36.4; 155.1; 155.2; 155.4. Feuillerat, A. M.  51.2. Ficino, Marsilio  65.2; 71.2; 95.2; 110.4; 111.2. Field, Nathaniel  143.2. Field, P. J. C.  32.1; 32.3. Fielding, Henry  15.4; 157.3. Finn 8.6. Firbank, Ronald  21.4; 23.5; 109.1; 118.1. Fish, S. E.  23.1. Fisher, J. H.  13.1; 13.2. Fisher, John  35.2; 36.2; 39.1; 39.2. FitzGerald, Edward  43.1. Fitzgerald, Irish dynasty  7.3. Fitzgerald, Lady Elizabeth  43.3. Fitzroy, Henry, Duke of Richmond  43.2. Flaubert, Gustave  97.1; 144.1. Fletcher, Giles  50.1; 87.2. Fletcher, John  130.1; 131.1; 137–140; 141.1; 141.2; 143.2; 143.3; 144.2; 147.2; 148.2; 149.1; 149.3. Florio, John  36.6; 116.2; 118.2. Fludd, Robert  36.6. Foakes, R. A.  104.2. Ford, B.  25.1; 26.2; 93.1. Ford, John  128.2; 128.6; 135.2; 139.2; 139.3; 141.1; 143.2; 143.3; 144–146; 147.3; 147.4; 148.1; 150.2; 155.1; 156.2. Fornari, S.  59.2. Fortescue, Sir John  29.3. Foscolo, Ugo  111.1. Foucault, Michel  39.5; 86.3; 118.2. Fowler, A.  24.3; 59.2. Fowler, William  24.3; 25.2. Fowles, John  20.3.

Index of names Foxe, John  34.4. Francis I de’ Medici  133.1. Francis I, King of France  22.2; 43.1. Francis II, King of France  34.5. Francis of Valois, Duke d’Alençon and Anjou  113.1; 153.2. Fraunce, Abraham  57.1; 84.1. Freud, Sigmund  12.2; 92.3; 118.2; 144.5. Frobisher, Martin  34.6. Froissart, Jean  15.2; 29.1; 31.2. Frye, N.  59.2. Fust, Johann  100.2. Gager, William  87.3. Gairdner, J.  30.1. Galen of Pergamon  36.2. Galilei, Galileo  36.5; 37.3; 83.1. Ganymede  70.1; 154.3. Gardner, H.  75.1; 76.1; 77.1; 81.2. Gardner, W. H. 75.2. Garnier, Robert  87.3; 93.1. Gascoigne, George  41.1; 41.2; 45; 46; 48.3; 70.2; 84.1; 87.2. Gaskell, Elizabeth  158.1. Gasper, J.  128.6. Gaunt, John of  16.1; 17.2. Gaveston, Piers  7.3. Gawain  10.2; 24.2. Geckle, G. L.  104.2. Gentili, V.  49.1; 53.1; 54.2. Gentillet, Innocent  34.1. Geoffrey of Monmouth  3.3; 9.2; 87.3; 91.1. Giaccherini, E.  8.3. Gibbons, Orlando  38.2. Gilbert, J.  12.3. Gilbert, W. S.  100.5; 156.1. Gildas of Rhuys  4.2; 9.2. Giles, Peter  39.5. Giraldi Cinthio (or Cinzio), Giambattista  87.3; 155.3; 156.2. Glapthorne, Henry  112.3.

Index of names Glaucus 154.2. Glendower, Owen  7.3. Godwin, Earl of Wessex  7.2. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  53.1; 54.4; 95.2; 100.1; 100.4; 100.5; 100.6; 101.3; 120.1; 147.3; Golding, Arthur  36.6. Goldoni, Carlo  112.4. Goldsmith, Oliver  128.1. Gollancz, I.  12.1; 12.2. Gombrich, E.  37.2; 37.3. Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich  100.5; 115.4. Gondomar, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña  136.1. Goodyere, Sir Henry  79.1. Googe, Barnaby  46. Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall  9.2. Gosse, Edmund  154.2. Gosson, Stephen  54.2; 86.3; 154.2. Gower, John  2.1; 8.2; 10.1; 10.2; 11.2; 11.4; 13; 14.2; 15.1; 16.1; 17.3; 20.3; 21.2; 21.4; 22.2; 23.5; 23.6; 31.2; 43.4; 155.4. Graves, Robert  23.2; 23.4; 23.6; 57.2; 116.5. Gray, Thomas  20.7; 21.3; 21.4. Grazzini, Anton Francesco, aka il Lasca 87.2. Green, Peter  23.1; 23.4. Greenaway, Peter  144.4. Greenblatt, S.  37.4; 56.3; 86.3. Greene, Robert  7.1; 86.3; 151; 154.2; 155–156; 157.1; 157.2; 158.1; 158.2; 159.2. Gregory, Lady Augusta  8.6. Gregory, William  29.1. Gregory II, the Great, Pope  3.3; 3.4; 4.1. Gregory Smith, G.  115.2. Grenville, Sir Richard  66.4. Greville, Fulke (Lord Brooke)  48.1; 48.3; 53.2; 55; 67.2; 69.1; 69.3; 87.3. Grey, Lady Jane  34.4. Grey de Wilton, Lord Arthur  59.1; 66.2; 69.1.

847 Grierson, H. J. C.  25.1; 73.4; 73.4; 75.1; 75.2; 76.1; 77.1; 81.2; 147.2. Griffin, Bartholomew  68.2. Griffith, R. R.  32.1; 32.3. Griffiths, Trevor  123.2. Grimald (or Grimoald), Nicholas  41.2; 87.2. Grocyn, William  36.2; 39.1. Grosart, A. B.  55.1; 70.2; 70.3; 71.2. Grossetête, Robert  7.1. Guarini, Giovanni Battista  51.1; 67.2; 69.1; 70.2; 87.2; 138.3. Guazzo, Stefano  36.6. Guest, Lady Charlotte  9.1. Guevara, Antonio  152.1. Guibbory, A.  73.4. Guicciardini, Francesco  36.6; 143.1. Guinevere  8.3; 9.1; 9.2; 12.5; 32.3; 32.5; 33.2. Guise, Henry, Count  99.2. Guittone d’Arezzo  41.1; 152.1. Gunby, D. C.  124.1; 126.2. Gunn, Thom  55.3. Guthlac of Crowland  5.4. Guthrie, Tyrone  26.2. Hadfield, A.  56.1; 56.3; 59.5; 65.2. Hadrian 3.2. Hakluyt, Richard  161.2. Hall, Edward  35.4; 71.1. Hall, Joseph  42.5; 71.1; 72.1; 78.1; 80.2; 103.1; 103.2; 112.1; 122.2; 129; 154.2. Hallam, Arthur  57.4. Hamilton, A. C.  50.1; 52.2; 53.2; 59.2. Hannah, J.  66.5. Hannibal 44.2. Hardy, Thomas  18.1; 19.3; 28.1; 144.1. Harman, Thomas  155.4. Harold Godwinson  3.4; 7.2. Harp, R.  115.2; 115.4; 120.2. Harrison, William  34.6; 161.1; 161.3.

848 Harvey, Gabriel  56.3; 57.1; 57.2; 59.1; 67.1; 70.3; 155.1; 157.1; 159.2. Harvey, Richard  157.1; 159.2. Haslewood, J.  44.1. Haughton, William  87.2. Hauser, Arnold  37.4. Hawes, Stephen  11.1; 21.4; 25.1; 28.4; 31.2; 32.5. Hawkins, John  34.6. Hawthorne, Nathaniel  16.1. Hayward, J.  73.1; 75.3. Hazlitt, William  21.1; 37.1; 48.3; 56.1; 56.2; 104.1. Heaney, Séamus  2.3; 6.1. Hebel, J. W.  68.1. Heine, Heinrich  100.2; 100.4. Hemingway, Ernest  32.3; 83.2. Hengist  3.3; 9.2. Heninger, S. K.  54.2; 59.5. Henrietta Maria of Bourbon  143.1; 144.3; 149.3; 149.6. Henry I, King of England  158.1; 158.2. Henry II, King of England  7.3; 69.3; 95.1. Henry III, King of England  7.1; 7.3; 99.2. Henry IV, King of England  13.1; 21.2; 22.1; 30.1; 32.1. Henry IV, King of France  67.1. Henry V, King of England  7.1; 7.3; 7.4; 21.2; 21.3; 22.1; 34.2; 39.2; 40.3; 87.3; 148.2. Henry VI, King of England  7.1; 7.4; 21.4; 22.1; 29.2; 29.3; 30.1; 43.2. Henry VII, King of England  2.2; 7.3; 7.4; 21.1; 21.4; 22.1; 25.1; 28.4; 34.1; 34.2; 34.4; 34.5; 36.4; 38.2; 39.1; 39.2; 42.3; 146.2. Henry VIII, King of England  7.1; 7.3; 22.1; 22.2; 23.1; 27.2; 30.1; 34.1; 34.2; 34.3; 34.4; 34.5; 34.6; 35.1; 35.2; 35.3; 35.4; 36.6; 38.1; 38.2; 39.1; 39.4; 40.3; 40.5; 42.2; 42.3; 43.2; 43.3; 43.4;

Index of names 48.1; 85.1; 85.2; 89.1; 89.2; 157.1; 157.3; 158.1; 158.2. Henry (or Harry) the Blind (or the Minstrel) 24.2. Henry Frederic Stuart, Prince of Wales  80.3; 110.3; 111.3; 124.2. Henry of Huntingdon  8.6. Henry Stuart, Lord Denley  34.5. Henryson, Robert  12.1; 25.1; 25.2–3; 41.2; 42.5. Henslowe, Philip  68.2; 104.1; 116.1; 128.3; 147.2. Heraclitus 83.3. Herbert, George  50.3; 72.1; 73.3; 79.1; 81.2; 81.4; 84.3; 141.1. Herbert, Lady Magdalen  77.1. Hercules  6.2; 52.1; 61.4; 102.2; 121. Herod  12.4; 28.2. Herodotus 91.1. Herrick, Robert  8.5; 25.5; 67.2. Hesiod  110.1; 111.1. Hew of Eglintoun, Sir  24.2. Heywood, John  74.1; 85.2; 89.2. Heywood, Thomas  41.2; 86.3; 115.1; 123.2; 123.5; 130.1; 141.1; 147–148; 149.1; 149.2; 153.1; 153.3. Hibbard, G. R.  157.2. Higden, Ranulf  28.3. Hilda, abbess of Whitby  4.1. Hill, Geoffrey  6.2; 128.6. Hilliard, Nicholas  38.1. Hilton, Walter  8.4. Hitchcock, Alfred  147.3. Hoby, Sir Thomas  36.6. Hoccleve (or Occleve), Thomas  21.2; 21.3; 23.2; 23.6; 25.1; 39.4; 44.2; 64.3; 73.2. Hodgkins, John  159.2. Hogarth, William  14.4. Holbein, Hans, the Younger  38.1; 40.3; 42.3.

849

Index of names Holinshed, Raphael  34.6; 47.1; 92.1; 161.3. Holland, Richard  24.2. Homer  8.3; 12.4; 13.3; 15.2; 17.3; 18.1; 20.3; 59.5; 60.2; 66.3; 110.1; 110.2; 110.3; 111.3; 155.1; 155.2; 157.4. Hooker, John  161.3. Hooker, Richard  36.6; 159.1; 160. Hopkins, Gerard Manley  2.3; 4.1; 5.4; 7.1; 8.4; 14.3; 15.3; 21.2; 23.2; 23.3; 23.4; 29.2; 42.2; 42.5; 47.1; 47.2; 49.3; 50.3; 56.1; 56.2; 57.2; 62.1; 62.2; 65.1; 65.3; 65.4; 67.1; 71.2; 74.2; 75.2; 76.3; 76.4; 80.1; 81.2; 81.3; 81.4; 83.4; 84.3; 102.2; 111.1; 113.1; 122.1; 141.3; 158.2. Horace  22.1; 68.3; 115.3; 116.5. Horatius Cocles  148.3. Horne, D. H.  94.1. Horsa 3.3. Hough, G.  59.2. Housman, A. E.  70.1. Howard, English family  43.2. Howell, Thomas  46. Huchoun of the Awle Ryale  24.2. Huebert, Ronald  141.1; 141.3; 144.4. Hugh of Lincoln  19.4; 20.6. Hughes, Ted  2.3. Huntingdon, Countess of (Elizabeth Stanley) 79.3. Huxley, Aldous  55.3; 115.2; 116.2. Huysmans, Joris-Karl  73.1; 118.4. Hylton, Walter  29.1. Hyppolita 20.3. Ibsen, Henrik  105.2; 124.3; 144.1; 147.3. Icarus 100.5. Igerne 9.2. Innocent III, Pope  7.3; 15.2. Innocenti, L.  86.2. Isabella of Angoulême  7.4.

Isabella de’ Medici  125.2; 126.1. Iseult 8.3. Isis  61.5; 63.2. Ives, S.  149.1. Jack, I.  24.3. Jacob  81.4; 88. Jacobus de Voragine  31.2. James I Stuart, King of England  24.3; 34.5; 34.6; 35.3; 38.1; 38.2; 45.1; 47.3; 55.1; 66.2; 66.3; 66.5; 67.1; 68.1; 69.1; 71.2; 72.3; 74.2; 77.2; 80.3; 85.1; 86.1; 86.2; 87.2; 104.2; 107.1; 112.3; 115.1; 120.1; 121; 123.1; 128.6; 129; 135.1; 141.1; 145.1; 151; 160.2. James I, King of Scotland  18.1; 24.3; 27.2; 32.1; 43.1. James II, King of Scotland  24.2.; 25.4; 26.2; 146.2; 156.2. James V, King of Scotland  26.2; 27.2. James VI, King of Scotland see James I Stuart, King of England. Jarman, Derek  99.1. Jason  6.2; 9.2; 21.2. Jean-Paul Richter  100.5. Jeffere, John  87.2. Jesus Christ  5.3; 5.4; 7.4; 8.4; 12.2; 12.3; 14.1; 14.3; 14.5; 15.2; 20.4; 21.3; 27.2; 28.2; 28.3; 44.1; 47.2; 60.1; 65.1; 65.2; 65.3; 76.4; 81.1; 81.4; 81.5; 82; 83.3; 89.1; 97.1; 97.2; 98.1; 100.3; 101.3; 136.2; 141.3; 157.2. Joan of Arc  7.1; 8.4; 29.2; 97.1. Jocelin of Brakelond  8.6. Jodelle, Étienne  87.3. John, King of England  7.1; 7.3; 87.3; 89.2. John of Salisbury  8.6. Johnson, Samuel  23.4; 40.6; 71.1; 73.3; 75.2; 156.1. Jonas  12.1; 154.2. Jones, G.  9.1.

850 Jones, Inigo  38.1; 67.2; 110.2; 115.1; 116.1; 121; 149.1. Jones, J.  72.1. Jones, T.  9.1. Jones-Davies, M. T.  128.6. Jonson, Ben  23.6; 36.6; 47.2; 56.2; 67.2; 69.2; 71.1; 72.1; 73.3; 75.1; 80.1; 85.1; 86.3; 87.2; 87.3; 93.1; 94.2; 95.2; 103.1; 104.1; 104.2; 106.1; 107.1; 110.2; 115–122; 124.1; 124.2; 127.1; 127.2; 127.3; 128.1; 128.3; 128.4; 128.5; 129; 130.1; 130.2; 131.1; 131.2; 132.2; 133.1; 137.1; 137.3; 138.1; 138.2; 138.3; 139.2; 139.3; 141.1; 141.2; 142; 143.2; 144.1; 144.3; 147.2; 148.1; 149.4; 149.6; 152.1; 153.1; 157.1; 158.2. Joseph of Arimathea  9.1. Jove  58.2; 60.4; 62.2; 64.2; 85.2; 95.2; 102.2. Joyce, James  2.6; 3.3; 4.1; 6.1; 7.1; 8.4; 11.4; 13.1; 14.2; 14.3; 17.4; 19.1; 19.4; 20.4; 20.5; 23.2; 23.4; 23.5; 32.1; 39.2; 39.5; 51.3; 53.1; 56.2; 59.5; 61.2; 64.3; 66.5; 67.1; 68.3; 73.4; 75.2; 78.1; 104.1; 110.1; 119.4; 127.3; 128.1; 133.1; 157.1; 157.3; 157.4. Jude  2.2; 12.4. Juno  96.1; 96.2. Jusserand, J. J.  14.2. Justinian 7.1. Juvenal  23.1; 72.3. Kafka, Franz  11.4. Kean, P. M.  15.1; 15.3; 19.1; 20.1; 20.5. Keats, John  12.5; 17.2; 21.1; 25.4; 42.2; 48.3; 56.1; 110.1. Keble, John  160.1. Kemp, R.  26.2. Kepler, John  36.5; 37.3. Kermode, F.  56.3; 61.5; 111.2. Kett, Robert  34.1; 40.1.

Index of names Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye  124.1. Kingsley, Charles  124.3; 141.3; 157.1; 158.1. Kinloch, T. F.  72.1. Kipling, Rudyard  2.3. Kirke, Edward  57.2. Klinger, Max  100.2; 100.4. Knightley, Sir Richard  159.2. Knights, L. C.  116.4. Knox, John  35.2. Kocher, P. H.  97.1. Kolve, V. A.  19.3. Kyd, Thomas  87.3; 93; 95.3; 105.3; 116.2; 133.2; 145.3; 149.3; 154.1; 157.3. Lacan, Jacques  86.3. Lactantius, Lucius Caecilius Firmianus  5.4. Lamb, Charles  48.3; 55.2; 56.2; 69.2; 70.2; 95.2; 104.1; 105.2; 110.2; 123.1; 123.2; 124.1; 124.3; 128.1; 130.1; 137.2; 144.1; 144.2; 144.4; 147.1; 147.3; 157.1; 157.4. Lancaster, English dynasty  7.4; 16.1; 32.1. Lancelot  8.3; 9.1; 32.3; 32.5; 33.2; 33.4. Lanfranc of Pavia  7.2. Langdon, John  89.2. Langland, William  2.1; 8.2; 10.1; 10.2; 11.2; 13.3; 14; 15.1; 15.4; 16.1; 19.5; 20.2; 20.7; 21.2; 21.4; 22.2; 23.3; 23.6; 25.2; 26.1; 26.2; 44.2; 57.4; 103.1; 119.4; 157.2. Languet, Hubert  48.2; 48.3. Lanyer, Aemilia  36.6. Laocoön 25.1. Latham, Agnes  66.3. Latimer, Hugh  35.4; 89.2. Latini, Brunetto  11.1; 13.2. Laud, William  72.3; 150.2; 159.2. Lausberg, Heinrich  84.3. Lawes, W.  149.1. Lawlis, M.  158.1.

Index of names Lawlor, J.  14.1; 14.3; 14.5. Lawrence, D. H.  15.4; 73.4; 161.1. Lawrence, T. E., aka Lawrence of Arabia  32.1; 161.1. Layamon (Laзamon) 8.1; 9.1; 9.2. Lazarus 4.1. Leavis, F. R.  15.4. Leech, C.  124.1; 144.2. Lefèvre (or le Fevre), Raoul  31.2. Legge, Thomas  87.3. Legouis, E.  2.2; 13.2. Leicester, Earl of see Dudley, Robert. Leishman, J. B.  73.4; 76.1; 79.1. Leland, John  35.4; 161.1. Lenau, Nikolaus  100.4; 100.5. Leopardi, Giacomo  48.3. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  100.4. Lettou, John  31.2. Levin, H.  99.1. Lewis, C. S.  1; 6.3; 8.3; 13.1; 14.2; 18.1; 18.2; 21.4; 24.3; 25.1; 25.4; 26.2; 31.1; 32.1; 32.3; 32.5; 34.6; 37.3; 39.2; 39.3; 42.1; 43.1; 45.1; 45.2; 51.3; 53.1; 56.1; 56.3; 57.1; 59.1; 59.2; 59.4; 65.2; 66.3; 68.2; 69.2; 73.3; 73.4; 73.5; 75.2; 76.1; 84.1; 111.3; 154.3; 155.2; 160.1. Liburnio, Niccolò  43.1. Lillo, George  92.1. Linacre, Thomas  36.2; 39.1; 40.3. Liszt, Franz  73.1. Lodge, Thomas  21.2; 50.1; 71.1; 86.3; 87.3; 151; 154. Lombardo, A.  23.6; 144.4. Longinus 54.2. Longland, John  35.4. Looney, W. M.  48.2. Lorenzo de’ Medici  150.1. Lorrain, Claude Gellée (or Claude)  51.3. Lotman, Yuri  36.6; 37.4; 100.1. Lowes, J. L.  15.2; 15.4; 16.1.

851 Lucanus, Marcus Annaeus  15.2; 114.2. Lucian of Samosata  39.2; 39.4. Lucifer see Satan. Lucretius  60.3; 81.3; 95.3; 111.1. Lucy, Sir Thomas  35.2. Lupton, Thomas  85.2. Luther, Martin  23.1; 35.1; 35.2; 35.3; 36.2; 39.1; 47.2; 83.1; 89.1; 100.2; 101.2; 159.1. Lydgate, John  8.3; 16.1; 20.3; 21.3; 21.4; 23.6; 25.1; 30.2; 44.1. Lyly, John  36.2; 86.1; 152–153; 154.3. Lyly, William  36.2; 39.2; 40.1; 51.3; 87.3; 157.2; 159.2. Lyndsay, or Lindsay, David  24.3; 25.1; 25.4; 26; 28.4; 85.1; 89.2. Macaulay, George Campbell  13.2; 54.2. McCarthy, T.  32.1. Macchia, G.  100.5. McDiarmid, M.  26.2. McDonald, R.  115.2. McGinn, D.  157.1. Machaut, Guillaume de  15.2. Machiavelli, Niccolò  34.1; 37.3; 39.4; 40.4; 48.2; 55.3; 66.4; 75.2; 83.1; 91.1; 95.4; 98.1; 132.2; 150.1. McKerrow, R. B.  157.1. MacNeice, Frederick Louis  22.2. Macpherson, James  8.6; 30.1. Macrobius, Ambrogius Theodosius  15.2. Maeterlinck, Maurice  144.2. Mahomet  14.2; 14.5; 25.5; 97.2. Malden, H. E.  30.1. Maley, W.  59.5. Mallarmé, Stéphane  42.5. Mallock, William Hurrell  152.3. Malory, Sir Thomas  11.1; 21.1; 21.4; 31.1; 31.2; 32–33; 40.1; 43.1; 48.3; 53.2; 59.1; 84.2; 87.3; 152.4. Mamoli Zorzi, R.  100.5.

852 Mandeville, Sir John  8.6. Manly, M.  14.1. Mann, F. O.  158.1. Mann, Thomas  100.2. Mannyng of Brunne, Robert  8.4. Manuzio, Aldo  54.2. Manzoni, Alessandro  73.1. Map, Walter  9.1. Marcus Aurelius  29.1. Marenco, F.  14.3; 18.1; 37.1; 42.1; 118.2; 147.1. Margaret of Anjou  7.4. Margaret of Burgundy (or of York)  31.2. Margaret Tudor  34.5; 146.2. Maria Anna of Habsburg, aka Maria Anna of Austria  141.5. Marino, Giambattista  41.1; 60.2; 73.5. Marius, Gaius  154.2. Marlowe, Christopher  7.3; 23.6; 34.4; 66.3; 68.2; 71.2; 84.2; 87.1; 87.3; 93.1; 94.1; 94.2; 94.3; 95–102; 105.1; 110.1; 110.2; 111.3; 115.2; 115.3; 115.4; 117.1; 117.2; 118.3; 119.4; 120.1; 123.2; 124.1; 124.2; 126.2; 127.2; 128.3; 141.1; 146.1; 147.3; 150.1; 153.1; 154.2; 155.1; 156.1; 157.1; 157.2; 157.3. Marprelate, Martin  157.1; 159; 159.2; 160.1. Mars  11.4; 20.3; 60.3. Marston, John  72.1; 74.1; 78.1; 87.2; 95.1; 103–109; 110.2; 110.3; 112.1; 116.1; 116.2; 116.5; 122.2; 124.2; 125.1; 128.1; 128.2; 129; 131.3; 154.2. Martial, or Marcus Valerius Martialis  43.5; 122.2. Marucci, Franco  19.5; 84.3; 100.5; 157.4. Marvell, Andrew  73.3. Marx, Karl  37.2; 37.4; 60.2; 95.3; 118.2. Mary I Tudor  34.3; 34.4; 34.5; 35.2; 35.4; 36.5; 40.1; 41.2; 43.2; 43.3; 44.1; 85.2; 85.2; 88; 90.3; 95.3; 128.6; 160.1. Mary of Guise  34.4.

Index of names Mary Magdalene  47.2; 47.3; 76.4; 81.3. Mary Stuart  34.1; 34.3; 34.4; 34.5; 61.6; 69.1; 153.1. Mary the Virgin  5.3; 12.2; 12.3; 17.1; 21.3; 28.2; 47.2; 47.3; 61.5; 65.4; 81.4. Massinger, Philip  128.6; 137.1; 141–143; 147.2; 147.3; 147.4; 148.1; 148.2; 149.7; 155.2; 158.2. Maturin, Charles  100.5. Maupassant, Guy de  107.2. Mead, W. E.  21.4. Medwall, Henry  28.4. Melanchthon, Philip  100.2. Melchiori, G.  73.5. Meldrum, William  26.2. Mephistopheles see Satan. Mercury  20.3; 58.2; 96.2; 101.3; 102.2; 116.4. Meres, Francis  70.1; 84.1; 104.1; 116.1. Merlin  9.1; 9.2; 32.5; 33.2; 60.3. Metaphrastes, Simon  110.1. Metastasio, Pietro  51.3. Mexía, Pedro  97.1. Michael of Northgate  8.4. Michelet, Jules  37.4. Midas  13.3; 25.5; 153.1. Middleton, Thomas  87.2; 92.3; 123.1; 123.2; 128.4; 128.6; 129–136; 139.2; 141.1; 141.3; 143.1; 144.1; 144.2; 144.3; 145.1; 145.2; 146.1; 147.3; 148.1; 149.4; 150.2. Miglior, G.  40.6. Milton, John  2.3; 5.2; 10.1; 14.3; 23.4; 32.1; 36.2; 36.6; 54.2; 56.1; 59.4; 65.3; 66.5; 73.4; 78.2; 94.2; 101.1; 121. Minos 17.3. Minot, Laurence  8.1. Minturno, Antonio  54.2. Mittner, L.  16.1; 100.2; 100.6; 101.3. Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)  100.5. Monmouth, Geoffrey of  8.1; 9.1.

Index of names Montaigne, Michel de  36.6; 42.2; 83.1; 103.2; 124.1 Montemayor, Jorge de  47.3. Monteverdi, Claudio  38.2; 51.1; 67.2. Montgomerie, Alexander  25.2. Mordred  9.1; 9.2. More, Ann  74.1. More, Thomas  28.4; 34.2; 34.3; 35.2; 35.3; 36.2; 36.5; 38.1; 39; 40.1; 40.2; 40.3; 40.5; 40.6; 48.1; 59.4; 66.2; 66.4; 74.1; 85.2; 157.3. Morley, Thomas  38.2; 67.2; 121. Morpheus 17.1. Morris, B.  124.1; 124.2; 126.2. Morris, Richard  12.2; 73.5; 75.2; 76.4; 81.3. Morris, William  6.1; 6.3; 17.5; 34.6; 56.1; 102.2; 147.4. Morton, John  39.1. Morton, Thomas  73.2; 74.2. Moses  89.1; 100.3. Mountfort, W.  100.4. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  69.1; 109.1. Mucius Scaevola  148.3. Muir, Edwin  130.1. Muir, K.  42.3. Mulcaster, Richard  57.1. Mullini, R.  86.2. Mulryne, J. R.  124.2. Munday, Anthony  87.2. Murdoch, Iris  12.5. Musaeus 110.1. Mussato, Albertino  87.3. Myers, A. R.  7.2. Nashe, Thomas  32.3; 39.3; 40.1; 43.3; 47.2; 86.3; 93.1; 96.1; 116.1; 151; 155.1; 156.1; 157; 158.1; 159.2. Nelson, W.  59.2; 65.2. Neptune  102.2; 153.2; 153.3. Nero 11.4. Nevil, William  21.4.

853 Newhauser, R.  12.4. Newman, John Henry  141.3; 157.1; 159.2. Newton, Isaac  36.5. Nicholas of Cusa  95.2. Nicholas of Guildford  8.5. Nicholl, C.  157.2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm  95.3. Nisbet, Murdoch  35.4. Noah  28.2; 28.3. Norfolk, Duke (Thomas Howard)  34.6. North, Thomas  36.6. Norton, Thomas  21.4; 45.1; 90.1. Nott, George Frederick  43.3. Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg)  111.1. Nunn, Trevor  123.2. Nürnberger, W.  100.4. O’Donoghue, B.  21.2. O’Grady, John  8.6. O’Neill, Eugene  144.1. Ockham or Occam, William  37.3; 7.1. Odin 2.5. Offa of Mercia  6.2. Oisin 8.6. Oldcastle, Sir John  21.2. Oliphant, Margaret  30.2. Oliver, Isaac  73.2. Olivero, F.  12.3. Orm 8.4. Orosius, Paulus  13.2. Orpheus  8.3; 25.2; 25.3; 64.2; 100.3; 155.4. Orsini, N.  55.3. Orsini, Paolo Giordano  125.2. Orton, Joe  123.2. Orwell, George  15.4; 19.4; 23.4; 66.4; 123.2; 124.4; 149.1. Osborne, John  144.1. Osiris 61.5. Overbury, Sir Thomas  67.1; 124.2; 132.2; 135.1.

854 Ovidius, Publius Naso  13.3; 15.2; 17.2; 17.5; 21.2; 31.2; 36.6; 45.1; 60.3; 92.3; 103.1; 111.2; 112.1; 116.5; 155.2; 157.2. Padgett Hamilton, M.  20.6. Pagnini, M.  73.5; 84.3; 87.3; 113.1; 113.3. Painter, William  36.6; 126.1. Palgrave, Francis Turner  66.5; 73.3. Pandora 153.3. Parfitt, G.  115.4; 119.4; 122.1. Paris, Matthew  8.6. Paris of Troy  94.2. Pasolini, Pier Paolo  19.5; 20.5; 83.1. Pasqualigo, Luigi  87.2. Paston, English family  30; 32.3; 40.6. Pater, Walter  2.2; 12.2; 23.5; 25.3; 25.4; 32.3; 37.2; 37.4; 42.2; 100.3; 100.5; 123.2; 152.1. Patrizi, Francesco  39.4. Patroni Griffi, Giuseppe  144.4. Peacock, Thomas Love  37.1; 152.3. Pearsall, D.  13.1; 13.3; 16.2. Pecock, Reginald  29.2; 29.3; 35.1; 40.1. Peele, George  86.1; 87.3; 94; 128.3; 128.6; 155.1. Pelagius 3.3. Penda of Mercia  3.3. Penelope 155.3. Pennaforte, Raimondo di  10.2. Penry, John  159.2. Peraldo, Guglielmo  10.2. Percy, Thomas  27.2. Perondino, Pietro  97, 1. Perrault, Charles  32.3. Petrarca, Francesco  8.6; 15.1; 16.1; 19.4; 20.6; 22.1; 24.3; 25.2; 36.5; 36.6; 40.1; 41.1; 42.1; 42.2; 43.1; 43.4; 44.2; 49.3; 50.1; 50.2; 50.3; 57.1; 57.2; 59.2; 63.1; 66.3; 69.1; 75.2; 76.1; 79.3; 122.1; 146.1; 154.2. Petronius 112.4.

Index of names Pettie, George  36.6; 152.1. Phaer, Thomas  25.1. Philip II, King of Spain  34.4; 36.5; 90.3; 141.1; 153.1. Philippa of Hainaut  7.4. Piccolomini, Alessandro  112.4. Pickerying, John  87.3. Piero di Cosimo  124.2. Pilatus, Pontius  28.2; 157.3. Pindar  27.2; 122.1. Pinter, Harold  109.1. Pirandello, Luigi  120.2; 131.2; 138.2; 139.2. Pisanello 20.2. Pius II, Pope  22.2. Pius V, Pope  34.6; 35.2. Plantagenets (English dynasty)  7.4; 9.2. Platen, August  100.4. Plato  36.5; 39.4; 40.2; 50.3; 54.2; 59.1; 65.2; 65.4; 68.2; 76.1; 111.2. Plautus, Titus Maccius  87.1; 87.2; 88; 100.2; 116.1; 116.2; 147.4; 153.1. Pliny the Elder  152.1. Plutarch  36.6; 42.3; 86.1; 110.4; 114.2. Pluto 20.3. Pole, Reginald  35.2. Politian (Angelo Ambrogini)  17.5; 25.2; 25.5; 94.2. Polo, Marco  8.6. Polydore Vergil  34.1; 89.2. Polyphemus 6.2. Pompey 114.2. Pontano, Giovanni  39.4. Pope, Alexander  15.4; 23.4; 68.3; 78.1; 79.3; 90.2; 110.1; 115.3. Porter, Henry  87.2. Porter, William  38.2. Porzio, D.  74.2. Pound, Ezra  2.3; 25.1. Poussin, Nicolas  51.3. Powell, N.  55.3. Powys, John Cowper  128.6. Powys, Theodore Francis  128.6.

Index of names Praz, M.  1; 2.3; 2.6; 6.1; 8.2; 13.2; 14.3; 15.1; 15.2; 15.4; 16.2; 18.1; 19.1; 20.2; 20.3; 21.4; 24.3; 25.2; 26.2; 27.2; 32.3; 37.2; 41.1; 42.1; 45.1; 50.1; 51.3; 53.1; 53.2; 55.3; 56.2; 56.3; 59.2; 59.5; 65.2; 66.4; 69.1; 70.3; 73.3; 73.4; 73.5; 74.1; 76.1; 79.1; 81.4; 83.1; 86.3; 93.1; 95.2; 97.1; 102.2; 110.2; 112.1; 115.2; 118.2; 124.1; 124.2; 130.1; 144.4; 147.2; 147.3; 152.1; 154.3. Preston, Thomas  91. Priam  18.2; 96.1. Priapus 17.4. Prior, Matthew  27.2. Procopius of Caesarea  140.1. Prometheus  6.2; 68.2; 100.5. Propertius, Sextus  67.2. Proserpine 60.2. Prouty, C. T.  94.1. Prynne, William  86.3; 149.1. Purchas, Samuel  161.2. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich  100.5.  Puttenham, George  10.1; 23.4; 36.6; 41.1; 48.3; 84. Pygmalion  11.4; 69.2; 103.2. Pynson, Richard  31.2. Pythagoras 100.3. Quiller-Couch, A.  73.3. Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus)  36.5; 115.3. Rabelais, François  78.1; 157.1. Racine, Jean  144.4; 144.5. Raphael 37.2. Rajna, Pio  18.1. Ralegh (or Raleigh), Sir Walter  34.5; 34.6; 55.1; 55.2; 58.3; 59.1; 66.1–4; 66.5; 69.1; 93.1; 95.3; 111.3; 113.2; 116.4. Ramsay, Allan  24.3. Randolph, Thomas  87.2; 120.3. Rastell, John  85.2; 87.2.

855 Rastell, William  85.2. Read, Herbert  12.5. Rebhorn, W. A.  84.1. Rede, W. L.  100.5. Redford, John  85.2. Redpath, T.  76.1. Rees, J.  55.3; 110.4; 112.1; 114.2. Reisch, Gregorius  21.4. Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn) 20.2. Rhys, Ernest  32.1. Rich, Lord Robert  50.1; 52.1. Richard, Duke of York  7.4. Richard I, King of England  7.1; 7.2;. Richard II, King of England  7.4; 10.1; 12.3; 13.1; 13.2; 14.1; 16.1; 22.1; 69.1. Richard III, King of England  7.1; 7.4; 21.4; 39.2; 39.3. Richardson, Samuel  30.2; 53.2; 147.3; 155.2. Ridolfi, Roberto  34.6. Riggs, D.  97.1; 101.1. Rimbaud, Arthur  48.3. Ripley, George  21.4. Rizzio (or Riccio), Davide  34.5. Robert I, King of Scotland  24.2. Robert of Gloucester  9.1. Robin Hood  8.3; 27.2; 28.1; 36.6; 61.8; 115.3. Robortello, Francesco  54.2. Robynson, Ralph  39.2. Roet, Philippa  16.1. Roger of Wendover  8.6. Rojas, Fernando see De Rojas. Rolle, Richard  8.4. Rollo (or Hrolf )  7.2. Ronsard, Pierre  25.2; 50.1. Rosati, S.  73.2; 73.5. Rossetti, Christina  49.3. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  11.1; 12.3; 32.1; 68.2. Rossi, S.  23.6. Rossini, Gioacchino  112.2. Rousseau, Henry, Le Douanier  16.1. Rowley, Samuel  101.1; 128.6.

856 Rowley, William  131.1; 134.1; 135.1; 135.2; 137.1; 141.1. Rowse, A. L.  8.3. Roydon, Matthew  110.4. Rudick, Robert  66.3. Ruskin, John  2.2; 13.1; 15.4; 19.5; 23.5; 80.1. Russell, Bertrand  3.3; 7.1; 35.3. Russell, Lucy, Countess of Bedford  76.4; 79.3; 80.3. Ryan, L. V.  40.6. Sabellicus, Georgius  100.2. Sackville, Thomas  11.3; 44.2; 46; 90.1; 90.3. St Augustine of Canterbury  2.4; 3.3; 4.1. St Augustine of Hippo  25.1; 29.3; 35.3; 73.1; 74.2. St Bartholomew  48.2. St Bonaventure  15.1. St Brendan  8.3. St Catherine  8.4. St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne  4.1. St Dominic  14.1. St Dorothea  128.6; 141.2; 141.3; 141.4. St Erkenwald  12.1. St Francis of Assisi  8.4; 14.1; 25.5; 47.3; 73.1. St George  6.1; 15.4; 22.2; 36.6; 60.1. St Godrich  8.2. St Helena  5.3; 5.4. St Hugo  158.2. St Ignatius of Loyola  40.3; 80.2; 81.2; 81.3; 136.2. St Jerome  5.4. St John the Baptist  73.2; 87.2; 89.1; 100.3. St John the Evangelist  12.2; 74.2. St Joseph  5.3. St Julian of Norwich  5.2; 8.4; 14.4. St Luke  157.2. St Margaret, Queen of Scotland  25.1; 25.4. St Matthew  5.3; 12.2; 28.2. St Patrick  3.3; 8.6.

Index of names St Paul  20.4; 36.2; 47.3; 73.1; 73.2; 74.2. St Peter  7.3; 47.2; 47.3; 61.3. St Thomas  7.1. St Winefred (or Winifred)  4.1; 47.1; 158.2. Saintsbury, G.  1; 12.1; 45.2; 84.1; 84.3; 152.1. Sa lisbur y, Countess (Catherine Howard) 79.3. Sallustius 22.2. Samson  12.5; 74.2. Sanna, L.  138.2. Sannazzaro (or Sannazaro), Jacopo  51.1; 145.3. Sappho 153.2. Sardanapalus 43.4. Sargeaunt, M. J.  144.4; 145.1. Sartre, Jean-Paul  144.1. Satan  2.3; 5.2; 5.4; 12.5; 14.3; 19.5; 20.7; 50.3; 59.3; 60.2; 61.5; 65.3; 81.3; 81.4; 83.1; 100.2; 100.3; 100.4; 101.1; 101.2; 101.3; 157.2. Saturn  20.3; 95.2; 102.2; 120.1. Savonarola, Girolamo  36.2; 112.3; 150.1. Scaligero (or della Scala), Giulio Cesare  54.2. Scapula, Johannes  110.1. Scattergood, J.  23.5. Schiller, Friedrich  15.4. Schirmer, W. F.  21.3. Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich  37.1. Schmidt, A. V. C.  14.2. Schulte, E.  23.1; 23.4; 23.6. Schwob, Marcel  123.2. Scipio Africanus  17.4. Scott, Alexander  25.2. Scott, Walter  7.4; 21.4; 27.2; 37.1. Scott-Kilvert, I.  127.3. Scotus, John Duns  7.1; 23.4; 47.1. Scotus, John Eriugena  3.3; 7.1. Scyldings of Denmark  6.1; 6.2. Sebastian I de Aviz  141.1. Sejanus, Lucius Aelius  117.1; 117.2.

Index of names Seneca, Lucius Annaeus  36.6; 55.2; 72.1; 86.1; 87.1; 87.3; 90.2; 90.3; 93.1; 93.2; 97.2; 103.2; 109.2; 110.4; 113.3; 117.1; 144.2; 154.1. Sensabaugh, G. F.  144.3. Serafino Aquilano  42.2; 49.3; 152.1. Sercambi, Giovanni  15.1. Serpieri, A.  73.5; 75.1; 75.3; 76.1; 76.4; 124.1; 124.3; 124.4. Seymour, Lady Jane  43.2. Shakespeare, William  1; 3.3; 7.1; 7.3; 7.4; 8.3; 8.6; 9.1; 9.1; 13.2; 15.1; 15.3; 15.4; 17.2; 18.1; 18.2; 20.3; 20.4; 20.6; 21.4; 23.3; 23.6; 24.2; 25.2; 25.3; 28.2; 28.3; 28.4; 34.4; 35.2; 37.1; 38.2; 39.1; 40.3; 41.2; 42.5; 44.2; 45.2; 47.2; 49.2; 51.4; 52.2; 53.1; 53.2; 60.2; 61.3; 61.4; 61.7; 61.9; 62.2; 63.1; 63.2; 66.2; 66.3; 66.4; 67.1; 68.1; 68.2; 68.3; 69.1; 69.3; 70.1; 70.3; 71.1; 72.1; 73.5; 75.1; 77.1; 78.1; 84.1; 84.2; 86.3; 87.1; 87.2; 87.3; 88; 89.2; 90.1; 90.3; 91.1; 92.1; 92.2; 93.1; 93.3; 94.1; 94.2; 95.1; 95.3; 97.2; 99.1; 101.3; 103.1; 103.2; 104.1; 104.2; 105.2; 105.3; 106.2; 106.3; 107.1; 109.1; 110.2; 111.2; 111.3; 112.2; 112.4; 113.2; 114.1; 114.2; 115.1; 115.3; 115.4; 115.6; 116.1; 116.2; 117.1; 117.3; 123.2; 123.3; 123.4; 123.5; 124.1; 124.2; 125.2; 127.2; 127.3; 128.2; 128.6; 130.1; 132.2; 133.1; 133.2; 137.1; 137.2; 138.1; 139.1; 139.2; 141.2; 142; 144.1; 144.2; 144.3; 145.1; 145.2; 145.3; 147.2; 147.3; 147.4; 149.1; 150.1; 152.1; 153.1; 153.3; 154.1; 154.2; 154.3; 155.1; 155.2; 155.4; 156.2; 157.1; 159.1; 160.2; 161.2; 161.3. Shaw, G. B.  7.4; 8.4; 11.2; 115.5. Shelley, Mary  100.5. Shelley, Percy Bysshe  2.3; 8.5; 48.3; 95.2; 111.1.

857 Sherwin, Ralph  47.1. Shirley, James  110.2; 114.2; 141.1; 144.3; 149–150; 152.2; 155.2; 158.2. Shore, Jane  44.1. Sidney, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke  49.1; 51.2; 53.2; 55.1; 58.1; 69.1; 69.2; 70.2; 87.3; 93.1; 122.3. Sidney, Sir Henry  48.2. Sidney, Sir Philip  1; 10.1; 11.1; 11.3; 15.3; 15.4; 22.1; 27.2; 36.6; 38.1; 38.2; 42.1; 43.3; 45.2; 46; 47.3; 48–54; 55.1; 57.1; 57.3; 58.1; 58.3; 59.1; 59.2; 59.3; 60.2; 60.3; 61.7; 63.1; 63.2; 63.3; 66.5; 67.2; 68.2; 68.3; 69.1; 69.2; 69.3; 70.1; 70.2; 70.3; 84.1; 86.3; 90.2; 105.2; 115.3; 115.5; 122.2; 122.3; 123.1; 132.2; 149.4; 152.1; 154.2; 154.3; 155.2; 155.4; 157.2. Simon Magus  100.3. Simon of Montfort  7.3. Sixtus V, Pope  125.4. Skeat, W. W.  3.4; 14.1; 14.4; 17.2; 17.4. Skelton, John  21.1; 22.1; 22.2; 23; 25.1; 25.4; 25.5; 26.2; 31.2; 32.3; 39.2; 39.3; 41.1; 44.1; 45.2; 49.2; 50.3; 57.4; 75.1; 89.2; 157.1. Smeed, J. W.  100.4. Smith, Alexander  25.4; 25.5; 70.2; 100.5. Smith, J. C.  25.1; 32.3; 115.2; 147.2. Smith, William  68.2. Smollett, Tobias  30.2; 157.3. Soane, G.  100.5. Socrates  13.3; 141.2. Solomon  12.5; 20.4; 21.2; 100.3. Somerset, Earl of (Robert Carr)  110.3. Somerset, Edward  41.2. Sommer, H. O.  32.2. Southey, Robert  23.4; 32.1. Southwell, Robert  47.2; 47.3; 73.3; 81.2; 128.1. Spagnoli, Giovanni Battista, the Mantuan  22.2; 57.3; 68.2.

858 Spearing, E.  8.4. Speed, John  35.4; 161.1. Speirs, J.  15.4; 18.2. Spencer, Gabriel  116.1. Spencer, T.  73.4. Spenser, Edmund  1; 11.1; 15.1; 15.4; 18.2; 21.1; 21.4; 22.2; 32.1; 34.6; 40.3; 43.5; 46; 47.1; 48.1; 48.3; 51.1; 54.4; 55.2; 56–65; 66.1; 66.2; 66.3; 66.4; 67.1; 67.2; 68.2; 68.3; 69.2; 70.1; 70.3; 72.1; 75.1; 77.1; 77.2; 78.1; 78.2; 84.1; 93.1; 94.2; 97.1; 103.1; 111.3; 113.2; 116.4; 118.4; 136.2; 138.2; 138.3; 149.3; 152.1; 153.1; 154.1; 157.1; 157.3; 160.1. Spiess, Johann  100.4; 100.5. Spinoza, Baruch  71.2. Spondanus ( Jean de Sponde)  110.1. Spurgeon, C. F. E.  15.4. Stanyhurst, Richard  25.1. Statius, Publius Papinius  15.2; 122.3. Steane, J. B.  97.1. Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)  124.3; 144.1. Stephen, Leslie  141.1. Sterne, Laurence  70.2; 157.1. Stevenson, Robert Louis  107.1. Stewart, S.  115.2; 115.4; 120.2. Stoker, Bram  128.6. Stone, Nicholas  73.2. Stonor, English medieval family  30.1. Stoppard, Tom  138.2. Stow, John  35.4; 161.1. Strabo, Valafridus  3.2; 9.1. Strachey, William  161.2. Strafford, Earl (Thomas Wentworth)  149.3. Striggio, Alessandro  67.2. Strode, Ralph  12.1. Stubbs, John  34.5. Styan, J. L.  26.2; 86.3; 104.2; 123.2. Suckling, John  73.3. Sullivan, Arthur  156.1.

Index of names Sommers (or Sommer, or Summer), William, or Will  157.1; 158.2. Sulla, Lucius Cornelius  154.2. Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl  22.1; 25.1; 41.1; 41.2; 42.1; 42.2; 42.4; 43; 44.1; 46; 48.3; 54.4; 57.1; 63.2; 68.3; 70.2; 90.2; 147.4; 157.3. Sweeney, A.  47.2. Sweet, Henry  2.3; 2.5. Sweyn I, aka the Forkbeard  7.2. Swift, Jonathan  8.6; 15.1; 23.2; 58.2; 73.3; 129. Swinburne, Algernon Charles  2.3; 32.1; 37.1; 92.1; 104.1; 110.1; 110.2; 110.4; 115.1; 115.4; 120.2; 122.1; 123.2; 124.2; 124.3; 128.1; 128.6; 130.1; 130.2; 144.2; 144.4; 147.1; 147.2; 147.4. Sylvester, Joshua  36.6; 71.3. Symonds, John Addington  37.1; 147.1; 147.3; 147.3. Symons, Arthur  141.1; 147.2. Tacitus, Publius Cornelius  3.3; 6.1; 6.2; 140.2. Taillefer 7.1. Taine, Hippolyte  2.3; 3.3; 8.3; 37.1; 37.2; 97.1; 115.4. Takamiya, T.  32.1. Taliesin 9.1. Tansillo, Luigi  41.1; 47.2. Tantalus 60.2. Tasso, Torquato  51.1; 59.2; 59.2; 60.2; 87.2. Tennyson, Lord Alfred  3.2; 5.2; 6.3; 9.1; 9.2; 15.4; 18.2; 32.1; 33.4; 56.1; 57.4; 59.1; 66.4; 67.2; 149.6. Terence (Publius Terentius Afer)  87.1; 87.2; 88; 100.2; 153.1. Thackeray, William Makepeace  70.2; 142; 157.1; 157.3. Theocritus 57.3. Theodosius 143.2.

859

Index of names Theophilus of Adana  100.2; 141.3. Theophrastus 72.3. Theseus  10.2; 17.5; 20.3. Thomas, Dylan  23.4; 64.2; 84.3; 113.1. Thomas, Edward  68.3. Thomas Ingoldsby (Richard Harris Barham) 23.5. Thomas the Rhymer  24.2. Thompson, Francis  42.5; 71.1; 111.1; 113.1. Thomson, James B. V. (Bysshe Vanolis)  21.2; 24.3; 25.1; 42.5; 44.2; 56.1; 71.1. Throckmorton, Job  159.2. Thurmond, J.  100.4. Tiberius  117.1; 117.2. Tieck, Johann Ludwig  124.3. Tillyard, E. M.  25.1; 36.6; 37.4. Timur 97.1. Titus Livius  108; 148.3. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel  2.3; 6.1; 6.2; 6.3; 8.3. Tolstoy, Lev  73.1; 147.3. Tomkis, Thomas  87.2. Topcliffe, Richard  35.2. Toscanella, O.  59.2. Tosi, L.  124.3; 124.4. Tottel, Richard  41.2. Tourneur, Cyril  123; 143.1; 155.1. Trajan 14.5. Travers, Walter  160.1. Trevelyan, G. M.  34.6; 37.4. Trevisa, John  8.2. Trismegistus, Hermes  110.4. Trissino, Gian Giorgio  108. Tristram  8.3; 18.1; 18.2. Trollope, Anthony  30.2; 128.6; 147.3. Tudor, English dynasty  7.1; 24.3; 34.1; 34.2; 34.6; 36.3; 36.4; 36.6; 40.5; 61.4. Tudor, Owen  34.2. Turberville, George  46. Turpin 8.3.

Tusser, Thomas  46. Tyler, Wat  13.1. Tyndale, William  31.2; 35.3; 35.4; 36.2; 39.1. Udall, Nicholas  85.2; 88; 159.2. Ulysses  6.2; 9.2; 17.1; 18.1; 23.6; 40.3; 60.2; 69.3; 77.1; 96.1; 96.2; 110.1; 110.3; 153.3; 160.2. Usk, Thomas  13.3. Uther 9.2. Varchi, Benedetto  41.1. Vasari, Giorgio  84.3. Vaughan, Henry  73.3. Vaux, Lord Thomas  41.2; 46. Vegio, Maffeo  25.1. Venus  11.2; 11.4; 13.2; 13.3; 17.3; 17.4; 19.3; 20.3; 21.3; 24.3; 47.3; 50.3; 60.4; 61.2; 61.9; 65.2; 70.1; 91.2; 94.2; 95.4; 96.1; 96.2; 102.2; 153.2. Vespucci, Amerigo  39.4. Vico, Giambattista  51.4. Victoria, Queen of England  3.4; 6.1. Villon, François  25.4; 94.1; 157.1. Vinaver, Eugène  32.2. Virgil  8.3; 13.3; 15.2; 17.5; 25.1; 25.3; 31.2; 36.6; 43.1; 57.1; 57.3; 58.2; 59.5; 60.2; 68.2; 90.2; 93.2; 95.1; 95.4; 96.1; 96.2; 116.5. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor  100.4. Visconti, Luchino  144.4. Vortigern  3.3; 9.2. Vowell, John see Hooker, John. Wace, Robert  3.3; 8.1; 9.1; 9.2. Wagenknecht, E. C.  20.6. Wagner, Richard  6.1. Waith, E.  139.1. Waldegrave, Robert  159.2. Wallace, Sir William  24.2. Walsh, J.  8.4.

860 Walsingham, Sir Francis  48.1; 52.1. Walsingham, Sir Thomas  111.3. Walton, Izaak  66.5; 70.2; 73.1; 73.2; 74.2; 82; 83.3; 160.1. Warburton, John  144.1. Warner, William  69.1. Warton, Thomas  10.1; 23.4. Watson, Thomas  50.1; 152.1. Waugh, Evelyn  23.4. Webbe, William  84.1. Webster, John  36.6; 93.1; 110.2; 123.1; 123.2; 124–127; 128.2; 128.6; 131.1; 132.1; 133.1; 134.3; 137.2; 139.1; 140.2; 141.3; 143.1; 144.1; 145.1; 148.1; 149.6; 150.2. Weever, John  104.1. Weil, J.  95.4. Wells, H. G.  20.4; 39.7; 60.2; 79.3. Whetstone, George  97.1. Whigham, F.  84.1. White, M.  123.2. Whitgift, John  157.1; 159.2; 160.1. Whitman, Walt  71.2. Widman, Georg Rudolf  100.4. Wieler, J. W.  114.2. Wilde, Oscar  23.2; 113.2; 119.4; 124.3; 143.2; 144.3. William II, King of England  7.1. William the Conqueror  2.7; 3.4; 7.1; 7.2; 8.6. William of Malmesbury  8.6. William of Orange, King of England  7.3. Wilson, E.  115.4; 116.2; 124.4. Wilson, John Dover  152.1; 153.1; 153.2.

Index of names Wilson, Sir Thomas  40.1. Windeatt, B. A.  8.4. Wine, M. L.  92.1. Wolfe, John  161.3. Wolsey, Thomas  23.1; 23.5; 23.6; 34.3; 35.2; 40.3; 150.2; 158.2. Woodward, Rowland  79.1. Woolf, Virginia  30.2; 48.3; 51.3. Wordsworth, William  15.4; 23.4; 25.1; 27.2; 37.1; 69.1; 69.2; 71.2; 161.2. Wotton, John  66.5. Wotton, Sir Henry  66.5; 79.4. Wroth, Mary  36.6. Wulfstan  3.4. Wyatt, Thomas  22.1; 23.1; 41.1; 41.2; 42; 43.1; 43.3; 43.4; 45.2; 46; 49.3; 50.1; 57.1; 63.2; 68.2; 70.1; 70.2; 73.3; 75.2; 81.2; 147.3. Wyatt, Thomas, the Younger  34.1; 128.6. Wyclif (or Wycliffe), John  7.3; 12.6; 14.1; 15.2; 23.1; 35.1. Wyntoun, Andrew  24.2. Xenophon 59.1. Xerxes 44.2. Yeats, W. B.  8.6; 9.2; 56.2; 56.3; 90.2. Yonge, Nicholas  38.2. York, English dynasty  30.1. Zacchi, R.  86.2. Zola, Émile  107.2. Zoroaster 100.3. Zwingli, Huldrych  35.1; 35.3.

Thematic index

Advent  5.3; 74. aestheticism  2.7; 3.4; 6; 7; 12; 15.2; 15.3; 17.3; 20.2; 23.4; 24; 26.2; 28.2; 32.3; 36.6; 37.3; 47.2; 52.4; 53.2; 57.2; 59.4; 69.2; 79; 84; 86.3; 87.3; 102.2; 105; 110; 111.3; 115.3; 118.2; 119.3; 121; 141.2; 141.4; 147.2; 148.3; 149.2; 150. agnosticism  17; 67; 73.4; 100.3. Alexandrianism 59.3. algolagnia 102.2. America 107. American colonies  60. American literature  161. Anglo-American criticism  56.3. dream of American gold  66.2. expeditions to  66.2; 107; 157.3. Indians of  110.2; 142. North America  34.3; 34.4. South America  34.4. Amazons  20.3; 52; 56.3; 128.6. Anglicanism  36.6; 38.2; 47; 74; 159; 160; 160.2. Anglican anthropology  27; 51.4; 57.2. Anglican Church  47; 60; 160.2. Anglican constitution  159.2. Anglican faith  22.2; 35. Anglican propaganda  89.2. apocalypse apocalyptic misgivings  62.2; 73.2; 119.4; 136. Biblical Book  59.3; 60; 61.5. apocryphal Gospels  13.3; 15.4; 21; 28.2; 92; 100.3; 154.3; 155. apologia  17.5; 54.2; 79.3; 116.5; 141.2. of Anglicanism  160.

of the auto da fé 141. of the Christian faith  117. of crime  144.2. ‘for Eve’  36.6. of Protestantism  35.4. of sedition  117. of sensual love  111.2. of sodomy  95.3. of suicide  74.2; 114.2. of the Tudor regime  34. Apostles of Cynewulf  5.3. archetypical, method  64. archipelagos Azores 74. Falkland 71. Ascension  5.2; 81. Asia  20; 52.2; 97; 141. association  11.4; 15; 20.5. Athens  20.3; 152.2; 152.3. attributions  2.7; 21; 24; 39.2; 66; 78; 123.2; 124.2; 136; 138; 155. Augustinianism 59.3. authoring  2; 12.5; 15.4; 87; 115.3; 118.5. autobiography  8.4; 19.3; 21.2; 42.3; 72; 152.2. ‘banquets of languages’  106.3. Baroque  36.4; 38; 47.2; 56.2; 64; 71.5; 113; 141.3; 143.3; 144.4; 157.2. late 71. pre- 36.4. Beowulf  2.3; 2.6; 3.3; 4; 5.2; 5.3; 6.2; 6.3; 8.3; 8.4; 9.2; 12.4; 12.5; 21.4; 59.3. bestiaries  2.3; 8.5; 152.

862 Bible  5.2; 7.3; 8.4; 13.3; 14.2; 26.2; 29.2; 3; 4.5; 35.2; 35.3; 35.4; 36.6; 38; 75.3; 92; 94.3; 101; 110; 119.3; 126; 152.3; 160.2. Biedermeier  20.3; 23.3; 63; 100.4; 137.2. bóc  2.5. Bohemia  66.5; 141. bohémien  94; 154. bombardment, of England in World War I 2.2. ‘bright young things’  23.4; 116.2. Britannia  3.2; 9; 33.3; 68.3; 90.2. British Museum  2.6; 6.3. Caledonia 3.3. Calvinism  35.2; 71.2; 72.3; 73.2; 81.2; 123.2; 124; 144.4; 160. Cambridgeshire 32. cannibalism 5.3. Canterbury  2.4; 7.2; 19.2; 19.3; 21.3; 34.3; 35.2; 39; 72.3; 89.2; 95.3; 136; 159.2. carnival  5; 19.5; 22.2; 28.2; 36.6; 119.3; 159. Shrove Tuesday  22.2. Catholicism  3.3; 19.5; 34.4; 34.6; 35.2; 36.6; 38.2; 39.5; 43.2; 57.4; 60; 61.6; 65.2; 67; 72.3; 73.2; 74.2; 77.2; 85; 95.4; 99.2; 100.2; 114.4; 115.4; 116; 117; 124; 136; 141.3; 141.5; 144.4; 149.3; 154; 159; 160. anti- 48.2. English 141.3. Spanish 48.2. Celts  2.4; 3.2; 3.3; 4; 7.3; 8.2; 8.3; 9; 12.4. Britons  3.2; 3.3; 3.4; 4; 9.2; 140.2. Picts 3.3. Scots 3.3. Cheshire 12. chivalric, code  20.3; 20.4; 32.4. Christianity  2.3; 3.2; 3.3; 4; 5.6; 8.3; 13.3; 27; 39.7; 59; 65.2; 110.2. cinema  100; 131.3.

Thematic index cinematic technique  118.5; 119.4; 133. red lights  107.2. silent 32.4. classicism  36; 37.2; 37.3; 115; 115.2; 115.3; 152. anti- 36.6. Codex Exoniensis  2.6. colonialism  56.3; 110.2. postcolonialism 71.2. comedies city  104; 128.6; 131.3; 132; 135.2; 142; 149.2. classic  51; 87; 112.4; 115; 153. commedia dell’arte  100.5; 105; 106; 118.2; 128. Elizabethan 85.2. of errors  40.3; 91.2; 155.4. historical 153. of humours  127.2. Jacobean  128.3; 131.3. middle-class  104; 107.2. naturalistic 112.3. pastoral 115.3. Plautine  87.2; 149.4. realistic 128.3. of the Restoration  107.2. romantic  132; 149.7. Shakespearean  61.4; 88. tragicomedy  39; 87.3; 92.2; 123.4; 124; 128.4; 128.6; 132.2; 135; 137.2; 139; 147; 149.6; 150. common law  34.3. communism 61.4. Constantinople 141. conversation piece  152.3. Cornwall  33.3; 34.2. Counter-Reformation 38. Crusades  7; 19.4. Danegeld  7.2. Dante studies  11; 12.2; 16.3; 21.2; 22.2; 25.3; 25.5; 26.2; 42.2; 59.2; 61.3; 83; 111.3.

Thematic index Darwinism 100.4. deconstruction 23.2. degeneration  12.6; 13.3; 37.3; 73.3; 78.2; 79.3; 80.3; 98.2; 118.3; 119.4. Denmark  2.2; 6.2; 69; 155.2. descriptivism 14.2. determinism  32.5; 123.2. diaries  63.2; 83.2; 86.2; 100.6. Domesday Book  7.2. Donjuanism 100.5. drama academic  87.2; 91. Aeschylean 45.2. Baroque 143.4. Caroline 143.3. city comedy  92; 112. comic 107. court 22. didactic 45.2. Elizabethan  1; 36.6. historical  26; 90.2; 91; 94.3; 108; 125.2; 140; 146.2; 147.2. Jacobean  104.2; 123.5; 126.2; 130.2. Jonsonian  119.4; 120.3; 149.6. judicial 92. liturgical 28. lyrical 94.3. Machiavellian 117. Marlovian  100.6; 117.3; 118.2; 156. medieval  28; 87. middle-class 96.2. Middletonian  132.2; 133; 134; 135.2. Moorish 128.6. neoclassical 96.2. pastoral  87.2; 138; 153; 157. political  90.2; 91. popular 28.2. psychiatric 112.3. radio 87.3. reading 115. romantic 51.4. Senecan  108; 117.

863 Shakespearean  18; 20.6; 23.2; 93.2; 132.2. soliloquy  68.3; 76.4; 103.2. Websterian 127.3. Dublin  47; 149.3. Early English Text Society  8.3. East  8.6; 34.5; 73.2; 82; 97; 100.3; 161.2. ecdotics  2.7; 51.2; 75; 87; 101; 136.2; 137. Edda  2.4. ekphrasis  19.3; 20.2; 21.2; 51.3; 73.2. England  2.2; 2.3; 2.4; 2.6; 2.7; 3.3; 3.4; 4; 6.2; 7.2; 7.3; 7.4; 8.3; 8.4; 8.6; 9.2; 11; 14.3; 15.2; 19.4; 20.6; 22.2; 23; 24.2; 24.3; 28; 29.3; 30.2; 31.2; 32.4; 32.5; 34.3; 34.3; 34.4; 34.6; 35.3; 35.4; 36.2; 36.3; 36.4; 36.5; 36.6; 38.2; 39.6; 40.2; 40.5; 41.2; 42; 43; 48; 49; 51.4; 54.4; 55; 56.2; 56.3; 57; 58.3; 59.2; 60.2; 61.3; 68.3; 69; 71; 73.3; 73.4; 73.5; 74; 84; 85; 86.2; 87.3; 90; 94.2; 95.2; 100.4; 105.2; 112; 114; 117; 120.2; 130.2; 136.2; 138.2; 141.4; 141.5; 146.2; 147.3; 150; 152.2; 152.4; 156.2; 157.3; 158.2; 159.2; 161.2; 161.3. English cities  2; 2.4; 2.7; 3.4; 7.2; 7.4; 5.3; 19.2; 19.3; 28.2; 28.3; 32.2; 34.2; 34.3; 35; 39; 71; 72.3; 84.2; 95.3; 141.5. English, language Middle  2.2; 2.6; 8.2; 8.3; 8.4; 12; 13.2; 14.3; 24.3; 27; 40.5; 59. modern  2.2; 15. modern standard English  15. Old or Anglo-Saxon  2.2; 2.3; 2.4; 2.6; 2.7; 6.2; 8.2; 12; 14.5; 23.3; 31.2; 40.5; 42.5. epiphany  61.7; 61.9; 123.5. Episcopalianism  159.2; 160. epistemology 17.5.

864 Eros  8.3; 12.3; 12.5; 32.5; 40.6; 42.2; 42.6; 110.4; 124.3; 128; 144.4; 152.3. essay writing  83; 157. Essex  66.5; 110.3; 132.2. ethnic diversity  5. Euphuism  13.3; 36.6; 40.6; 145.2; 152.3; 154.3; 155.2; 158.2; 160. Europe  2.7; 3; 5; 7.2; 8.3; 20; 22.2; 28.2; 31.2; 34; 35; 36; 38; 43.3; 43.4; 44.2; 47; 51.4; 66.5; 74.2; 98; 100.4; 108; 111; 141; 155; 161. evolutionism  58.2; 60.3; 62.2; 64.3; 65.2. Platonic 58.3. Shavian 11.2. existentialism  83.2; 144.4. Exodus 5.2. exoticism  6.3; 148.2; 157.3. fables  8.3; 20.7; 51.2; 25.3; 51.3; 52.3; 54.3; 57.4; 60.4; 116.4; 118.2; 128.3; 138.2; 153.3. fabliau(x)  8.3; 8.5; 20.5; 21.3; 25.4; 26.2; 28.3; 39.2; 55.2; 60.3; 61.3; 158.2. fairs St Bartholomew  119.3; 149.6; 158.2. fantastic  17.3; 19.4; 23.3; 23.5; 51.4; 56.2; 110; 115; 120; 125.3; 138.2; 143.2; 150. Faustbuch  100.4; 100.6; 101.2. Faustism  100.4; 100.5; 115.4. feminism  15.4; 36.6; 56.3; 123.4; 124.3; 126. anti- 73.4. femme fatale  77; 102.2. flamboyant  41; 47.2; 104.2. Flanders  7.3; 31.2; 34.2; 34.5; 42.3; 45; 110.3. formalism  37.4; 56.3; 89. France  2.2; 7.2; 7.3; 7.4; 11; 21.3; 21.4; 22; 24.2; 24.3; 32.3; 34.3; 34.4; 34.5; 35.2; 47.2; 47.3; 66.2; 66.4; 67; 69; 76.3; 77; 99.2; 100.5; 112; 113.4; 114; 128.3; 141; 144.3; 149.3; 154.3; 158.2. French cities  141; 143.3.

Thematic index French Revolution  7.3. Frisia 2.2. Gaelic language and literature  2.3; 8.6; 24; 128. Gaul  3.2; 9.2. gender and gender criticism  15.4; 36.6; 52; 56.3; 70; 73.4; 143. genius loci  109.2; 118.2. German peoples Angles  2.2; 2.4; 3.3; 4; 5; 6.2. Danes  2.2; 2.7; 3.4; 5.2; 6.2. Franks 2.7. Frisians 6. Geats 6.2. Germans  3.3; 7.2. Goths  113.2; 73.2. Jutes  2.2; 2.4; 3.2. Saxons  2.2; 2.4; 3.2; 3.3; 7.2; 9.2. Vandals 113.2. Vikings  2.4; 3.4. Germany  34.3; 35.3; 40.6; 76.3; 82; 89; 100.2; 100.4; 100.6; 101.2; 101.3. hagiography  2.2; 4; 5.2; 6; 29; 31.2; 81. Hampshire  21.2; 88; 105.2. Hebraism  40.2; 54.2; 98.2; 152.3. anti-Semitism  19.4; 100.4. Hellenism  40.4; 54.2; 152.3. Holland  6; 34.3; 61.6; 101; 120.2; 128; 134; 154. Holy Grail  9.2; 32.5; 33.4; 60.2. homosexuality  7.3; 99; 100.2; 146. Huguenots  34; 36.6; 48.2; 66.2; 106.2. St Bartholomew’s night  48.2; 95; 97.2; 99.2; 113.4. humanism  31.2; 34; 36.2; 36.3; 36.4; 36.5; 37.3; 39.5; 57.2; 65.3. Hungary  97.2; 98.2; 141. Jesuitism  7; 8.4; 34.6; 35; 47.2; 56; 66.4; 67; 73.4; 73.5; 74; 75.2; 76; 81.4; 83.3;

Thematic index 116; 119.4; 133.2; 136; 141.5; 144.4; 154.3; 161.3. anti- 74.2. she-Jesuits 136. Judith  2.6; 5.2. Gethsemane  5.4; 12.4. Gospels  12.5; 142. John’s 74.2. Matthew’s 12.2. Gothic and neo-Gothic  37; 56.2; 60.2; 94.2; 108. pre-Gothic 20.7. grammar  23; 34.3; 36.2; 36.4; 63.3; 64; 88; 100.3; 100.5; 106.3; 149.3. Greece  49; 98; 116.5; 144.2. ancient 20. grotesque  9; 25.5; 39.3; 77; 92; 95; 118.3; 126.2; 129. iconoclasm  94; 95.2. imagism 5.4. imperialism  34.6; 97; 161. incunabula  23.2; 84.3; 87; 156. ingénus  14. inglese italianato  40.6. ‘intelligent artisans’  14. interlude  11.4; 17.4; 19.2; 19.3; 19.4; 19.5; 26.2; 28; 85.2; 88; 94.2; 116.2; 153. Internet 31. Ireland  2.4; 3.3; 7.3; 8.6; 9.2; 48.2; 33.3; 34.3; 34.4; 34.6; 47; 53; 56.2; 56.3; 59.2; 61.6; 63.2; 71.2; 89; 99; 123; 161.3. Irish cities  59. Islamism  8.3; 20.6. Israel  4; 9.2; 13.3. Italy  2.2; 2.3; 3.4; 7; 19.2; 22; 36.6; 37.4; 40.6; 41; 42; 54; 66.5; 69.2; 73.2; 73.5; 87.3; 93; 100.5; 112.2; 112.3; 115.2; 124.3; 125.2; 128; 141.5; 143; 144.2; 148.2; 152.2; 155.3; 157.3; 161.

865 Italian cities  34.5; 36.2; 42; 54.2; 66.5; 69; 74.2; 105.2; 106.3; 109.2; 112.2; 118.4; 127.2; 128.4; 128.5; 132.2; 133.2; 138; 141.4; 143.2; 145.3; 148.2; 149.7; 152.2; 152.3; 155.2; 155.3. travels to  36; 42. kenning  2.6. Kent  2.6; 8.4; 13; 16.2; 31.2; 40; 42.3; 66.5; 92; 152.2; 152.4. kitsch  21.4; 73.3; 157.2. knight’s fee  7.2. Lebensraum  2.2. Lent  19.5; 43.2; 83.3; 131.3. letters  30; 47.2; 69.2; 73.4; 75.3. libraries of the Convent of Grey Friars  32.3. of St George’s Guild  15.4. of Vercelli  2.6. literature Anglo-Norman  2.2; 8.2; 8.3. Anglo-Saxon  2.3; 2.4; 2.7; 8.2; 14.5. anti-Faustian 100.4. Arthurian 31.2. Chaucerian 34.3. chivalric 40.6. classical 86.3. comic 159. Elizabethan  36.6; 37.4; 38. English  1; 2.2; 2.3; 6.2; 8.5; 8.6; 9.2; 10; 12.2; 12.4; 13.2; 14.3; 15; 17.4; 17.5; 18; 19.3; 21.2; 22; 23.3; 23.4; 23.6; 24.3; 25.2; 26; 31.2; 36.3; 51.3; 56.2; 57.4; 59; 64.3; 81.2; 84; 89; 93. epigrammatic 73.5. ‘fimetic’ 15.4. Franco-Norman 8.3. French 7. German 100.4. Greek  39.4; 40.2.

866 hagiographic 22. homiletic  15.2; 22. Italian 86.3. Latin  2; 2.3. popular  27.2; 28.3. Ricardian 10. Scottish 24. travel 161. Lollardism  7.3; 13.3; 14; 15; 21.2; 29.2; 35; 89.2. anti- 7.4. London  2.6; 3.2; 7; 13.2; 14; 15.2; 16.2; 21.2; 23; 24.3; 25; 28.2; 29; 30; 32.2; 34.3; 34.6; 39; 41.2; 43.2; 47; 56.2; 59; 66.2; 67; 70.2; 71.2; 73.2; 74.2; 86.2; 87; 92; 94; 95.3; 104.2; 116.2; 118.4; 120; 124; 129; 131.2; 132.2; 138; 141; 144.2; 147.2; 147.4; 149.3; 151; 152.2; 152.4; 154.2; 155; 155.2; 157; 157.2; 158; ‘lords of the rings’  5.1. lycanthropy  126.2; 145. Mabinogion  9. macaronic, tradition  14.2; 14.3; 23.3; 23.4; 23.5; 23.6; 25.3; 25.4; 39.4; 40.5; 49.2; 59.4; 78; 93; 105; 113.3; 119; 131; 148; 156; 157.3; 157.4. Magna Carta  7.3. male chauvinism  19.5. Malta  95.4; 98.2; 127.2; 141.4. Manichaeism  6; 24.2; 37.4; 81.4. mannerism  38; 56.2; 73.5; 124.2; 137.3; 149.4; 157.3. manuscripts Cotton Nero A.x. 12. Cotton Vitellius A.XV  6.3. Fairfax  3; 13.2. Harley 27. Junius 2.6. Marxism  13; 37.4; 118.2; 158.

Thematic index masques  11.2; 38; 49; 57.4; 60.4; 67.2; 69.3; 85.2; 94.2; 110.2; 112; 115; 116.4; 120; 121; 122; 130; 132; 133.2; 139.2; 145.3; 146; 147.2; 149.2; 149.3; 151; 153; 157; 158.2. Mediterranean Sea  51.3; 51.4. Mercia  2.6; 3; 5.4; 6.2; 8.4. middle class  13.2; 30.2; 31.2; 32.3; 34; 86; 92; 128; 137.2; 142; 161. miracle play  28.2; 86; 89. mock-heroic tradition  20.3; 21.4; 25.5; 88; 139.3; 157.3; 157.4. Modernism  17.3; 23.2; 37.3; 73.4; 151. postmodern  17.3; 23.2; 23.3; 32.5; 37.4; 42.2; 119.3; 144; 151. monologue comic 85.2. dramatic  2.3; 5.4; 15.3; 23.2; 24.4; 25.4; 25.5; 43.4; 43.5; 77; 78; 155.4. Platonic 39.6. stream of consciousness  11.4; 50.4. Morocco  94.3; 148.2. music librettos  85; 109. melodrama 112.3. operetta 112.3. songs  8.5; 26.2; 36.3; 42.2; 42.4; 49.3; 49.4; 67.2; 70.2; 105; 111.3; 122; 132.2; 149; 157. musical and visual arts  8.3; 40.4. mystery plays  28.2; 28.3. mythology Arthurian  8.3; 43.3. Celtic 8.6. classical, Greek and Roman 6.3; 9.2; 25.2; 56; 69.3; 96.2; 111.2; 155.3; 157.2. Germanic 8.3. Icelandic 3.3. Indo-European 9.

867

Thematic index mythical method  124.3. pagan  17.4; 64.2; 141.3. Scandinavian 6.3. Scottish 24.2. Teutonic 12.4. naturalism  14.2; 32.3. Maupassantian 107.2. Zolian 107.2. necromancy  7; 156; 157.2. Netherlands, the  116; 123; 124. New Criticism  37.4. New Historicism  126. Nibelungenlied  2.4. nonsense  23.3; 23.5. Norfolk  8.4; 23; 29.3; 30; 34.6; 47.2. Norman Conquest  2.2. Normandy  7.2; 8.2. Normans  2.6; 2.7; 7.2; 8.3; 8.6; 32. Northumbria  2.6; 2.7; 3.3; 6.2. Norway  7.2; 66.5; 150. novel  8.2; 9; 12.5; 15; 18; 19; 23.3; 29.2; 30.2; 40; 42.4; 43.3; 48.2; 50.3; 52.3; 56.3; 63.2; 83; 86.3; 100.5; 110; 116.2; 141.3; 149.7; 151; 152.3; 154.3; 155.2; 157; 158. novel, history and genres Alexandrian 61.3. autobiographical  50; 57.2. chivalric 18. epistolary  30.2; 70.2; 155.2. erotic 42.4. euphuistic  154.2; 154.3. historical 157.2. Huxleyan 56.3. of manners  153. martyrologic 141.3. medieval 8.3. metrical 8.3. middle-class 18. pastoral  11; 51.4; 154; 155.4. picaresque 69.

popular 158. romanced biography  26.2. sentimental  50; 147.3. verse novel  26.2. Victorian 147.3. objective correlative  20.3. onomastics  50; 51.4; 54; 58; 59.2; 61.2; 87.2; 93; 101; 116.2; 123.4; 131.3. paganism  2.2; 2.3; 3.3; 4; 8.3; 17.4; 20.6; 27; 56.2. pageant  23.5; 23.6; 28.2; 34.6; 60; 61.2; 61.7; 61.9; 64; 86; 111.3; 124.2; 128.6; 149.4; 149.5. pantomime  20.5; 100.4; 102.2; 105.3; 157. papacy  29.2; 35.3; 89.2; 125.4. Paris  8.6; 25.4; 47.3; 48.2; 76.4; 141; 144.4. Paston letters  29; 30; 32.3; 40.6. pathetic, genre  13.3; 15.4; 27.3; 51; 60.3; 125.4; 126.2. Pelican Guide  2.2. Pentecost 20.5. Petrarchism  23.6; 24.3; 41; 42.2; 44.2; 49.3; 50; 57.2; 64; 154.2. anti- 68.2; 122. philology  6; 27; 37.4; 66.3; 123.2; 155. Germanic 2.3. piracy  8.3; 33.3; 61.4; 61.6; 66.2; 97; 141.4; 157.3. plague  7.2; 7.3; 8.2; 12.6; 15.2; 20.7; 25; 28.3; 34.6; 74; 118.4; 123; 129; 138; 154; 157.2. Platonism and neo-Platonism  40.2; 59.3; 65.2; 95.2; 144.3; 152.2. Poet Laureate  10. poetry  Aesopian 57. allegorical  21.3; 56.2 alliterative  10.2; 42.5.

868 Anglo-Norman 10.2. Anglo-Saxon  2.6; 5.2; 6; 10.2. Arthurian  57.3; 116.4. burlesque 41. chivalric  18.2; 56.2; 59; 72. court 11.2; 21.3; 27. Dantesque  26.2; 59.2. didactic  44; 57.3. Donnian  73.2; 73.3; 73.4; 73.5; 83.3. encomiastic  57.3; 59; 72. epic 24.2. epigrammatic 71. erotic 103.2. French  10.2; 14. heraldic 5. homiletic  5.4; 8.3; 21.2. Italian  11; 47.2; 48.3. Langlandian 14. Latin  3.4; 8.5; 23.5; 40.4. lyrical  8.3; 8.6. Metaphysical  8.4; 21.4; 42; 66.3; 73.5; 110.2. mythological 21.2. moral 8.4. Morrisian 102.2. oneiric  11; 24.3. oral 41.2. pastoral  11; 22.2; 77.2. philosophical 123.2. political  8; 23.4. Protestant 24.3. religious  2.6; 3.4; 5.2; 122.3; 160. Romantic  18.2; 64.3. satirical  22.2; 116.5. Scottish 24.3. Shakespearean 115. Spenserian  1; 11; 56.3; 60; 72; 160. theological 14.3. topographic 68.3. Virgilian 95.4. Wacian 9.2.

Thematic index poets of the Great War  48. Poland 155. pornography 72.3. Portugal  34.4; 93.3; 94.3. positivism  37.2; 100.4. Pre-Raphaelites  12.3; 56. progressivism 23. prose Anglo-Saxon  2; 3.4; 8.4. argumentative  75.2; 159; 160. chivalric 11. conduct books  36.4. Dekkerian 129. Donnian  78; 83. Elizabethan 48.3. English  29; 31.2; 32; 35.4; 153; 157.3; 159. essayistic 70.2. homiletic 36.4. Latin  4.2; 8.4; 36.6; 40.3; 55. Lyly’s 152. Malory’s 32.3. narrative  40; 151; 154.3; 161. satirical 131. Welsh 9. prostitution  128.2; 128.4; 128.5. Protestantism  35; 40.5; 48.2; 59; 66.4; 99.2; 115.4; 159. vs Catholicism  48.2; 59. English  72; 95.4. Protestant literature  24.3. psychoanalysis  15.4; 95.2; 110.4. Freudian  12.2; 43.4; 92.3; 118.2; 144.5. Puritanism  32; 65.2; 87.2; 115.4; 151; 159; 160.2. realism  8.3; 19.2; 19.5; 21.2; 32.3; 107.2; 109.2; 141.5; 151. Realpolitik  34.3. Reformation  2.2; 8.3; 14; 22.2; 23.6; 24.3; 26; 31.2; 34.3; 34.5; 35; 36.2; 37.2; 38; 43.2; 44; 47; 57.2; 59; 89; 90; 100.2.

869

Thematic index relativism  12.4; 15.4; 63.5; 73.5; 97.2; 124.3; 127.2; 134.3. remakes  18; 42; 126; 138.3; 147.4; 153. Renaissance  2.2; 15.4; 22.2; 36.3; 36.4; 37.2; 37.3; 37.4; 38; 61; 66; 77.2; 87.3; 95.2; 95.4; 100.4; 110.3; 121; 130; 159.2; Elizabethan  36.5; 36.6; 37; 66.4. Irish 8.6. Italian 57.2. northern  37.2; 42. Scottish 24.3. Restoration  23.6; 36.4; 38; 39; 107.2; 110.2; 113; 128.5; 137.3; 149.2; 152; 153. rhapsody  5; 11.4; 23.6; 73.2; 111; 157.2. rites of fertility  28. romance  2; 6.3; 8; 9.2; 11; 12.5; 15.2; 31.2; 32; 33; 43.3; 47.3; 50.3; 51.2; 52; 61.7; 61.9; 63; 76.2; 85.2; 147.2; 155. Arthurian 9.2. biographical  48.3; 57.2. chivalric 43.3. court 20. homoerotic 70. medieval 92. pastoral  51.3; 51.4. Romanism 159.2. Romanticism  2.2; 2.3; 15.4; 18.2; 23.4; 26; 29; 36.4; 37.4; 56; 59; 64.3; 95.2; 100.4; 100.5; 110; 111; 123; 130.2; 144; 149.4. post- 56; 137.2. pre- 56. Rome  2.4; 3.2; 3.3; 4; 7.3; 8.3; 9.2; 21.2; 30.2; 33; 35; 40; 42; 47.2; 57.4; 66.5; 96; 101.2; 116.5; 117.3; 125.2; 125.3; 140.2; 157.3; 157.4. Rosicrucianism 48.3. Russia 34.6.

saga  2.2; 2.3; 28. Arthurian  9; 59. Breton  21.2; 30.2. British 9. Celtic 9. Homeric 95.4. Icelandic 2.3. Old German  2.3. satire  8.3; 17.2; 18.2; 20.4; 20.7; 21.3; 25.5; 26; 43.2; 49; 69; 72.2; 78; 84.3; 85.2; 94.3; 95.4; 96; 103.2; 104.2; 107; 112.4; 116.2; 118.3; 118.5; 119.4; 120.2; 125.3; 127; 138.2; 140.2; 142; 148; 153.3; 159. science  36.4; 36.6; 54.3; 85.2; 100.2; 115.3. scientism  37; 54.2; 100.4; science fiction  39.4. Scotland  7.3; 18; 21.4; 24.2; 24.3; 25.2; 25.4; 26.2; 34.3; 34.4; 34.5; 34.6; 35.4; 43; 68.3; 71.2; 85; 116; 120; 146.2; 153; 156.2; 159.2. Scottish cities  9; 24.2; 24.3; 26; 34. Sehnsucht  11.3; 20.3; 50.3; 51.4. semiotics  59.3; 73.5; 120.2. Shropshire  14; 70. slapstick  28.2; 28.3; 88; 119.4. socialism 143.3. Spain  2.3; 34; 34.3; 34.4; 35; 42.3; 79; 93; 99.2; 100.5; 134; 135.2; 136; 141; 141.5; 146.2; 153; 161. Stilnovo  11.2; 13.2; 17; 22; 41; 76.3. Stonehenge 9.2. stream of consciousness  14.3. structuralism  38.4; 56.3; 65.2; 84.3. poststructuralism  56.3; 73.5; 86.3. Sutton Hoo ship  6. Sweden 2.2. symbolism  2.7; 55.2; 90.2.

sadism and masochism  63.2; 73; 76.4; 139.2; 145.2; 149.2.

television 31. ‘terrible’ sonnets  14.3.

870 Thanatos 124.3. theatre of the absurd  26.2; 104.2; 124.2. academic 87.2. Baroque 144.4. bourgeois 107. Brechtian 26.2. Caroline 149.6. classical 86. of cruelty  91.2; 104.2. Eliotian 87.3. Elizabethan  28.4; 51.4; 86.3; 87; 92; 113; 133. epic 107. experimental 104. historical 107. horror 87.3. Italian 87.2. Jacobean  87; 133; 149.6. Jonsonian  115.5; 118.2; 120. Lyly’s  152; 153. of marionettes  100.6. medieval  21; 23.6; 28; 95. metatheatre  104.2; 119.4; 126; 133.2. musical  53; 112.3. naturalistic 133. pagan 86.3. popular  28; 86.3; 87.3; 144.3. Protestant 85.2. Restoration  23.6; 128.5; 149.2. ritual and symbolic  90.2. Swinburnian 124.3. theatrical companies Admiral’s 112. Blackfriars 104.2. Chamberlain’s 116. Thebes  8.3; 18.2; 20.3; 30.2. theory of literature atomistic 2.2. organic 2.2. Thomism  7; 36.5; 73.2; 73.4; 81.4. Tory Party  37.

Thematic index Tractarianism 160. Traumdeutung  14.3. Tunis 141.5. typology of culture (Lotman)  2.2; 36.6. Ulysses ( Joyce)  4; 11.4; 17.3; 20.4; 23.5; 32; 23.5; 32; 39.5; 53; 64.3; 75.2; 157.3; universities Cambridge  7; 21.3; 34.2; 35.2; 36.2; 40.5; 42.3; 57.4; 67; 72.2; 74; 84.2; 86; 87.2; 89; 91; 95.3; 110.3; 147.2; 149.3; 151; 157. Glasgow 34. Heidelberg 100.2. Louvain 23. Oxford  7.3; 8.4; 8.6; 9; 16.2; 21.3; 21.4; 24.2; 24.3; 29.2; 34.2; 34.3; 35.2; 35.3; 36.2; 39; 44.2; 47; 66.2; 66.5; 70.2; 71.2; 71.3; 74; 87.2; 88; 94; 103; 104.2; 110.3; 141; 144; 149.3; 150.2; 151; 152; 154; 156; 160; 161.2. Paris  7; 25.2. St Andrews  24.3. ‘university wits’  28; 151; 155; 157.2; 158. USA 2.3. utopianism  39.7; 51.4; 58.3; 66.5; 72.3; 81.4; 143.3; 153.3. Victorianism  49.3; 56; 56.2; 73.3; 80; 86.3; 95.2; 100.5; 107; 115; 124.3; 128.2; 130.2; 141.3; 142; 147.3; 152.3; 158; 160. Wales  7.3; 9; 34.3. Welsh districts  48.2. Welsh literature  9. walls Antonine 3.2. Hadrian’s 3.2. wars Anglo-Scottish 156.2. appeasement  7.4; 34.3.

871

Thematic index civil in ancient Rome  21.3. of the future  2.2. Hundred Years’  7.3; 7.4; 120.2. of the Roses  7.4; 21.3; 32; 69. between Spain and Portugal  93. against the Spaniards  136. of theatres  115; 115.4. of Troy  18.2. Warwickshire  32.3; 55. waste land  9; 44.2. Weltanschauung  2.3; 8.3; 15; 26; 38.2; 83; 105; 115.3.

Wessex  2.6; 3.4. West  7; 82; Whigs 37. Widsith  2.2; 5. Wiltshire 71.2. wit  41; 42.2; 42.5; 43; 50.2; 73.3; 73.5; 75.2; 80; 111.3; 115.2; 115.3. Worcestershire 14. word painting  21.2. Yeomen 34.2. Yorkshire  13; 32; 47.3.

Volume Book 1

Volume 1 begins by discussing Anglo-Saxon literature before focusing on the three major Middle English poets of the late fourteenth century: Gower, Langland and Chaucer. It then engages with the sixteenth-century prose romances of Sidney, the epic and lyrical poetry of Spenser, and Donne’s love and religious poems. Full coverage is devoted to the legendary fifty-year blossoming of the Elizabethan theatre (excluding Shakespeare, the object of Volume 2), from Kyd and Marlowe up to Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Ford and Shirley. The final part addresses the sixteenth-century prose works of Lyly, Greene and Nashe, homiletics by Hooker and others, and Elizabethan travel literature and historiography.

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Franco Marucci

Franco Marucci is a former Professor of English at the Universities of Siena, Florence and Venice Ca’ Foscari. His publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009) and Joyce (2013). His Storia della letteratura inglese in eight volumes was published by Le Lettere / Editoriale Srl, 2003– 2018. As a creative writer he is the author of Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the blog , with comments and features on literature and music, and a weekly sports page.

Medieval and Renaissance Literature to 1625

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author.

Histor y of English Literature

‘Franco Marucci’s History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.’ — J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford