Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion 9780748644667

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Untutored Lines

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson Titles available in the series: Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability James Kuzner 978 0 7486 4253 3 Hbk The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in SeventeenthCentury French Literature John D. Lyons 978 0 7486 4515 2 Hbk Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain Dale Shuger 978 0 7486 4463 6 Hbk Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion William P. Weaver 978 0 7486 4465 0 Hbk Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture website at www.euppublishing.com/series/ecsrc

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Untutored Lines The Making of the English Epyllion

William P. Weaver

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To Katherine

© William P. Weaver, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4465 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4466 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 4920 4 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 4919 8 (Amazon ebook) The right of William P. Weaver to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Series Editor’s Preface

vii

Introduction 1 Progymnasmata: Humanist Rites of Passage Part I

1 14

Rudiments of Eloquence: Boyhood

2 Fabula: Observing ‘Amorous Rites’ in Hero and Leander

47

3 Chreia: Making Themes in Venus and Adonis

70

4 Narratiuncula: Coming of Age in Oenone and Paris

94

Part II

First Exercises: Adolescence

5 Narratio and Confirmatio: Forensic Performance in Lucrece

123

6 Encomium: Antinous as Lord of Misrule in Orchestra

148

7 Thesis: Controlling Speech in Cephalus and Procris

169

Epilogue: Jesus’ First Exercises in Paradise Regained

195

Appendix

199

Bibliography

203

Index

215

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Acknowledgements

Untutored Lines is a very well-tutored work, and all of its deficiencies are those of the student. I was fortunate to have outstanding teachers during the early stages of this project, which began as a PhD dissertation in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The book owes a great deal to all the teachers and friends who patiently responded to its earliest drafts; I can only hope that its current shape provides some measure of repayment. Kathy Eden and Alan Stewart were particularly generous and characteristically brilliant with feedback at several stages of the project. The Honors College at Baylor University has provided a rich interdisciplinary context for writing most of the book, and a Summer Sabbatical award from the Honors College came at a critical time in 2009. More colleagues than I can name have provided intellectual stimulation and general inspiration. For their judicious comments on written drafts, I wish to thank Phil Donnelly, Chris Hassel, and Richard Russell. A significant part of Chapter 2 first appeared in Studies in Philology, and much of Chapter 5 first appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to reprint this material here. Two anonymous readers for Edinburgh University Press made invaluable criticisms of the book’s argument and design. Lorna Hutson made unfailingly helpful suggestions in correspondence and in response to the manuscript. All errors are, of course, my own. From its inception to completion, this book could not have been written without the loving support of my wife, Katherine, a constant source of inspiration and encouragement. With irrepressible good humour she listened and responded to countless versions of the ideas presented here. This book is dedicated to her.

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Series Editor’s Preface

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’? The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back.1 The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims rather to shift the emphasis from a story of progress – early modern to modern – to series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity. In keeping with one aspect of the etymology of ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Rinascimento’ as ‘rebirth’, moreover, this series features books that explore and interpret

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anew elements of the critical encounter between writers of the period 1500–1700 and texts of Greco-Roman literature, rhetoric, politics, law, oeconomics, eros and friendship. The term ‘culture’, then, indicates a licence to study and scrutinise objects other than literary ones, and to be more inclusive about both the forms and the material and political stakes of making meaning both in the past and in the present. ‘Culture’ permits a realisation of the benefits to be reaped after two decades of interdisciplinary enrichment in the arts. No longer are historians naïve about textual criticism, about rhetoric, literary theory or about readerships; likewise, literary critics trained in close reading now also turn easily to court archives, to legal texts, and to the historians’ debates about the languages of political and religious thought. Social historians look at printed pamphlets with an eye for narrative structure; literary critics look at court records with awareness of the problems of authority, mediation and institutional procedure. Within these developments, modes of research that became unfashionable and discredited in the 1980s – for example, studies in classical or vernacular ‘source texts’, or studies of literary ‘influence’ across linguistic, confessional and geographical boundaries – have acquired a new critical edge and relevance as the convergence of the disciplines enables the unfolding of new cultural histories (that is to say, what was once studied merely as ‘literary influence’ may now be studied as a fraught cultural encounter). The term ‘Renaissance’ thus retains the relevance of the idea of consciousness and critique within these textual engagements of past and present, and, while it foregrounds the Western European experience, is intended to provoke comparativist study of wider global perspectives rather than to promote the ‘universality’ of a local, if far-reaching, historical phenomenon. Finally, as traditional pedagogic boundaries between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ are being called into question by cross-disciplinary work emphasising the ‘reformation’ of social and cultural forms, so this series, while foregrounding the encounter with the classical past, is self-conscious about the ways in which that past is assimilated to the projects of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, spiritual, political and domestic, that finally transformed Christendom into Europe. Individual books in this series vary in methodology and approach, sometimes blending the sensitivity of close literary analysis with incisive, informed and urgent theoretical argument, at other times offering critiques of grand narratives of the period by their work in manuscript transmission, or in the archives of legal, social and architectural history, or by social histories of gender and childhood. What all these books have in common, however, is the capacity to offer compelling, well-

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documented and lucidly written critical accounts of how writers and thinkers in the period 1500–1700 reshaped, transformed and critiqued the texts and practices of their world, prompting new perspectives on what we think we have learned from them. Lorna Hutson

Note 1. Terence Cave, ‘Locating the Early Modern’, Paragraph, 29.1 (2006): 12–26, 14.

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A boy will speak one way, an adolescent another. Joachim Camerarius, The Elements of Rhetoric: Or the Chief Exercises of Boyhood Study and Style (1540)

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Introduction

In several early editions, Erasmus’ De Ratione Studii (1511–12), the virtual charter of the English grammar school, was printed with his ‘Sermon on the Boy Jesus’, an encomium of Jesus written in the person of a boy student and delivered to his peers on the founding of St Paul’s School in 1510.1 The Boy Jesus of the sermon is not the subject of the gospels at a certain stage of life (though the episode of the twelve-yearold Jesus at the Temple does play a crucial role in the sermon); rather, he is the image and example of a ‘new kind of boyhood’, a boyhood marked not by age but by moral innocence and simplicity.2 Chock-full of rhetorical amplifications and figures of speech, the sermon is a schoolmaster’s idyll of childhood, and it furthermore offers a way around growing up (which is closely identified with moral, especially sexual, corruption). In effect, the Boy Jesus promises to inhabit the pious boy and grow up to become ‘perfect man’ (virum perfectum) within him.3 Christianity, writes Erasmus in a paradox that recalls the contemporary Praise of Folly, is nothing other than a ‘reboyification’ and a ‘mystery of boyhood’.4 The episode of the twelve-year-old Jesus at the Temple, which is the only scriptural portrayal of Jesus’ boyhood – the only scriptural episode, indeed, between Jesus’ circumcision and baptism (a span of thirty years) – is eagerly anticipated in Erasmus’ sermon, which is purportedly on the ‘boy’ Jesus and explicitly takes the Gospel according to Luke, the only of the gospels to record the episode, as its source. But it is only at the end of part 2, fully two-thirds of the way into the sermon, that Erasmus so much as alludes to the episode. I quote from an early, anonymous translation: When he was but .xii. yeres of age, he stale awaye prevely from his parentes; whiche coulde not be founde neyther among his kynsfolke, nor among his acquayntaunce; at last was found after the space of .iii. dayes. But wheare, I beseche you, was he founde? In fayres? in markettes? in ways? in taverns?

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Untutored Lines daunsyng or synging? Harken, ye chyldren, where the chylde Jesus was founde, levying his frendes, and in maner a fugityve and a renaway; and ye shall easyly understande where ye ought to be consernaunt. In the temple, I saye, he was founde; syttynge in the myddes of the doctours; hearynge theyr reasons, and demaundynge questions of them.5

Why does Erasmus postpone the episode until so late in the sermon? Because the temple narrative strategically divides the sermon, as well as the life of Jesus, into two symbolic stages. The episode closes the portrait of the Boy Jesus, who is not just the premier example of obedience and piety but also, importantly, a model of verbal plenitude, an abundance of speech figured in the length and copious oratory of part 2.6 Part 3 is comparatively brief, and describes the submission of the Boy Jesus to new and alien forms of discipline and violence, culminating in the crucifixion. ‘Perpetual adolescence’, the stage of life entered here, is clearly not as pleasant as ‘the mystery of boyhood’.7 But they are two phases of Erasmus’ ‘perfect man’, a paradox of verbal plenitude and violent discipline that converge on the episode of the boy Jesus being examined by his teachers at the temple. Erasmus’ Boy Jesus is prototypical of the boys represented in the English epyllion, the genre of mythological, erotic verse narrative that flourished in the 1590s; in the verbal plenitude of his boyhood and the violent discipline of his adolescence, he stands at the origins of a typology that would come full circle in Milton’s representation of the Son of God becoming ‘perfect man’ in Paradise Regained.8 In moral terms, there is not a lot of resemblance between the Boy Jesus and his less-thansaintly epigones, the boys Leander, Adonis, and Paris, and the adolescents Tarquin, Antinous, and Cephalus. But in the disciplinary terms outlined in the following chapters, and in the exercises that governed the transition from boyhood to adolescence in the English grammar school, all of their stories describe a basic trajectory: the cultivation of a provisional discursive abundance followed by the submission to a corrective violence. That is the most general way of describing the threshold crossed in the disciplinary transition from grammar to rhetoric in humanist education, a threshold that we must seek to inhabit while outlining a cultural poetics of the English epyllion. This book shows that English poets of the 1590s used the exercises of the grammar school, and the transition between the lower and upper forms of the grammar school, to imagine and celebrate the coming of age of boys in the epyllion. My reason for writing the book is that the English epyllion has an urgent cultural significance that is obscured by its highly self-conscious literary artifice. There have been excellent studies of the literary fashions and influences reflected by this polymorphous

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and inventive genre, but the cultural work that the epyllion performed has only recently become the concern of scholars – this despite the tremendous energy that has been put into cultural studies of Renaissance literature in the last three decades.9 Widely neglected as a literary fashion that swept through gentlemanly circles of the universities and Inns of Court in the 1590s, the epyllion is, I will show, the literary genre through which poets represented rites de passage from boyhood to adolescence as enacted in the institutional context of the humanist grammar school. Given the prominence of these solemnities in the genre, ‘minority epic’ might be a better label than ‘minor epic’ in its English tradition. Scholars have noted the thematic significance of the boys that populate the English epyllion.10 What remains opaque is the ritual process that characterises boys in these poems and solemnises their passage to adulthood. As I show, this ritual process centres on the progymnasmata, or ‘preliminary exercises’, the written rhetorical themes (mostly in Latin) that formed a key part of the humanist literary curriculum from the early sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.11 The progymnasmata include a number of literary genres, and so are important for the history of form, but taken as a sequence they represent a social process.12 In the ancient world, they were designed specifically to facilitate the transition of the male student from the tutelage of the teacher of grammar (grammaticus) to the teacher of rhetoric (rhetor).13 In other words, the progymnasmata had a critical social and narrative function. They not only defined what it was to be a student of the grammaticus and the rhetor, they also told what it was to graduate from one to the other. Several narratives about coming of age are inscribed in the arrangement of the fourteen exercises: coming of age, taking a new master, becoming eloquent. By comparing humanist theory and practice of the progymnasmata with poetic performances and representations of these exercises in the epyllion, this book seeks out the precise terms of becoming ‘perfect man’ in the humanist grammar school.

Rites of Passage In a classic essay published in 1959, Walter Ong described Latin language study in the humanist grammar school as a ‘puberty rite’.14 Adopting the anthropological schema of rites de passage, the ritual practices that solemnise social ruptures and biographical transitions, he argued that the grammar school functioned like a place of marginalisation: an in-between place for boys who had been separated from their homes and were destined to serve the Tudor monarchy as part of an

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elite corps of state administrators. Within the transitional space of the school, boys were initiated into a virtuous manhood by physical violence (flogging) and a discourse of ‘courage’. Humanist Latin, Ong concludes, was socially divisive. It separated the learned from the unlearned, the present from the past, and the men from the boys: ‘the complex in which Latin was normally taught had associated the language in a special way with some sort of toughening.’15 Written against the grain of mid-century formalism (the essay appeared in Studies in Philology), Ong’s appeal to the social implications of literature would hardly meet with objection today, when social implications are the raison d’être of most professional literary scholarship. His use of the rites de passage as a comparative model, on the other hand, appears dated, and it might be asked what use we have today for an anthropological schema already fifty years old when Ong’s essay was published. The social sciences, and anthropology in particular, have advanced considerably since the 1950s, due in no small part to the dismantling of British and French colonies. Furthermore, although the model of the rites de passage has been meaningfully applied (and significantly nuanced) in the meantime, notably in the fieldwork of Victor Turner and the classical studies of Claude Calame, the model is no longer at the centre of anthropological discourse. Sociological methods and the linguistic turn have displaced earlier paradigms, some of them tarnished with a history of ethnocentrism. What use could the rites de passage possibly have for the current field of Renaissance literature, which owes much of its discourse and methodology precisely to those social and philosophical anthropologies that outmoded cultural anthropology and its study of ritual? The study of ritual, especially in a form disembarrassed of the normalising procedures of structuralism (some of which are evident in Ong’s essay, with its language of surface and depth), draws attention to the role of peer groups in the historical formation of the subject. It draws attention to those conditions of selfhood that are not coterminous with the state or society more generally. Subjectivity and selfhood in Renaissance England and English literature have been at the centre of scholarly debate for decades, and recent studies show the continuing importance of the theme.16 Because of the influential theories of Foucault and Bourdieu, the self has frequently been imagined largely in relation to the state, or to a more abstract collectivity, discourse, or practice. Recent scholarship has turned, however, from the emerging nation state to more local (and tenacious) sites of social identity, including the city, church, household, and school. This multidirectional turn reflects, I think, the more complex and various terms in which early

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modern selfhood was conceived. Not just the state but institutions, not just the public but publics, and not just practice but practices were the terms in which selfhood was negotiated. In this study, accordingly, historical questions are put locally. What social practices were occasioned by the boundaries of the grammar school curriculum? What faces of humanism are revealed in certain kinds of textbooks? What was it to be puer rhetoricus and adolescens rhetoricus, and how did these relate to that strangest of creatures, homo rhetoricus?17 How, finally, did these various conditions work to give definition to a literary genre?18 The grammar school, long conceived of by literary critics as a largely formal condition of English literature (Ong was exceptional in this regard, though his social critique of the grammar school was in part motivated by his antipathy for humanist Latin), has in recent decades been the subject of a vigorous reevaluation. Most recently, scholars such as Lynn Enterline and Jeff Dolven have shown that far from merely recording or reproducing what they learned in the grammar schools, English poets used imaginative literature to represent and critique the practices of that space. For Enterline, ‘scenes of writing’ in Ovidian literature provide the basis of an incisive reflection on embodiment in early modern culture.19 Similarly for Dolven, ‘scenes of instruction’ in Renaissance romance illuminate some fissures in humanist epistemology.20 Although poetry is not ethnography (nor do these critics mistake it as such), it nonetheless has much to tell us about humanist discourses and practices. My second defence of ritual is more particular to the subject matter of this book. The schema of the rites de passage precisely describes the social and institutional occasion of the progymnasmata. As I show, the cultural significance of the progymnasmata is that they define not just disciplinary boundaries but life stages and peer groups. They are instrumental as well as symbolic, educating the adolescent and training him in certain forms of adolescent speech and style. Furthermore, as practised in the Renaissance, the progymnasmata are ‘liminal’ forms, coinciding with the transition from grammar to rhetoric, and often from one teacher to another. They therefore tell a story of what it is to leave one group, or place, and enter another. (Like most rites de passage, the progymnasmata are not occasioned by puberty, but nonetheless Marlowe and Shakespeare will find no small humour in the coincidence of institutional and sexual kinds of change.) Although there is no ‘awesome machinery of ritual’ in the humanist grammar school or in the epyllion, nonetheless, the rites de passage schema simply makes legible a narrative that is central to the representation of boys and adolescents.21 In his foundational study, Rites de passage (1909), Arnold van

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Gennep described three stages or components by which an individual leaves one social status or space and enters another.22 These are the rites of separation, transition, and integration, and they roughly correspond to a narrative of before, middle, and after. This tripartite schema has been taken to illuminate a number of ritual practices, from mundane leave-takings to extraordinary crises in the community, and it has proved very durable, due in part to the flexibility of the schema. One of the rites de passage that has received a lot of attention is tribal initiation. In the economical description of Gloria Ferrari, ‘an initiation involves integration into a group of like persons; it marks a profound change in the individual; and it is irreversible.’23 Claude Calame’s description of tribal initiation is even more pertinent to this study of the progymnasmata: initiation involves ‘the formation of a group of male or female adolescents of the same age and their collective access to adult status through a series of educational and liminary practices that correspond to a symbolic death and rebirth.’24 In most cases, rites de passage have been understood to reflect the hazards of transition, both to the individual and to the group. In Victor Turner’s compelling description, ritual typically coincides with a ‘crisis’ in the group or the life of a member, and the rites de passage are a collective means of resolving the crisis, of reestablishing individual and group identity through the ritual process.25 In this light, the ritual process may be taken as a key to a group’s convictions and dispositions. I have taken the rites de passage not as a model to be vindicated but as a heuristic for understanding the social significance of the progymnasmata in the genre of the English epyllion, where they are so frequently cited and performed. As detailed in Chapter 1, the progymnasmata were practised in two subsets in the English Renaissance: the ‘rudiments of eloquence’ and the ‘first exercises’ of rhetoric. These correspond, I argue, to two phases of a major transition in the schoolboy’s life: his entry into the study of rhetoric under the schoolmaster in the upper forms of the grammar school. The rudiments of eloquence, the subject of Chapters 2 through 4 (Part I), solemnise the boy’s last rites of grammar. Corresponding to the rites of transition in Van Gennep’s tripartite schema, the rudiments represent a temporary suspension of norms and disciplines – what Turner describes as ‘anti-structure’ in The Ritual Process. The rudiments include a number of polymorphic, elemental, and fictional literary forms, as well as ingenious operations in paraphrase, interpretation, and improvisation. The purpose of these undisciplined exercises was to cultivate an abundant reserve of verbal expression that could be corrected by the schoolmaster in the upper forms, beginning with the first exercises of rhetoric.

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The first exercises of rhetoric, the subject of Chapters 5 through 7 (Part II), correspond to the rites of integration in Van Gennep’s tripartite schema. These exercises enact the reinstitution of norms and solemnise a boy’s entry into a new group with its characteristic disciplines and practices. They are the more easily defined and recognisable progymnasmata, represented here by the forensic exercises in narratio and confirmatio (Chapter 5), the epideictic exercise in encomium (Chapter 6), and the deliberative exercise in thesis (Chapter 7). The correspondence of these three chapters to the three classical genres of oratory is artificial and should not be taken as a rigid pattern of instruction, but it is a somewhat lucky correspondence. As will become clear, discipline and arrangement are characteristic of these exercises and distinguish them from the rudiments of eloquence, the last rites of boyhood. To describe these rites of integration, I also compare them with Turner’s ‘rites of redress’, which more accurately describes the legal and juridical forms that these disciplinary exercises take.26 A ritual process is at work in the Renaissance practice of the progymnasmata, and it is this ritual process that makes clear the significance of the rhetorical forms in the English epyllion. In the epyllion, two subsets of the progymnasmata are symbolic of two social groups or stages, one group marked by verbal plenitude, the other by disciplinary violence. The progymnasmata represent, in fact, the crossroads of these two strategic conditions of becoming ‘perfect man’ in Erasmus’ terms: a man who has first cultivated and then disciplined verbal abundance. As a boy on the threshold of adolescence, he has cultivated discourse by means of festival, subversive, creative forms; as an initiate into adolescence, he has disciplined discourse by corrective, juridical, violent forms.

Scenes of Performance In classical rhetoric and Renaissance humanism, an influential way of dividing the study of grammar and rhetoric ran right down a division of narration into fictional and historical narration. These two types of narration are my basis for reading two types of the English epyllion: mythological and historical.27 The thematic difference between these two types is symptomatic, I argue, of a more basic difference between writing narration exercises in the school of grammar and the school of rhetoric. English epyllia treating mythological themes are denizens, I argue, of a transitional, idyllic, green world of verbal plenitude, while the epyllia treating historical themes are representative of probationary, initiatory, and violent processes of discipline. Although there are risks

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of oversimplification in such a scheme, the dichotomy is warranted by a number of complementary, paired epyllia, including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Edwards’ Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus, and William Barksted’s Mirrha, the Mother of Adonis and Hiren, or The faire Greeke. By putting mythological epyllia in dialogue with historical epyllia, I attempt in this study to give precise definition to the genre without glossing over its obvious complexities. Humanist disciplines illuminate not only thematic but also stylistic and dramatic differences between mythological and historical epyllia. Differences of style are in the foreground of the chapters that follow and need little comment here. More in the background, though equally critical, are what I call the ‘scenes of performance’, the dramatic circumstances that poets evoke to contextualise the rites of passage of their boys and adolescents. In mythological epyllia, to celebrate a boy’s rites of transition and dramatically locate their performance of the rudiments of eloquence, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Heywood evoke a holiday scene in an exotic culture. The ‘scene of culture’, my name for this dramatic setting, is a temporary, heterogeneous, and relatively unregulated site of mythography. It is most vividly illustrated by Hero and Leander, where the Festival of Adonis in Sestos inaugurates Leander’s coming of age. Shakespeare evokes the scene of culture more allusively in Venus and Adonis, where the Bacchanalia in Thebes lie in the textual background of Venus’ banquet of sense. Finally, in Oenone and Paris, Oenone repeatedly recalls her and Paris’s wedding feast on Mount Ida. Here the scene of culture is nostalgically evoked to eulogise the boyhood of Paris, whose departure from Ida coincides with his transition to adolescence. These festival occasions give imaginative or dramatic context to the performance of the rudiments of eloquence, and the occasions are appropriate. Like the pagan holiday, the rudiments accommodate excess, prodigality, and promiscuity. They usher the boy into a place of marginalisation, or separation from his peer group, so that he might shed his identity before entering into a new social status. Within this space, unregulated by social and disciplinary norms, he is subject to the hazards and discoveries of transition. The ‘scene of rhetoric’, the dramatic circumstances of adolescent initiation, contrasts starkly with the scene of culture. It is a space of homogeneous time, instrumental rhetoric, and disciplined speech. Contrary to the heterogeneity of the scene of culture, the audience in the scene of rhetoric is largely male. It is represented in Chapters 5 to 7 of this book by three conventional spaces of oratory: the court of law, the royal palace, and the diplomatic embassy. In Lucrece, Lucrece’s final speech

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in the company of her husband, father, and other Roman lords makes frequent reference to criminal procedure, evoking the law courts (both ecclesiastical and civil) as the setting of her speech and the telos of her rhetorical preparation. Orchestra, probably written as an entertainment for the all-male audience of the Middle Temple, represents a more problematic instance of the scene of rhetoric. Its dramatic setting, the palace at Ithaca sans Odysseus, is the unruly scene of a mock-encomium, and although the performance is clearly a festival one, it cites several norms and disciplines of humanist rhetoric. In fact, as a send-up of the scene of rhetoric, Orchestra may be among its best illustrations. Finally, a fugitive scene of performance lies in the textual background of Cephalus and Procris. In Ovid’s version of the myth in Metamorphoses 7, one of Edwards’ sources, the history is narrated during a diplomatic embassy to Aegina. This diplomatic embassy, and the court of King Aeacus, is crucial for understanding Cephalus’ fate as a failed persuader. (The Ovidian background to this poem is therefore comparable to Shakespeare’s allusions to the Theban Bacchanalia in Venus and Adonis, another of Edwards’ models.) These dramatic scenarios, whether actual, figurative, or fugitive, all illustrate the main narrative of the first exercises of rhetoric. As a place of ritual integration, the scene of rhetoric is marked by juridical, probationary, and corrective forms. If the purpose of the rudiments is to give free rein to eloquence, the purpose of the first exercises is to restrain eloquence and direct it into certain channels of verbal and social competency. These scenes of performance illuminate the ritual drama unfolding in the two types of epyllion. In poetic epyllia we find a comic, eulogistic representation of boys in scenes of marginalisation from one social group (childhood, the lower forms of the grammar school, the usher). In historical epyllia, correspondingly, we find a darker portrayal of boys in scenes of integration into a new social group (adolescence, the upper forms of the grammar school, the schoolmaster). The violence of the adolescent is sometimes anticipated even in the transitional boy, as in Marlowe’s representation of Leander at the end of his incomplete Hero and Leander. Leander’s greedy, violent consummation of his betrothal to Hero has been compared to rape, and although the relevant lines have been jumbled in various redactions, making Hero’s consent a matter of textual criticism, there is no denying the violence of the scene.28 Leander’s violence anticipates the verbal and physical threats of male figures in historical epyllia – figures such as Shakespeare’s Tarquin (Chapter 5), Trussell’s Theseus, Edwards’ Cephalus (Chapter 7), and Barksted’s Mahomet. Indeed, a rape scene is central in several historical epyllia.29 Initiated or integrated into the new social status of

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adolescence, these figures in their ‘nonage days’ represent the violence of ritual redress, the disciplinary correction or humiliation by which a new member is incorporated into a group.30 Significantly, adolescents in the epyllion do not primarily suffer violence, as does Erasmus’s Boy Jesus on entering the stage of adolescence. Rather, the adolescents of the epyllion appear as the agents of physical violence or sublimated violence (as in the case of Penelope’s suitor, Antinous, in Davies’ Orchestra). Male adolescents thus usually enact physical violence in the English epyllion, but they also, more subtly, suffer symbolic forms of violence. In probationary scenes of rhetorical trials, I will show, they experience the discipline, correction, and mastery of rhetorical forms, the progymnasmata, which stand as their effective initiation into adolescence. I am not suggesting that the English epyllion represents physical violence as simply the consequence of disciplinary violence (both symbolic and real) in the grammar school. Nor do I wish to read the physical violence of the epyllion as an allegory of the violence of the schools. Rather, at this stage of the study, I simply wish to make a provisional claim: the English epyllion demands that we comprehend the physical violence of its adolescent figures in terms of rhetorical forms of discipline, the progymnasmata.

Notes 1. On the title page of Matthias Schürer’s 1512 edition of the De Ratione Studii, the sermon is given the full title Concio de Puero Iesu in schola Coletica Londini instituta pronuncianda (‘Sermon on the Boy Jesus to be Delivered in Colet’s School Founded in London’). It is included in the first authorised edition of 1514 and reprinted in dozens of editions of the De Ratione Studii before 1540. See Jean-Claude Margolin’s introduction in Erasmus, Opera Omnia (ASD) (Amsterdam, 1969–), I-2, 91–6. Of the De Ratione Studii, Margolin writes that it ‘would serve as an institutional charter not only for St Paul’s School and grammar schools in general, but also for all secondary schools of humanist inspiration through the 16th and 17th centuries’ (85). 2. The Concio de Puero Iesu was probably delivered at the inaugural ceremonies of St Paul’s School in September 1510. In contemporary correspondence, Erasmus describes a portrait of the Boy Jesus hanging on the wall behind the master’s chair. The portrait was removed in 1561, undoubtedly because of Protestant objections. See James Henry Rieger, ‘Erasmus, Colet, and the Schoolboy Jesus’, Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962): 187–94; Donald Lemen Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York, 1948), 38–46. 3. Opera Omnia, 10 vols (Leiden, 1703–6), V.610. Hereafter LB and cited by volume and column number. Translations are my own.

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4. ‘Christianity is nothing other than a rebirth, that is to say, a reboyification (repuerascentia quaedam). How great, dear boys, is the mystery of boyhood (pueritiae sacramentum) in which Jesus took so much delight.’ LB V.604. 5. A Sermon on the Child Jesus by Desiderius Erasmus in an Old English Version of Unknown Authorship, ed. J. H. Lupton (London, 1901), 28. The translator renders repuerascentia as ‘a beynge a chylde agayn’ (19) and pueritiae sacramentum ‘the mysterie of chyldhode’ (20). 6. For Erasmus’ theory of verbal plenitude, see the classic study by Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979), 3–34. 7. In the peroration of part 3, Erasmus writes, ‘Therefore, dear comrades, if we strive to become the members of Christ, we will thrive in a perpetual adolescence (perpetua quadam adolescentia), even in this life, in body as well as mind. As the prophet has said, the righteous will flourish like a palm tree.’ LB V.608. 8. Paradise Regained, book 1, line 166, in John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (London, 1997). 9. In Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis, 1932), Douglas Bush characterised the mythological tradition of the Elizabethans somewhat narrowly as a reaction against moral and allegorical commentaries on Ovid. Scholars have since found more intellectual depth in the poetry and expanded the scope of inquiry beyond ‘Italianate sensualism’, but the narrative of a sudden liberation from the stranglehold of the Ovidius Moralisatus continues to basically inform scholarship on the epyllion. For studies with a literary focus, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ, 1977); and Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, 1981). Hulse admirably considers several textual and cultural circumstances of the epyllion. Two recent studies turn to political and sexual discourses of the late Elizabethan age to situate the epyllion. See Jim Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (Toronto, 2003); and Georgia Brown, ‘Literature as Fetish’, chapter 3 of Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge, 2004), 102–77. Albeit in different terms, these latest studies renew and in some ways intensify the hold that the moralised Ovid has on interpreting the epyllion. The moralised Ovid, which runs to thousands of pages of Latin or French, supplies the semblance of a textual background, a colossal reason to rehearse Bush’s narrative of liberation. My aim is not to disprove the narrative, but to show that behind the English epyllion lies a rich textual and pedagogical culture that cannot be reduced to the moralised Ovid. 10. The representation of male adolescents in the epyllion is central to the argument of Ellis in Sexuality and Citizenship. In Brown, ‘Literature as Fetish’, the epyllion is ‘associated’ with youth, as on pp. 119, 126, and 127. Brown includes a section titled ‘Rites of passage’, which concerns authorship, or ‘self-promotion through self-marginalization’ (108), and includes an illuminating discussion of marginal literary forms.

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11. Peter Mack situates the progymnasmata within the eclectic curriculum of the English grammar school in Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002), 24–47. Manfred Kraus details the Renaissance reception of progymnasmata in ‘Progymnasmata, Gymnasmata’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding, 10 vols (Tübingen, 1992– 2011), 7:159–91, esp. 167–77. For studies of the scope and influence of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata in early modern England, see Donald Lemen Clark, ‘The Rise and Fall of Progymnasmata in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Grammar Schools’, Speech Monographs 19 (1952): 259–63; Richard Rainolde, The Foundacion of Rhetorike, ed. Francis R. Johnson (New York, 1945), iii–xxii; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 1986), 129–35, 155–60. T. W. Baldwin scours the plays for evidence of Shakespeare’s training in Aphthonian progymnasmata in William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, 1944), 2:288–54. 12. Of the progymnasmata in the ancient world, Ruth Webb writes, ‘Read as evidence for an educational process, these same exercises emerge as a pragmatic preparation for life as an eloquent member of the elite.’ ‘The Progymnasmata as Practice’, in Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity, ed. Yun Lee Too (Leiden, 2001), 314. I find the language of ‘process’ more persuasive than ‘practice’ for describing the social meaning of progymnasmata in the Renaissance. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London, 1977). 13. Or perhaps more accurately, they emerged from a history of negotiation and arbitration between teachers of grammar and rhetoric. On the relatively obscure origins of the progymnasmata and their evolution in ancient pedagogy, see Kraus, ‘Progymnasmata, Gymnasmata’, 160–2. 14. Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 103–24. 15. Ibid. 123. 16. See Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago, 2010). This magisterial work appeared as I was completing this book. 17. See Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1976). 18. Studies of reception, notably Sasha Roberts’ Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Houndmills, 2003), have brought to light the formation of groups through shared texts and reading practices. My aim is to show that conditions of writing no less than reading were instrumental in the making of peer groups. Reading and writing practices are in fact complementary, and the study of production necessarily entails questions of reception. Writers are first readers, and imitation is above all interpretation. See also Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado with Red and White: The Earliest Readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593)’, Review of English Studies ns 44 (1993): 479–501. 19. Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2000).

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20. Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, 2007). See also, more recently, Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 2010). This innovative study of the Renaissance classroom appeared at a late stage in the present study. I have incorporated some references to it in the footnotes. 21. The phrase is from René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977), 19. 22. Les rites de passage was first published in 1909 but not translated into English until 1960. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London, 1960). 23. ‘What Kind of Rite of Passage was the Ancient Greek Wedding?’ in Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives, ed. David B. Dodd and Christopher A. Faraone (London, 2003), 27. 24. ‘Coming of Age, Peer Groups, and Rites of Passage’, in The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, ed. George Boys-Stones, Barbara Graziosi, and Phiroze Vasunia (Oxford, 2009), 283. 25. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, 1969), 94–130. 26. In Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, 1974), Turner describes four phases of public action: breach, crisis, redress, reintegration. Within this four-phase schema, redress is still a ‘liminal’ process and is therefore close to the still fluid conditions of performance in the historical epyllia. 27. An important exception to the general identification of the English epyllion with mythology, Hulse includes historical poems in his study of the ‘minor epic’, demonstrating the thematic range of the genre. Building on Hulse’s insights, I wish to rearticulate the relationship between mythological and historical themes as a reflection of the two types of narration in grammar school exercises. 28. See Vincenzo Pasquarella, ‘The Implications of Tucker Brooke’s Transposition in Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe’, Studies in Philology 105 (2008): 520–32. 29. Rape is the subject of The Rape of Lucrece, Cephalus and Procris, The First Rape of Faire Helene, and Hiren: or The faire Greeke, while rape or threat of rape is sublimated in the amatory speeches of Orchestra and Ovids Banquet of Sence. In the dedication to Hiren, William Barksted shamefully paraphrases Shakespeare’s ‘untutored lines’ as ‘unpolish’t pen’. Hiren: or The faire Greeke (London, 1611), sig. A2r. Given the subject matter of Lucrece and Hiren, Barksted’s allusion to his phallus is deplorable, associating the poet with the rapist he represents. As I will argue, although this metaphor retrospectively implicates Shakespeare in a figurative ‘rape’ of his heroine, The Rape of Lucrece reveals an author who identifies more with his heroine than with his adolescent villain. 30. Hiren: or The faire Greeke, line 10.

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Chapter 1

Progymnasmata: Humanist Rites of Passage

Let it be the schoolmaster’s foremost concern to exercise the boy every day in speaking and every other day in writing. At the very onset of puberty I would train him in the exercises the Greeks call progymnasmata, that is, preludes or, if you will, first passes at eloquence.1

In the following chapters I argue that English poets drew on two distinct sequences of grammar school exercises to represent boyhood and adolescence and solemnise the process of transitioning between the two. In this chapter, I outline the historical conditions of that fictional representation. What conditions made it possible for English poets to represent boys as one kind of speaker, and adolescents as another? Moreover, what made them interested in doing so? What did boyhood and adolescence, and the literary exercises associated with both, mean in cultural terms? What did they matter? This chapter is not a history of the progymnasmata in the early modern period, but rather an essay in response to a single question: how does one account for the importance of the progymnasmata for poets of the English epyllion?2 It is a start (an important start) to cite the number of editions – that is, to chart the ‘rise and fall’ of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata.3 But it is not a statistical importance that the exercises have in the epyllion; that is, the epyllion does not merely reflect the influence of the rhetorical forms. Nor will a technical understanding of the progymnasmata alone explain their symbolic value. No amount of formal convenience or pedagogical utility can explain the centrality of the forms to the imagination and representation of boys and adolescents in the epyllion. Even if we could show the relation of the progymnasmata to major currents in the history of ideas (and there is much to link the progymnasmata with the wave of commonplace logic that swept European humanism) we would still have an incomplete account of the cultural currency of the forms for English poets. These circumstances are not, of course, insignificant,

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but I am convinced that the English epyllion reflects primarily a cultural occasion of the progymnasmata, and that to comprehend this occasion, we need to look beyond statistics, formal considerations, and the history of ideas to investigate the relation of the progymnasmata to the disciplinary organisation of the humanist grammar school.4 There we find that the progymnasmata had a crucial occasion that far outsized their modest formal and intellectual pretensions, and even outsized their rather impressive run in the printing presses.5 In a word, the progymnasmata were occasioned by a threshold, a threshold of institutional, social, and biographical significance. In European humanism, they marked the student’s introduction to rhetoric, a discipline that informed a number of social practices.6 Scholars have shown the pervasive influence of rhetoric in social, political, and psychological discourses of early modern Europe; what the present study contributes is an account of the very forms that attended, marked, indeed ritualised the male subject’s franchise into this discipline.7 The student who performed progymnasmata was not just starting a new course of study, he was joining a new social group, taking on a new master, and entering into a new social status. Called by humanists the ‘first exercises with the rhetorician’, the progymnasmata became a central rite of initiation, and it is in this capacity that their cultural significance becomes clear. I begin this chapter with the ‘first exercises’, first in order of significance though not in order of the student’s experience, which began with the ‘rudiments of eloquence’. I show that in the humanist reception of the ancient forms, the progymnasmata were conceived of and practised as an introduction to the art of rhetoric. This might seem a natural use of the exercises, but it is in fact extraordinary. The humanist strategy, unlike the ancient Greek or Latin tradition, places the exercises not in relation to occasions of speaking and writing, but in relation to rhetoric as a discipline. The exercises introduce the student, that is, to an academic discourse: rules of engagement for intellectual conversation and controversy. By focusing on the academic quality of rhetorical discipline, I adopt a widely held view among historians that Renaissance ‘humanism’ is best used to describe a vocational group of schoolmasters, professors, and scholar-printers who were dedicated to reestablishing literary instruction on the classical literature of ancient Greece and Rome.8 Some historians have characterised the polemics of the humanists as ideological, reflecting fierce competition among the well-educated for a limited number of spots in the state and university bureaucracy; others have seen in the humanist movement a veritable break with the past, a profound change, for better or worse, of the institutional face of

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learning in Europe.9 What is not in dispute is the centrality of the art of rhetoric to the activities, vocations, or agendas of humanist educators. Eloquence was the new aim of education, a public eloquence in broad daylight that would shame the obscure disputations of the scholastics. Given this aim of eloquence, and given the centrality of rhetoric to humanists’ self-advertisement (however sincere), the progymnasmata thus had symbolic as well as practical value.10 This introductory function of the progymnasmata in the humanist tradition was uniquely institutionalised in England, where a division of the grammar school into lower and upper forms corresponded to the disciplinary boundaries of grammar and rhetoric. In this context, the progymnasmata marked a break with the past. They ushered not only a technical transition but a social one as well, as the student performing the first exercises was effectively initiated into a new social status. Furthermore, the transition was associated with physical violence. As illustrated by a key passage in John Brinsley’s dialogue on education, Ludus Literarius (1612), the Aphthonian theme presented a crisis for the schoolmaster, a test of his patience. I read this physical violence in a larger economy of symbolic violence that stems from Quintilian’s discussion of correction in his treatment of the first exercises. In the entering in to new types of reading, thinking, and writing, there is necessarily some measure of symbolic violence, as the pupil must submit to new disciplines, but the cultural prestige of eloquence places a special burden on the master and makes his violence – both real and symbolic – more acute. In the third section, I show that the violence of the progymnasmata participates in a larger narrative of coming of age, or a more complete sequence of rites de passage. If the first exercises represent rites of redress, or a symbolic correction of social transgression, that is partly because another, relatively undisciplined sequence of exercises has preceded them. Following the instructions of the Roman teacher of rhetoric Quintilian, humanists divided the progymnasmata into two sets of forms and practices, the rudiments of eloquence and the first exercises. The effect of this division, which further demarcated the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric, was to make more transparent the formal, cognitive, and material boundaries of the transition. Significantly for poets of the epyllion, the division ran right through a division of narration into ‘fictional’ and ‘historical’ narrations, and the telling of poetic narratives (narratiunculae, or ‘brief myths’) plays a decisive role in marking the disciplinary boundaries of grammar and rhetoric. Falling outside the traditional boundaries of grammar and rhetoric, the rudiments of eloquence represent a liminal practice, a provisional kind of undisciplined

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practice, which would be corrected by the boy’s entrance into rhetoric, adolescence, and the progymnasmata. None of these historical conditions makes the use of the progymnasmata in the English epyllion inevitable, nor does the epyllion simply represent what was experienced in the grammar school. Rather, the humanist tradition of the progymnasmata supplied the forms and techniques of discursive production that made it possible for Marlowe to imagine Leander as a ‘bold sharp sophister’, for Shakespeare to imagine Venus as a pedagogue, and for their imitators to recognise what they were up to. Furthermore, while the poets do use the forms to characterise boys and adolescents, the forms are not merely symbolic – static signs of a uniform social identity. Rather they represent a ritual process, an educative series of performances that both signify and shape the subject.11 In the making of the English epyllion, that process was as important to poets as the boundaries of boyhood and adolescence, and gave them a critical way of negotiating the humanist rites de passage. At the end of this chapter, I outline in general terms some of the major narratives being told in the transition from grammar to rhetoric, and from boyhood to adolescence.

The Progymnasmata as an Introduction to the Art of Rhetoric Reliable evidence dates many of the progymnasmata to the second century bce, but the earliest surviving complete series of fourteen prose themes is Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, written in the late fourth century ce.12 The textbook reflects in distinctive ways the rhetorical culture called the Second Sophistic – Aphthonius was a student of the famous sophist Libanius – but its influence stretches far beyond that cultural milieu. It had a conspicuous place in Byzantine rhetorical education, being the object of lengthy academic commentaries from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, and it was translated into Latin in Europe in the late fifteenth century. From then it began to have a great impact on Latin education for more than two hundred years, and its legacy may be found even in modern compositional practices. Because Aphthonius’ textbook supplied the basis for most Renaissance practice of the forms, it provides a useful outline and starting point for the study of progymnasmata in the sixteenth century – but only a starting point, for humanist practice of the exercises took on distinctive forms, occasions, and uses. Aphthonius’ textbook is composed of fourteen chapters, each containing two parts: an introduction to the written exercise, and one prose

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Table 1.1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

The fourteen chapters of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata

Fabula Narratio Chreia Sententia Confutatio Confirmatio Locus communis Laus Vituperatio Comparatio Ethopoeia Descriptio Thesis Legislatio

Fable Narration Elaboration of an anecdote Elaboration of a maxim Refutation of a narrative Confirmation of a narrative Commonplace (amplification) Encomium Invective Evaluative comparison Impersonation Ecphrasis Argument in favor of a proposition Introduction of a law

theme to illustrate the exercise (see Table 1.1; Aphthonius includes two illustrations of encomium).13 Most of the examples are about 400 words; fabula is a brief 50, and the longest example, thesis, is about 800 words. In the introduction to each theme, Aphthonius defines the exercise, divides it into its kinds, gives brief instructions for writing, and indicates the stylistic qualities of the genre, occasionally comparing it to the formal genres of oratory, making its professional utility apparent. A key part of his instructions, typically saved for last, when he presents his example, is his enumeration of the ‘headings’ or topics of invention. So for chreia (elaboration of a famous anecdote or saying), he writes, ‘you should elaborate it with the following headings: praise, paraphrase, cause, contrary, comparison, example, testimony of the ancients, brief epilogue.’14 These quasi-logical topics of invention, which vary for each exercise, assist the student in finding arguments to develop a theme. Within the progymnasmata, they also have a formal utility; they give the theme the appearance of a formal oration. So just as a formal oration is broken into narration, division, confirmation, and so on, the progymnasmata are given a kind of formal construction. If these headings originally had some operational value, they crystallised over time into formal elements.15 Beginning with fabula and proceeding to legislatio, the most obvious principle of arrangement of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata is from easier to harder themes. There is also a blending of fictional and historical subject matter, reflecting the transition between the teacher of grammar (whose duties included reading the poets) and the teacher of rhetoric. Taught by the teacher of rhetoric in the Greek tradition, the

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exercises represent a kind of weaning process, which includes critical scrutiny, even vituperation, of the poet’s fables. The central exercise of encomium is illustrated, furthermore, by the praise of a historian, Thucydides, whose writing represents a grown-up kind of eloquence. The final four exercises, less formal in their arrangement, may represent swimming without corks, a first essay in spontaneous kinds of composition. So ethopoeia and ecphrasis depend on an imaginative or imitative kind of invention (as opposed to invention by a series of headings or topics), while thesis and legislatio, organised around antitheses and solutions, mimic the cross-examination of the courtroom. All of these later exercises condition a student for extempore speaking, probably in the context of the controversiae, the mock-forensic declamations of the Second Sophistic. In the battery of fourteen exercises, all of the genres of oratory are accounted for: deliberative oratory in the early moral themes and the last two exercises, thesis and legislatio; forensic oratory in confutatio, confirmatio, and locus communis; and, of course, epideictic oratory in encomium, vituperatio, and comparatio. In addition to introducing the three genres of oratory, some of the progymnasmata also mimic parts of the formal oration. As Aphthonius notes, fabula is like a prologue, locus communis is like an epilogue, and narratio is a recognisable part of most formal orations. When they were codified in the form written by Aphthonius, the progymnasmata were uniquely tied to the declamations, the public performances of oratory that flourished in the imperial age.16 The declamations help make cultural sense of the progymnasmata; they are the ‘exercises’ for which the progymnasmata are ‘preliminary’.17 But the progymnasmata long outlived the public use of the declamations, having a central place in Byzantine and Renaissance education. Likewise, the Progymnasmata attributed to Hermogenes and translated by Priscian around 500 ce survive in numerous manuscripts, suggesting that the exercises had a more or less continuous influence in the Latin Middle Ages.18 Within each of these subsequent traditions, the progymnasmata had to be adapted. The voluminous commentaries of the Byzantine age reflect an academic, literary use of the exercises alien to the vociferous training grounds of the Second Sophistic. In the Latin Middle Ages, taught by grammarians instead of rhetoricians, as they were in Greek education, the progymnasmata appear not as practice for public performances of oratory, but as first exercises in prose composition.19 In this context, the forms have a different function. The provisional quality of the forms, evident in the Greek tradition, where writing is a shadow of speaking, is obscured. Likewise, without reference to the genres of oratory, the simulated construction of the forms is less important, and

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forms constructed for purely pedagogical purposes acquire an independent currency as models of composition. Other conditions of education in this period, such as the auctores for reading and dictamen for writing, would have to be considered for a fuller account of a ‘medieval’ strategy. But the point of these examples is clear – the progymnasmata do not have a natural application, and their cultural significance must be interpreted according to the particular uses to which they were put. The second printed edition of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, which was to be the standard textbook of the exercises in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illustrates the humanist use for the sophistic textbook.20 Between 1508 and 1509, the celebrated Venetian printer Aldus Manutius completed an enormous edition, the two-volume collection of Greek rhetorical treatises entitled Rhetores Graeci, which included the editio princeps of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, a major work that was missing in the five-volume works of Aristotle that Aldus printed between 1495 and 1498.21 The first volume of the Rhetores Graeci was an imposing 734-page royal quarto, set in Aldus’ innovative reduced Greek cursive. The book was devoted to the known body of Greek rhetorical doctrine; in addition to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the volume included among others Hermogenes’ composite Ars rhetorica, the cornerstone of Byzantine rhetorical instruction, Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Ars rhetorica, and Demetrius of Phaleron’s On Style. Standing at the head of this imposing collection of theoretical treatises is Aphthonius’ textbook of fourteen model themes. The Progymnasmata takes up all of eighteen pages in the first volume of the Rhetores Graeci, making it roughly proportionate to the book’s front matter, which comprises sixteen pages. The formal exercises appear here as introductory or preliminary to the art of rhetoric; they are the tangible threshold of an entire discipline.22 The sheer mass of the Rhetores Graeci (which was followed by a second volume of Byzantine commentaries on Hermogenes’ works) suggests the weight of culture placed on these modest pedagogical exercises. A similar presentation, though on a different scale, is found in other early editions of Aphthonius’ textbook. Before Reinhard Lorich’s popular stand-alone edition of the Progymnasmata became the standard Renaissance edition, it was not unusual for the textbook to be printed as preliminary to more comprehensive treatises on the art of rhetoric. Of the twenty-three editions of the complete text prior to 1540 listed by Lawrence D. Green and James J. Murphy in the second edition of Renaissance Rhetoric: A Short-Title Catalogue, ten appear at the head of compilations of theoretical and pedagogical treatises.23 The first English adaptation of Aphthonius’ textbook, Richard Rainolde’s The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), illustrates the human-

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ist strategy.24 The title says it all.25 The exercises are not preliminary to the declamations or preparatory for prose genres. They are the ground of the entire discipline of rhetoric, and the architectural metaphor underscores Rainolde’s basically theoretical conception of the exercises. In his letter to the reader, he writes, ‘No man is able to invente a more profitable waie and order, to instructe any one in the exquisite and absolute perfeccion, of wisedome and eloquence, then Aphthonius, Quintilianus, and Hermogenes.’26 Tellingly, ‘Aphthonius’ appears here as the first text in a canon of authorities on rhetoric. The occasion for his project, Rainolde goes on to explain, is that no one has set forth these exercises in English, ‘though in fewe yeres past, a learned woorke of Rhetorike is compiled and made in the Englishe tongue, of one, who floweth in all excellencie of arte, who in judgement is profounde, in wisedome and eloquence moste famous.’ This praise is for Thomas Wilson and his Art of Rhetoric (1553), the first comprehensive classical account of rhetoric in English, a work that went through a second edition in 1560 and was reprinted several times in the following decades.27 By referencing this work, Rainolde makes clear a particular cultural use for Aphthonius. The desideratum is not an English Aphthonius but an English complement (introduction) to this new English rhetoric. The Foundacion of Rhetorike would be to The Art of Rhetoric what Aphthonius was to Quintilian and Hermogenes; the progymnasmata would be a practical introduction to the art of rhetoric. What Rainolde might have overlooked was that Wilson incorporated progymnasmata into his didactic presentation of The Art of Rhetoric. In fact, the first book is for the most part an unacknowledged (and, as far as I know, until now unattributed) translation of Erasmus Sarcerius’ Rhetorica (1536), an introductory rhetoric that consists almost entirely of progymnasmata.28 Sarcerius, the first subrector at the Katharineum in Lübeck, explains the reason for his work: In response to pleading boys, therefore, I determined to write a sort of grove (sylva) of paradigms, for no other reason than to satisfy my students and to show that it is true what is said about certain arts, that they are learned more by practice and the demonstration of paradigms than by the bare precept.29

The Rhetorica adopts the Aphthonian theme for the humanist culture of teaching by example. Beginning with the epideictic genre, Sarcerius enumerates the types and headings of the genre of encomium, and then supplies no fewer than nineteen model speeches in praise of people, deeds, things, places, cities, rivers, houses, ships, fields, and mountains. The exhaustive types of encomium are taken from (Desiderius) Erasmus, but the headings are Aphthonian. Sarcerius proceeds in a similar fashion

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through the remaining genres of oratory: the deliberative genre, the ‘didactic’ genre (invented by Philip Melanchthon, whose influence is seen elsewhere in the Rhetorica), and finally the forensic genre.30 Thomas Wilson’s truncated inclusion of the Rhetorica as the first book of The Art of Rhetoric reflects a basic humanist strategy: to introduce the art of rhetoric with progymnasmata. In fact, the humanist ‘reception’ of the progymnasmata might better be conceived of as a technology of instruction, and the exercises plausibly represent a transformation of the discipline of rhetoric on the model of humanist grammar.31 As illustrated by Quattrocento grammars and William Lily’s grammar in England, Latin was at this time being taught by means of the briefest of introductions followed by assiduous practice in reading and translating.32 The humanist introduction to grammar frequently took the form of tables of the eight parts of speech and their inflections, while practice took the form of imitating classical sentences. Such an emphasis on paradigm and practice was a polemical one, targeting medieval methods of rote memorisation of grammatical rules and logical analysis of sentences, respectively. The notion that the brief paradigms of the progymnasmata could serve as an introduction to rhetoric is clearly analogous. Conceived as a summa of the art of rhetoric, the progymnasmata could forestall and even supplant a more comprehensive experience of the precepts. It could supply the bare minimum of theory and allow subsequent, assiduous exercise. The Aphthonian paradigm, in this capacity, introduces theory as much as it facilitates practice. There are other indications of the strategy. One early humanist commentator on the Progymnasmata complains of the deficiency of exempla in Aphthonius’ textbook. He praises Priscian and the sixteenth-century German humanist Petrus Mosellanus, author of the first modern textbook of ‘first exercises’, for including ‘more notable and suitable examples, which you often lack in Aphthonius’.33 This is odd, given that Aphthonius is the only ancient author of the progymnasmata to include models of the fourteen exercises (following Hermogenes, Priscian does not include model themes).34 But by exempla the commentator is evidently referring not to model themes but to citations of classical literature, which Priscian and Mosellanus both supply. For exempla, humanists looked to classical texts, just as they looked beyond grammatical textbooks for models of writing. Lorich’s popular edition of the Progymnasmata, supplemented by dozens of loci classici drawn from Latin and Greek poetry, history, and oratory, is a clear illustration of this practice.35 What need, then, for Aphthonius, and what purpose does the Aphthonian paradigm serve? A strong possibility is that for some humanists, the Aphthonian paradigm, with its unique arrangement of

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formal headings, served not as a model of imitation, but as an abstract or outline of rhetorical theory: a visible, memorable distillation of rhetorical doctrine much like the grammatical paradigm (hic haec hoc) is a visible, memorable distillation of grammatical usage. Thus for humanists, the progymnasmata were doing double duty; on the one hand, they introduced the art of rhetoric in paradigmatic fashion, and on the other, they served as a series of chapters in which to collect classical examples of eloquence.36 Paradoxically, in humanist practice the progymnasmata do not function primarily as models of prose composition. They stand in relation – paradigmatic or even metonymic relation – to rhetoric as a discipline. The importance of this for the cultural significance of the forms in the Renaissance can hardly be overstated. In effect, the headings of the chreia may have been to the study of rhetoric what ‘hic haec hoc’ was (and still is, to some extent) to the study of grammar – shorthand for an entire discipline in its institutional form. What if a Renaissance teacher saw in a model fabula, for instance, not a convenient model of writing or a preparation for spontaneously composing a prologue in a live speech, but the threshold of a discipline? What if, in writing a model narratio, a Renaissance student experienced not a sense of discovery or an opportunity to speak persuasively, but a sense of responsibility to new constraints and rules? What if a Renaissance writer used the headings of an encomium not as a memorable analytic table or an outline of a formal oration, but as a gesture towards his initiation into the premier discursive practice of the day? These imaginings are speculative, but such speculation is vital for describing the cultural significance of the forms, particularly as they are represented in contemporary literature.

Disciplinary Boundaries in the English Grammar School The burden of culture placed on the Aphthonian theme was augmented in England because of the disciplinary organisation of the grammar schools. In statutes drawn up in 1528 for his school at Ipswich, Cardinal Wolsey writes of the violence of entering into the fifth form, the first of the upper forms of the grammar school: Now I imagine that you are impatient to know what Rule of Study we will enjoin to this Form. Well; you shall be satisfy’d. In the first Place, I think proper to put you upon your Guard, that tender Youth are neither to suffer severe Whippings, nor sour-looking Threats, nor any Kind of Tyranny; for by such Treatment, the Fire of Genius is either extinguish’d, or, in a great Measure, damp’d.37

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The physical violence of the grammar schools in England is a notorious part of their legacy, and Wolsey’s attempt to curb the disciplinary practice of whipping is far from unique.38 What is interesting about this particular mention of physical punishment is its occasion: the entry of the student into the upper forms of the grammar school. Transformed in the first half of the sixteenth century, largely on the precepts of Erasmus, the grammar school in England supplies a very illuminating institutional setting for the teaching of the progymnasmata.39 Organised into between six and eight ‘forms’, ‘classes’, or ‘ranks’, the grammar school was also usually divided into two schools, a lower school overseen by an usher, and an upper school overseen by a master. Apart from these divisions, there was a lot of uniformity throughout the school. It was typical for the entire grammar school to meet in one room, ordered by rank.40 Furthermore, the daily and weekly routine, an unrelenting battery of drills, exercises, and exams, was uniform for all students, the major variation being the authors read and the compositions written or performed. The common verbal construal of the three liberal arts in the period – as well as the mechanical clock, a relatively new technology – made possible this graduated regularity of operation.41 Some exercises were even common to the lower and upper forms, with upper school students reading aloud the assignment to lower school students, who copied and later ‘rendered’ the exercise. In effect, a student of the upper school found himself still performing drills and routines of the same sort he performed when he began, only on a new author, in a new literary form, or in a new language (Greek). This perfect monotony of schedule within the schools is illustrated by contemporary school statutes arranged not by class but by routine, ranks being distinguished within each day and hour by the author to be read and the exercise to be performed. Perfectly uniform in almost all respects, the lower and upper forms of the grammar school were distinguished primarily by master and discipline. The lower forms were the domain of the usher, who arrived at six o’clock in the morning and set everybody to his morning routine, while the upper forms were the domain of the schoolmaster, who arrived an hour later and left an hour earlier. In the seven forms of the Eton school in 1560, students of the fourth were actually ‘transferred’ twice a day from the usher, who reviewed them in grammar drills, to the master, who initiated them into making themes. Such an arrangement made the disciplinary boundaries of the grammar school an integral part of the daily routine. The magisterial division of the school was also replicated in some exercises, with new upper school students giving certain lessons to veteran lower school students. Because teaching a lesson functions

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here as a demonstration of the student’s mastery, its effect is to further demarcate the social boundaries of the lower and upper schools.42 The disciplinary division of the lower and upper forms was no less tangible than the division of labour between usher and master. In his history of the ‘movement toward authorized uniformity’ in the grammar schools between the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, T. W. Baldwin describes how the schools, which originally deferred advanced grammatical instruction until the upper forms, eventually came to distribute the study of grammar and rhetoric between the lower and upper forms. Describing the statutes of the Canterbury school, where Christopher Marlowe went to school between the ages of 15 and 17, Baldwin writes, ‘The boys still do some grammar in the fourth form outside the lower school, but in other respects the demarcation is now complete between lower school and upper, with grammar as the function of the lower school and rhetoric of the upper. This demarcation is soon to be made even more complete.’43 Because grammar and rhetoric are frequently viewed as complementary arts of discourse – a view consistent with the humanist promotion of grammar and rhetoric over and against logic – the significance of this demarcation may not be immediately apparent. But the formal study of rhetoric introduced new disciplines of reading, thinking, and writing, as well as new authors and texts. In the absence of other defining features of a student’s promotion from the lower to the upper forms, this disciplinary demarcation, made only more evident by the tutelage of a new master, must have been significant in the experience of the grammar school student. Apart from the master’s birch, probably the most visceral experience of entering into the discipline of rhetoric was ‘making themes’, John Brinsley’s concise description of prose composition.44 Without question making themes was the constitutive activity of the upper forms.45 At Eton in 1560, prose themes were written every morning in the upper forms, except for Friday, when they were postponed until the evening for the sake of morning ‘corrections’, a disciplinary tribunal for the crimes and misdemeanours of the preceding week.46 Theme writing structured the weekly routine as well, as themes assigned Friday were submitted and corrected every Saturday, a day that ended the week with extempore declamations by boys of the upper forms. If Erasmus’ epistolary manual, the ubiquitous De Conscribendis Epistolis, is stipulated for making themes in earlier school statutes, later school statutes increasingly specify the Progymnasmata.47 Aphthonius is specified among the ‘oratours’ to be read at Norwich in 1566. At the cathedral school of Durham in 1593 and at Blackburn Grammar School in 1597, Aphthonius is specified ‘for Themes’. The Progymnasmata also appear in lists of grammar school

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texts in the later sixteenth century. The rising stock of Aphthonius’ text in the second half of the sixteenth century is indubitably linked to the popular Latin edition of the Progymnasmata by Reinhard Lorich, first published in 1542, revised in 1546, and frequently published in London after 1572.48 But rather than replacing Erasmus’ letter-writing manual, which served a similar purpose of introducing formal oratory, Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata was probably incorporated into existing sequences of prose composition as it became more widely available. In the case of the cathedral school at Durham, letter-writing appears to have been taught as a preparation for the Aphthonian theme.49 Inevitably there were local variations, but a general pattern is clear: in most schools, making themes was the daily exercise of the upper forms. There was, furthermore, an initiatory quality to making themes. In his dialogue on grammar school education, Ludus Literarius (1612), Brinsley records the physical violence that attended ‘making themes’ in the upper forms of the grammar school. One of his fictional interlocutors, a choleric master named Spoudaeus (‘Impatient’), describes his method of teaching prose composition, saying that according to the custom of the schools he ‘read them some of Apthonius’ rules’, and began with fabula and chreia.50 But Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata (later identified as Lorich’s edition) provokes him to physical violence: But yet (alas!) that which my children have done hereby for a long time, they have done it with exceeding paines and feare, and yet too-too weakely, in harsh phrase, without any invention, or judgement; and ordinarily so rudely, as I have been ashamed that any one should see their exercises. So as it hath driven mee into exceeding passions, causing me to deale over-rigorously with the poore boyes. [. . .] And yet notwithstanding, in their entring to make Theames, and so likewise into versifying, I have not known how to avoid it, but I have been enforced to use so much sharpnesse, as to make them to call all their wits together, and to stir them up to all diligence and paines; or otherwise I should haue done no good at all.51

On hearing this confession of the bully schoolmaster, Philoponus (‘Loves Labour’), the usually cool mouthpiece of Brinsley in the dialogue, becomes indignant as he thinks about the effective torment of students on their ‘entering to make themes’. He berates Spoudaeus and all schoolmasters who beat their scholars for not being able to master the Aphthonian theme, ‘inasmuch as the matter of them is harder’ and requires some training in logic and reading of authors who deal with loftier matter.52 Masters who beat their scholars for not mastering Aphthonius, he says, turn the school from a site of recreation (ludus) into a torturer’s rack (carnificina) or a threshing floor (pistrinum).53 Brinsley thus represents this part of the literary curriculum as a crux

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for the scholar and schoolmaster alike; the language of ‘entering into’ is especially suggestive of an initiatory process.54 This physical violence participates, however, in a larger economy of symbolic violence illustrated by one of the major sources of humanist practice, Quintilian’s treatment of the first exercises in The Orator’s Education (95 ce). At the beginning of book 2, chapter 4, his chapter on the ‘first exercises with the teacher of rhetoric’, Quintilian writes a long digression on correction, saying that correction should be used only sparingly, lest boys’ creativity be quashed prematurely. Treating education as a comprehensive training in eloquence, he encourages the teacher to give boys ample scope – even licence – for invention and expression in their written themes. It is better to suffer excess in a boy’s writing, he explains, than to discourage him with excessive criticism, for ‘exuberance is easily remedied’. Judgement, both the teacher’s and the boy’s, should follow copious invention – and slowly: It is worth noting too that boys’ minds sometimes cannot stand up to undue severity in correction. They despair, they feel hurt, they come ultimately to hate the work, and (most damaging of all) they make no effort because they are frightened of everything. Farmers know this: they do not believe in applying the pruning hook to the tender leaves, because these seem to be afraid of the knife and not yet able to bear a scar.55

Physical punishment does not come into the purview of Quintilian’s warnings against excessive correction, but there is a symbolic form of violence in the correction and judgement that he describes. For this correction, however it is administered, represents a new discipline and the authority of a new master, the teacher of rhetoric, whose duties Quintilian has taken up in book 2, beginning with the progymnasmata. It is significant that he inserts the important matter of correcting student work here, in his treatment of the first exercises. In this context, correction represents the boy’s responsibility to new forms of writing, new rules of logic, and new standards of style. English warnings against excessive whipping and Quintilian’s warning against excessive correction address different forms of violence in very different social contexts, but they both address the same problem: how to preserve the genius or creativity of boys on their entry into a new discipline.

Literary Exercise between the Disciplines Quintilian came up with a solution for which, if it had any preservative effects on the creative powers of Marlowe and Shakespeare,

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the anglophone world should be eternally grateful. In The Orator’s Education 1.9, he provides an interesting supplement to the grammarian’s duties, which he has covered in chapters 4–8.56 That he is done with the traditional grammar curriculum is clear at the beginning of 1.9, where he writes, ‘This concludes the two subjects which this profession claims to undertake, namely the principles of speech and the exegesis of the authors; the first of these is called “methodical” and the second “historical” grammatice-.’57 In this summary statement, including Greek technical terms methodikê and historikê, Quintilian refers to the conventional division of the grammarian’s responsibilities into two parts: correct speaking (recte loquendi scientia) and reading the poets (enarratio poetarum).58 What he goes on to describe in 1.9, it appears, is outside the traditional grammatical arts.59 ‘Let us add to these duties, however, some rudiments of eloquence (quaedam dicendi primordia) in which they are to instruct pupils still too young for the rhetor.’60 Quintilian begins the rudiments with a number of exercises to be performed on animal fables (Aesopi fabellae): reading aloud, writing down, translating from verse into prose, and finally paraphrasing. He then lists other rudimentary models that are to follow the fable: maxims (sententiae), character anecdotes (chriae), and character sayings (ethologiae).61 Finally, he says that the poet’s tales (narratiunculae) should be handled by the grammarian, but only for the sake of gleaning information and not, like the other primordia, for the sake of developing style. The list of forms enumerated here bears comparison with the first four themes in the Aphthonian series of exercises (fabula, narratio, chreia, sententia), though the emphasis in Quintilian’s treatment is more on techniques of reading and paraphrase, not on the paradigmatic forms themselves. It is a motley collection of small forms brought together by a pedagogical occasion. The primordia dicendi are a somewhat awkward appendix to the grammatical chapters of The Orator’s Education. They literally fall between two epilogues on the treatment of grammar, one at the beginning of 1.9 (see above), and another in 1.10, which begins, ‘So much for Grammar (Haec de grammatice).’62 Given the two epilogues, 1.9 reads like an interpolation. The primordia, although they include activities that resemble the duties of both grammar and rhetoric, are neither fish nor fowl, and they function as a holding pattern for students who have exhausted the traditional grammatical arts but are too young to go on to the school of rhetoric. They are Quintilian’s school for the precocious. Supplementing the technical arts of the grammarian and forestalling those of the rhetorician, they are supposed to shepherd the boy through a delicate transition – social and developmental no less than academic.

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It is this in-between situation of the primordia dicendi that makes them a fascinating object in the history of Renaissance poetry. They represent a body of literature that, although it has the imprimatur of the premier authority on rhetorical education, nonetheless falls outside, quite literally between, the disciplinary boundaries of grammar and rhetoric. It is in that capacity that the primordia represent what Victor Turner calls ‘anti-structure’.63 They may be seen as ‘rites of transition’, the liminal rites de passage that are marked by temporary inversions of hierarchy, suspensions of nomoi, and new conditions of becoming. This anti-structural quality of the primordia critically illuminates the frequent evocation of festive forms and occasions in the mythological epyllia – the dramatic circumstances that I describe in Part I as the ‘scene of culture’, a temporary, heterogeneous, and relatively unregulated site of poetic production. For the poet, the primordia represent not just an educational exercise but a site of extra-disciplinary practice, a site of poetic production and resistance to the discourses of grammar and rhetoric. It is on this site, represented by Sestos, Thebes, and Ida, that the poetic epyllia of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Heywood are at play. One of the first humanists to adapt Quintilian’s rhetorical curriculum for use in the English grammar schools, Erasmus greatly expanded his cursory treatment of the rudiments in a section on advanced exercises in the De Ratione Studii. For Erasmus, the rudiments of eloquence do not represent simply a holding pattern for precocious boys, but rather the building blocks of an elaborate programme of advanced reading and writing in Latin and Greek, in verse as well as prose. ‘These [exercises] must be arranged’, he writes, ‘thematically and orderly such that the simplest lessons come first – and these in small doses. Then as the seeds of learning mature (adolescunt), let the more serious lessons fall into place.’64 Preceded only by the ‘brief but witty theme of a letter’ set out in the vernacular (one of Erasmus’ rare uses for the vernacular) and translated into Latin or Greek (or both), the rudiments of eloquence are the foundational exercises in Erasmus’ programme of advanced exercises, an outline of which may be seen in Table 1.2. (As the table shows, Erasmus considered the Aphthonian progymnasmata not as a formal introduction to rhetoric but as part of this advanced workshop of style. He reserved the formal introduction to rhetoric for letter-writing.) The expansion of Quintilian’s list of forms into a full array of advanced themes reflects the centrality of copia in Erasmian pedagogy. Copia is the well of linguistic resources from which a student must eventually draw as occasion, subject matter, and audience demands.65 If Quintilian ‘would not want even maturity to come too soon’, Erasmus might not have maturity come at all.66 The net effect of his

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Table 1.2

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

‘Advanced themes’ in Erasmus’ De Ratione Studii (ASD I-2, 130.1–132.15)*

Latin and/or Greek rendering of the brief witty theme of a letter (proposed in the vernacular) Apologues (Aesopic fables), short myths, maxims briefly elaborated and explained Short moral themes Progymnasmata (Aphthonian themes) Praise, invective, myth (fabula), parallel, comparison, ecphrasis, analysis, ethopoeia, rebuttal, personification Prose renderings of verse, verse renderings of prose (metaphrasis) Stylistic imitation of letters by Pliny and Cicero Variation of maxims Exercises in Latin and Greek metrical prose Variations of a theme through six different verse forms Further manipulation and elaboration of Greek maxims

* The order is Erasmus’, numbers are my own.

account of the advanced exercises of grammar is, on the one hand, to focus the aim of the primordia dicendi – stylistic facility – and, on the other, to expand their scope with myriad exercises and prose and verse genres. Not just composition, but imitation, emulation and versification would be the means of developing copia. Despite the apparent indeterminacy of Erasmus’ exercises, they nonetheless reflect a design, which can be summed up by his famous adage: festina lente, or ‘make haste, slowly’. Illustrated by the Aldine device of the anchor and dolphin, the oxymoron captures the double motivation of the exercises, which simultaneously delay and advance the student’s progress. Summing up the entire list, he returns to the importance of their strategic arrangement: ‘If these seem difficult to boys at first, they will become easier by use, and the careful and inventive instructor will spare his boys no small trouble if he will forestall those he deems beyond their abilities.’67 In the De Ratione Studii, Erasmus thus elaborates the rudiments of eloquence into a more fully articulated series of exercises tied to boys’ linguistic and cognitive development. This developmental arrangement of the exercises strongly contributed to their social significance, enabling them eventually to become identified with the transition from childhood to maturity. Given their ‘primordial’ shape, the rudiments of eloquence are not as clearly defined as Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, but they nonetheless represent a coherent practice. Take, for instance, the Progymnasmata of Thomas More and William Lily, a series of eighteen Greek epigrams translated into Latin in a friendly competition between the author of

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Utopia and the first headmaster of St Paul’s.68 From the vast Greek Anthology, the eighteen epigrams have evidently been selected (perhaps by More or Lily) as a sampling of the rudiments of eloquence. Most importantly, the first epigram is a fable, which was the definitive beginning of the written exercises in the classical tradition.69 The remaining progymnasmata genres represented in the epigrams are narratio, chreia, sententia, and ethopoeia.70 Although they share genres with some of Aphthonius’ prose themes, these progymnasmata reflect an entirely different practice. Here, exercise is not a formula to be followed, but an operation. As Quintilian writes, remarking on the relativity of form in the rudiments, ‘the forms are different, but the strategy is the same’ (similis est ratio, forma diversa). In its protean capacity, able to assume in its few lines a variety of other literary genres, the Greek epigram is therefore a perfect container for the elemental, transformational practice of the rudiments of eloquence. As late as the mid seventeenth century, both epigrams and emblems (a humanist genre modelled in part on the epigram) were firmly ensconced in grammar school practice of the rudiments of eloquence. Here, in a treatment of the ‘Elements of Rhetorick’ for the fourth form, is the beginning of Charles Hoole’s rendering of The Orator’s Education 1.9: After they are thus become acquainted with variety of meeter, you may cause them to turn a Fable of Aesop into what kind of verse you please to appoint them; and sometimes you may let them translate some select Epigrams out of Owen, or those collected by Mr. Farnaby or some Emblemes out of Alciat, or the like Flourishes of wit, which you think will more delight them and help their fansies.71

Hoole is in this section treating the same exercises as Quintilian lays down: translating, paraphrasing, and parsing small forms.72 He follows Quintilian’s discussion right to the end of 1.9, specifying Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a source to supply the ‘brief myths solemnised by the poets’ (my translation of narratiunculas celebratas a poetis) that complete the circuit of the rudiments. Although Hoole’s book postdates the poems considered in this book by several generations, it testifies to the enduring legacy of Quintilian’s treatment of the ‘Elements of Rhetorick’, the preliminary exercises for boys who are just on the threshold of the upper forms and the discipline of rhetoric.

From Discursive Plenitude to Disciplinary Correction In the English grammar school, making themes fell into two stages, corresponding to Quintilian’s primordia and Erasmus’ advanced themes on

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the one hand, and progymnasmata (or letters, in Erasmus’ plan) on the other. Summarising the sequence of compositions in the Eton system, which was copied or adapted by a number of grammar schools, Baldwin writes: The boys of the fourth were making themes of the kind suggested by Erasmus in the De Ratione and in the preface to the Apothegms. Erasmus expected these to precede formal Aphthonian themes, which is probably the type being studied by the fifth at Eton, though Aphthonius, the only known guide, is not specifically mentioned there. It is clear, then, that Eton boys were to write both formal epistles and formal themes by the fifth. They would have had elementary forms of these before, leading up to the formal study in the fifth.73

School statutes providing for a sequential study of Erasmus’ De Copia and De Conscribendis Epistolis are modelled broadly on this sequence. As Baldwin rightly suggests, these are representative of two stages of making themes – the first a vade mecum of simple theme writing, the second a battery of Aphthonian themes or first exercises in rhetoric. Behind this division of themes is a basic narrative: a primordial treasury of eloquence forestalls the violence of rhetorical ‘correction’. If we take the rudiments of eloquence to be rites of transition, which take place in a space of temporary unrestraint, the succeeding series of first exercises appears to perform a complementary, disciplinary function of redress. In Victor Turner’s analysis, the rites of redress reestablish and reassert cultural nomoi.74 Often taking juridical forms, they accommodate the initiand by means of symbolic violence. In the narrative that English poets tell in the epyllion, the corrective forms of the first exercises are solemnised by violence, including physical violence that inaugurates a sequence of discipline (for instance, Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece) and symbolic violence that reintegrates an individual into society (Lucrece’s rhetorical defence and accusation). Appropriately, poets of historical epyllia evoke distinctive dramatic circumstances, what I call the ‘scene of rhetoric’, to contextualise the first exercises. The court of law, the royal palace, and the diplomatic embassy – these are among the various scenes that bring to life the social narrative inscribed in the progymnasmata, representing the social spheres that rewarded eloquence. What, then, is the symbolic violence entailed in ‘making themes’? In what ways might Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata and the violent schoolmaster be more than accidentally related? In their paradigmatic, formulaic, and mimetic form, Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata discipline the student in new patterns of reading, thinking, and writing. Before moving to the poems that represented this drama, I wish to briefly outline some of the more specific contours of the transition – to compare specific

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forms of verbal plenitude with the complementary forms of discipline to which they were subjected in the school of rhetoric. Although these are diverse in kind, they are representative of a single event, the entry into the study of rhetoric. All are illustrated in each of the chapters that follow, but I have indicated places where specific transitions are in focus. Fiction to history The most distinctive transition is generic. When he takes up narratio in the first exercises, Quintilian writes, ‘We have given poetical Narratives to the grammatici; the rhetor should begin with historical ones, which are more grown-up because more real.’75 Although he makes a clear demarcation between poetical and historical narrations, Quintilian does not draw an absolute line. Rather, historical narrations are relatively true (and consequently relatively grown-up: tanto robustior quanto verior). A rhetorical definition of history, which was influential in humanist historiography and education, is not the modern definition of history as a series of verifiable or falsifiable events.76 History is rather judged on a continuum with fictional narration, both being measured by a standard of verisimilitude or probability.77 It differs radically from fiction in subject matter, but not in manner of treatment. Likewise, historical narration will no sooner be told than elaborated with set speeches and descriptions, moralised, and subjected to debate on either side of the question of its truth.78 Poetic narration has in many ways prepared for writing narrations both historical and rhetorical. So the move from fiction to history, though operative in the transition from grammatical to rhetorical exercises, is a somewhat fluid transition. If both poetical and historical narrations were judged by the standard of probability, however, probability could be conceived in ways particular to fiction or history. Probability in poetical narration (particularly of the middle, or plausible kind of Quintilian’s tripartite schema: fable, comic plot, history) is best understood as mimetic verisimilitude. Measured against the standards of character types, historical exempla, and vividness of narration, poetic narration rises to probability the more it conforms to a certain idea or image. The truthful fabricator is therefore one who can best envision a scene and make words sound as if they were images. Voice is itself mimetic; in a mid sixteenth-century English rhetoric, Richard Sherry tellingly includes the figure prosopopoeia, or impersonation of character, under the heading of enargeia (vivid description).79 Probability in historical narration, on the other hand, arises from strategies of selection and organisation. Writing on the style of historical

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narration in the grammar school, Quintilian first describes it as a method of selection: ‘it is sufficient to note that it should be neither quite dry and jejune . . . nor, on the other hand, tortuous and revelling in those irrelevant Descriptions to which many are tempted in their wish to imitate the poets. Both are faults.’80 This is the very point at which Quintilian launches into his digression on correcting student work; discipline is, in the first place, learning what to leave out. Aphthonius’ headings are a guide to what could be said on a subject, but the probable narration will focus on those circumstances that are persuasive in an argument. Secondly, a probable history must not only select, it must make an artful arrangement of words, events, and circumstances. Returning to his theme after his diatribe on correction, Quintilian writes, ‘I want written Narratives to be as carefully composed as possible.’81 Right speaking takes reflection and some deliberation; spontaneity (central in the practice of vivid description) can wait. These disciplines are further illustrated below, in Chapters 4 and 5, where different standards of probability are applied not only in narrative exercises but in confirmatio as well. Operation to formula The rudiments and first exercises reflect different conceptions of ‘exercise’ and its relation to literary form. On the one hand, the difference is disciplinary and stems from Quintilian’s division of labour between grammarian and rhetorician. As summarised by James J. Murphy, ‘Quintilian maintains a separation between the two subjects by specifying that the grammaticus work almost entirely through imitatio, that is, through copying or paraphrasing models. The rhetoricus, on the other hand, works mainly through precepts that lay down a complete system of speech invention and presentation. Hence Quintilian distinguishes between the two by their method as well as by their ends.’82 Quintilian’s disciplinary division is paralleled, furthermore, by different conceptions of the progymnasmata by Theon and Aphthonius. According to Theon, who with Quintilian represents an earlier tradition of the rhetorical exercises, exercise is an operation performed on a variety of literary forms.83 In this sense of exercise, form is relative, reflected in the Latin words used to describe the grammar exercises: primordia, rudimenta, elementa. The rudiments are the raw material, the undifferentiated lump to be worked like clay into something through whatever native powers of expression a maker has. In Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, which forms the outline for humanist practice of the first exercises, ‘exercise’ refers not to the operation

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being performed but to the form itself. Operations that in Theon’s account were performed on a number of literary forms, including refutation and confirmation, here take on formal qualities. Form becomes fixed, as the rhetor directs a student’s verbal resources into prescribed channels. For instance, refutation is refutation of a narratio, preparing the student to make forensic arguments in the controversiae, the mocklegal declamations.84 Brinsley’s dialogue Ludus Literarius, introduced above, illustrates the difference. To help Spoudaeus with his entering of boys into making themes, Philoponus outlines a simpler, easier theme. But Spoudaeus is not content; he wants his students to write in the accepted way: This way may be very good for entering young Schollers, and to store them, with the best matter and phrase: but might there not be some speciall rules and directions given, for writing their Theames according to the order of the chiefe Schooles, prosecuting the severall parts of the Theame?85

Spoudaeus’ importunacy, his desire for ‘rules and directions’ for themes, reflects the social significance that the Aphthonian theme had acquired by the turn of the seventeenth century.86 Stamped with the recognisable headings, the well-ordered theme has a certain prestige, not just for the student but for the schoolmaster. As we have seen, Spoudaeus is ashamed to show his student themes because of their poor quality. Here he suggests again his desire to have something to display, implying that he and his students alike will be failures if they do not produce themes ‘more curiously’ – that is, according to the topics of invention, the genres of oratory, and the formal arrangement of the speech – or ‘according to the order of the chief schools’. Unlike the rudiments of eloquence, the site of undifferentiated literary exercise, the Aphthonian theme is a badge of training, a mark of initiation into the formal order or rule of speaking (see Chapter 6). Poesis to praxis A more subtle discipline of the first exercises may also be the most important for poets of the English epyllion. The rudiments take place in a figurative workshop, the first exercises on a training ground. One is a place of crafting, shaping, and preparing for the productive or poetic arts, the other a place of going through certain motions, repetitions, and drills. The outcome of the rudiments is an artefact, the outcome of the first exercises is a disposition or competency. One shapes word-things, the other conditions persons and activities. Impersonation and description are basic conditions of the rudiments

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of eloquence. The character to be imitated in the exercises of fable and ethologia is a stereotype, a mask to be put on. Description, likewise, takes static things for its objects in the workshop of the rudiments. Effictiones, icones, hieroglyphs – the thing to be described is plastic. The activity in both cases, impersonating and describing, is a kind of fiction. Tellingly, the Latin word for ‘elaboration’, the key operation performed on the small kinds, is exergasia, a metaphor drawn from the manual arts of production.87 (This probably carries over into Brinsley’s usage of ‘making themes’.) If the basic constituents of the rudiments are persons and images, the basic constituents of the first exercises are deeds and circumstances. In the transition from writing narratiuncula to narratio, the student turns from vivid description to the circumstances of a deed. Here the deed focalises narration, disciplining the earlier open-ended exercise of vivid description. Vivid imagination is now directed to the circumstances, the headings of the Aphthonian theme, and the speaker has to mentally review the whole scene and all its parts in order to discern places of argument. Similarly in the exercises of encomium and vituperatio, ‘deeds’ (res gestae) are the most important heading of argument, and everything that leads up to the praise of deeds was conceived of as the ‘circumstances’ of a person’s life.88 A pattern will be clear by now. Underlying all of these narratives of maturing in speech is a contest between the two verbal disciplines at the heart of the humanist literary curriculum: poetry and rhetoric. It might be expected, especially from a post-Romantic perspective, that the poets of the English epyllion would chafe at the disciplines of the first exercises and revel in the rudiments of eloquence. And there is certainly evidence of that – not all of our literary prejudices are legacies of Romanticism. But the story is more complicated, and I hope that the following chapters reflect the vitality of the epyllion in sorting out a real and productive rivalry between poetry and rhetoric.

Notes 1. ‘Illud interea ad magistri curam et sollicitudinem pertinet, ut puer loquendo quidem quotidie, scribendo autem alternis saltem diebus exerceatur. In ipso pubertatis ingressu primum exercebo eum in eis, quae Graeci vocant progymnasmata, id est, praeludia quasi quaedam et praecursiones ad eloquentiam.’ Marc Antoine Muret, ‘De Via ac Ratione Tradendarum Disciplinarum’, Oratio 2.18 in M. Antonii Mureti Opera Omnia, ed. Carolus Henricus Frotscher, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1834–41), 1.417. 2. A general history of the progymnasmata is a desideratum. But see

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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Kraus, ‘Progymnasmata, Gymnasmata’; and Bartosz B. Awianowicz, ‘Progymnasmata in the Theory and Practice of the Humanistic School from the Late 15th to the Mid-18th Century’, Eos 94 (2007): 317–22, an English summary of his 2007 PhD dissertation written at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torún. Clark, ‘The Rise and Fall of Progymnasmata’. Michel Foucault’s influential theory of the modern disciplines informs but does not determine my description of the ‘disciplinary organization’ of the humanist grammar school. Of the liberal arts in the early modern period, it is rhetoric in my view that most urgently needs to be conceived of as a discipline. See Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), 135-94. In speaking of the progymnasmata, I limit myself to the paradigms of prose composition and leave aside the more elementary, syntactical manipulations of chreia, also traditionally called ‘progymnasmata’. See Ronald F. Hock and Edward N. O’Neil, eds, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, vol. 1: The Progymnasmata (Atlanta, 1986). The objects and ends of humanist rhetoric were not those of the modern state, but Foucault’s description of (physical) exercise as a procedure of discipline is analogous: ‘Exercise is that technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behaviour towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual either in relation to this term, in relation to other individuals, or in relation to a type of itinerary.’ Discipline and Punish, 161. Influential works on the social impact of rhetoric in the English Renaissance include Lanham, Motives of Eloquence, Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, 1985), and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York, 1987). In Elizabethan Rhetoric, Mack shows the influence of humanist education on numerous speech genres in Elizabethan England. An influential argument of this view is Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York, 1961). See also L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1991), 122–63: ‘The philosophical overtones humanism later developed are only in part the result of its originally classical emphasis – the teaching, study, and promotion of classical literature’ (122). With special attention to later, Northern humanism, Ann Moss makes a powerful restatement of this view in Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford, 2003). A debate over the achievements of humanistic learning was ignited by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s revisionist history of Renaissance education, From Humanism to the Humanities. Although their conclusions have not been widely accepted, Grafton and Jardine’s historical investigation of classroom practice set a new agenda for scholarship, especially on the English Renaissance. See Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, 1996). Grafton and Jardine discuss the symbolic value of the progymnasmata in From Humanism to the Humanities, 129–35. For an example of the

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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Untutored Lines progymnasmata in practice, in the twelve-year old Edward VI’s written themes, see pp. 155–60. Edward’s repetitive drilling in the themes may reflect a rite of passage, a temporary humiliation as the price of entry into the discourses and practices of rhetoric. The forms represent a crux for tutor and pupil alike: on the threshold of the discipline by which humanists largely defined their endeavours, they are a test of resolve on the part of the teacher and endurance on the part of the pupil. Although I have divided the remainder of this book into two parts, representing the peer groups symbolised by the rudiments and first exercises, I have kept a sequential numbering of chapters to underscore the narrative process at work in the same exercises. Kraus, ‘Progymnasmata, Gymnasmata’, 160. For further history of the progymnasmata, see Donald Leman Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York, 1957), 177–212; Stanley F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), 250–76; Hock and O’Neil, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, 10–22; Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata, ed. Michel Patillon and Giancarlo Bolognesi (Paris, 1997), vii–xxiii, cxx–cxxvi. Translated in George A. Kennedy, trans., Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Leiden, 2003), 95–127. For the Greek text I have consulted Hugo Rabe, ed., Aphthonii Progymnasmata (Leipzig, 1926). Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 97. In his history of encomium in the ancient world, Laurent Pernot observes this effect of pedagogy on an existing practice: ‘Enkômion is henceforth conceived of as a series of chapters’ (my translation). La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde Gréco-Romain, 2 vols (Paris, 1993), 1: 150. D. A. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983), 10–13; see also Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome, 250–76. On the declamations, see Robert A. Kaster, ‘Controlling Reason: Declamation in Rhetorical Education at Rome’, in Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity, ed. Yun Lee Too (Leiden, 2001), 317–37; Stanley F. Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire (Liverpool, 1949); Russell, Greek Declamation. Donald Lemen Clark, ‘Rhetoric and the Literature of the English Middle Ages’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (1959): 19–24. For a richly contextualised definition of exercitatio in the Middle Ages, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), 142. The editio princeps of the Greek text of the Progymnasmata was printed in Bologna in 1507, one year prior to the Aldine edition discussed here. Lawrence D. Green and James J. Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric: ShortTitle Catalogue 1460–1700, 2nd edn (Aldershot, 2006), 27. Hereafter RRSTC. For the circumstances of this edition, see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca, NY, 1979), 149–59. This early humanist reception of the progymnasmata almost certainly reflects Byzantine practice. In Byzantine manuscripts, the Progymnasmata

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

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of Aphthonius appears as the first part of the ‘Hermogenic Corpus’, a comprehensive treatment of rhetoric in a number of works by Hermogenes, the Greek sophist of the second century ce. See George L. Kustas, Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric (Thessaloniki, 1973). Two early Latin translations of the Progymnasmata appear in translations of the Hermogenic corpus. See Kraus, ‘Progymnasmata, Gymnasmata’, 168. RRSTC, 27–8, 31. It is freely adapted from the Lorich edition of Aphthonius. The full title is A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike, because all other partes of Rhetorike are grounded thereupon, every parte sete forthe in an Oracion upon questions, verie profitable to bee knowen and redde. The Foundacion of Rhetorike, sig. a3v. RRSTC, 462. Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park, PA, 1994). The Rhetorica, first printed in Marburg in 1537, is dated 13 November 1536 in a dedicatory letter. My text is Erasmus Sarcerius, Rhetorica (Marburg, 1539). This, and a Wittenberg edition of 1597 (printed by Lorenz Säuberlich), may be added to the ten editions between 1537 and 1583 listed in RRSTC, 388. The full title (as in the Marburg edition) indicates the utility of the themes as quasi-declamations: Rhetorica Plena ac Referta Exemplis, quae Succinctarum Declamationum Loco Esse Possunt. Rhetorica, sig. a3r. With the exception of the forensic exercises, which are here based on status theory, the Rhetorica is essentially the conventional progymnasmata rearranged and supplemented by Melanchthon’s genus didacticum (also didascalicum, didaskalikon), on which see Kees Meerhoff, Entre logique et littérature: Autour de Philippe Melanchthon (Orleans, 2001), 15–17, 25–38, and passim. On status theory in relation to the progymnasmata, see below, Chapter 5. For this comparison, I draw on Phillip J. Donnelly, ‘Latin Pedagogy and Ethical Ends in “The Royal Grammar” (1542)’, in Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions: Incarnation, Narrative, and Ethics: Essays in Honor of David Lyle Jeffrey on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. D. H. Williams and Phillip J. Donnelly (Notre Dame, IN, forthcoming). On the influence of Guarino da Verona and Lorenzo Valla on humanist methods of teaching grammar, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1989), 172–82: ‘The real break between medieval and Renaissance instruction occurred immediately after the students had finished the Ianua and Disticha Catonis. Renaissance students did not go on to medieval verse grammars such as the Doctrinale, but read Vives’ Colloquia and, above all, Cicero and Vergil. Renaissance humanists and teachers viewed grammar as a tool for the study of ancient literature’ (182). Robert Black argues for a less revolutionary Guarino in Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001), 124–9. Alardus of Amsterdam writes this in the preface to his edition of Priscian’s Praeexercitamenta, which appears in Rudolph Agricola, Lucubrationes, ed. Alardus of Amsterdam (1539, repr. Nieuwkoop, 1967), sigs. L1r–L1v.

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34. Compare the comment of Clark: ‘[Aphthonius] won the textbook market in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because he included model themes.’ ‘Rhetoric and the Literature of the English Middle Ages’, 24. 35. Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, trans. Agricola and Cataneo, ed. Reinhard Lorich (London, 1572). 36. In the Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, Lorich includes hundreds of loci classici for imitation. 37. Quoted in Baldwin, Small Latine, 1:124. 38. For critical perspectives on corporal punishment in the humanist classroom, see Bushnell, ‘The Sovereign Master and the Scholar Prince’, chapter 2 of A Culture of Teaching, and Alan Stewart, ‘“Traitors to Boyes Buttockes”: The Erotics of Humanist Education’, chapter 3 of Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1997). 39. Baldwin documents these changes in Small Latine, 1:75–435. For an outline of the history of schools in England up to the sixteenth century, see Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London, 1989), 1–21. Orme sees the change in schooling during the Renaissance not as a special or unusual event but as ordinary: ‘Ever since the twelfth century schools have undergone changes, some generated within, some due to outside forces operating now to the schools’ advantage, now to their detriment’ (7). 40. Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 19. 41. The earliest evidence of school routines structured by the clock dates from the 1450s. Orme, Education and Society, 179. 42. In Virgil’s Schoolboys, Wallace attends to parallel scenes of mastery in Virgil’s poems and in the humanist classroom. 43. Small Latine, 1:166–7. See also 1:154, 159. 44. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius or The Grammar Schoole, ed. E. T. Campagnac (Liverpool, 1917), 172. Chapter 13 is entitled ‘Of making Theames full of good matter, in a pure stile, and with judgement.’ 45. John Brinsley identifies the exercises of the ‘highest fourmes’ as themes, declamations, verses, and orations. Ludus Literarius, 200. 46. Baldwin, Small Latine, 1:357. 47. Ibid. 415–28. 48. For a list of editions see RRSTC, 28–30. Except where otherwise noted, all references to Lorich’s Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata are to the 1572 London edition. 49. Baldwin ultimately describes a threefold sequence from advanced themes to letter-writing to Aphthonian theme. Where the services of both the De Conscribendis Epistolis and the Aphthonii Progymnasmata were retained, instructors would have inevitably run into some redundancies, but redundancy hardly appears to have fazed schoolmasters. One novel aspect of Lorich’s edition, its inclusion of classical verse as exempla of the fourteen themes, should not be overlooked. Verse themes were the penultimate exercise of the upper school before declamatory exercises. Thus the Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata could have been utilised throughout the upper forms, as the student began with prose themes and later turned to verse themes. This component of Lorich’s edition suggests a further relationship with Erasmus’ letter-writing manual. A student who studied the rules

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56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

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of prosody in a letter-writing manual would eventually put those rules to work in composing an Aphthonian theme in verse. Camerarius’ Elementa Rhetoricae (1540) incorporates units on both letter-writing and prosody into its complete circuit of exercises and may suggest how all of these components worked in sequence. See below, Chapter 3. Ludus Literarius, 172. Ibid. 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid. 174. Philoponus has asked Spoudaeus to tell him what way he has used ‘for the entring of [his] children in making their Theames.’ Ibid. 172. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 5 vols, ed. and trans. by D. A. Russell (Cambridge, MA, 2001), book 2, chapter 4, paragraphs 11–12 (2.4.11– 12). Unless otherwise noted, references to The Orator’s Education are to this edition and translation. See F. H. Colson, ‘The Grammatical Chapters in Quintilian I. 4–8’, Classical Quarterly 8 (1914): 33–47. The Orator’s Education, 1.9.1. See The Orator’s Education, 1.4.2. For the development of the theory of ‘grammar’ in the ancient world, see Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and its Humanist Reception (New Haven, 1997), 20–40. See Toivo Viljamaa, ‘From Grammar to Rhetoric: First Exercises in Composition according to Quintilian, Inst. 1.9’, Arctos 22 (1988): 179– 201. The Orator’s Education, 1.9.1. I have supplied my own translation of dicendi primordia, which Russell translates ‘elements of oratory’. The Orator’s Education, 1.9.3. Most sixteenth-century editions read ‘ethologiae’; several include a marginal note with the manuscript reading ‘aitiologiae’ (an explanation of a deed or saying). Modern editors attribute the emendation to Raphaello Regius, whose annotated edition of the Institutio oratoria was first published in 1493. See Rodney P. Robinson, ‘Ethologia or Aetiologia in Suetonius De Grammaticis c. 4, and Quintilian i. 9’, Classical Philology 15 (1920): 370–9; F. H. Colson, ‘Quintilian I. 9 and the “Chria” in Ancient Education’, The Classical Review 35 (1921): 150–4. The Orator’s Education, 10.1.1, my translation. See also Viljamaa, ‘From Grammar to Rhetoric’, 179. See Turner’s discussion of liminality and communitas in The Ritual Process, 94–7. ASD I-2, 130 (my translation). The abuses of copia, which easily degenerated into the notebook method (Erasmus recommended a commonplace book), are well known. William G. Crane provides a disparaging portrait of copia in Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style (New York, 1937). More recently, the notebook method of composition has been illuminated by critical theory. In Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford, 1989), 1–99, Lorna Hutson situates copia in early modern discourses of profit and providence. See also Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings,

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66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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Untutored Lines Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993); and Bushnell, ‘Harvesting Books’, chapter 4 of A Culture of Teaching. The Orator’s Education, 2.4.9. Printed editions rubricate the main body of the letter with the title ‘On the formal instruction of students’ (De ratione instituendi discipulos). The title somewhat obscures Erasmus’ subject, which is the formal instruction of boys (pueri), a word that he uses throughout the letter, only occasionally using adolescentes. The text of More and Lily’s Progymnasmata has been edited by Leicester Bradner and Charles Arthur Lynch in The Latin Epigrams of Thomas More (Chicago, 1953), 6–14. Even Petrus Mosellanus, who denigrates the rudimentary forms, retains the fable as a starting point in his adaptation of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata, the De Primis apud Rhetorem Exercitationibus Praeceptiones (first printed in 1523). Chreia is represented by Progymnasmata 10; sententia by 4; ethopoeia by 3; and narratio by 14 and 17. Charles Hoole, A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching (London, 1661), sigs. G8v–G9r. After discussing manipulation of verses after the manner of Stockwood’s Progymnasma Scholasticum (comparable to Quintilian’s discussion of manipulating chreia), he recommends that students take an ‘argument’ from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a text for paraphrase and elaboration: ‘adorn and amplifie it with fit Epithetes, choice Phrases, acute Sentences, wittie Apophthegmes, livelie similitudes, pat examples, and Proverbial Speeches; all agreeing to the matter of moralitie therein couched.’ A New Discovery, sig. G10v. Small Latine, 1:363–4. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 39–41. The Orator’s Education, 2.4.2. See Moss’ discussion of verisimilar narration in Renaissance Truth, 191– 254, esp. 225–7. In Metamorphic Verse, Hulse shows that the minor epic was for both Daniel and Drayton an exercise in poetical truth. Describing Samuel Daniel’s writing of history in the Complaint of Rosamond, Hulse speaks of ‘a middle scale of truth’ (206). The Orator’s Education, 2.4.18. Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550, repr. Gainesville, FL, 1961), 69 (sig. Eiiir). The Orator’s Education, 2.4.3. Ibid. 2.4.15. James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middles Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), 25. See Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 5–8. Theon influenced the humanist practice of the rudiments, primarily via the work of the German humanist Joachim Camerarius, who published a Latin translation of the Progymnasmata (tellingly titled the ‘First Exercises’ (Primae Exercitationes)) in 1541. This may have been translated as a companion (sequel) to his own Elementa

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84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

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Rhetoricae (1540), written as a battery of the rudiments of eloquence (see below, Chapter 3). Camerarius had probably already absorbed Theon’s work before writing the Elementa. As I will further elaborate in Chapter 5, the declamations (conceived of as ‘exercises’ or a training ground) informed humanist conceptions of the ‘preliminary’ or ‘first’ exercises. Ludus Literarius, 178. A printed marginal note at this place reads, ‘The ordinary manner of directing Schollers how to begin to make Theames, according to Apthonius’ rules.’ Ludus Literarius, 172. For my conception of the rudiments of eloquence as a workshop of style, I draw on Rosalie Colie’s illuminating lectures, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1973), esp. ch. 2. Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, 80.

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Fabula: Observing ‘Amorous Rites’ in Hero and Leander

Musaeus’ Hero and Leander, translated by the celebrated printer Aldus Manutius, praised by the formidable critic Julius Caesar Scaliger, and widely imitated in a number of vernacular tributes in the sixteenth century, was an ambitious model for an English poet to take up in the late sixteenth century.1 From its earliest printings in the 1490s, the poem, thought to be by the legendary contemporary of Orpheus, was advertised as a primeval source of eloquence.2 It was also thought to be the source of Ovid’s Heroides 18 and 19, and so offered to the aspiring Ovidian an unparalleled witness to the master’s technique of embellishment and amplification.3 But Marlowe was a latecomer to an already crowded international effort to simultaneously overgo Ovid and enrich the poetic resources of vernacular tongues. In fact, as Gordon Braden has argued, by the time Marlowe took up the theme, the European vernacular tradition surrounding Musaeus was virtually exhausted, freeing up Marlowe to begin anew with a direct encounter with the Greek text.4 Early in his translation Marlowe pays homage to the ‘song’ of this primordial poet, whom he refers to as ‘divine Musaeus’.5 The force of this reference is its placement between two major embellishments, each over forty lines long, that Marlowe supplies in his version. The tribute is strategically placed to draw attention to the greater abundance of Marlowe’s imitation – its copia, or fullness of discourse, which was a major object of literary imitation in the sixteenth century.6 As T. W. Baldwin describes Marlowe’s relationship to his source, ‘For some time he kept his eye upon the text, in at least one place in the conventional Latin translation of Musurus; but finally he simply followed the trend of Musaeus, presenting the details freely in his own way and making lengthy insertions of his own.’7 In its unfinished form, which ends at sunrise after the lovers’ first night together, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is 818 lines in heroic couplets, or about three times its source in length.8

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The length of Marlowe’s paraphrase reflects at one level the general influence of rhetoric on early modern habits of imitation. But Marlowe’s imitation also reflects a precise occasion of rhetoric in its institutional form, illustrated by the textual appearance of Musaeus’ Hero and Leander in a grammar school textbook. In most sixteenth-century editions, the Greek text of Musaeus’ Hero and Leander was accompanied by Aesop’s fables, two mock epics, the Hippocratic Oath, and a collection of maxims.9 The first edition of this intriguing compilation, entitled The Fables of Aesop the Phrygian in Greek and Latin with Other Minor Works, was printed in six volumes with continuous pagination in Basel by Froben in 1518.10 It was later printed as one volume in 1524, and Fabricius reports fifteen subsequent editions of the collection before 1584, including one at London in 1572 with the note ‘for use at the Eton school’.11 At first sight, the edition appears to be a hopelessly disparate collection, a freakish accident of the young printing industry. What has Musaeus, highly regarded by many humanists as an Orphic poet, to do with Aesop?12 As I show in this chapter, Froben’s edition has a theoretical precedent in the rudiments of eloquence, the advanced exercises of grammar defined by Quintilian and introduced above, in Chapter 1. Influential sixteenth-century humanists, in their emulation of ancient culture, recuperated this group of grammar school exercises, which included animal fables and brief myths (narratiunculae), and used them to prepare boys for the study of rhetoric. The purpose of the rudiments was to cultivate an abundant reserve of linguistic expression that could be corrected in the school of rhetoric, and a diversity of literary forms was employed to that end. Froben’s polymorphic compilation is one example of the tools at the humanist schoolmaster’s disposal in the teaching the rudiments; Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is an unusually good outcome. Although the poem is not an artefact of the humanist grammar school, I will argue that it was written in the workshop of the rudiments of eloquence, and that understanding these circumstances vitally informs a cultural reading of the poem. The appearance of Musaeus’ Hero and Leander in a collection of the rudiments of eloquence lies behind Marlowe’s representation of Leander as a boy on the threshold of adolescence. I don’t mean to suggest that the poem is an allegory of the humanist grammar school, but that the cultural conditions of writing are felt in its very texture and theme. What the rudiments represent in the humanist grammar school is a temporary suspension of the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric, a transitional space in which the student is free to cultivate language and narration of a protean, inventive, and potentially subversive sort. That transitional

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space has its symbolic representation, I argue, in the Feast of Adonis at Sestos, where Marlowe’s story begins. As we will see, the Feast of Adonis is a ritual occasion that gives rise to mythography in a variety of forms – both visual and verbal – and it illustrates the licence, abundance, and heterogeneity of the rudiments of eloquence. It is a vivid example of what I call the ‘scene of culture’, the dramatic conditions evoked in the mythological epyllion to contextualise the boy’s last rites of boyhood. In the ritual drama of the poem, Sestos represents a place of marginalisation for Leander, a place of temporary separation from his peer group in the transition to adolescence. Marked by its profusion of visual signs, rituals, and enigmas, the scene of culture occasions the voluble – and delightfully innocent – eloquence of Leander.13

Musaeus among the Rudiments of Eloquence In his division of the progymnasmata between grammarian and rhetorician, Quintilian enumerates for the grammar school several literary genres that appear, at first glance, to have little formal unity. He says, however, that it is not a form that unites them, but a ratio, or ‘method’, of using them for compositions: ‘In all of these exercises the method is the same, but the form differs (similis est ratio, forma diversa).’ He describes the method with reference to Aesop’s fables: Let them learn to tell Aesop’s fables, which follow on directly from their nurses’ stories, in pure and unpretentious language; then let them achieve the same slender elegance in a written version. Verse they should first break up, then interpret in different words, then make a bolder paraphrase, in which they are allowed to abbreviate and embellish some parts, so long as the poet’s meaning is preserved. This task is difficult even for fully trained teachers; any pupil who handles it well will be capable of learning anything.14

In this passage, Quintilian describes different types of an activity generally called ‘translation’ in the Renaissance.15 His description of the ‘bolder paraphrase’ is especially germane to Froben’s 1518 Aesop, since it illuminates the relationship among the three genres represented there: fables, mock-heroic poems, and maxims. Quintilian’s definition of a distinct group of grammarian’s ‘rudiments’ influenced the printing of Greek Aesopic fables in the sixteenth century. In his 1505, and only, edition of the Greek fables, Aldus Manutius collected a group of forms appropriate for the grammar school rudiments.16 The Vita et Fabellae Aesopi differs from previous editions of the Greek fables because it is an eclectic compilation. Following two fable collections, one in prose attributed to Aesop and one in verse by the Byzantine

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Ignatius Diaconus (falsely attributed to ‘Gabrias’, i.e., Babrius), there are two treatises on interpreting Greek myths, a collection of myths refuted with rationalist retellings, a commentary on hieroglyphics, and a collection of proverbs with an explanation of their origin, frequently a mythological narrative.17 Aldus was not, apparently, interested in printing the fables as an independent text, regardless of the fact that such editions were successful and would have secured him a quick profit.18 The fables for the grammarian-become-printer were more important as part of a sequence: the rudiments of eloquence, which cultivated abundant reserves of linguistic facility. Aldus’ edition of Aesop is essentially a collection of ‘fabulae’ (in the rhetorical definition of implausible narratives) and their interpretations; it closely corresponds to the forms recommended by Quintilian for the grammar school, especially in that it begins with the fables and ends with proverbs. (Underscoring its pedagogical aim, Aldus includes and translates Aphthonius’ chapter on fable and model fable of the ants and the cicadas at the head of the collection.)19 Drawing on Quintilian’s description of the ‘bolder paraphrase’, Froben made a more practical refinement of Aldus’ 1505 Aesop, which supplied a battery of Greek rudiments of eloquence. From Aldus’ textbook, he retained the Greek life and prose fables of Aesop and the verse fables of ‘Gabrias’, as well as Aldus’ Latin translation of these. Instead of reproducing Aldus’ massy reference book, however, Froben made a smaller compilation of works that the student could handle. This edition, printed in octavo, is not an encyclopaedic resource such as Aldus compiled but a more practical handbook of literary exercises. Froben’s edition furthermore contains some works valuable for practice in composition: longer versions of fables. In place of the allegorical and etymological interpretations of myths, it builds on the basic element of the animal fable by including two mock-heroic narratives, the pseudoHomeric The Battle of the Frogs and Mice and The Battle of the Weasel and Mice, which are essentially verse fables puffed up with set pieces in description and declamation. In putting the mock-heroic poems with fables, Froben may have been inspired or even directed by his associate Erasmus, who claims to have imitated The Battle of the Frogs and Mice in his adage ‘A dung-beetle hunting an eagle’.20 In this adage, Erasmus does not simply recount the fable (as in other adages), but first sets out an elaborate description of the antagonists and only then writes an elaborately amplified version of the story as told by Aesop. In an important acknowledgement of the amplifying exercise he demonstrates in ‘A dung-beetle hunting an eagle’, Erasmus refers to the briefer fable from which it springs, and he twice

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attributes the fable to Aesop (once on the authority of Lucian, another time on the authority of Aristophanes).21 The Greek fable attributed to Aesop was known to Erasmus (probably through Aldus’ Aesop), but instead of relating it in fable form, he references two different citations of the fable in satire and comedy. This allusiveness is a reflection on the ‘gnomic’ quality of the fable, which includes proverbial clarity in its moral but also allegorical potential in its symbolic representation. The fable is essentially portable, and its form mutable. It can be reduced to a moral statement or expanded in a fuller embellishment. Interestingly, Erasmus made the largest expansion of this adage for the revised edition of the Adages printed in 1515 by Froben, who also printed ‘A dung-beetle hunting an eagle’ separately with ‘The Sileni of Alcibiades’ and ‘War is sweet to those who have not tried it’ in 1517.22 Erasmus may have advised Froben on the selection of volumes to accompany the 1518 edition of Aesop’s fables. Adapting Aldus’ 1505 Aesop, which is a compilation of the poetic forms useful for grammar school paraphrase, Froben focuses the activity to the ‘bolder paraphrase’, similar to the one that served Erasmus in his mock-heroic story of the dung-beetle. The conjunction of the fables with the mock-heroic narratives exemplifies two states of a narrative: one in abbreviated form, and one amplified by added description and declamation. Aldus’ and Froben’s editions of Aesop’s fables are key texts in the humanist tradition of the rudiments of eloquence, and they both illustrate important features of the school exercises. Aldus’ edition, by joining the animal fables with the tales of anthropomorphic gods, illustrates the rhetorically defined genre of the ‘poetical’ narrative. Froben’s edition, by juxtaposing animal fables with mock-heroic poems, illustrates the ‘bolder paraphrase’. Froben included in this textbook Musaeus’ Hero and Leander, and this was the standard edition of the poem throughout the sixteenth century, running to over a dozen editions. The formal presentation of this poem among the fables and amplified mock-heroic narratives situates it within a pedagogical context that greatly informed Marlowe’s imitation.

Marlowe’s Paraphrase In his adaptation of Musaeus’ poem, Marlowe demonstrates the same strategy found in the mock-heroic amplification of a fable, using two formal elements for amplification: description and declamation. He follows his source only briefly, using lines from Musaeus to launch into elaborate descriptions of the two protagonists.23 In its structure,

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Hero and Leander resembles Erasmus’ amplified fable ‘A dung-beetle hunting an eagle’, because it opens with descriptions of the characters in nearly symmetrical passages (5–50, 51–90). These descriptions, among the most distinctive features of Hero and Leander, resemble even more nearly the verse descriptions found in a fable told in Edmund Spenser’s ‘Februarie’ eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender (1579). In the fable of the oak and briar, the narrator Thenot begins with a comparative description of the two characters, who represent wise age and foolish youth. It is useful to see the whole passage, which shows the same kind of detail and symmetry as Marlowe’s description of Hero and Leander: There grewe an aged Tree on the greene, A goodly Oake sometime had it bene, With armes full strong and largely displayd, But of their leaves they were disarayde: The bodie bigge, and mightely pight, Throughly rooted, and of wonderous hight: Whilome had bene the King of the field, And mochell mast to the husband did yielde, And with his nuts larded many swine. But now the gray mosse marred his rine, His bared boughes were beaten with stormes, His toppe was bald, and wasted with wormes, His honor decayed, his braunches sere. Hard by his side grewe a bragging brere, Which proudly thrust into Thelement, And seemed to threat the Firmament. Yt was embellisht with blossomes fayre, And thereto aye wonned to repayre The shepheards daughters, to gather flowres, To peinct their girlonds with his colowres. And in his small bushes used to shrowde The sweete Nightingale singing so lowde.24

Thenot does in verse what Erasmus did in prose in ‘A dung-beetle hunting an eagle’; he amplifies a fable with an opening description of the two protagonists. The descriptions are not static but in motion, and summon up past deeds before coming to the present. We get a portrait of the oak in its prime, as well as a georgic scene of a swineherd gathering acorns from around it. Likewise, the briar is not so much described as placed in a dramatic scene, complete with song. The same features of description have been recognised in the opening of Hero and Leander, though without an awareness of the genre or exercise from which they spring.25 In the narrator’s description of Leander, for instance, there is as much attention to the responses of others as actual description:

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His presence made the rudest paisant melt, That in the vast uplandish countrie dwelt, The barbarous Thratian soldier moov’d with nought, Was moov’d with him, and for his favour sought. (79–82)

The description of Hero and Leander is less ostensibly moral than Thenot’s description of the oak and briar, but a similar dynamism is clear. Marlowe draws on diverse traditions, especially mythological allusions and Petrarchan blazon.26 Within the formal structure of his poem, however, there is a clear reference to the grammar school amplification of the fable. Like Erasmus, Marlowe may have drawn some inspiration from the muses of The Battle of the Frogs and Mice. In fact, the description of Hero’s clothing seems to draw on a figurative conceit in the mockheroic ‘armourings’ of that poem, where the mice are the first to arm themselves: First they fitted on greaves, breaking in half and fashioning well the green bean pods that they had set upon and gnawed during the night. They had corslets from straw-sewn hides that they had made skilfully after skinning a weasel. Their shield was the bossed lid of a lamp; their spear a long needle, bronze work of the War god; and the helmet on their heads the husk of a chickpea.27

The frogs, not to be outdone, are equally ingenious in fashioning their armour: They covered their shanks in mallow leaves; they had fine corslets from green mangelwurzels; they fashioned cabbage leaves well into shields; each had a long needle-rush held firm for a spear; and helmets from thin snail shells protected their heads.28

In the description of Hero’s footwear, Marlowe plays on a similar conceit: Buskins of shels all silvered, used she, And brancht with blushing corall to the knee; Where sparrowes pearcht, of hollow pearle and gold, Such as the world would woonder to behold; Those with sweet water oft her handmaid fils, Which as shee went would cherupe through the bils. (31–6)

Hero’s clothing mocks our sense of verisimilitude. Like the frogs and mice going into battle, she wears nature’s clothing ingeniously fashioned, and instead of natural materials being turned to engines of war, they combine in her shoes to make a hydraulic music-machine. Though there is no direct imitation of (Homer)’s words in Marlowe’s fantastic

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description, a common method of amplification is evident. More important than this local echo is the opening descriptive comparison of the two protagonists, which resembles the rhetorical amplification of animal fables by Erasmus and Spenser. Appearing as it does at the beginning of the poem, it is the most important indicator of a generic commitment in Marlowe’s imitation of Musaeus. In addition to amplifying the story with description, Marlowe also adds declamation, which is a key part of the mock-heroic humour of The Battle of the Frogs and Mice. Addition of speeches, especially formal orations, has a long tradition in the grammar school exercise of writing animal fables. It is the main method of amplifying fables according to Priscian’s Praeexercitamenta, a sixth-century translation of the Progymnasmata traditionally attributed to Hermogenes. Priscian’s chapter on fables, which was included in Froben’s edition of Aesop and in subsequent editions, explains the method and gives a brief illustration: If you want to write the fables now briefly, and now more fully, how should you do it? For the brief fable, let it be told with simple narration; for the longer, let a speech be made for the characters involved. For example: The monkeys met together, and they were holding counsel about building a city. Having agreed to build, they were getting ready to dig the foundation when an elder monkey dissuaded them, telling them that they might easily be captured if they walled themselves in. So much for the brief fable. If you want to draw it out, write it like so: The monkeys met together, and they were holding counsel about building a city. One of them took the floor to argue that they ought to have a city. ‘You see’, he said, ‘that men are happy because they live in cities. They each have their own houses and a forum in common, and they go to the theatres and enjoy spectacles and concerts.’ In this way, you can draw out the speech in speechifying, saying then that the yeas carried the vote, and then you can make up a speech for the cautious monkey.29

The sophistical speeches of Leander are an important part of Marlowe’s amplification of Musaeus. Leander’s long harangue on ‘Virginitie’ (199– 294) is declamatory in nature and seems to be in the tradition of artificial speeches like the monkeys in counsel or the frogs and mice in battle. It is crucial to his characterisation, for although he seems in the speech very knowing, he is later described by the narrator as a ‘novice’ (497) and as ‘rude in Love’ (545). Leander very much resembles the stock character of the youth, precocious but inexperienced. He is so sophisticated in his ignorance that he opens his harangue with a formal pretense of sincerity: ‘My words shall be as spotlesse as my youth, / Full of simplicitie and naked truth’ (207–8). The irony is, of course, that he really is simple, despite the seeming artifice of rhetoric. Hero, fortunately, sees through the self-representation of her suitor: ‘Who taught thee Rhethoricke to deceive a maid? / Aye me, such words as these should I abhor, / And yet

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I like them for the Orator’ (338–40). Able to distinguish between the show of words and the innocent youth who is performing them, Hero appears more savvy than Leander. In contrast to his verbose display of youth, she is quieter but more adept at disguising when she pretends to be indifferent or contrary to his suit (311–12, 489–96, 567–70, 777–8). There are no comparable declamations given to Hero, who plays a demure votaress and speaks aloud two words, ‘To Venus’, in the first 337 lines of the poem. Hero’s relative silence fits her priestly, otherworldly role as the object of men’s gaze. There is little question that the roles of the two protagonists are determined to some extent by gender conventions; however, Marlowe’s representation also reflects the strategy by which he makes a ‘bolder paraphrase’ of Musaeus.30 He takes the two formal elements of amplifying a fable, declamation and description, and distributes them between his protagonists. This distribution introduces a tension, or at least a comparison, between poetic and rhetorical types of production, a tension that emerges from the very exercise of the rudiments of eloquence, the extra-disciplinary practices of late boyhood.

Leander in the Scene of Culture The opening parallel descriptions of Hero and Leander signal the poet’s commitment, at least provisionally, to the fable genre. The descriptions are not ornamental or gratuitous but reflect a rhetorical motive, which is to move the audience to a response, such as praise or blame, belief or disbelief, attraction or repulsion. (It is no wonder that scholars have sought out a moral interpretation of Hero and Leander; Marlowe constructs the story within a formulaic pattern of exemplarity.) In the examples of amplified fables by (Homer), Erasmus, and Spenser, the opening description of characters sets in opposition moral qualities: belligerent and peaceful tribes in the frogs and mice, greatness and baseness in the eagle and the dung-beetle, old age and youth in the oak and briar. In a similar way, the symmetrical descriptions at the beginning of Marlowe’s poem invite comparison; even the first lines, which Marlowe takes directly from Musaeus, introduce the theme of difference: ‘On Hellespont guiltie of True-loves blood, / In view and opposit two citties stood’ (1–2).31 The iconic setting of the two cities reflects a difference between the two protagonists. Though both Hero and Leander are described by hyperbole, classical allusion, and Petrarchan conceit, there is one striking difference in the way they are described – the narrator describes Hero’s clothing but Leander’s body.32 The difference corresponds closely to the division of the means of representation that

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governs the rest of the poem; Leander’s naked appearance is to declamation (his ‘naked truth’) as Hero’s clothing is to description. Compare, for instance, the end of the descriptions. The description of Leander culminates in a prosopopoeia, in which Leander’s suitors give voice to some commonplaces of rhetorical persuasion. By contrast, the description of Hero culminates in a visual sign, an etiology of the hemispheres. The one is characteristic of a rhetorical type of discourse, the other of a fictional or poetic type, and throughout Hero and Leander Marlowe will keep these two in productive tension. Unlike the portrayal of Leander through his speech on virginity, an iconic tableau characterises Hero: And in the midst a silver altar stood, There Hero sacrificing turtles blood, Vaild to the ground, vailing her eie-lids close, And modestly they opened as she rose: Thence flew Loves arrow with the golden head, And thus Leander was enamoured. (158–62)

Hero’s characterisation takes place in the context of an ecphrasis, the description of Venus’ temple, where the love exploits of the anthropomorphic gods are painted on the floor. During the Festival of Adonis, these visual depictions of myth are deictic, gesturing to the ritual practices of the place and occasion. The ecphrasis thus gives a local habitation and a time to myth, for the feast of Adonis locates these myths temporally as well as geographically. In this context, Hero’s robe, described at length in the opening effictio, is not ornamental but liturgical, and the emblematic representation of a reluctant Adonis, which Shakespeare will remove from this liturgical context in Venus and Adonis, is a key indication of Marlowe’s interest in a culturally situated mythography. The image of the veil, prominent in the description quoted above, is a clue to the kind of representation Marlowe employs in his characterisation of Hero. The veil was an important metaphor in Renaissance discussions of the ‘poetic fable’.33 Like the veil, the poetic fable alternately conceals and reveals, depending on the speaker’s intention and the audience’s interpretative capacity. It is most often defended as a means of representing something unfamiliar, lofty, or beyond the powers of the audience’s apprehension. The fable can be used as a means of persuasion or confusion, as in the famous example of Jesus’ purpose in speaking in parables, which is related differently by two evangelists.34 Deriving from religious and philosophical forms, the veil demarcates a group of initiates who are not repelled by the apparent darkness or absurdity of the symbolic image.

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The representation of Hero similarly depends on a poetical economy of concealment and disclosure, for the images used to describe her are off-putting to the rationalistic reader. Hero is, notoriously, ‘Venus Nun’, an absurdity that prompts one of Leander’s wittiest arguments: ‘Then shall you most resemble Venus Nun, / When Venus sweet rites are perform’d and done’ (319–20). Throughout the first part of the poem, she wears the garments of her unlikely vocation; her priestess’ robe is no more plausible than her hydraulic shoes. When she first speaks, she is interrupted by her tears, which occasion another image noted for its absurdity: ‘and as shee spake, / Foorth from those two tralucent cesternes brake, / A streame of milk-white paths, whereon the gods might trace / To Joves high court’ (295–9). Just when Hero’s speech might reveal more of her character, the iconic tears perpetuate her veiled representation. In his description of Hero by the distortional devices of hyperbole, allusion, and irony, Marlowe portrays her as a mind-altering apparition. Early in the poem, the narrator alerts the reader to the various effects of the images through which Hero is represented: ‘Her vaile was artificiall flowers and leaves, / Whose workmanship both man and beast deceaves’ (19–20). She has sinister effects on those who view her: But far above the loveliest, Hero shin’d, And stole away th’inchaunted gazers mind, For like Sea-nimphs inveigling harmony, So was her beauty to the standers by. (103–6)

The comparison to the Sirens reiterates the fabulous means that Marlowe exploits to portray Hero. She not only deceives but also enchants, infuriates, and surprises, and she is the occasion of life, death, and poetry. Interestingly, all of these effects were attributed to ‘fables’.35 Marlowe thus invests Hero (and Sestos more generally) in a fictional economy of representation that serves as a place of marginalisation for the boy Leander. Introduced during the Feast of Adonis, Sestos vividly illustrates the scene of culture: an occasional, unregulated, and heterogeneous place of poetic and rhetorical invention, to which the boy is removed before his entry into the normalised, disciplined, and homogeneous space of rhetorical production (the scene of rhetoric). Turning to Leander, we will see that the scene of culture occasions a number of discourses, including Petrarchan and Ovidian irony, the humanist letter, and moral comparisons (parabolae). But Marlowe portrays these discourses as alien within the scene of culture, and more often than not in tension with the visual types of representation that flourish in Sestos. One of the ‘wandering guests’ who comes to the ‘solemne feast’ to

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find a lover, Leander promptly exploits the scene of culture. Upon seeing Hero and being stricken by her ‘amorous looke’, he ‘kneel’d, but unto her devoutly praid’ – that is, not to Venus, the apparent object of worship, but to Hero (177). Leander’s pretence, his mock-veneration of Venus, is an ironic posture with respect to panegyric that Marlowe knew well from the Amores, the love elegies he translated in the 1580s.36 In the Amores, the elegiac lover is repeatedly exploiting the trappings of panegyric to ritualise his love affair with the beloved woman. In tropes that would become conventional in Petrarchan poetry, the lover enlists triumphs, altars, and prayers in his service. But he also turns against panegyric, placing the beloved above the gods, cursing public festivals and occasions when they interrupt his romance, and using the gods’ follies as occasions of satire. Irony has been diagnosed as a central characteristic of ‘Ovidian’ verse, especially the epyllion.37 What I wish to underscore is that the Ovidian elegist’s irony is frequently directed against panegyric occasions. Irony is, in this context, only a more aggressive form of the Petrarchan lover’s stance with respect to the festival. Both are parasitic performances within the panegyric celebration; the Ovidian has simply dropped the Petrarchan’s sincerity. Like the Ovidian lover, Leander draws on and responds to sacred ritual in an aloof, ironic way.38 He has hardly exited the prologue of his opening speech when he exalts Hero above Venus, asking rhetorically, ‘Why should you worship her, her you surpasse?’ (213). And he ends his harangue on virginity with the bold question, ‘Tell me, to whom mad’st thou that heedlesse oath?’ (294). But the most impetuous gesture may be Leander’s (anachronistic) allusion to part of the Christian liturgy. Turning Hero’s ‘regular and formall puritie’ against her like a Hebrew prophet decrying Israel’s formal observance of religion (299–308), Leander concludes, ‘To expiat which sinne, kisse and shake hands, / Such sacrifice as this, Venus demands’ (309–310). It is a daring allusion to the most famous of the penitential Psalms: ‘For thou desirest no sacrifice, els I would geve it thee: thou delightest not in a burnt offering. Sacrifices for God is a mortified spirite.’39 The allusion is all the more scandalous given the occasion of David’s repentance in this case: adultery with Bathsheba. A travesty of Christian liturgy and ritual in the context of amorous rites, Marlowe’s citation of Psalm 51 is a supreme gesture of Ovidian irony. It characterises Leander as a knowing ironist of things sacred. Another scene portrays a contest between Leander’s voluble inventiveness and Hero’s quiet eloquence. At the end of their first encounter at the festival of Adonis, Hero tries to discreetly communicate her desire to Leander, inviting him to follow her to her ‘solitarie’ tower:

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So on she goes, and in her idle flight, Her painted fanne of curled plumes let fall, Thinking to traine Leander therewithall. He being a novice, knew not what she meant, But stayd, and after her a letter sent. Which joyfull Hero answered in such sort, As he had hope to scale the beauteous fort. (494–500)

Inexperienced in the rites of courtship, Leander reverts to a written letter.40 Marlowe is alluding, of course, to Ovid’s Heroides 18 and 19, verse letters between Leander and Hero. These fictional letters were staples of the humanist rhetorical curriculum. Called ‘declamatiunculae’ (little declamations) by Erasmus, they were taught as preliminary prose compositions on the threshold of the upper forms of the grammar school (see below, Chapter 4). In other words, courted in the scene of culture, Leander reverts to the humanist genres with which he is familiar. The miscommunication reiterates the symbolic difference already established in the opening effictiones: Hero communicates through a visual, Leander through a verbal, sign. Poetic and rhetorical discourses thus continue to meet in Marlowe’s negotiation of two modes of representation: poetic fictions and humanist speech genres. By situating Hero so integrally in the scene of culture at Sestos, Marlowe draws attention to the cultural difference of Leander, who hails from a different scene of performance altogether. Perhaps taking a cue from Musaeus’ marked description of Leander as xeinos, ‘stranger’ or ‘guest’, he portrays him as an interloper, if not a bungler, in the scene of culture.41 It is as if he is using an alien culture (Sestos) as a foil to reveal the ritual forms of his own (represented, I would suggest, in Abydos). Although Marlowe is not an ethnographer of the humanist school, he does show a lively sense of cultural relativism, not least an awareness of the peculiar rituals of the humanist tribe. In Leander’s second leave-taking of Hero, the narrator follows him on his return to Abydos on the far side of the Hellespont, and this episode includes an important representation of the social group from which Leander has been temporarily separated in his rites de passage. (Abydos thus anticipates some features of the ‘scene of rhetoric’, explored more fully in Part II.) In this scene, the mode of speaking that Leander showed before now characterises his native city. When he leaves Sestos for the second time, he wears an ‘amorous habit’ that ritualises his betrothal and indicates his temporary marginalisation (588). It consists of a garland of ‘Cupids myrtle’, a purple ribbon wound with Hero’s hair, and her ‘sacred ring’ (589–93). Whatever their origins, they are familiar signs in Sestos, for they ‘made his love through Sestos to be knowne’

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(595). Fame spreads the knowledge to Abydos before Leander can return, so there is a suggestion of cultural continuity, but the narrator goes on to describe a quite different scene of literacy and recognition in that city. I quote the narration at length to illustrate how the narrator’s speech and style shift with the geographical shift to Abydos: Home when he came he seem’d not to be there, But like exiled aire thrust from his sphere, Set in a forren place, and straight from thence, Alcides like, by mightie violence, He would have chac’d away the swelling maine, That him from her unjustly did detaine, Like as the sunne in a Dyameter, Fires and inflames objects remooved farre, And heateth kindly, shining lat’rally; So beautie, sweetly quickens when t’is ny, But being separated and remooved, Burnes where it cherisht, murders where it loved. Therefore even as an Index to a booke, So to his mind was yoong Leanders looke. O none but gods have power their love to hide, Affection by the count’nance is descride. The light of hidden fire it selfe discovers, And love that is conceal’d, betraies poore lovers. His secret flame apparantly was seene, Leanders Father knew where hee had beene, And for the same mildly rebuk’t his sonne, Thinking to quench the sparckles new begonne. (601–22)

There is a rhetorical as well as geographical ‘passage’ here that seems to accommodate a reader at home in humanist modes of thought. This second discovery of Leander’s love is separated from the first discovery, the ‘amorous habit’, by nearly twenty lines – lines that address the gentleman reader. At the centre of his re-naturalisation is a parabola (comparison) drawn from natural philosophy: the comparison of the sunbeam’s warmth at various angles and the soul’s relation to its beloved. For the reader steeped from his youth in Latin comparisons between the natural world and the moral life of human beings, the parabola would have had the tonic effect of bringing to mind his belonging to a given audience. The parabola reorients him, preparing him to recognise Leander’s love on quite different terms and by more familiar signs – and perhaps even to forget the more obvious cultural signs of his betrothal. The spring to catch woodcocks is the sudden conclusion to this far-fetched enthymeme: ‘Therefore even as an Index to a booke / So to his mind was yoong Leanders looke’ (613–14). There could not be a more solicitous, flattering, or subtle address to the learned male audience to which the

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narrator now turns. ‘Therefore’ has quasi-logical force for a university audience steeped in syllogisms and evidential reasoning. Appearing conspicuously at the beginning of the line, the word functions as a territorial boundary marker between two scenes of performance. Even the vehicle of the metaphor it introduces, an ‘index to a book’, appeals to the conditions of learning and performing in humanist institutions. We are now thoroughly in ‘bookish’ territory, as the subsequent euphuisms confirm. Any reader of Hero and Leander who remembers the scene that just transpired in Sestos must be struck by the redundancy of this second ‘discovery’ of Leander’s love in Abydos. Both narrator and father look right past Leander’s ‘amorous habit’ to more clinical, textbook signs of his condition. (There is no reason to suspect that Leander has abandoned the clothing; as the first lines quoted indicate, he appears like a stranger in his own country.) The physiognomic signs of Leander’s love visible to this audience are not ‘natural’ signs over and against the ‘conventional’ signs of Sestian culture. They are, of course, equally conventional, drawing on troves of medieval love poetry. If the endearing joke is on Leander in the first passage, when he reverts to a ‘little declamation’ in his ritual courtship, the humour appears to come in the second passage at the expense of an audience educated in humanist speech genres. It is not clear where the narrator stands in relation to these discourses. While there is a delicious irony in the father’s magisterial recognition of his son’s love, the narrator’s adoption of a euphuistic style is ambiguous. Caught up in his own rhetoric, the narrator appears to forget the cultural circumstances of Leander’s betrothal, recounted less than twenty lines before. Marlowe thus represents Sestos as conducive to the exercise of various speech genres, but he also represents these speech genres as foreign to, and in tension with, the image-laden, enigmatic, and fictional scene of culture. In his Ovidian travesties of the panegyric feast at the beginning of the poem, Leander at first appears fully literate and competent within the scene of culture. But increasingly he reveals his ignorance, not least when he declaims twenty-one couplets on virginity as a jewel, and then shows his apparent ignorance of Hero’s ‘jewel’. Described as a ‘novice’ and ‘rude in love’, he is the perfect pattern of the precocious boy, witty and eloquent, whose rhetorical facility far outstrips his age. His verbose ignorance has an interesting parallel in the grammar school, where humanists postponed correction and sanctioned unruly, even wanton talk for fear of prematurely disciplining a boy’s resources of invention. It is in this dialectic of exuberance and correction that we can appreciate George Chapman’s continuation of Hero and Leander, which begins with the chastisement of the young lover by the goddess

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Themis. Although Chapman has a different agenda than reasserting the disciplines of rhetoric, nonetheless the pageantry of his sestiads performs the function of ritual integration (into a more Christian and Platonic practice).

Puberty Rites and the English Epyllion The cultural distance between Sestos and Abydos puts into perspective the evident change in Leander’s sexuality, which occurs just prior to the scene in Abydos. In an episode that appears to represent the simultaneous sexual maturation of the lovers, the narrator juggles very different discourses to represent what we would call puberty. It occurs during the ‘first meeting’ of the lovers (following the first leave-taking), and so marks another scene with ritual significance. In fact, in light of the miscues on their first leave-taking, the narrator’s exasperated description of their reunion rings true: ‘O who can tell the greeting, / These greedie lovers had, at their first meeting’ (507–8). This is not hyperbole, it is a confession – flummoxed by the different cultural horizons of his lovers, the narrator refuses to transcribe their words. Instead, he translates: ‘He askt, she gave, and nothing was denied, / Both to each other quickly were affied’ (509–10). The prologue to this scene suggests that love transcends language and culture, but what transpires reveals a meeting of very different worlds. The narrator first describes Hero’s passage in classical terms, from parthenos (virgin) to numphê (bride). The ‘mirthfull’ Cupid, a ubiquitous figure in ancient representations of love, ushers Hero into this transitional phase.42 The narrator pointedly describes her as ‘this captive Nymph beguil’d’ (524), the only time Marlowe uses the word ‘nymph’ in the poem. Interestingly, in his discussion of the panegyric genre of epithalamium (where he cites Musaeus’ Hero and Leander as an example) Julius Caesar Scaliger describes the beguiling of the nymph by Cupid as part of the wedding rites: ‘Sometimes you will depict her coerced by Venus or Cupid, she who previously scorned their dominion.’43 So Marlowe, who generally suppresses the wedding imagery that abounds in Musaeus, preserves in this scene some elements of the ancient ritual. In the ancient world, the term ‘nymph’ marked a social transition, but Marlowe makes Hero’s transition a highly erotic one. Coerced by Cupid, Hero throws herself on Leander ‘like light Salmacis’, a figure of metamorphosed sexuality. Cupid’s work clearly has a physical effect, and Hero’s sudden and uncharacteristic aggression, with its androgynous overtones, supports a reading of this passage as a scene of sexual differentiation.

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The appearance (and disappearance) of Cupid from this scene throws into relief the very different description of Leander’s sexual maturity that follows.44 When Hero throws herself on Leander, Cupid, who has been attending to Hero from the time she let slip the words ‘Come thither’, disappears from the narration and is not mentioned again. The turn to Leander introduces a different language of love, stemming from a different culture. Critically, Leander’s physical immaturity is itself put in terms of humanist discourse, being described as a kind of illiteracy. Taking Hero into his arms after she has thrown herself at him, he toys with her but is soon dumbfounded: Like Aesops cocke, this jewell he enjoyed, And as a brother with his sister toyed, Supposing nothing else was to be done, Now he her favour and good will had wone. (535–8)

‘The Cock and the Jewel’ was the first fable in the most popular English fable collection of Marlowe’s day, Caxton’s translation of the twelfth-century Latin verse fables of Walter the Englishman (Gualterius Anglicus).45 The fable was first in the collection because it illustrated how the fables were supposed to be read in the medieval tradition – to appreciate, unlike the foolish cock, a meaning obscured by a ridiculous narrative.46 In what appears to be a casual comparison, Marlowe references not only the prime fable of the medieval fable collection (which was popular in vernacular editions across Europe throughout the sixteenth century) but also the allegorical method of reading fables. Leander’s wanton play with Hero is like a deficient form of reading. The solution is not instruction, as it turns out, but friction. The ensuing passage (539–56) describes Leander’s physical maturation in the now-familiar terms of early modern medical theory: with Hero’s assistance, heat, rubbing, and pleasure are the means by which Leander enters his physical adolescence and discovers what else ‘was to be done’. As Stephen Greenblatt has shown, learned discourses about sexuality, particularly discourses concerning the differentiation (maturation) of the sexes, infiltrated literature of the period, including the literature of the public stage.47 Marlowe clearly glances at some of this medical lore in his depiction of Leander’s discovery of sex, and taking the fuller medical discourse as background to the scene, we are left to imagine that Leander not only discovers sex at this point, he also becomes male. As he protests to Neptune in a later scene, ‘I am no woman I’ (676). Neptune has, in fact, mistaken him not for a woman but for Ganymede, a sexually undifferentiated boy. In recent readings of the epyllion, sex and sexuality have been taken

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to be the definitive discourses of adolescence. From this perspective, Leander’s sexual differentiation, his becoming ‘male’, must be taken as the definitive social construct, the event by which he becomes a political subject.48 What this assumption obscures, however, is the larger social discourse according to which Leander comes of age. As we have seen, Leander’s maturation, his becoming adolescent, is largely told in disciplinary terms of the grammar school.49 Furthermore, this scene of Leander’s sexual differentiation may not mark the definitive change represented in Hero and Leander. Marlowe describes a symbolic transformation in a later scene, the scene of abduction by Neptune, which follows the scene of friction with Hero. There is plenty of fondling in the later scene, but the element is hardly conducive to friction. Swimming to Sestos, where he will consummate his love with Hero, Leander is abducted by Neptune, drowns, nearly dies, and is resuscitated by the god. Mistaken by Neptune for Ganymede, Leander resembles in this scene a number of mythological youths, like Adonis, Narcissus, or Hermaphroditus, whose ambiguous or inverted sexuality appears to be a sign of their transitional condition between boyhood and adolescence. The most curious thing about this ritual scene of death, burial, and rebirth is that it is solemnised by the telling of an amorous tale – Neptune tells Leander a tale of a shepherd’s love for an ephebe. The tale is uncannily similar to what may have been the only English epyllion published at the time: Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, a pastoral complaint of a lovesick god to a shepherd. As a ‘small myth’ (narratiuncula), the tale is a sign of the boy’s final exercise in the lower forms of the grammar school, and the Hellespont here symbolises the threshold between the study of poetic narrative (grammar) and historical narrative (rhetoric).50 Leander’s escape from the magisterial figure of Neptune is a key moment in the social narrative of coming of age in the grammar school; the fictional narrative marks the last of the rudiments of eloquence that Quintilian situates as preliminary to the youth’s adolescence. Neptune’s loving embraces and speeches may evoke the solicitous usher, loath to hand the boy over to the schoolmaster and detaining him with one last fable. (Shakespeare will make this analogy between lover and teacher more explicit in Venus and Adonis.) The epyllion thus marks a major moment of social transition. That it is described as a death and rebirth is a function of its centrality – more crucial than the physical maturation that has already occurred. A similar ritual use of myth transpires much earlier and may mark a social transformation of Hero; it coincides with her invitation to Leander to her solitary tower. Soon after she inadvertently speaks the (apparently taboo) words ‘come thither’, she literally falls in a swoon. In retrospect it

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appears to be, like Leander’s drowning, a temporary death that marks an entry into a new stage of life. Like Leander’s rite of passage, it too is solemnised by a mythological narrative – the odd digression on Mercury and the maid, a tale of frustrated eros like many of the English epyllia. For the narrator’s digression occurs between Hero’s inadvertent words and her fainting. The transition from the digression back to the main narration is abrupt: ‘By this, sad Hero, with love unacquainted, / Viewing Leanders face, fell downe and fainted’ (485–6). The weakness of the vague preposition ‘by’ and the ambivalent reference of ‘this’ make Hero’s fainting contiguous with the poetic digression, and if we consider Leander’s rite of passage as paradigmatic, we find the Mercury myth to function as a ritual solemnity – a suspension of the ordinary time of the narration for the sake of marking an important transition in the life of one of the protagonists. But there is a key difference consistent with Hero’s characterisation in the exotic culture of Sestos. The narrative is occasioned by her attempted (and rejected) prayer to Venus, and this contextualises the Mercury episode in a panegyric setting. Occasioned by a prayer, the digression appears like the narratives about the gods in the Homeric Hymns, archaic verse hymns to the gods that framed an episode from the god’s life with an invocation and a prayerful epilogue. Hero’s prayer is not a prayer to Mercury, but still the prayer as an event may be seen as a framing device for an otherwise gratuitous digression. If we take the background of the Homeric Hymns and their ritual performance seriously, the Mercury digression may be seen as a performance within, or at least a trace of, the panegyric scene. The ‘paean’ to Mercury is no less occasioned than the depiction of Venus and Adonis on Hero’s sacred robe in the Feast of Adonis. In his cultural differentiation of his characters, Marlowe is extremely vigilant; everything related to Hero appears framed in a heterogeneous, panegyric scene. The pagan scene makes Leander appear naked indeed – that is, stripped of ritual, culture, and custom. But he is ‘naked’ only to those to whom the scene of rhetoric is natural, those blind to the ritual practice of their own culture. The Mercury and Neptune interludes are not digressions but key parts of the narrative of Hero and Leander: Hero and Leander’s rites of passage to adolescence. The inset narratives may be an elaborate mise-en-abîme, an indication of what Marlowe was about when he took up a ‘small myth solemnised by the poets’. It suggests a performative dimension to Hero and Leander that transcends a simple allegory of the grammar school. Marlowe’s ‘celebration’, over and against his ‘representation’ of coming of age, derives its energy from the very licence, fluidity, and transformations of the scene of culture that he evokes to situate his performance of mythography.

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Notes 1. Musaeus, Hero and Leander, ed. Thomas Gelzer, trans. Cedric Whitman (Cambridge, MA, 1975). For evidence that the Aldine Latin translation is by the printer himself, see 323n. 2. For a masterful study of the Aldine edition, see Warren Boutcher, ‘“Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature 52 (2000): 11–52, esp. 21–5. For the muses of Musaeus and Orpheus, see Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, 93–124. 3. Boutcher, ‘Who taught thee Rhetoricke?’ 25. 4. ‘The Divine Poem of Musaeus’, chapter 2 in The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven, 1978). 5. ‘Amorous Leander, beautifull and yoong, / (Whose tragedie divine Musaeus soong)’, ll. 51–2 in the edition of Roma Gill, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, vol. 1: All Ovid’s Elegies, Lucan’s First Booke, Dido Queene of Carthage, Hero and Leander (Oxford, 1987). All quotations are from this edition and identified parenthetically by line number in the text. 6. See Cave, The Cornucopian Text, 3–34; Crane, Wit and Rhetoric, 56–79, 132–61. 7. T. W. Baldwin, ‘Marlowe’s Musaeus’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 54 (1955): 478–85. The text quoted is found on p. 485. Baldwin follows a conventional attribution of the Aldine Latin translation to Marcus Musurus, but see above, note 1. 8. The corresponding narrative comprises 282 lines of Musaeus’ Hero and Leander. See Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 86. 9. I have consulted, among other editions, Aesopi Phrygis Fabulae Graece et Latine (Basel, 1541). The contents of this edition are the following: a life of Aesop by Maximus Planudes, Aesop’s fables, verse fables attributed to Gabrias, the pseudo-Homeric The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, Musaeus’ Hero and Leander, Agapetus Diaconus’ ‘Exposition of Articles of Advice’ (a series of Greek maxims addressed to the emperor Justinian I), the Hippocratic Oath, and The Battle of the Weasel and Mice. 10. Each volume was printed with a separate title page and colophon. The first volume is entitled Aesopi Phrygis Vita et Fabellae (Basel, 1518). 11. Johann Albert Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca (1790, repr. Hildesheim, 1966), 1:644–5. Columbia University Library holds copies of several editions not listed in Fabricius, including a Basel edition with the date 1541 on the title page but 1545 on the colophon. This new edition is augmented with a glossary of Latin translations of the allegorical Greek names in The Battle of the Frogs and Mice. Additional copies at Columbia that are not mentioned by Fabricius were printed at Basel in 1550 and 1558, and at Venice in 1561. 12. On the humanist reception of Musaeus, see Braden, ‘The Divine Poem of Musaeus’, 81–5. 13. In ‘Who taught thee Rhetoricke?’ Boutcher persuasively argues that the declamatory speeches of Leander are not merely reflexive means of embellishment but representational (and satirical) of contemporary modes of

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18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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eloquence. My agenda in this chapter is similar to Boutcher’s, and I reach the same general conclusion: Hero and Leander is as much about humanist rhetoric as it is about sex. But I will argue that it is NeoLatin humanism, not vernacular humanism, that is in question, and an ‘Aesopic Musaeus’, not an ‘Ovidian Musaeus’, that brings us closest to the cultural conditions of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Boutcher is led by his political critique to interpret Leander as a rapacious anti-hero. In my reading, Leander represents a grammar school boy on the threshold of adolescence, and it is only when he becomes an adolescent that his violence and rapaciousness become apparent. The Orator’s Education, 1.9.2–3. Roger Ascham names six kinds of translation in the second book of The Scholemaster (1570, repr. New York, 1968), sig. L1r. Vita et Fabellae Aesopi cum Interpretatione Latina (Venice, 1505). Cornutus’ De Natura Deorum (the title given in Aldus’ edition) has been translated into English by Robert Stephen Hays, ‘Lucius Annaeus Cornutus’ Epidrome (Introduction to the Traditions of Greek Theology): Introduction, Translation, and Notes’ (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1983). For the collection of myths retold, see Palaephatus, On Unbelievable Tales, trans. Jacob Stern (Wauconda, IL, 1996). The essay on allegories now called ‘Heraclitus on Homer’ has been edited and translated into French by Félix Buffière, Allégories d’Homère (Paris, 1962). George Boas translated the popular text on hieroglyphics: The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo (New York, 1950). Aldus’ collection of proverbs from Zenobius, Plutarch, and the Suda has not been translated. On Aldus’ career, see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius. During his stay in Venice, Erasmus drew on the 1505 Aesop for his amplified edition of the Adages printed by Aldus in 1508. The order derives not from Quintilian, but from Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, which was very influential in Latin editions in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Near the beginning of his adage, Erasmus makes an invocation of the muses who inspired (Homer) to write The Battle of the Frogs and Mice: ‘But if the Muses, who were not reluctant at one time to dictate to Homer the “Battle of the Frogs and Mice”, will condescend to leave Helicon for a moment and come to me, I shall try to give a complete account of the matter to the best of my ability.’ The translation is that of Denis L. Drysdall in the Collected Works of Erasmus (CWE), vol. 35: Adages III vi 1 to IV ii 100, ed. John N. Grant (Toronto, 2005), 181. Ibid., 180–1, 214. Ibid., 178–80, note 1. See Baldwin, ‘Marlowe’s Musaeus’; and Braden, ‘The Divine Poem of Musaeus’, 124–37. Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Harmondsworth, 1999), 43–4. Subsequent references to Spenser’s shorter poems are to this edition and cited by line number. ‘Hero is portrayed by the details that the young Apollo courted her for her hair, that Cupid mistook her for his mother, that Nature bestowed on her so much beauty that it depleted the stock and there was none left for half

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26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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Untutored Lines the world. Leander is described as having hair that would have inspired the Grecian youth more than the Golden Fleece, and cheeks and lips that exceeded in beauty those of Narcissus. The purpose here is obviously not to delineate the characters with any realism or verisimilitude; it is to relate them to the whole fabric of myth. The intensification of their beauty is not done directly, for the most part, but by exhibiting its effect upon others.’ Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, MA, 1952), 81. Marlowe’s descriptions, especially of Leander, may be indebted in part to the effictiones, epideictic descriptions ‘from head to toe’ treated in medieval artes poetriae. See Edmond Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1924), 129–30, 214–16; Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953, repr. Princeton, 1990), 59–60. Martin L. West, trans. and ed., Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 275. Ibid., 279. Latin text in Aesop, Vita et Fabellae Aesopi cum Interpretatione Latina, sig. A4r. On gender conventions, see David Lee Miller, ‘The Death of the Modern: Gender and Desire in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander’, South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 757–86. Cf. Ellis’s comment on the representational capacity of the cities: ‘Both Abydos and Sestos can function as memory places’. Sexuality and Citizenship, 97. In Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 88–115, Keach discusses the descriptions and their significance at length. Fabula, or the rhetorical genre of implausible narratives, including both animal fables and mythological tales. See above and also Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1969), 3–20, 117–31; and Trimpi, Muses of One Mind, 97–116. See Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 23–47. Most famously in Plato’s Ion. See also Plutarch’s essay on the pedagogical uses of poetry, How The Young Man Should Study Poetry, in Plutarch’s Moralia, ed. and trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, 14 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1927), 1:87–91. Published early in the seventeenth century as All Ovids Elegies. Gill, The Complete Works, 6. The classic statement is Keach’s Elizabethan Erotic Narratives. See below, Chapter 4, for a further response to Keach’s argument. For further comparison of Leander with the lover of the Amores, see L. E. Semler, ‘Marlovian Therapy: The Chastisement of Ovid in Hero and Leander’, English Literary Renaissance 35 (2005), 176–9. Ps. 51: 16–17, quoted from Matthew Parker, The Holie Bible [The Bishops’ Bible] (London, 1568). Boutcher here reads a more sinister use of the Heroides. ‘Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?’ 41.

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41. Musaeus, Hero and Leander, l. 181. 42. Claude Calame, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Princeton, 1999), 65–88. 43. Poetices Libri VII ([Lyon], 1561), bk. 3, ch. 101, fol. 150. 44. Cupid’s role in the ‘amorous rites’ was commonplace in classical love poetry. Interestingly, he is exclusively related to Hero in Marlowe’s version of the tale, and his appearance is rare in other English epyllia. 45. Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainesville, FL, 2000). 46. The medieval hermeneutical tradition of the fables was complex, but the interpretation of fables in the Aesopus Moralisatus can be generally defined as allegorical – the meanings of the fable are not, contrary to the great tradition of fable writing, intuitive. 47. ‘Fiction and Friction’, chapter 3 of Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 66–93. 48. See, for instance, Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 94–108. ‘Marlowe’s refusal to bring the poem to its proper end is at the same time a refusal to participate in the heterosexualizing of the subject’ (97). 49. Sexual differentiation is only part of the discourse of Leander’s coming of age. Even in this scene, friction does not just force his sexual organs outward, it remedies his illiteracy, teaching him to read and speak: Which taught him all that elder lovers know, And now the same gan so to scorch and glow, As in plaine termes (yet cunningly) he crav’d it, Love alwaies makes those eloquent that have it (553–6). One sign of Leander’s physical maturation is eloquence, presumably a more sophisticated form than he previously displayed, for here the narrator demurs to report his speech. 50. Ellis reads Neptune as a figure of the humanist implicated in the pederasty of ancient Greek education. Sexuality and Citizenship, 99–102.

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Chapter 3

Chreia: Making Themes in Venus and Adonis

Festina lente

The Adonis myth has a conspicuous place among the preliminary exercises of rhetoric. Most visibly, it is the paradigmatic diêgêma in Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata.1 In this ‘short narrative’, which is supposed to prepare students for a judicial sort of narration, Aphthonius tells the story of a triangular love affair. Aphrodite loves the mortal Adonis, and her divine lover Ares is jealous. There is no fatal boar to cut down Adonis in his prime. Rather, seeking to dispatch his rival, ‘Ares attacks Adonis.’2 Aphrodite learns of the attack and runs through the woods to find Adonis, falls on a rose bush and pierces her foot; her blood causes the white rose to turn red. The entire story is told in remarkably few words, in a highly elliptical style that intensifies the emotion of the story. The Italian humanist Angelo Poliziano found the brief myth worthy of emulation, trying to recreate in Latin the energetic brevity of Aphthonius’ Greek.3 Edmund Spenser alluded to Aphthonius’ rose in the pastoral elegy Daphnaïda: White as the native Rose before the chaunge, Which Venus blood did in her leaves impresse.4

As noted by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, Shakespeare may allude to the diêgêma in the opening lines of Venus and Adonis: Even as the sun with purple-colored face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase.5

Grafton and Jardine explicate the allusion: ‘the textbook familiarity of the white rose turned red in Aphthonius’ narratio on Venus’ doomed love allows Shakespeare to produce a frisson of anticipation of disaster – the white of the rose already tinged with red.’6 Like Spenser reduces

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the Aphthonian narration to a simile, Shakespeare reduces it even more economically to an epithet. But the brief myth was begging for a freer paraphrase, and in the Elements of Rhetoric (1540), the German humanist Joachim Camerarius obliged.7 In fifty-four lines of Latin elegy, entitled ‘A short narrative (narratiuncula) elaborated in elegiac verse’, he retains Aphthonius’ etiological construction of the narrative, which supplies the theme of his prologue and the story’s denouement (the rose and Venus’ wound), but he fills it in by paraphrasing the central episode of Ovid’s account in Metamorphoses book 10. Ares is thus dropped from the narrative, and Adonis is cut down by the more familiar boar’s tusk. A new story emerges from this freer paraphrase of the Aphthonian paradigm. Adonis appears here as a youth on the threshold of manhood; he is a ‘beautiful youth’ when he captures Venus ‘with an enormous love’ and a ‘man’ when he fatally engages the boar in combat.8 The poem’s focus is also on his resistance to Venus’ charms. ‘You alone possess her, Adonis’, the narrator asserts (25), paraphrasing the Ovidian line, ‘she possesses him.’9 Camerarius also critically reimagines the central scene in Ovid’s account, Venus’ narration of the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes to Adonis. In Ovid’s version, Venus rests her head on Adonis’ willing lap in the shade of a poplar. Camerarius reverses the roles of goddess and boy: When the middle of the day has now past, and the burning pole blazes with Phoebus’ fire, under a black holm oak mild Venus restrains you in her lap, holding you in her snowy arms. She tells you stories, too, eloquent about former things for which Love had supplied the plots. (31–6)

Camerarius derives the shade of this encounter from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the chronography of the midday sun is his own, as is the image of a reluctant Adonis. Camerarius’ elegiac-didactic version of the Adonis myth supplied the plot and arguably modelled the rhetorical strategies for a much lengthier, English paraphrase: Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. From Camerarius Shakespeare took the main outline of his epyllion, which focuses almost entirely on Venus’ copious arguments to a reluctant Adonis, and furthermore, crucially, remains with Venus after Adonis rejoins the hunt. Like Camerarius, Shakespeare does not narrate Adonis’ death but instead follows Venus in an ecstatic search for Adonis through a trackless wood.10 His clearest verbal imitation of Camerarius’ elegy is tellingly his description of the time of the main encounter: And Titan, tirèd in the midday heat, With burning eye did hotly overlook them. (177–8)

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And there are clear visual reminiscences of that central scene, as in Shakespeare’s description of Venus’ snowy arms: Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prisoned in a gaol of snow. (361–2)

Of course, Shakespeare was no less inventive in his paraphrase of Camerarius than was Camerarius in his paraphrase of Aphthonius, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses proved no less a source of inspiration.11 But the cultural significance of Venus and Adonis – its relation to a programme of learning – is to be found in its NeoLatin source. The significance of Camerarius’ elegy for reading Venus and Adonis is its place within a complete programme of boyhood exercise, the Elements of Rhetoric, subtitled The Chief Exercises of Boyhood Study and Style. Appearing near the end of the book, in a relatively brief section of exercises in versification, the narratiuncula is quite literally among the penultimate exercises of boyhood, being followed in this collection only by thesis.12 In this context, the poem solemnises a boy’s last rites of grammar, forestalling his symbolic entry into adolescence. The theme of Camerarius’ elegiac narratiuncula, Adonis’ frustrated transition to manhood, is therefore perfectly suited to its occasion. At the end of the Elements of Rhetoric, the tragic story is apotropaic; like newlyweds sing of star-crossed lovers on their wedding night, so Camerarius’ schoolboys sing of an ill-fated boy.13 Shakespeare’s textual source is therefore evocative of a ritual occasion, a scene of culture momentarily enjoyed at the margins of the disciplines. This chapter is an essay in reading Venus and Adonis according to the humanist discourse of boyhood exercise, particularly as represented in the Elements of Rhetoric. What does the ‘mystery of boyhood’, to borrow Erasmus’ suggestive phrase, have to tell us about the epyllion’s theme and poetics? Conversely, what does the poem have to tell us about early modern discourses of boyhood? What kind of commentary does Shakespeare provide on the practices that he represents? Finally, is Venus and Adonis representational only, or does it, like Camerarius’ narratiuncula, celebrate the very transition that it depicts? Beginning with Quintilian’s brief instructions for the rudiments of eloquence, I show that Camerarius’ Elements represents a comprehensive programme of boyhood eloquence. The textbook is not a well-oiled machine for reproducing culture, but a more variable workshop of eclectic, episodic, and ethical literature. Under these conditions, the boyhood study and style is as much process as practice and illuminates the strategies of imitation in Venus and Adonis and the mythological epyllion more generally. Then turning to Venus’ speeches in Venus and

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Adonis, I show that Shakespeare’s representation of the goddess as a pedagogue draws on the discourses – and some of the exercises – of this textbook. In her performance of the rudiments of eloquence, notably exercises in chreia and ecphrasis, Venus exhibits contradictory motives. Whereas Camerarius’ Venus plays the solicitous schoolmaster, holding back the unready boy in the grove of boyhood study, Shakespeare’s Venus first desires to usher Adonis into a sexual maturity with the example of a lusty horse, and then later, in the second half of the poem, to retain him with wanton descriptions of the hunt. Her ambivalence reflects a basic ambivalence in the rudiments of eloquence, which are designed to simultaneously facilitate and forestall the onset of maturity. Like Leander’s rites de passage, therefore, sexuality is part, but only part, of the complex terms of Adonis’ boyhood, and Shakespeare no less than Marlowe revels in comic juxtapositions of sexual and pedagogical discourses. At the end of this chapter, I attempt to move beyond a thematic reading of Venus and Adonis to illustrate its occasional construction. For the boyhood study and style is, I argue, not just a formal or thematic condition, but also an occasion of the poem. Shakespeare’s eclectic use of the Metamorphoses, his imitation of the Salmacis myth in particular, illustrates his attempt to situate his poem – truly a performance – within a scene of culture.

Boyhood study Following his instructions for Aesop’s fables in Institutio oratoria 1.9, Quintilian indicates that ‘Aphorisms, Chriae, and Ethologiae may also be written under the grammatici, so long as the arguments are supplied, because the themes can come out of reading.’14 Later he adds ‘short narratives solemnised by the poets’, stating that these should be included for the sake of gleaning information and not, like the other primordia, for the sake of developing style.15 The list of forms enumerated here bears comparison with the first four themes in the Aphthonian series of exercises (fabula, narratio, chreia, sententia), though the emphasis in Quintilian’s treatment is more on techniques of reading and paraphrase, not on the paradigmatic forms themselves. The diversity and perhaps relativity of genre is a condition, in fact, of the very kind of eloquence that the student is supposed to develop in these exercises. Drawing on Quintilian’s primordia and Erasmus’ advanced exercises (see above, Chapter 1), Joachim Camerarius compiled in the Elements of Rhetoric a comprehensive battery of grammar school exercises ‘for

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boyhood study and style’ – the most complete compilation of the rudiments of eloquence that I have found. In this textbook, there is only a minimal amount of adherence to rhetorical rules and procedures; the exercises are instead ‘elemental’ – building blocks that develop style, expression, and argument at a local level. Camerarius illustrates all of the exercises with classical passages, and he is clearly interested not so much in paradigms (Aphthonius’ model themes) as in texts as raw material for performing various stylistic and argumentative operations. He treats rudimentary forms of argument in the exercises aitiologia, aenigma, and allegoria, as well as confirmation and refutation, yet one senses that the value is placed not on a formal development of arguments, but on ingenuity and intuition. (In this focus on the ‘exercise’ as an operation not a form, the Elementa Rhetoricae is indebted to Theon’s Progymnasmata.) There is a principle of arrangement, and Camerarius distinguishes between two subgroups, the rudiments (my headings I and II in Table 3.1) and the advanced operations (heading III), saying, ‘we have arranged these so that, handling them distinctly within a single school, we might progress gradually from the lesser to the greater.’16 But all of them are to be exercised by boys, before they proceed to the study of rhetoric.17 There is, furthermore, no evident way in which these exercises develop into a larger system or discipline, as in the Aphthonian progymnasmata. In the tradition of Quintilian’s primordia and Erasmus’ advanced themes, the ‘elements’ have a different aim: an exuberant profusion of words and arguments that can later be corrected by the discipline of rhetoric.18 As shown in Table 3.1, the Elements of Rhetoric can be broken down into three roughly symmetrical parts. The first one-third is devoted to the writing, paraphrasing, elaborating, and correcting of narratives. The great emphasis on narration surely reflects Camerarius’ singular view of discourse: ‘all speech is either narration, prologue to narration, or sequel’.19 Expanding on Quintilian’s two narrative genres, Aesopic fables and poetic myths, Camerarius enumerates five types of narration for exercise: Aesopic fables, stories of everyday life, poetic myths, histories, and rhetorical narrations. These have some correspondence to the three genres of narration as defined by rhetoric (fabulous, probable, historical), but Camerarius reclassifies narratives to place emphasis on a ‘modest’ eloquence, the eloquence of the spoken word. Thus Aesopic fable, written in ‘pure’ Latin, gets its own classification, as does a genre that treats only what is common, everyday, and domestic. (The label ‘stories of everyday life’ is my own. Camerarius uses a conventional term, narratio verisimile, to label this very interesting genre, but he describes a more naturalistic form of imitation than is conventionally

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The ‘Chief Exercises of Boyhood Study and Style’ (Camerarius, Elementa Rhetoricae)*

I.

Narrations and descriptions 1. Aesopic fables ainoi apologoi 2. Stories of everyday life Comic plots and mimes Amorous tales and stories of women (Plutarch) Colloquies 3. Poetic myths Allegories 4. Histories 5. Rhetorical narrations 6. Descriptions II. Small forms 7. Chreia 8. Sententia 9. Ethologia 10. Epistola 11. Comparison III. Advanced operations 12. Paraphrase 13. Imitation 14. Explanation (aitiologia) 15. Solution (of enigmas and riddles) 16. Commonplaces 17. Praise and blame 18. Versification 19. Argumentation (thesis) Epilogue: Declamations * Outline headings and numbers are my own. Compare the Index of ‘Chapters’, sigs. a7r–a8r.

meant by ‘probable narration’.) The section on narrative exercises closes with a lengthy excursus on description (ecphrasis). The second third of the book is given to the small forms that Quintilian lists, including chreia, sententia, ethologia, and comparatio. Reflecting the widespread use of letter-writing in the humanist classroom, and perhaps Erasmus’ influence in particular, Camerarius includes an essay on letter-writing. Interestingly, he explains that the Greeks included letter-writing and the entire epideictic genre under the general heading of prosopopoeia, or impersonation (which he has just treated as ‘ethologia’). The character-based study and practice of many

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of these exercises, including letters, animals fables, chreias, ethologiae, and the dramatic forms of narration, is intimately related to Camerarius’ desire to cultivate a ‘popular’ kind of Latin eloquence. At the heart of many of the exercises is a performance. The last third of the book includes more advanced operations, including paraphrase, imitation, commonplaces, encomium, and thesis.20 Although some of these share names with the ‘first exercises’ of Quintilian or the progymnasmata of Aphthonius, they are not formulas or paradigms but operations ‘to be performed on all of the above exercises’.21 For instance, Camerarius tellingly describes ‘commonplaces’ (loci communes), not the Aphthonian exercise of ‘common place’. In this context, commonplaces are exemplary passages of amplification to be drawn from the students’ reading and collected into a commonplace book of the virtues and vices. Versification (carmina componenda) is one of these advanced operations, and it is in this context that the Adonis elegy, entitled ‘Brief Myth Elaborated in Elegiac Verse’ (Narratiuncula exposita in versibus elegiacis), appears. As its title makes clear, the poem illustrates a genre (poetic myth) that has already been treated in prose, and two operations, old (elaboration) and new (versification). If he has proceeded through the book in order, by the time he arrives at this poem, the boy has run through the full battery of rudiments of eloquence listed by Quintilian, some ‘advanced exercises’ recommended by Erasmus, and a number of operations described by Theon. Beginning with Aesop’s fables, he has written a number of genres of narration, descriptions and elaborations, chreias, maxims, ethologias, letters, comparisons, paraphrases, exercises in imitation, etiologies, enigmas, commonplaces, and short speeches in praise and blame. Building on Quintilian’s division and Erasmus’ further articulation of boyhood and adolescence, Camerarius’ Chief Exercises for Boyhood Study and Style gave humanist schoolmasters a disciplinary definition of boyhood. Boyhood by this account was the age for reading and imitating literature, for cultivating a copious style, and for preparing for the study of rhetoric. The full battery of exercises allows the master to hold precocious boys back, to let their linguistic resources mature before sending them on to the teacher of rhetoric. In this context, Camerarius’ depiction of a smitten Venus ‘holding back’ a boy Adonis in her lap, telling him ‘stories of former things, to which Love supplies abundant argument’, almost reads as an allegory, a veiled account of the loving schoolmaster’s solicitous concern for a boy and his eloquence. Adonis is a ‘youth’ when the poem begins, and the only thing standing between him and adulthood is a mythological narrative.

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Boyhood Style The Elements of Rhetoric is not the only source of the rudiments of eloquence, and it is one among hundreds of textbooks used in the literary curriculum, but it comprehensively describes the discursive practices of the social group we are considering in this study: boys on the threshold of rhetoric and the upper forms of the grammar school. Although the practices here associated with the boyhood style are acutely on display in Venus and Adonis, they are also to be found more generally in a number of English epyllia. So it is worth pausing to characterise the boyhood style in general terms before looking at specific instances in Shakespeare’s poem. What, then, is this ‘boyhood style’, and how is it reflected generally in the writing of Venus and Adonis? There are three characteristics that I wish to highlight. First, the boyhood style is eclectic. It is a harvest of short, exemplary passages from wide and various reading in the poets, historians, and orators. There is no master genre; prose selections include riddles, fabliaux, and an ‘actuarial dialogue’ – quite literally a domestic servant going over the receipts of a wealthy man (one of the more uninspiring scenes of everyday life in the book). Furthermore, although prose predominates, it is generously supplemented by poetry. Among his verse citations Camerarius includes passages from the didactic, elegiac, lyric, epic, tragic, and comic poets. Nor are these genres fixed systems. Virgil’s Aeneid is cited along with tragedies for pathos, the Georgics along with the Aeneid and Caesar’s Gallic Wars for vivid description. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a ‘universal tragedy’, and Herodotus and Livy supply a number of useful fables. Camerarius’ selections are not exactly predictable – for instance, the Eclogues are surprisingly underrepresented, while the Georgics and Ovid’s exile literature are cited in abundance. Perhaps the Georgics recommended itself for its theme of fertility, the Epistulae ex Ponto for its marginality vis-à-vis the literary establishment.22 So the first pattern of boyhood eloquence that emerges from Camerarius’ textbook is a fertile eclecticism. In its panoply of illustrations, the textbook itself serves as a model of the copious and various selection of exemplary Latin that the boy must collect for himself.23 Second, the boyhood style is episodic. As quoted above, Camerarius says in his introduction to narrations that ‘all speech is either narration, prologue to narration, or sequel.’ The statement does not seem to be made exclusively about the boyhood style, but it is clearly illustrated in the four hundred octavo pages of boyhood exercise that follow. Narrations of all kinds are the objects of all manner of exercise, including description, paraphrase, elaboration, confirmation, and refutation.

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Furthermore, boys have little use for long, continuous narrations. Rather, they need episodes drawn from epic poetry, prose histories, orations, and letters in both prose and verse. Camerarius frequently uses the language of pieces to describe the exercises, including ‘beginnings’, ‘fragments’, and ‘shards’.24 These words reflect a purposeful strategy in the transmission of classical learning: But let me repeat what I said earlier, that we must discern that faculty (of speech) which appears suited to our learning and the times. Let no one gape dumbfounded at a finished work, or even a rough-hewn and unfinished copy, of antiquity. For I call our ‘eloquence’ a mere babbling when compared with the eloquence of old. Of this ancient eloquence I have collected these fragments and rudiments (quaedam particulae, atque elementa) for your diligent emulation during your feebleness of learning.25

Camerarius describes what has been amply documented in influential scholarship on the Renaissance: humanists with ambitions of imitating classical civilisation were often dazzled into a sense of inadequacy, diagnosed in modern terms as ‘anxiety’.26 But being a good pedagogue with concerns more immediate than immortality, he makes a sensible prescription: pick up the pieces of classical literature and get to work. Third and finally, the boyhood style is ethical, in the sense of shaping and expressing character through performance. Of course, a lot of the exercises, especially the fables, maxims, and chreias, have moral content, but there is an equal emphasis on the expressive quality of the exercises, and a number are, as has been mentioned, performances. In the prologue, Camerarius describes an eloquence that ‘springs’ from the breast, the seat of character: ‘That is not speech, which is born from the tongue, but which bubbles or springs from the breast as if from a fountain.’27 Boys are to cultivate therefore not so much a written style as a vocal style of self-presentation; pronunciation is a vital part of boyhood exercise. There is a rhetorical ethos implicit in the exercises.28 Camerarius is explicit about the popular, unsophisticated speech that ought to mark the boyhood style. Given that this popular or natural idiom must be cultivated primarily through imitation, both written and spoken, the ‘fragments’ and ‘shards’ of speech collected in the Elements and the boy’s commonplace book constitute a mimesis of lived eloquence, a background din of voices, anecdotes, and comments brought to life in the echo chamber of the humanist schoolroom.29 Like Erasmus’ Sermon on the Boy Jesus, the exercises are ethopoetic, a representation and performance of how boys ought to speak, not necessarily how they speak. The three characteristics outlined above are far from unique to the ‘boyhood style’ that Camerarius describes; there is significant crossover with other humanist genres and exercises, especially letter-writing, imi-

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tation, and colloquy. And some of the characteristics, like the practice of reading viva voce, may be taken as symptomatic of more general humanist ideals. But the student or teacher who progressed very far into the Elements of Rhetoric would have had the sense of being at a particular stage in his (or his pupils’) rhetorical career. The boyhood style represents something like Bourdieu’s ‘field’, although mechanical reproduction does not seem to be the point of the exercises. Sites of relative creativity, they nonetheless give shape and definition to a social group. They exhibit both fluidity and coherence. In Venus and Adonis, which is nothing if not fluid in its negotiation of styles and sources, we find key features of the boyhood style. Most obviously, Venus and Adonis is eclectic.30 The poem is ostensibly Ovidian, but Shakespeare draws on a number of Ovids. He has wrested the basic outline and some of the words of his tale from two episodes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, drawn an epigraph (printed on the title page of the first edition) from an elegy in Ovid’s Amores, and invested the story with the mock didactic tone of the Ars amatoria. Into this bricolage of Ovidian texts he incorporates imitations of Virgil’s Georgics and English works on animal husbandry and venery. Furthermore, although there is disagreement about its relationship to Hero and Leander, a ‘tissue of parallels’ between these poems leaves open the possibility that Shakespeare imitated Marlowe – took episodes from his poem as points of elaboration. He thus may have used Marlowe’s simile of a ‘hot proud horse’ for the digression on the jennet, not to mention Marlowe’s description of Hero’s sleeve, ‘Where Venus in her naked glory strove, / To please the carelesse and disdainfull eies, / Of proud Adonis that before her lies’, for the argumentum of the entire poem.31 The episodic quality of the poem is less obvious, since nothing much happens (Shakespeare does not even narrate the main event, the death of Adonis). But if the narrative aspect of the poem as a whole is not apparent, a more partial and occasional type of narration is clearly in effect. Missing a narration of the main event, in fact, the poem reads as an endless string of allusions, comparisons, and descriptions. Not only the lengthier instances, such as the jennet interlude, Venus’ allegory of the park and deer, and her narration of the coney hunt, but also more subtle forms of narration, such as comparisons beginning ‘look how’, allusions to classical mythology, and brief chronographies, lend the poem an episodic style. Venus and Adonis is a singular illustration of how much discourse could function as prologue and sequel to an (absent) act. In its ceaseless generation of discourse, regardless of how small the occasion and barren the scene, it illustrates the abundance for which schoolboys and masters strove in the exercise of the rudiments. Shakespeare’s

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frantic pace of invention and embellishment conforms to the pedagogical occasion of his source text: a setting back the clock of maturity, with its disciplines and corrections, to indulge once more the boyhood style. Finally, the second half of the poem, which records a number of Venus’ complaints before and after sunrise and looks ahead to the second half of The Rape of Lucrece, is a clear citation of ethopoeia, a major exercise of boyhood style. Shakespeare draws on the commonplaces of the forsaken woman to frame a significant part of the poem as a complaint: And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans, That all the neighbour caves, as seeming troubled, Make verbal repetition of her moans: Passion on passion deeply is redoubled. ‘Ay me’, she cries, and twenty times ‘woe, woe’, And twenty echoes, twenty times cry so. (829–34)

Shakespeare continues through this section to employ a number of similes to characterise Venus’ frenzied state of mind. She is compared to barflies, craven soldiers, and (less persuasively) ‘poor people’: various character types that serve as a target for stylistic impersonation. The protean quality of her performance – now maternal, now amorous, now magisterial, now rebellious – may reflect the imitative conditions of practice in the boyhood style. The rhetoric of Venus and Adonis is therefore in many ways the rhetoric of boyhood, and it is of more than formal concern. The style and literary practice of the poem are directly related to its theme: the boyhood of Adonis and his transition to adolescence, symbolised by the boar hunt, a rare cultural reference in the otherwise abstract landscape of the poem. The rhetoric of boyhood gave Shakespeare a cultural practice by which to translate the Ovidian story into early modern discourses. But like Marlowe he does not merely translate but performs translation, setting forth the rhetorical practices of the grammar school in order to characterise and critique them. His decision to cast Venus in the role of a teacher is, I think, crucial to that critique.

‘The Lesson Is but Plain’ Shakespeare’s representation of Venus as a loving schoolmaster has been illuminated in recent studies by M. L. Stapleton and Lynn Enterline. Although she is never called a teacher or tutor, Venus clearly plays a schoolmasterly part, heavily inflected by Ovid’s praeceptor in the art of love.32 Building on these studies, and analysing the formal construction

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of her speech, I wish to show the specific practices by which Shakespeare locates Venus and her pupil Adonis at a crucial moment in the humanist literary curriculum. Venus’ speech on the jennet episode stands as the most explicit citation of school rhetoric in the poem. Responding to Adonis’ complaint about the loss of his horse, she delivers an ‘afternoon lecture’ in which she holds up the horse’s flight (in pursuit of a mare) as an example to Adonis.33 Her spontaneous eloquence, amplified by no fewer than four parallels (parabolae), closely resembles a central exercise in Camerarius’ Elements: elaboration of a chreia. A chreia is the verbal relation of a notable saying or action; it is therefore like sententia with which it shares the same headings of elaboration in Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata. What distinguishes it from sententia is that it is attributed to a person (even if the person in question is a statue). Camerarius identifies three operations that boys should perform on the chreia, and Venus does each of these in a rather programmatic fashion. First, Camerarius writes that students may practise by ‘taking over’ (usurpare) a chreia and ‘inserting it skillfully, like a gem, into a speech on a proposed theme’.34 To take over a chreia, he explains, is to use it like someone’s testimony.35 Like fables, maxims, and parallels, chreia was one of the small forms with which schoolboys stocked their commonplace books. Boys were supposed to cull these notable sayings and deeds from their reading, but Erasmus and Lycosthenes had made the work of finding chreias a lot easier in their prodigious collections of apothegms, the related genre of notable sayings. The trick, under these conditions, was not to find a chreia, but to take it over – to drop it into conversation or speech at the opportune moment.36 Such an occasional, moral utility of the chreia is implied in its name; the Greek word for chreia literally means ‘use’, and Latin writers generally translated it usus. The Greek word probably lies behind Camerarius’ verb usurpare, a pun that insists on the skill to be learned in the exercise. To take over a chreia is to make it useful to oneself, in persuasion as well as deliberation.37 ‘Thy palfrey, as he should, / Welcomes the warm approach of sweet desire’ (385–6). So Venus begins her theme, citing two parallels out of the gates to illustrate her argument. It is a supremely opportunistic ‘use’ of the horse’s action. Like any good schoolmaster, Venus acts on the fly, taking advantage of presented opportunity to illustrate copious eloquence: Unlike myself thou hear’st me moralize, Applying this to that, and so to so, For love can comment upon every woe. (712–14)38

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Fully ten stanzas after Adonis’ horse breaks his reins and runs after the mare, she thus usurps the episode – makes use of it – in her suit to Adonis. It is as if she summonses the horse back from his chase to give testimony, a fugitive exemplum from the natural world. After students have taken over a chreia, continues Camerarius, they may expand it if it is brief, or compress it if it is long. In a single stanza, Venus compresses the episode, earlier told in sixty-six leisurely lines, into six lines of pointed narration. Her retelling of the story is selective and artful, an imaginative and interpretive re-depiction of the scene. In fact, when compared with the episode the narrator tells, it is a different story altogether: How like a jade he stood tied to the tree, Servilely mastered with a leathern rein; But when he saw his love, his youth’s fair fee, He held such petty bondage in disdain; Throwing the base thong from his bending crest, Enfranchising his mouth, his back, his breast. (391–6)

While the narrator takes the event to represent the force of nature, Venus interprets the episode as a story of emancipation. She tells only part of the story, leaving out the bulk of the interlude, which begins not with the courser but with the jennet and consists primarily of the comic courtship of the anthropomorphised horses. Most tellingly, she invests the courser with heroic fortitude, whereas the narrator, telling the same part of the story, attributes no emotion or reason to the courser but like Virgil in Georgics 3 describes a universal, primordial impulse.39 She leaves out mention of Adonis’ part in the story, his failed attempt to restrain the horse. Instead, she invites him to withdraw from the episode, as if stepping out of a frame, and view it from her peculiar vantage point. The narration is the centrepiece of her oration, and it closely resembles the use of narration in emblems, both in the epigram and in the commentaries, where the explanation of the image often boils down to a history. Finally, in taking up a chreia, says Camerarius, boys may ‘expand it by adding reasons, for or against’. In the third stanza, Venus supports her narration of the event with some reasons, or more accurately ‘reasonings’, further exempla cached away in her treasury of wit for just such an occasion: Who sees his true-love in her naked bed, Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white, But when his glutton eye so full hath fed, His other agents aim at like delight? Who is so faint that dares not be so bold To touch the fire, the weather being cold? (397–402)

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The stanza hardly needs comment. Any number of commonplaces could appear here without changing the meaning, not to mention the effect, of the argument. Satisfied with her reasonings, Venus concludes with an epilogue, recapitulating the argument: Let me excuse thy courser, gentle boy, And learn of him, I heartily beseech thee, To take advantage of presented joy. Though I were dumb, yet his proceedings teach thee. O learn to love: the lesson is but plain, And once made perfect, never lost again. (403–8)

The epilogue reiterates not just the argument but also the didactic nature of the entire speech. The most artificial of the stanzas, it sets boundaries to the speech as a set piece and underscores the formality of the goddess’s posture vis-à-vis Adonis. The speech does not exemplify rhetorical technique or rhetorical figure alone, in other words, it is a set piece in theme writing, a citation of a cultural form. Although I have quoted Camerarius’ enumeration of exactly the procedures that Venus follows in her lecture, I do not wish to imply that Shakespeare is following or citing his account of elaborating the chreia. The jennet episode is not a citation of Camerarius or the Elements of Rhetoric, but rather a citation of boyhood style as practised in the rudiments of eloquence. When Venus takes up the jennet episode for the sake of making a speech, she engages in a routine practice of the grammar schools. (In Ludus Literarius, John Brinsley will describe a simple theme ‘not above 12 or 16 lines’ in almost exactly the same terms.40) Her re-narration and confirmation resemble Erasmus’ instructions for elaboration in De Copia: I think I should remind you that descriptions of this sort consist mainly in the exposition of circumstantial details, especially those which make the incident particularly vivid, and give the narrative distinctiveness. Not a little is contributed to such descriptions by the adducing of parallels, the introduction of similes and contrasts, by comparison, metaphor, allegory, and by any other figures of speech that will light up a topic.41

In a slightly more formulaic fashion than Erasmus prescribes, Venus argues her theme. The practice represents no logical method, and Venus employs no topics of invention to produce her reasonings. Rather, she draws on something like a commonplace book, an important tool of learning that Camerarius, following Erasmus, recommends for boyhood study and style. Given its conformity to these pedagogical strategies, Venus’ ‘afternoon lecture’ might more truly be called a ‘theme’ (the student theme, in

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Brinsley’s account, begins as a model lecture). Adonis refers to it as an ‘idle theme’, a phrase he repeats later to characterise all of her discourse (422, 770). By recognising it as a theme, we can better understand the cultural stakes of Venus’ performance. As shown in Chapter 1, making themes is the transitional exercise of the grammar schools, ushering boys into the upper forms.42 In Brinsley’s account in Ludus Literarius, making themes is a critical test of master and scholar alike, separating the brutal from the loving master, and the boys from the men. It is a discursive practice fraught with social meaning, a ritual ‘entering in’ of boys into adolescence. There is a terrific irony of this educational practice in the context of Venus’ passionate suit to Adonis. Venus, who has tried to arouse Adonis’ sexual interest by all sorts of postures, gestures, and assaults, also tries the schoolmaster’s theme. Perhaps conflating social and sexual maturation, which were not necessarily coincidental (as illustrated above in Chapter 2), she thinks that she can usher Adonis into a full-fledged adolescence by making themes. This might seem to contradict the purpose of the boyhood study and style, which is to hold back and stave off premature adolescence. But this is only one aspect of the rudiments of eloquence, which are strategies of both advancing boyhood and forestalling adolescence. In fact, this basic tension within the rudiments has a parallel in the two halves of Venus and Adonis. In the first half, Venus attempts to accelerate Adonis’ maturity. But when he states his intention to hunt the boar with his friends, she suddenly changes tack, attempting with very similar modes of eloquence to hold him back. This contradictory motivation goes to the heart of Venus’ representation as a pedagogue. In the numeric centre of the poem, when she is trying friction in earnest – the more usual means of sexual differentiation – the narrator says, ‘All is imaginary she doth prove’ (597). Recent editors, paying more attention to Venus’ psychological state, gloss this as meaning ‘Everything that she experiences is imaginary.’43 Earlier editors are probably correct, however, in an interpretation that accords with line 608, ‘She hath assayed as much as may be proved.’44 Thus line 597 may be taken to mean ‘she tries everything in her imagination’ or ‘she tries every imaginary thing’ to make a man of Adonis. It describes her basic verbal strategy: vivid description. The strategy dominates the second half of the poem, and it continues to mark Venus and Adonis as a celebration of the boyhood style. Following his treatment of narrative, and before taking up chreia, Camerarius extends the discussion of narrative with a lengthy treatment of description (ecphrasis). The section on ecphrasis does begin a new section, but it flows directly from an excursus at the end of narratio

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on brevity, or the laconic style. Echoing Quintilian’s cautions about early correction, Camerarius dissuades the schoolmaster from teaching brevity and encourages exercise in abundant discourse: Boys should always practise copia more than brevity. When their intelligence matures, and they have a firmer understanding, whatever exuberance they have can easily be trimmed by correction. To correct a deficiency, however, is difficult. As the doctors say, there is less danger and labour in regulating superfluity than in supplementing deficiency.45

The pathological analogy is an interesting substitution of the more usual agricultural or arboreal one (as cited by Quintilian in the same context). It is evocative of what Terence Cave describes as the reification of discourse in Erasmian pedagogy – the provisional superfluity of wordthings, here figured as a corpulent body of speech, a carnival observance of boyhood study and style.46 Ecphrasis and its attendant discourse of enargeia are ubiquitous in Renaissance rhetoric and poetics, but the Elements of Rhetoric places ecphrasis within an educational narrative, and it is this narrative that informs Shakespeare’s use of description in the second half of Venus and Adonis. Among the rudiments of eloquence, description is a strategy of delay, of postponing a boy’s progress into rhetorical and logical forms of correction, forms that require a ‘firmer understanding’. It reflects the temporary suspension of disciplined speech for a ceremonial, even festive indulgence of excess. This pedagogical strategy, too, like the earlier strategy of making themes, serves Venus’ purposes as a lover. As Colin Burrow writes, ‘To tell a long tale (and one which involves a lot of wriggling and weaving) has a practical point. It is designed by Venus to enable her to spend as long as she can underneath her lover.’47 If Venus’ amorous designs are the more apparent in the poem, they are underwritten by humanist educational strategies.48 Venus’ contrary motives, to usher Adonis into adolescence and to retain him in a condition of boyhood, reflect a tension within the exercises of boyhood style. As outlined by Erasmus and Camerarius, the rudiments of eloquence are simultaneously strategies of progress and delay. Even in Erasmus’ expansion of Quintilian’s list of boyhood themes, and Camerarius’ even longer, exhaustive list, each exercise being subdivided into dozens of types, we can see a humanist impulse at work: an impulse to forestall the imposition of logical and formal disciplines on speech. And yet, for all of the increase in their presentation of the exercises, Erasmus and Camerarius alike insist on an order – a narrative of development that ultimately leads to correction when the time is right. In the meantime, the rudiments of eloquence are uniquely equipped to lead and detain at the same

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time, to create an alternative time, a kairos removed from the linear progression of chronos, but one that contains within itself an outline and a sense of growth. As Cave has shown, Erasmus adopts the language of festivity to give shape and meaning to the humanist pursuit of copia.49 We saw in Chapter 2 that Marlowe figures Sestos as a place of alienation for Leander, a transitional site of separation from the disciplines of the scene of rhetoric. In a way that remains to be investigated, Shakespeare similarly situates Venus’ performance within a ritual setting. Through a series of metaphors and allusions, he conjures a social setting for the celebration of the boyhood style: the banquet, the very setting that Cave identified as the figurative place of copia.

Venus’ Frustrated Banquet Patrick Cheney has recently drawn attention to the trope of combat in Venus and Adonis.50 In his study of Shakespeare’s self-presentation as a ‘national poet-playwright’, he reads Venus’ performance as a gesture to the poetics of the Virgilian epic. In Cheney’s view, Shakespeare encodes in his basically pastoral exercise in Venus and Adonis his simultaneous pursuit of a laureate career through the words and gestures of Venus. This Virgilian paradigm is juxtaposed with a complementary Ovidian paradigm in Adonis: ‘In short, while we can view the opposition between Venus and Adonis in sexual terms, we may also view it in terms of the 1590s clash between an Ovidian aesthetics of poetry and theatre, represented by Marlowe, and a Virgilian aesthetics of poetry and epic, represented by Spenser.’51 In my view, Cheney makes too restrictive a reading of the trope of combat, which participates in a larger, more comprehensive trope of play in the poem. The encounter between the two protagonists is frequently characterised in terms of a game, a trope that brings Adonis precariously into a scene of performance dictated by Venus’ gestures. ‘This beauteous combat wilful and unwilling, / Showed like two silver doves that sit a-billing’ (365–6). Their rapport is described as a ‘war of looks’ and ‘dumb-play’, and Adonis risks ending up willy-nilly like Mars, whose amorous play Venus describes in tellingly magisterial terms: ‘And for my sake hath learned to sport, and dance, / To toy, to wanton, dally, smile, and jest’ (105–6). Near the beginning of the poem, Venus describes her detainment of Adonis with the same trope: ‘Love keeps his revels where there are but twain; / Be bold to play; our sport is not in sight’ (123–4). Venus’ performance is described extensively in terms of social entertainment. The premier trope of Venus’ longings is not battle but the banquet.

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She explicitly elaborates the trope in one of the most notorious passages of the poem, in which she catalogues Adonis’s beauty in a feast of the senses: But O, what banquet were thou to the taste, Being nurse and feeder of the other four. Would they not wish the feast might ever last, And bid suspicion double-lock the door, Lest jealousy, that sour unwelcome guest, Should by his stealing in disturb the feast? (445–50)

From the outset she invites Adonis to ‘Not cloy thy lips with loathed satiety, but famish them amidst their plenty’, and Adonis’ coldness is described as ‘leaden appetite’ (34). The banquet is repeatedly evoked in metaphors of eating (55-60, 229–40, 399, 5478), tasting (127–8) and drinking (91–6). The abundance of Venus’ rhetoric itself is a complement to this motif; her copious oratory is figured, as it was in humanist writing, as a verbal feast for consumption.52 The banquet motif anticipates Venus’ ultimate frustration. In the central stanza, her unreciprocated desire is compared to the punishment of Tantalus, whose appetite is eternally mocked by the ever-receding signs of a banquet. This comparison gives way to an analogy with birds tormented by the signs of painted grapes, an image wrested from its commonplace use as an encomium of artistic verisimilitude and here introduced to reinforce the theme of the failed symposium. If she begins by invoking the bonhommie of the symposium, Venus ends by drinking alone. When Adonis finally departs, her festal song devolves into the late-night, lonely oratory of the tavern, where Copious stories, oftentimes begun, End without audience, and are never done. For who hath she to spend the night withal, But idle sounds resembling parasites? Like shrill-tongued tapsters answering every call, Soothing the humour of fantastic wits. (845–50)

This is a sad commentary on the fate of Venus’ convivial eloquence. Like the intoxicated bravura of the bar, her ‘copious tales’ continue towards no foreseeable punch line, carried along by sheer momentum. What Shakespeare appears to represent in Venus is an attempt to recreate the festive conditions of the scene of culture, largely through the genres and gestures of the boyhood style. And yet there is no banquet; in fact, there is hardly anything we might call cultural context for her ‘revels’ at all. If Marlowe removes the amorous rites of Hero and Leander from the wedding feast, which is figuratively evoked in

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his source, he at least retains the Feast of Adonis as an imaginative context for telling the story. Venus and Adonis, on the other hand, is deliberately abstract. Its major cultural reference, to the seasonal cult of Adonis, is buried in a sophisticated numerology.53 This is enough to show that Shakespeare knew the cultural significance of his tale; otherwise, he makes little of the seasonal symbolism of the Adonis myth. Furthermore, the characters have been abstracted from the mythological tradition. As Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen write, ‘Shakespeare, it seems, wanted to strip the two principal characters down to their absolute essentials.’54 Venus has been separated from her son Cupid, attached to her in Ovid’s version of the tale and in numerous contemporary visual depictions. No reference is made to Adonis’ mythological parentage. There is no geographical situation of the story, and (on the surface) only the progress of the sun gives the poem a temporal framework.55 Ovid’s telling of the Hermaphroditus myth, on which Shakespeare drew for his representation of a reluctant Adonis, supplies a fascinating model of such violence towards the scene of culture. In book 4 of the Metamorphoses, the story is told by Alcithoe, daughter of Minyas, to her sisters as they labour at spinning and weaving. The significance of this all-female context of telling stories is that the ‘Minyades’, as the sisters are called, are labouring against the orders of the local priest of Bacchus, who has instituted a feast to the god in Thebes. All the Thebans – young and old women, young men and wives – honour the god, leave off working, and celebrate the Bacchanals: ‘Only the daughters / Of Minyas keep to themselves inside their houses / Spoiling the holiday, spinning the wool.’56 Alcithoe is the ringleader of this heterodox group, and book 4 opens with a succinct statement of her irreligion, making the performative context of the ensuing stories a major issue.57 The sisters begin to tell stories to pass the time and lighten their labour; they narrate the myths of Pyramus and Thisbe, Venus and Mars, and Apollo and Leucothoe, before Alcithoe tells the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, a ‘new’ story (the sisters twice emphasise the novelty of their tales). But as soon as Alcithoe finishes her tale, a truly new transformation takes place, as their looms, cloths, and threads are turned into vines and grapes: a forced holiday in retribution for their irreligious abstinence. They themselves are changed to bats with blind eyes and small voices, an implicit judgement of their meagre storytelling, away from the ritual occasion of the feast. It is a poetic justice that only Bacchus – elsewhere known as the mischievous Pan – could conceive. The priest had warned of the god’s wrath for abstainers, but he did not predict that vengeance would come with such irony.

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In Ovid’s account, the Bacchanalian feast thus supplies a differentiating context for Alcithoe’s performance, which at once reflects an abandonment of the scene of culture and a precarious recreation of that scene in an unsanctioned space. The telling of unoccasioned mythological narratives, with no other purpose than to ease the tedium of spinning, is an affront to the social and cultural occasions of these narratives. In the context of spinning, and spinning for profit not pleasure (Ovid makes no description of the subject matter of their weaving – a deliberate and critical omission of ecphrasis), selecting a tale is an arbitrary exercise. Listen, for instance, to Alcithoe searching for subject matter: Nor do I think I will tell you about Sithon Who alternated being man and woman, Nor about Celmis, playfellow of Jove When he was little, and is adamant now Whichever way you take the word. The rain Brought the Curates forth, never mind how, And never mind how Crocus and his darling, Smilax, were turned to little flowers. This one Is new, and so I think you ought to like it.58

The litany of spurned myths is a perverse priamel, an utterly arbitrary turn from mythology simply because it is old and familiar. By enumerating all of these myths, Alcithoe betrays the poor conditions she has for choosing any myth – there is no occasion for telling any of these stories or for even citing them in this context. Novelty supplies a poor copy of decorum in a scene divorced from all circumstance. The sisters’ lust for new stories reflects a kind of incipient modernism, an impatience with the cyclical return of feasts, games, gods, and heroes. In Venus and Adonis, where almost every trace of the scene of culture has been removed, Shakespeare appears to be imitating the heterodox Alcithoe as much as Ovid, and he inscribes the liability of his performance in the fate of Venus. Like Venus (and Alcithoe), the poet mimics the festive and erotic conditions of the banquet, but equally like Venus, the spontaneity of his performance is perplexed by institutional practices and the textual nature of his undertaking. Like her banquet, his is tropical only. It pretends to the social occasions of performance but radically records its disengagement from the festive scene. The poet thus courts the same risks as Venus; his adoption of convivial forms for the sake of a literary debut, like the ‘wanton talk’ of Venus, is liable to offend or shame. Divorced from social occasion and formalised in writing, the poet’s song risks echoing like the wanton chirping of the cicadas (figured in the ‘idle sounds’ and ‘shrill-tongued tapsters’ of the simile). In the context of the literary debut, convivial forms, far from creating a

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common source of revelry, tantalise the reader and characterise the poet not as a master of the revels but as an exiled banqueter. Shakespeare’s apparent disaffection from the feast, his performance of mythography under conditions of labour, homogeneous time, and profit, may reflect a number of motives. The one ostensible occasion for writing Venus and Adonis was the coming of age of its dedicatee, Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton, who at twenty years old was about to enter into his majority. Although this occasion is not stated in the dedication to the poem, it is implicit in one of the major themes of the poem: Adonis’ rites de passage. In celebration of Southampton’s twenty-first birthday, Venus and Adonis may be apotropaic, wishing the young man, still a ward of the parsimonious Burghley, safe passage to his majority, not to mention his estate. In this case, the motif of the broken banquet may point to some deficiency in the conditions of performance: a sense of ostracism from the Southampton circle, an anxiety of being admitted to the proverbial feast, or, perhaps, a sense of shame for doing double duty as a poet, celebrating a nobleman’s rites de passage but also writing for publication, spinning and weaving on the unconsecrated loom.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

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Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 97. Ibid. See Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 132. Daphnaïda, 108–9. Venus and Adonis 1–3, in The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford, 2002), p. 175. All quotations of the poems are taken from this edition and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by line number. From Humanism to the Humanities, 133. In Elizabethan usage, ‘purple’ was closer to red than what we think of as purple, and Shakespeare often uses it to describe blood. See ibid., 133n46. Joachim Camerarius, Elementa Rhetoricae, sive Capita Exercitiorum Studii Puerilis et Stili (1540, repr. Basel, 1545). The epigraph to my book is taken from this edition and is found on sig. l7r: ‘Aliter loquetur puer, aliter adolescens.’ For text and translation of the poem, see Appendix. The lines quoted are 17–8, 41. Subsequent references are to lines and are made parenthetically in the text. P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant (Oxford, 2004), book 10, line 535 (10.535). Unless otherwise noted, references to the Metamorphoses (Met.) are to this edition. Whereas Ovid’s Venus returns from heaven on hearing Adonis’ cry,

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

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Camerarius’ Venus is decidedly more terrestrial: ‘The offspring of Myrrha ended with a groan what began as shouts; turning to these, the Cyprian returns swiftly, through regions of the swiftly passing forest where there is no path, and with fear making a way where there is no way.’ Compare Met. 10.719–21: ‘She recognized from afar the groan of the dying and turned her winged team there. Immediately she saw from high heaven his lifeless body, lying in his gore.’ Jonathan Bate contextualises Shakespeare’s strategies of imitation in Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), 1–47. Appropriately, Thomas Edwards will incorporate the exercise thesis into his epyllion Cephalus and Procris, one of the earliest imitations of Venus and Adonis. See below, Chapter 7. Merchant of Venice act 5, scene 1, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames, 1998). The Orator’s Education, 1.9.3. Ibid., 1.9.6 (my translation). The Latin narratiunculas a poetis celebratas evokes a festival scene of origins. Quintilian seems to recommend taking them from a festival occasion for exercise in a parallel scene of rhetoric. This cultural theft is played out in both Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, and rectified in later mythological epyllia, which increasingly look to framing devices to reintegrate mythology into a festival scene. Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. b2r. ‘[The Greeks] declared that before the boy is sent to the Rhetor, he is to be exercised in these as much as necessary, since this school is no less needful for eloquence than recognition of letters is for reading.’ (In quibus prius ad Rhetorem quam mitteretur puer, usque adeo necessariam posuere exercitationem, ut non magis cognitionem literarum ad lectionem pertinere, quam eloquentiam hunc ludum requirere, statuerent.) Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. a3r. Correcting student work is ‘tedious and of little value’. Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. c7v. Camerarius is an oracle. ‘Omnis sermo vel est alicuius rei narratio, vel narrationis proœmium, aut consequens et adiunctum.’ Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. b2v. Quintilian treats imitation and paraphrase in book 10 of The Orator’s Education. Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. y4v. This view of exercise as an operation is drawn from Theon’s Progymnasmata. See Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 5–9. See Brown’s illuminating comments on ‘marginal forms’ in Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 120. After listing a number of proverbs, Camerarius writes, ‘I could list several examples taken from the poets, but I leave these to your own study and observation.’ Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. l4r. For a cultural critique of notebook pedagogy, see Crane, Framing Authority. Camerarius frequently uses ‘primordia’ as synonymous with ‘elementa’. It is his selection of histories that he describes as ‘particulae’ and ‘ramentae’. Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. g2v. Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. B8v.

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26. See Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982). 27. Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. a4r. 28. On rhetorical ethos in the Renaissance, see Lorna Hutson, ‘Ethopoeia, Source-Study and Legal History: A Post-Theoretical Approach to the Question of “Character” in Shakespearean Drama’, in Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism, ed. Martin McQuillan et al. (Edinburgh, 1999), 139–60. On the classical tradition of ethos, see Jakob Wisse, Ethos and Pathos: From Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam, 1989). 29. For an illuminating discussion of echo as a experiential condition of the humanist schoolroom, see Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys, 78–122. 30. I use the term ‘eclectic’ to refer to an intentional form of imitation, as distinct from modern theories of ‘intertextuality’. The latter term has become rather imprecise in literary criticism. For an attempt to give it some definition, see Robert S. Miola, ‘Seven Types of Intertextuality’, in Shakespeare and Intertextuality: The Transition of Cultures Between Italy and England in the Early Modern Period, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Rome, 2000), 23–38. T. W. Baldwin compiles verbal imitations in On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere’s Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, 1950), 1–48. Interestingly, Baldwin, who tends to be fairly assertive in tracing Latin sources, is hesitant to describe any textual relationship between Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander. He finds the ‘tissue of parallels’ between these poems to be accidental. Ibid. 91–2. 31. Hero and Leander, 13–14. 32. M. L. Stapleton, ‘Venus as Praeceptor: The Ars Amatoria in Venus and Adonis’, repr. in ‘Venus and Adonis’: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York, 1997), 309–21; Lynn Enterline, ‘Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Grammar Schools’, in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Stephen Orgel and Peter Holland (Houndmills, 2006), 173–90. 33. Baldwin, Literary Genetics, 26. 34. Elementa Rhetoricae, sig. k1v. 35. Ibid. sig. k5r. 36. ‘In our themes (scriptiunculis) let us get in the habit of using these citations appropriately, accommodating them to the matter at hand – not heaped up and forced, but as if sprung from the issue itself. This will happen only with diligent and assiduous practice. The later we start practising this, the harder it will be.’ Elementa Rhetoricae, sigs. y2r–y2v. 37. Hutson contextualises these educational practices in early modern economic discourses in Thomas Nashe in Context, 38–54. 38. Cf. Camerarius’ lines, quoted above: ‘She tells you stories, too, eloquent about former things for which Love had supplied the plots.’ 39. See Georgics 3.242–4. Unless otherwise noted, references to Virgil are to P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969). 40. Ludus Literarius, 177. 41. CWE 24.579. 42. Baldwin, Small Latine, 1:120–2. ‘Throughout the upper school the boys have probably written both verse and prose for their moral themes. They began turning verses in the fourth form and writing verses in the fifth, and

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

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would doubtless have continued to write verse just as they continued to study poets throughout the upper school. Similarly, the boys were writing prose themes by the fifth form, doubtless of the Aphthonian variety, and then worked up to the oration in the succeeding forms, both in Latin and in Greek’ (122). Burrow, 207n. See also The Poems, ed. John Roe (Cambridge, 1992), 110n. See The Poems, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Philadelphia and London, 1938), 61n. Elementa Rhetoricae, sigs. h5v–h6r. The Cornucopian Text, 31–4. The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 30. The Ovidian praeceptor’s advertisement of rhetoric probably lies behind this coincidence. Ars amatoria 1.459–62. My text is Amores, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, ed. E. J. Kenney (Oxford, 1995). The Cornucopian Text, 24. Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge, 2004), 87–92. Ibid., 92. Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquet and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Chicago, 1987), 173. See Christopher Butler and Alistair Fowler, ‘Time-Beguiling Sport: Number Symbolism in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’, in Shakespeare 1564– 1964: A Collection of Modern Essays by Various Hands, ed. Edward A Bloom (Providence, 1964), 124–33, repr. in ‘Venus and Adonis’: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York, 1997), 157–69. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds Shakespeare’s Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems (London, 2007), 62. To the reader alert to the poem’s intricate numerology, the sun’s progress evokes a ritual calendar: midsummer night’s eve and the festival of Adonis at the autumn equinox. See Butler and Fowler, ‘Time-Beguiling Sport.’ But in a performance of the poem, the seasonal indices of Venus and Adonis would almost certainly escape the audience, who would strain to hear some scant references to seasonal symbolism in Shakespeare’s handling of the Adonis myth. Instead of pointing to a scene of culture, the hidden, numerological structure discovered by Butler and Fowler may point equally to the poem’s alienation from the scene of culture. Metamorphoses 4.32–4, in Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, 1955), 82. Ibid., 81 (Met. 4.1). Ibid., 103–4 (Met. 4.279–87).

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Chapter 4

Narratiuncula: Coming of Age in Oenone and Paris

The cultural abstraction of Venus and Adonis, considered in the previous chapter, may be contrasted with the pointed cultural situation of Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris, among the earliest imitations of Shakespeare’s poem.1 The change is evident from the opening lines, which paraphrase Shakespeare’s description of daybreak: When Sun-bright Phebus in his fierie carre, Ended his passage through the vernall signes, And all the trees that on the mountaines are, Aspyring Cedars, and the loftie pines, And verdaunt flowers mantled all in greene Newlye received their liveries from their Queene.2

Heywood not only amplifies Shakespeare’s two-line chronographia, he substitutes the calendar for the day as the temporal frame of reference. The location of the Sun relative to the heavens, as opposed to its location relative to the horizon, supplies a cultural context for the poem, rich with possibilities of significance where Shakespeare’s poem shuns contextual interpretations.3 Heywood similarly departs from his model when he specifies the geographical location of the poem on mount Ida (11). Paris, from the couch that he shares with Helen, rises ‘with speedie course’ and pursues game ‘as farre as Ida mountaine; / There he alight’s, and sitts him by a fountaine’ (11–12). Adonis, on whom he is modelled in this passage, ‘hied him to the chase’ (Venus and Adonis 3). Even while lifting lines from Venus and Adonis and paying tribute to il miglior fabbro throughout Oenone and Paris, Heywood exploits cultural associations of both temporal and geographical setting in a way that makes his poem more than a work of plagiarism.4 He is not only an early imitator of Venus and Adonis, he is its first censor. The paraphrase of the first stanza is just one indication of a more structural change in Heywood’s negotiation of the scene of rhetoric in

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Oenone and Paris. Like Marlowe, who situates mythology in the Feast of Adonis, Heywood brings mythological narration back into a liturgical context, a cultural situation that gives Paris’ and Oenone’s speeches significance within a narrative framework. We do not yet find a frame narrative, a cruder device of later epyllia, to orient us in this cultural world, but rather a series of allusive gestures to the zodiac, which serves as background to a number of narratives of transition: the transition from the season of festival to the season of labour in the ‘labours of the months’, the transition from youth to adolescence (the age of majority and hence of marriage) in the narrative of the ‘ages of man’, and the transition from the green world of pastoral to the brazen world of heroic epic in the career of the rota Virgilii. As we will see, the scenic backdrop to Paris’ rape of Helen is a virtual palimpsest of cultural transitions. At the time of his encounter with Oenone in the poem, Paris has crossed the decisive line in this multiplex cultural narrative. He has, in a word, come of age, and it is his majority as much as his infidelity that causes the nymph’s complaint. The cultural background supplies a frame for seeing what happens in the foreground of Oenone and Paris: the performance of progymnasmata by Paris. Paris performs not just progymnasmata, but precisely the exercises marking the boy’s graduation from the teacher of grammar to the teacher of rhetoric. Quintilian, who was responsible for the subdivision of the progymnasmata, wrote that when the boy began to write narratives, he was to be handed over to the teacher of rhetoric. This is precisely the point to which Paris has progressed, and the centrepiece of his oratory, the speech that Heywood uses to represent Paris’ coming of age, is none other than the famous Judgement of Paris. ‘The Judgement of Paris’ as recounted in Oenone and Paris is complemented by a second major speech, in which Paris ‘confirms’ the truth of his narrative to an incredulous Oenone. Together these performances indicate the irreversible move of the boy from the shady grove of fable (‘Unseene of Titans narrowe searching shine’) to the glinting arena of historical narration. Oenone and Paris is the first English epyllion to explicitly mark a primary teleology of the progymnasmata: historical narration. Like Marlowe’s gratuitous description of Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare’s mock-moralisation of the jennet episode, Heywood’s narration and confirmation imitate school forms. But unlike these parodic examples, the set pieces by Paris are at least provisional to the performance of a real cultural labour (historical and legal writing), and as such, they characterise Paris as progressing along the discursive path prescribed by the progymnasmata. Recognising the citation of these school forms in Oenone and Paris is

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not a formal problem only but enables an incisive reading of Heywood’s address ‘to the courteous reader’ and to ‘gentlemen’ in his dedication of Oenone and Paris. Picking up on Marlowe’s distribution of a homosocial scene of rhetoric in Abydos and a heterogeneous scene of culture in Sestos, Heywood distributes the scenes of rhetoric and culture between his two interlocutors. The dialogue form allows for some comic miscues and misreadings as we saw in the ritual courtship of Hero and Leander. But the point of the comparison seems to be more in earnest, an exploration of the conditions of writing afforded by the grammar school and its ritual practice. At the end of this chapter, I will respond to the influential argument by William Keach in his monograph (the first) on the epyllion, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives. Reconfiguring Keach’s comparison of ‘irony and pathos’, I argue that these are symptomatic of the two scenes of performance that are repeatedly negotiated in the English epyllion.

Vivid Narration Like the epyllia of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Oenone and Paris reflects an ingenious manipulation of genre. Heywood made a dialogue by splicing together two fictional letters by Ovid: Heroides 5, Oenone’s complaint to Paris after he has left her for Helen; and Heroides 16, Paris’ letter of introduction to Helen. (This letter, along with a reply from Helen in Heroides 17, forms the first of three pairs of letters now thought to be forgeries.) Heroides 5 supplied Heywood with the basic outline of the narrative and much of Oenone’s speech, while Heroides 16 supplied him with one of the major set pieces in his epyllion: Paris’ narration of his infamous judgement. Letter-writing, which had an obvious practical application in the diplomatic and social spheres that humanist teachers wished to impact, had a vital place in the teaching of composition in the sixteenth century.5 Erasmus, as we have seen, makes the letter the first formal exercise of rhetoric (following the ‘advanced themes’ of grammar), and until Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata became widely available in the second half of the sixteenth century, letter-writing manuals by Erasmus, Vives, and Hegendorf probably supplied the outline of rhetorical practice. Camerarius, as we have seen, incorporates letter-writing into his comprehensive programme of boyhood study and style, and school statutes continue to indicate letters as part of a graduated series of theme writing. It is not hard to imagine why Erasmus might have preferred the letter to Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, and why the letter was not entirely displaced in humanist practice. In the codified form that has come down to

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us, the progymnasmata are a product of the Second Sophistic, a culture in which the declamations were popular forms of entertainment and an obvious telos of rhetorical education. The progymnasmata, accordingly, mediate verbal and spontaneous performance through the written, premeditated word. In the early sixteenth century, however, when declamations were performed in an exclusively academic setting, in the entrances and exits, the convocations and commencements of the universities, the progymnasmata did not have as big a cultural utility. If Erasmus and other educators envisioned a more diffuse practice and influence among their pupils, they might have found the letter to be more obviously related to the spheres of influence in early modern Europe. The letter also better accommodated the humanist rhetoric of presence, the plenitude of discourse that arises spontaneously from a fully engaged imagination and copious verbal reserve. Described as ‘one half of a dialogue’, the letter was not just a mock-up of rhetorical form, it was a performance of character.6 Heywood’s reconfiguration of two letters as a dialogue clearly gestures to the humanist tradition of letter-writing. By recasting Oenone’s impassioned words from the Heroides as a dialogue and not a letter, Heywood had to basically alter the classical legend – he had to invent a rendezvous between her and Paris. The point is a moment of tragic recognition as narrated by Oenone in Heroides 5. After describing Paris’ departure with a fleet bound for Sparta (which figures as the archetypal ‘abandonment’, a scene replayed in many of the Heroides), Oenone immediately describes the circumstances of Paris’ return after a long absence: An ancient hill surveys the awesome sea, A veritable mountain, it breaks the tide. From there I watched your maiden voyage; My instinct was to rush into the waves. While I lingered, a flash of purple, the ship’s bow. I was terrified; that wasn’t your accustomed style (cultus non erat ille tuus).7

The narration has a distinct beginning, an epic topographia that marks it off from the rest of the letter and frames a central image: the anxiously awaited appearance of Paris, who does appear but decked out in a new fashion (cultus ille). The set piece that follows is denouement: obligatory shrieks, rending of garments, beating of breasts, until finally Oenone departs from the promontory: ‘there to the companion rocks I lonely wept.’8 In Ovid’s version, there is no reunion with Paris upon this momentary reappearance. Oenone simply sees him from the lookout and retreats to record her ironic complaints. In the context of the Heroides, this episode is extraordinary.9 Oenone,

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who in other respects conforms to the abandoned woman type, does here what most abandoned women do when their lovers depart. Unlike Ariadne and Medea, the classic abandoned women on whose stories her own appears based, Oenone appears to come to terms with her abandonment only when her lover returns: the penny is a long time in dropping. Or maybe we should give Oenone some credit and see this passage – as well as Paris’ ‘passage’ – differently. Paris’ new style and the ‘shameful consort’ on his arm may serve for Oenone as tokens of Paris’ coming of age, and Ovid may invert the typical economy of the forsaken woman to represent something other than a geographical ‘abandonment’. In a tragic sort of recognition, Oenone sees in Paris’ new clothes an irrevocable loss of her boy shepherd. We might compare this poignant passage with Marlowe’s comic representation of Leander, who appears outlandish in his new Sestian garments, his ‘amorous habit’, after his betrothal to Hero. The two heroes’ geographical leave-takings are symbolic of a biographical transition from boyhood to adolescence. Heywood imagines a rendezvous between the two lovers at this point in the legend and reconstructs Ovid’s fictional letters as a fictional dialogue. The interest of the scene is the same as it is in Ovid’s Heroides – the discovery of Paris’ coming of age. Critically, Heywood replaces the imperial Roman purple, the sign of Paris’ majority in Ovid’s world, with contemporary signs of an English gentleman’s majority. Much of the remainder of this chapter will be given to decoding these signs, not the least of which are Paris’ forms of speaking. While these increasingly evident signs of Paris’ new cultural status are for the abandoned nymph a source of anxiety, the same signs are for Heywood’s readers, the ‘Gentlemen’ to whom he addresses the poem, a terrific source of irony. Just as Shakespeare makes repeated jokes at the expense of a Venus who won’t let go of her boy Adonis, so Heywood has fun at the expense of a nostalgic Oenone who is coming to terms with the loss of her boy Paris. Paris’ new style, the style that marks his coming of age, is his eloquence, epitomised by his narration of the Judgement of Paris. This, too, is inspired by an episode that Oenone narrates in Heroides 5. Early in the letter Oenone recalls the decisive moment that doomed their love, though she realises it only in retrospect. She describes it thus: That day sealed an awful fate; I trace Love’s first frost to that wretched day When Venus and Juno, and naked Minerva, More lovely when armed, came seeking your judgement. You told the story, and my ears rang thunder, Ice coursed through my veins, tremors gripped my frame.10

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‘That wretched day’ is ambiguous, referring both the actual day of Paris’ judgement and the fatal day when Paris narrated the story to Oenone. Both days are inseparably conflated in Oenone’s memory because of the powerful, psychosomatic experience of hearing the narration itself. To a writer educated in the humanist curriculum, Oenone’s traumatic response would suggest that Paris was supremely successful. His narration completely arrests, astonishes the hearer Oenone, and that was precisely the aim of the formulaic narratio in humanist education. It is no accident that Heywood constructed his minor epic around this ‘narrative’ event. It was an ambitious theme, for the source text describes its own measure of success – a traumatic response in the reader. In Heywood’s version, Oenone, upon hearing the narration, falls into an epileptic fit, the subject of three rather uncharitable stanzas (313–30). Oenone and Paris is as much about a narratio as it is about a forsaken woman. Paris’ narration of the ‘Judgement of Paris’ in Oenone and Paris is Heywood’s free paraphrase of Heroides 16, or ‘Paris to Helen’.11 One of the more amusing of the Heroides (and the first of the pseudo-Ovidian, somewhat parodic letters 16–21, which are paired) ‘Paris to Helen’ is the triumphant letter of an overconfident, vain young man. In this letter, written during a sea voyage to Sparta and sent as an introduction to Helen, Paris presses his rightful claim and the promise of Venus to give him whatever woman he wanted, ‘even the daughter of fair Leto’. In this epistolary context, the Judgement of Paris is an incredible story that Paris needs Helen to believe, for it establishes his ‘right’ to her, based on Venus’s ‘promise’. Secondarily, though perhaps of equal importance, Paris needs to allay her fears that she has been betrothed to a country bumpkin. He tells the Judgement of Paris, in fact, as the focal point of a set piece in self-praise. Paris begins his self-praise by describing and apologising for his humble birth: I lingered long gestating in my mother’s womb – Her belly swelled with a proper burden. Although I seemed common, my beauty and intellect Were certain signs of a noble birth.12

Birth and natural abilities (subdivided into the topics of physical and mental excellence) were the opening topics of praise in the conventional encomium. It is just on the heels of this formulaic praise that Paris tells of his famous judgement, which appears as a kind of ad hoc ‘education’, the next topic in the formulaic encomium. Then immediately after the episode, he describes the sudden discovery that he is in fact a prince.

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This is described as a ‘marvellous change of luck’ (versis ad prospera fatis), perhaps a nod to the final topic of the encomium, ‘fortune’.13 The amusing part of Paris’ letter is not that he earnestly praises himself (that in itself is typical of the Heroides), but that he must do so on the basis of such a thin resumé, completely devoid of ‘accomplishments’, the most important section of the classical encomium. Read as a cover letter, Heroides 16 shows extraordinary slacker IQ; it is a model of invention for the underachiever. In the very different context of Oenone and Paris, Heywood devotes twelve full stanzas to Paris’ narration, an exact doubling of thirtysix lines in Heroides 16.14 Apart from two important digressions, he ambles along pretty closely in the neighbourhood of the Ovidian text, freely paraphrasing it in many details.15 However inventive it is in description and detail, little that Heywood invents would have fallen outside the bounds of ‘translation’ as it was defined in the Elizabethan age. And yet there is a major change given the very different audience and circumstances. In the context of Oenone and Paris, the story serves as an excuse in a defensive speech. Heywood translates the Judgement of Paris not just across languages, that is, but also across rhetorical genres, from an epideictic to a forensic occasion. (For the ‘gentlemen’ readers of Oenone and Paris acquainted with the Heroides, there must have been no small pleasure in the recognition of Paris’ narratio to Oenone as virtually the same that he delivered, under much different circumstances, to Helen, only diplomatically cleaned up in a couple of embarrassing particulars.) More to the point, he translates the passage as a contemporary speech genre through which he makes the Ovidian texts his own. Before looking at Heywood’s translation, it is important to get a better sense of the stylistic virtue of narration that he might have sought out in his paraphrase of the Ovidian text. Just what was it about the narration (and not just the narrative) that could send Oenone into a swoon? Terence Cave’s phrase ‘the rhetoric of presence’ perhaps best captures the intended effect of narration in the rhetorical training of the sixteenth century.16 Essentially, the rhetoric of presence is the ideal of bringing images, people, and events before the mind’s eye by means of the voice alone.17 Concentrated in discussions of the classical term enargeia, or ‘vivid description’, the rhetoric of presence radiated out into every area of early modern critical writing.18 It was influential in the reception of Aristotle’s theory of mimesis and Horace’s dictum ut pictura poesis.19 It was an influential concept in many disciplines, especially preaching, both Protestant and Catholic.20 But vividness was not an advanced study for preachers and poets alone. As Cave has shown, the concept of

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enargeia was basic to the pedagogical theory of Quintilian as adapted by Erasmus.21 Take Erasmus’ description of enargeia, one of the more influential treatments, in the widely circulating handbook of rhetorical invention, De Copia: We employ this whenever, for the sake of amplifying or decorating our passage, or giving pleasure to our readers, instead of setting out the subject in bare simplicity, we fill in the colours and set it up like a picture to look at, so that we seem to have painted the scene rather than describe it, and the reader seems to have seen rather than read. We shall be able to do this satisfactorily if we first mentally review the whole nature of the subject and everything connected with it, its very appearance in fact. Then we should give it substance with appropriate words and figures of speech, to make it as vivid and clear to the reader as possible. All the poets excel in this skill, but Homer above all.22

Erasmus clearly defined enargeia as a kind of emulation; it consists in ‘amplifying’ and ‘decorating’, and it depends on clothing the subject in ‘appropriate words and figures of speech’. In other words, the grammar school concept of enargeia was defined as a type of paraphrase, and Marlowe’s paraphrase of Musaeus, especially his elaborate description of Hero and Leander, discussed above in Chapter 1, is an unusually successful performance of the ‘rhetoric of presence’. The Judgement of Paris, as told in Oenone and Paris, is a more programmatic performance. Comparison with the source text reveals the addition of numerous epithets, figures, and sententious phrases. Heywood finds room in the opening topographia for a brief catalogue of trees (a commonplace of the locus amoenus) as well as a hypotyposis evocative of that ubiquitous oak from Spenser’s ‘Februarie’: ‘whose oregrown trunks withstand the hardest strokes’. Throughout the narratio, actions are analysed into a sequence of steps, words are analysed into fuller descriptions, and conversational, enunciative types of figures are interjected.23 Circumlocution, the flotsam and jetsam of paraphrase, is everywhere on display. The influence of Spenser is fairly obvious. One peculiarity about Heywood’s paraphrase of the Judgement of Paris deserves special attention. For a narration that in outline depends so clearly on Ovid’s version, there is surprisingly little verbal dependence on the Ovidian text. In fact, apart from a few exceptions, there is little evidence that Heywood had the text in front of him when he paraphrased it.24 On the other hand, several discrepancies at the verbal level suggest that Heywood paraphrased the passage ‘without book’. ●

Periphrastic constructions (more specifically, instances of antonomasia) are changed. Mercury is not ‘The nephew of mighty Atlas and

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[Pleones]’ and ‘the winged courier’ but ‘The messenger of mightie Iove’ and ‘th’immortall oratour’. The Caduceus is not ‘the golden rod’ but ‘the snakie wand’. Juno is not ‘the wife of Jove’ but ‘The Mother’. Venus is consistently ‘the Queene of love’, a periphrasis not given in the Ovidian text. Conversely, Helen, referred to in Ovid as ‘the daughter of fair Leda’, is not referred to in Heywood. Epithets are dropped, added, or changed, and trees and animals are arbitrarily enumerated in the topographia. Only the ‘oaks’ of Ovid’s description are found (as ‘mighty oakes’) in Heywood’s catalogue of trees. As for the animals, the ‘goat, lover of crags’ is omitted and the ‘slow cow’ becomes the ‘horned ram’ (but compare ‘simple ewe’ with ‘ovis placidae’). Heywood omits two verbal interjections in which Paris pleads the veracity of his tale (Her. 16.60, 63). He also drops place names found in the Ovidian text: ‘nemorosae Idae’ and ‘Dardaniae muros’.

Thus in almost all particulars, the Ovidian text leaves few verbal traces in Heywood’s paraphrase. Of course it could be countered that Heywood was emulating the Ovidian text, and so intentionally, thoroughly altered its wording. Yet it would have taken a lot of vigilance to leave so few traces of verbal imitation, and Heywood was not so coy in his emulation of Shakespeare. Nor was he coy in his verbal imitation of Heroides 5 for the words of Oenone. Besides, emulation might account for the verbal discrepancies, but it would not account for the omission of Paris’ asides and place names. These are best accounted for by a paraphrase without book. Without book, Heywood had a fairly precise memory of the events and speakers of the story as told by Ovid. In a few places he appears to depend on words, but primarily for the sake of an embellished paraphrase. This kind of paraphrase – a nonverbal imitation of a story recalled in its events and speakers – eludes modern categories of source study and even the more plastic categories of postmodern ‘intertextuality’. But the conditions I have conjectured were just the conditions of writing enargeia as theorised by Quintilian and Erasmus. Erasmus, as we have seen, describes enargeia both as paraphrase (‘amplifying or decorating our passage’) and as a work of the imagination: ‘We shall be able to do this satisfactorily if we first mentally review the whole nature of the subject and everything connected with it, its very appearance in fact.’ The discovery of suitable words and figures depends not primarily on a verbal source, that is, but on a mental review of the scene. As described by Quintilian, on whom Erasmus draws for his dis-

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cussion of enargeia, this sort of non-rote, imaginative reconstruction of events was the precondition of moving an audience.25 Quintilian was not the first to note the importance of sympathy or emotion, but he may have been the first to describe a procedure for summoning this power of narration: We can indeed easily make this happen at will. When the mind is idle or occupied with wishful thinking or a sort of daydreaming, the images of which I am speaking haunt us, and we think we are traveling or sailing or fighting a battle [. . .] Can we not turn this mental vice to a useful purpose? Surely we can.26

The enargic narration was predicated upon this immediate relation of words to visions. The rhetoric of presence is not a rhetoric of mere translation, but a rhetoric of paraphrase that eludes classification. Was Heywood aware that he imported elements from Lucian’s narration of the Judgement of Paris in Dialogues of the Dead? Or did his memory of Lucian’s narration (which describes an exceedingly immodest Paris reviewing the naked goddesses) merely assist him in visualising (and prolonging) the scene? When Heywood added the golden apple and its inscription (not mentioned in Ovid), was he consciously modifying the story as told by Ovid, or (more likely) was he unconsciously importing the most famous visual element into his imaginative reconstruction of the story? But perhaps Heywood is not so much producing an enargic narratio as representing one. Do we not find Paris engaging in just these phantasiai or ‘visions’ at the beginning of Oenone and Paris? Whether he muzed on his beauteous rape, Or of Oenone selfe (sweet soule!) forsaken, Whether hee thanked Neptune for his escape, Or sea-borne Venus for his prize so taken, Whether hee came to viewe the wanton Fawnes, Or see the Satyres tripping through the Lawnes, There sate hee still, still musing as hee sate, Leaning his elbowe on a mosse-growne stumpe, His comely temples shadowed with his hatte, – Like frowning Iuno in an angrie dumpe. A scarfe of greene about his necke hee wore, Wherein a huntesmans horne hee hanging bore. (OP 25–36)

The description is iconic, recalling the young man (typically a huntsman) lost in thought in some illustrations of May in the labours of the months. We are left to imagine that it was a similar kind of wishful thinking that brought on his famous Judgement, when he was in a similar bower engaged in singing and fighting off sleep. They are just the conditions

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that Quintilian recommends exploiting for the sake of enargeia. By representing Paris as a visionary, and the Judgement of Paris as a vision, Heywood cites humanist theory (and practice) of vivid narration. If we see Heywood’s narration of the ‘Judgement of Paris’ as simply a ‘translation’ (or worse, plagiarism) of the episode from Ovid’s Heroides, we are missing the what early modern readers would have seen: a set piece in narratio, a test of the poet’s skill in enargeia, and an essentially imaginative form of writing.27 As we will continue to see, the speeches of Oenone and Paris are representational and performative, gesturing to the audience. Representing Paris as a young man telling narratives in the school of Quintilian and Erasmus, pesky teachers who make students translate without book, Heywood is winking to the ‘courteous reader’.

Paris at the Crossroads Heywood evidently conceived of the Judgement of Paris as a dream vision.28 ‘Sad Morpheus charmes’ (a periphrasis for ‘sleep’) cause him to stop singing, and he is ‘drowsilie leaning on [his] shepheardes crooke’ when the earth quakes and Mercury appears. The nodding shepherd is a far cry from the young man described in Ovid’s Heroides 16, gazing from a promontory at the Trojan citadel (a day-dreamer, but not a somnambulist). Oenone herself recalls the Judgement of Paris as a dream vision (she has heard it before), referring to it as ‘thy fatall vision / Of Iuno, Pallas, and fayre Citherea’ (103–4). Even outside Oenone and Paris, Heywood imagined the Judgement of Paris as a dream vision. In notes printed with Troia Britanica, for which, as we have seen, he translated Heroides 16, he repeatedly describes the episode as a ‘vision’.29 (This corroborates Joseph Quincy Adams’ identification of ‘T.H.’ as Thomas Heywood.30) The drowsy Paris was not Heywood’s invention but stems from Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Le Roman de Troie, where Paris recounts taking a break from a stag hunt when Mercury appears to him in a dream with the three goddesses in tow.31 Heywood need not have known Benoît’s romance but could have derived a visionary Paris from any number of sources, both visual and verbal. As Erwin Panofsky writes, ‘Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Judgment of Paris moves beyond the narrow scope of Trojan epics and, having become somewhat autonomous, successively invaded tapestry, figurine, engraving, painting, and drama.’32 The image of Paris taking his rest from a hunt nicely complemented Heywood’s imitation of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, in which Adonis is stalled by Venus from hunting with his friends.33

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Another equally important tradition informed Heywood’s representation of the Judgement of Paris. In the ancient and medieval traditions alike, Paris’ vision and judgement invite frequent comparison with another mythological legend: the choice of Hercules, or ‘Hercules at the crossroads’, as it is more famously known.34 As told by the sophist Prodicus in Xenophon’s work Memorabilia, Hercules faced a lifedetermining choice as a young man.35 Walking down life’s path, he was encountered by two female figures representing the life of virtue and the life of vice. In alternating speeches, both promise him happiness if he follows. Hercules chooses the life of laborious virtue, securing for himself a place not only in the heavens but also in the commonplace book of many a Renaissance schoolboy. It is apparent how this choice between two irreconcilable paths supplied a moral analogy for Paris’ judgement, an analogy made explicit in a speech in Athenaeus’ The Learned Banqueters and later illustrated in humanist emblems.36 In Heywood’s version of the Judgement of Paris, the choices of both Juno and Minerva are subjected to some of the conditions familiar from the Choice of Hercules. In a sententious couplet, Venus says, ‘Arte asketh study, Crownes a care to keepe them, / Both full of toyle and travell if thou seeke them’ (263–4, cf. Heroides 16.84, ‘both [gifts] are full of anxious care’). Furthermore, probably drawing on humanist commentaries on the Ovidian text, Heywood paraphrases Athena’s promise of virtus (military prowess) as ‘Vertue, witte, wisedome’, or ‘what ever arte and nature taught her’.37 Paris can choose to be learned without wealth (like Marlowe’s poor scholars), or he can choose to be wealthy without learning (like Daniel’s Philocosmus). Or, finally, infra dig, he can squander it all for the sake of physical gratification: ‘what thou most desirest’ (265). Paris’ election of Venus in Oenone and Paris is very clearly the road not taken by Hercules, who eschewed the well-beaten path to pleasure for the toilsome road to virtue. But that is not the whole story, and we need to gain perspective on this narration in the context of a number of transitions or ‘rites of passage’ in the poem. Several motifs of transition in Oenone and Paris place the Judgement of Paris in cultural context, showing it to be more complex than a choice between virtue and vice, as it was for Hercules. For in the context of the bower on Ida, and in a dialogue with the nymph Oenone, Oenone represents something other than virtue, and Helen (and by extension Troy) represents something other than vice. Paris at the crossroads (in the bower) is not simply, in Heywood’s telling, an exemplum. It is a ritual coming of age in the humanist grammar school. In the background of Oenone and Paris, Heywood offers a rich cultural representation of the thresholds that Paris has crossed in his abandonment of

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Oenone. These will give us critical perspective on the poem as a whole before returning to Paris’ speeches, which appear as the decisive signs of his coming of age. In several topographic and chronographic passages, Heywood borrows on a rich iconographical tradition, called the ‘labours of the months’, to locate the dialogue of Oenone and Paris within an annual cycle marked by the seasonal rhythms of agricultural work. In the labours of the months, as illustrated in books of hours, psalters, and almanacs, where they were often accompanied by the twelve signs of the zodiac, one characteristic activity or task represented each of the twelve months.38 As a remarkably stable set of conventions, the labours of the months had an extensive influence on the graphic representation of both landscape and time from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries.39 They were also employed outside strictly calendar or liturgical frames, adorning the capitals of columns in churches and descriptive passages in verse. There are several indications in Oenone and Paris that the dialogue takes place in the month of June. The poem begins, as we have seen, in the zodiac. The sun has ‘Ended his passage through the vernall signes’, meaning he has just entered the house of Cancer (the crab), associated with June, the first month of summer. In a contemporary epigram on the month of June, Robert Greene describes this zodiacal house as ‘Aestivall Cancers gloomie bower’, a description that would fit the melancholy bower described in Oenone and Paris, where Paris is found ‘Like frowning Iuno in an angrie dumpe’. (This is the closest we get to the month being named.) Heywood also incorporates symbols to locate the poem in June. In the labours of the month, June was the month of hay-making and weeding.40 This is suggestively evoked early in the poem, when Oenone says ruefully, ‘Eche morne I seate me by yon stinking weedes; / Faire smelling flowers agree not with my care’ (129–30). The nymph’s juxtaposition of weeds with flowers may refer to a change of season from the month of May (associated with flowers) to June. Later on, Paris describes the bower where he had his ‘fatal vision’ as ‘A nooke where neither simple ewe doeth feede / Nor horned ramme plucks up the springing weede’ (203–4). The ‘horned ramme’ plucking up weeds may evoke the farming implements that symbolise June in the labours of the months: a forked stick and a weeding hook.41 Interestingly, Oenone recalls that Paris, when last she saw him, was standing on a ‘banke of roseate Iillyflowres’ with his ‘hooke in hand’ (109, 110). The hook may refer to a shepherd’s crook, but it may also refer to a weeding hook with which Paris once tended his garden. (There are as many references to georgic as to pastoral in the poem. A striking instance is when Oenone

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says, ‘Here Cinthia lives that loves the painefull farmour, / Not brave Bellona glistring in her armour’ (419–20).) June appears to be the time of year when Paris both had his vision and returned to have the present conversation. Oenone marks their union with reference to the year: Lo, thrise the Sunne hath compast all the signes; Thrise have these groves beene mantled as you see them, And blustring Boreas with his chill colde windes Hath thrise disrobde them sithen you did flee them. Dailie, sithe thy dissembling speech did faile mee, By these still streaming fountaines I bewaile me. (121–6)42

The calendar in its cycle accommodates the conflation of historically discrete events into one ‘time’ and may explain Paris’ second narration of the Judgement of Paris in Oenone and Paris. In cyclical time as marked by the festival calendar, there is one fixed day when Paris betrays Oenone, and the present dialogue is a simple reiteration of that day. (We are left to imagine that Oenone commemorates the day on an annual basis.) In this evocation of a melancholy feast of Paris, Heywood may have taken his cues from his major source, the Heroides. Writing to Helen in Heroides 16, Paris records the day of his discovery as a Trojan prince (contemporary with the Judgement of Paris) as a new holiday: ‘The happy house welcomes its son after a long absence and adds this day to the Trojan feasts (festos).’43 Far from seeing a reason to celebrate, of course, Ovid’s Oenone records the day as a disastrous one: ‘That day sealed an awful fate; I trace / Love’s first frost to that wretched day.’44 Heywood exploits these calendrical allusions in the Heroides to characterise the Judgement of Paris as a ritual event. June also marks the end of the festival season, located centrally in April and May. In calendar illustrations, April and May, the springtime of growth and rebirth, were represented as times of holiday, leisure (hare hunting or hawking), and courtship.45 These activities were frequently located in a purpose-built locus amoenus outside the city walls.46 June signals a return to the city and, in the country, a return to labour: haymaking and weeding. It is with nostalgia, then, that Oenone looks back onto the blissful springtime of her and Paris’ love. She scolds him, ‘Forethinke thee not that heare thou didst frequent mee / Passing the Spring-tide of thy blooming Age’ (541–2). Paris’ return to Ida may be seen, in fact, as a temporary, wistful return to the locus amoenus, the pleasure garden of his youth. But more than a vanished springtime, Ida represents a seasonal accounting of time, complete with its cycles and holidays. It represents a ritual order that Paris has foregone in his

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entrance into manhood. He is at the threshold of history, exiting the shaded grounds of play for the tedious, mercenary working day. ‘Fayre, wage no warre, nor give no warriours wages’, Oenone vainly entreats (421). The entrance into manhood is also inscribed into the medieval calendar, and Heywood may also allude to this tradition.47 ‘At some time in the fourteenth century, a comparison between the human life-span and the twelve-month cycle began to circulate. In this plan, it was assumed that the age of seventy-two marked the proper end of life, and so each month represented one six-year chapter in the story.’48 Coincidentally in the labours of the months and in the ages of man, June followed May, the month of courtship, as the month of marriage. At the beginning of the poem, Oenone looks for Paris ‘As Phillis looked for Demophoon’ (46). This is more than a casual reference to the Heroides. It is a reference to one of Ovid’s heroines abandoned by her husband. By this allusion, Heywood emphasises a distinctive feature of his interpretation of the Oenone and Paris myth. Oenone is Paris’ ‘quondam wife’ (155), ‘his bride’, while Helen is ‘that guile-full Curtisan’ (65) and ‘That trothlesse Tindaris’ (413). Oenone complains, ‘thou hast broke thy vowe’ (349). Paris, nonplussed, blames ‘Hymen the god and authour of our marrying’ (191). By comparison, the only hint of nuptials in Ovid’s Heroides is a reference to Paris’ ‘new wife’ (coniunx nova), a sardonic circumlocution by which Oenone may or may not imply that she is his ‘old wife’. Paris’ momentary return in June is, then, a particularly vexing one for Oenone. In one of the most inventive passages of Oenone and Paris, she evokes their wedding festivities, promising a recreation of them should Paris return: The Satyres, and goat-footed Aegipines [fauns], Will with their rurall musicke come and meete thee; With boxen pypes and countrey Tamburines Faunus and olde Sylvanus they will greete thee ... The faire Napœe [wood nymphs], beawtie of these bankes, As once they daunced at thy wedding day, So will they now, and yeelde thee thousand thankes, Footing it finely to intreat thy stay. (391–3, 397–400)

In this vivid recreation of the wedding feast, there is a special connection with the calendar, for similar scenes of festival provided illuminations in the labours of the months. A French manuscript book of hours from the early sixteenth century illustrates the month of June with a wedding processional (as well as sheep-shearing and the zodiacal sign).49 Implicit in Oenone’s complaint is the charge that Paris has abandoned not just

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her but the wedding feast. The repeated evocation of the nuptial feast gives particular force to Oenone’s complaint and further interprets the Judgement of Paris through a ritual lens. Marriage is consequently identified with the green world, with its festivals and cycles, and it is a wedding feast that Paris symbolically abandons when he abandons Oenone. His abduction of Helen, far from leading to the nuptials promised by Venus in Lucian’s version (which Heywood knew well), is the exchange of a wedding feast for the grim strokes of war. This juxtaposition of weddings and wars is, of course, nothing new. The origins of the Trojan War were traced to a broken wedding feast, when Discord came uninvited to the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, and the surviving Homeric cycle winds down when Odysseus and Penelope finally ascend again their wedding bed. The Trojan War begins in earnest when Paris abducts Menelaus’ wife, and the Italian war in Virgil’s Aeneid is brought about by the broken betrothal of Lavinia to Turnus. In his representation of Paris as an unfaithful husband, Heywood simply adds his own etiology to this chronicle of broken weddings. Helen, not Paris, appears to be the violator, and she is blamed for the break-up of another marriage, not her own: ‘For ever, maie her whoorish trickes be scand / That breakes the knot of sacred Hymens band’ (521–2). The Virgilian wheel is a critical part of the cultural palimpsest that Heywood creates in his representation of Paris’ coming of age. It is one that particularly interests me because of its connection with a theme that I am tracing in this book: the discursive teleologies of the humanist rhetorical curriculum. Like the Virgilian career, the progymnasmata described a narrative of discursive progress. But unlike the Virgilian career, the grammar school student does not progress along a hierarchy of literary systems (pastoral, georgic, epic). Instead, he progresses from fabulous narration to historical narration and legal pleading. And this is what we find Paris doing in Oenone and Paris: telling and confirming an implausible narrative. Heywood superimposes two discursive transitions – two different ways of telling what it is to mature. The rota Virgilii may supply a more famous and accessible narrative in which to frame a parallel story of progress through the rhetorical exercises, a distinctly humanist path of eloquence and maturity. The rich imaginary of the medieval calendar thus mediates the Ovidian text in Heywood’s version of the legend, locating Paris not just at a moment within the historical legend but also at a crucial moment of transition in the life of a young man. But the most explicit cultural identifier, the feature that makes the poem clearly Elizabethan and not late medieval, is Paris’ discourse, his use of grammar school forms to make an apology to Oenone. Once we see the Judgement of Paris not as

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paraphrase tout court but as a humanist speech genre, we see that Paris is as much Elizabethan schoolboy as Trojan Prince.

Paris in the Upper Forms Numerous cultural references suggest that Paris is a boy in transition, but the unmistakable sign of his liminal status is his speech. Paris’ second speech (601–708), in which he confirms the veracity of his tale, complements the narratio of the Judgement of Paris by ‘confirming’ it, an exercise that followed narration in Quintilian’s order of the progymnasmata. Taken together, ‘narratio’ and ‘confirmatio’ are the first of Quintilian’s ‘first exercises with the rhetor’, and so they are, like the themes of Adonis, liminary practices that mark a social transition. Heywood’s confinement of Paris’ speech to two long set pieces underscores his representation of the young man as a ‘bold sharp sophister’ along the lines of Marlowe’s Leander (compare Oenone’s six speeches, ranging from a single line to 138 lines). That he separates the narration of the Judgement of Paris and its confirmation into two distinct speeches reflects a basic feature of the progymnasmata: the construction of sections of a speech as independent ‘preliminary’ exercises. These speeches are the decisive signs of Paris’ coming of age and allow us to further recognise Heywood’s performance of them as ritual forms. In his instructions on the ‘first exercises’, Quintilian adjoins to the exercise in narratio the quasi-forensic exercises in ‘refutation’ (anaskeuê) and ‘confirmation’ (kataskeuê). He writes, ‘To Narrative is usefully added the exercise of refuting and confirming, which is called anaskeuê and kataskeuê. This too can be applied not only to mythical and poetic traditions, but also to the records of history.’50 He gives several examples of implausible narratives from Roman history and, apart from suggesting that the exercise consists in scrutiny of the circumstantial topics of narration, offers little instruction in the actual form or method of this exercise.51 He digresses at length on the delicate transition from rhetorical invention (which must be cultivated at a young age) and critical judgement (which must follow the perfection of a copious invention). Narratio, in this account, is practised for the sake of developing facunditas, or what he (and Erasmus) would call copia dicendi. Although he is now treating narratio in the school of the rhetorician, Quintilian still treats the exercise as a transitional one. Heywood’s Paris is likewise transitional, reflecting aspects of both the boyhood and adolescent styles. On the one hand, he narrates and confirms his tale, reflecting the offices of an adolescent; on the other, it is a fictional tale.

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The legend (‘vision’) clearly would not have counted as a ‘first exercise with the rhetor’ in Quintilian’s terms; it would have been relegated to the grammarian. Of humanist practice of confirmatio, our best indication is neither the commentary of Quintilian nor the formula of Aphthonius. It is the supplementary models of ‘confirmation’ given in the printed school edition of Aphthonius.52 These take cues from both Quintilian and Aphthonius, but they equally reflect Erasmian pedagogy and may be seen as an illustration of the literary culture of the Renaissance. The humanist paradigms of confirmatio clearly err on the side of fostering copious invention. They are severely attenuated arguments compared with Aphthonius’ model, which introduces a logical sort of invention through topical ‘headings’ of argument. The humanist models are ‘topical’ in a different sense. As with humanist themes (see above, Chapter 3), the Aphthonian headings serve merely as place holders for commonplacing – citing exempla, testimonies, and parallels, probably from a commonplace book conveniently arranged by topical headings. The headings, which are heuristic in Aphthonius, lose their logical function and become a merely formal means of arranging evidence. Especially revealing is a model confirmatio by Petrus Mosellanus, who appears to dispense with the Aphthonian headings. After a couple of statements about the probability of Dido falling for Aeneas (whose virtues are catalogued), Mosellanus abandons the particulars of the story and begins arguing the propensity of the female sex to succumb to passion and desperation. The bulk of his confirmation is given to reciting ‘examples of many who gave themselves, though not deceived like Dido, to a plainly wicked and shameful passion’.53 In the ensuing list, analogy, an almost arithmetic ‘heaping up’ of parallel examples, replaces rhetorical probability as the modus operandi. Confirmatio in the humanist paradigms depends on marshalling a battery of stories with a willful neglect of circumstance. These humanist models of confirmatio look very much like what Paris does in his second speech in Oenone and Paris, when he confirms the truth of his narrative account of the Judgement of Paris. The second speech is shorter than the first. At 108 lines, it is a fairly disciplined speech, having only a two-stanza digression on Helen’s beauty. The rest of the speech, apart from an abrupt leave-taking in the final stanza, confirms the argument that Paris made in his first speech: Cupid is to blame, not he. There the argument flanks the narratio of the Judgement of Paris (182, 273), and it appears again here as a thesis: ‘Cupid, the cause that first of all I loved thee, / Is the occasion that I needes must leave thee’ (607–8). After a series of euphuisms, Paris fills eight stanzas with exempla of figures, mostly divine, who have been bewitched by Cupid.

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Zeus’ exploits fill nearly four stanzas, then Mars, Venus, Hercules, Diana, and Phoebus supply parallel examples that ‘Where Cupid mindes to enter, there he delves’ (645). This catalogue of lovers resembles the exempla that Petrus Mosellanus marshals in his model confirmatio, ‘that it is true what Virgil wrote, that Dido killed herself, unable to suffer love’.54 In the homosocial scene of rhetoric, formulaic speech substitutes for clothing as the ritual sign of adolescence. To the gentlemen readers of Oenone and Paris, Paris’ narratio and confirmatio are clear signs of his majority. They function in the same way as the royal purple, the new cultus in which Paris appears in Ovid’s account: as tokens by which Oenone may recognise her husband’s rite of passage into maturity. Like Neptune’s idyllic story and Venus’ theme on the jennet episode, Paris’ speeches also have a ritual function. They solemnise the geographical passage of Paris from Ida to Troy and all the cultural rites implicated in this scene: the passing of spring, youth, and the shady grove of fabulous narration.

Irony, Pathos, and the ‘Courteous Reader’ I have so far considered Heywood’s representation of Paris exclusively. Before leaving Oenone and Paris, I would like to draw some comparisons with the parallel representation of Oenone. The poem makes no fewer than nine references to her speechlessness, one reference (plus one) for every one of her speeches.55 In one of these, the narrator describes her sighs, which stop her voice, as ‘a preface to ensuing talke’ (329). That seems to me to sum up the numerous references to Oenone’s occasional aphasia – each one anticipates another voluble speech. Oenone speaks half again as many lines as Paris in the poem, in four times as many speeches. Her speech is far more various, too, than the Phrygian’s. She employs Petrarchan similes and blazon, Ovidian ironies, and various verbal figures. Her repertoire of commonplaces is as deep as Paris’, and she employs a number of rhetorical genres: praise, accusation, and persuasion are the most common. By comparison, Paris’ speech is fairly disciplined, especially if we consider that the two speeches taken together form one speech in the forensic genre. With one digression on Helen, his speech roughly follows the main sections of a formal oration – prologue, narration, confirmation – before he breaks it off abruptly without an epilogue (which, interestingly, would require emotional amplification). Despite his use of copious argumentation, there is a formality in Paris’ speech that is lacking in Oenone’s. Even the narrator introduces Paris’

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words with a disruptive formality: ‘In this dull extasie a while I leave her, / And turne to him that did of Ioye bereave her’ (149–50). Again in Paris’ second speech, the narrator speaks of ‘the Troians turne’ to speak (599). It is funny to imagine the boy biding his time, collecting his thoughts, and marshalling his commonplaces, until it is his ‘turn’ to speak, as if he were declaiming. Meanwhile, the nymph’s less disciplined, less predictable speech, goes on, broken only by her periodic tempest of sighs. The unifying image of Oenone and her unmannerly speech is the ‘forsaken woman’ of the Heroides and the long tradition that it spawned. Of course, many of her lines are in direct imitation of Ovid’s representation in Heroides 5, but Heywood underscores some conventional features of the forsaken woman. In addition to the numerous references to her stopped tongue (probably alluding at some level to Philomela), Oenone wears the willow garland, she weeps by a brook, and the surrounding rocks echo her complaint.56 Oenone’s turn from complaint to cursing near the end of the poem may reflect the specific influence of Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), which begins with Glaucus’ complaint and ends with Scilla’s rabid curses.57 Lodge’s influence may also be reflected in Heywood’s marked use of alliteration, which in Scillaes Metamorphosis functions as an extended acoustic play on an appearance of ‘Echo’ at the end of the poem. There is thus a clear demarcation of ‘scenes of performance’ in Oenone and Paris, marked by the narrator’s ‘turns’ from Oenone to Paris. Oenone and Paris do not so much speak to each other as speak in different languages – here Oenone’s voluble complaint is met with the bemused paternalism of a young man who has disciplined his mode of speaking. There could be no better reflection of this disjunction than Paris’s irrepressible laughter midway into the poem, following a series of grotesque parallels drawn by Oenone: At this the Troian ganne to chase a laughter; He would, and yet no longer could, forbeare it. (469–70)

The narrator lingers for two stanzas on this interruption, expressing in epigrammatic wit a conflict of irony and pathos where irony clearly has the upper hand. Here the contrary motives of mirth and woe, typically so productive of discourse, actually hinder words when they are in excess: Toyes stoppe his tongue but teares her talking hinders; Mirth maketh him, but mourning makes her, mute. (475–6)

What better emblem could there be of the conflict of irony and pathos, the twin symptoms of the epyllion as diagnosed by William Keach?58

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For Keach, the serio-ludic quality of the Elizabethan epyllion reflects a close reading of the Ovidian text by a generation of English poets. Unencumbered by the moral-allegorical tradition, which persisted into the seventeenth century, Shakespeare and Marlowe discovered and emulated the paradoxes and tensions inherent in Ovid’s writing (and across his oeuvre).59 What I have shown in this and previous chapters is that much of the irony in the epyllion depends on (speaks to) a readership trained in a very specific set of rhetorical exercises. Keach himself acknowledges the importance of an ‘immediate historical context’ in the reception and circulation of the epyllion – the universities and Inns of Court.60 What he assumes, however, is that the ‘gentlemen’ to whom several of the epyllia are addressed shared little more than a disdain for the moral-allegorical tradition. What they shared, as we have seen, is a common training in a specific set of rhetorical exercises, which these poets repeatedly exploit to represent the precocious boy orators of the epyllion. Heywood’s Oenone and Paris is a startling representation of these exercises and offers, furthermore, a historically informed way of reading the tension between pathos and irony in the Elizabethan epyllion. Taking, I think, a cue from Marlowe’s representation of Sestos and Abydos, Heywood distributes two scenes of performance between the interlocutors of his dialogue. Paris is very clearly, like Leander, a ‘bold sharp sophister’ – only more formulaically so. His declamations are more formal than Leander’s, and they are neatly, antiseptically contained in two long set pieces. His abandonment of Oenone is, furthermore, not just an abandonment of pastoral for epic, but also, in Heywood’s distinctive vision, an abandonment of the wedding feast, the iconic scene of culture. Having abandoned Ida and its ceremonies (though he wears a green scarf and carries a symbolic spear), Paris is almost entirely legible in the scene of rhetoric, the institutional place of performing formulas of rhetoric. On the other hand, Oenone’s appeal to Paris relies heavily on a landscape, a season, and a rite. In her last speech to Paris, she even describes herself as a restorer of a derelict shrine (575–6). Her request that Paris take her with him is not only improbable but nearly unimaginable. Oenone is as much a part of the landscape of Ida as are the bowers, brooks, and groves in which her speech is decipherable. The variety of her speech reflects the variety of the place (the short poem takes place in three locations) and time: the seasonal return of festivals that she evokes. It is telling that Heywood represents the female complaint as a more flexible, heterogeneous mode of discourse than Paris’ disputations. I do not mean to imply that the poet ultimately sympathises with Oenone and disparages Paris’ coming of age. Rather, I think that in the best of

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the medieval débat tradition, he represents two conditions of reading and writing myth and puts them in dialogue. More than even Marlowe or Shakespeare, furthermore, he represents these two conditions, or ‘scenes’, as mutually exclusive. At the very least, he cleanly distributes them, inviting the reader to sympathise, disparage, laugh, blush, or yawn. His narrator is less obtrusive than even Shakespeare’s, though I cannot read his description of Paris’ ‘new-stolne bride’ and ‘quondam wife’ as straightfaced. Overall the playing field is pretty level. In my opinion, Oenone and Paris is as much an elegy of Paris’ loss of the green world (of myth) as it is a paean to his graduation to the heroic world (of history). The poem, which begins in a melancholy bower where Paris is found musing ‘Like frowning Iuno in an angrie dumpe’, ends with Oenone’s maledictions, which foreshadow the moral and political depredations that follow as a direct result of his coming of age. Paris’ abandonment of the green world for the heroic world is also an abandonment of the liturgical observation of the seasons (evoked in the first stanza) for a secular, historical narrative of progress. It doesn’t matter that Paris’ impending progress coincides with Troy’s decline and fall – both rise and fall represent a secular, annalistic record of history divorced from the sacred cycles of the green world. Paris is therefore not only the mouthpiece for the performance of certain rhetorical exercises, he is a figure of the student who has advanced from the fabulous and gnomic exercises of the lower school to advanced exercises of historical narrative and argumentation in the upper school. His momentary return to the green world of Ida may represent a challenge to the ineluctable progress inscribed in the series of rhetorical exercises of Aphthonius: the progress towards history and historiography, the abandonment of ritual and fiction for the city and its secular narrative.

Notes 1. ‘Imitation’ is an understatement. Douglas Bush, reflecting a modern view of authorship, describes Oenone and Paris as a work of ‘plagiarism’. Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, 309. 2. Oenone and Paris by T.H., ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (Washington, DC, 1943), ll. 1–6. All references to Oenone and Paris (OP) are to this edition and are cited by line numbers parenthetically in the text. 3. The progress of the sun through the zodiac supplied a rich tradition of representation in books of hours, psalters, and almanacs, where zodiacal signs were coupled with the iconography of the ‘labours of the months’. See Bridget Ann Henisch, The Medieval Calendar Year (University Park, PA, 1999). 4. ‘[T]he point, probably, was for T.H. to lose his poetic maidenhead, while

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

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Untutored Lines paying tribute to Shakespeare as il miglior fabbro.’ Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado with Red and White’, 496. See several essays on the subject in Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell (Columbia, SC, 2007). The oft-quoted comparison stems from Demetrius, On Style, 223, in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1972), p. 211. Heroides 5.61–6. My text is Ovid, Heroides, Amores, 2nd edn, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1977). Heroides 5.74. Several recent studies of the Heroides focus on the composition of the collection as a whole. See Joseph Farrell, ‘Reading and Writing the Heroides’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98 (1998): 307–38; Efrossini Spentzou, Readers and Writers in Ovid’s ‘Heroides’: Transgressions of Genre and Gender (Oxford, 2003); Laurel Fulkerson, The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the ‘Heroides’ (Cambridge, 2005). Heroides 5.33–8. Compare OP 199–270 with Heroides 16.53–88. Heroides 16.43–4, 51–2. Heywood recognised the encomiastic frame of Heroides 16, which he translated in Canto 9 of Troia Britanica. A distich argumentum at the head of Canto 9 (‘Iota’) reduces Paris’ letter to the bookends of praise, birth and fortune: ‘Bright Hellen courted, Paris birth and Fate, / With his Louetrickes, Iota shall relate.’ Troia Britanica (London, 1609), fol. 194. The number 72, divided into twelve six-line stanzas, may be significant in relation to Heywood’s calendar references. See below. The most signal rearrangements accommodate sententious couplets at the end of sixains. See, for instance, ll. 215–16, 227–8, and 233–4. See also François Rigolot, ‘The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism 3: The Renaissance (CHLC 3), ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge, 1999), 161–7. See, for instance, the collection of papers edited by Carlos Lévy and Laurent Pernot, Dire l’évidence: Philosophie et rhétorique antiques (Paris, 1997). On enargeia in the sixteenth century, see Perrine Galand-Hallyn, ‘De la rhétorique des affects à une métapoétique: Évolution du concept d’enargeia’, in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin, 1993), 244–65; Wesley Trimpi, ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s An apology for poetry’, in Norton, ed., CHLC 3, 187–98. Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton, 1986), 141–83; Lawrence D. Green, ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Renaissance Conceptions of the Soul’, in Gilbert Dahan and Irène RosierCatach, eds, La Rhétorique d’Aristote: Traditions et commentaires de l’Antiquité au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1998), 283–97; Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden, 1993), 214–18. Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1988), 199–223; John W. O’Malley, ‘Content

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21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

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and Rhetorical Forms in Sixteenth-Century Treatises on Preaching’, in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley, 1983), 238–52. The Cornucopian Text, 3–77. CWE 24.577. All methods of copia described by Erasmus. ‘When, loe’ (OP 217) echoes ‘Ecce’ in Her. 16.59. ‘Both full of toyle and travell’ (264) comes pretty close to ‘Utraque suspensi plena timoris’ (84). After these verbal echoes, the closest verbal correspondences are in the following amplifications: OP 213–14 amplify Her. 16.67; OP 243–6 amplify Her. 16.75–6. ‘Gracing her fayre cheekes with a lovely smile’ (OP 260) amplifies ‘Dulce Venus risit’ (82). The Orator’s Education, 6.2.26–36. Quintilian ends the passage by recommending the utility – the necessity – of the phantasiai in the school exercises. The Orator’s Education, 6.2.30. Heywood later employed the same letter as a set piece in Troia Britanica (1609), an epic work in which he incorporated translations of Heroides 16 and 17 (Helen’s reply to Paris). Here the letters, translated into heroic couplets, interrupt the ottava rima in which the epic poem is written. Joseph Quincy Adams infers from this difference in metre that the translations were youthful compositions patched onto the later work. But this argument (which may well be accurate) assumes that the poet would want to create the appearance of a seamless work. It is just as likely that he would want to preserve or highlight the integrity of the letters as units of discourse, and so employ a new rhyme scheme for the occasion. I’m not convinced they were youthful translations. Troia Britanica 9 is more graceful than other translations by Heywood, including the paraphrase in Oenone and Paris, and the heroic couplet was his preferred metre for translating set pieces throughout his life. See Heywood’s Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s (London, 1637). Cf. the ‘holy meditations’ of the Son of God in Paradise Regained 1.183– 95, which introduces his narration of his baptism. See below, epilogue. ‘The Fortunes of Paris, his casting out to bee a Sheapherd after the ominous dreame of his Mother, with the vision of the three Goddesses in the mount of Ida, are more at large expressed in his Epistle to Helena.’ Troia Britanica, fol. 192. See also fol. 198 (sidenote: ‘The vision of Paris’) and fol. 212. Adams, Oenone and Paris by T.H., xxvi–xlv. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le roman de Troie: extraits du manuscrit Milan, Bibliothèque ambrosienne, D 55, ed. and modern French trans. Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Françoise Vielliard (Paris, 1998), ll. 3860– 921. Erwin Panofsky, Hercule à la croisée des chemins: et autres matériaux figuratifs de l’Antiquité dans l’art plus récent, trans. Danièle Cohn (Paris, 1999), 66–72. Panofsky, Hercule à la croisée, 66. One wonders if Shakespeare’s representation of Venus detaining Adonis is not to some degree based on analogy with the medieval judgement of Paris. See Panofsky’s remarks on the force of analogy in ibid. 64. Ibid., 68. See also Ayers Bagley, ‘Hercules in Emblem Books and Schools’,

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36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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Untutored Lines in The Telling Image: Explorations in the Emblem, ed. Ayers L. Bagley, Edward M. Griffin, and Austin J. McLean (New York, 1996), 69–95. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.21–34, in Memorabilia and Oeconomicus, trans. E. C. Marchant (Cambridge, MA, 1923), 95–103. David Corey contextualises the passage within ancient representations of Prodicus in ‘Prodicus: Diplomat, Sophist, and Teacher of Socrates’, History of Political Thought 29 (2008): 1–26. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai XII, 510c and XV, 687c, in The Deipnosophists, trans. Charles Burton Gulick, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1927–41), 5.295 and 7.181. See Panofsky, Hercule à la croisée, 206n155. On associations between Paris and Hercules in humanist emblem books, see Bagley, ‘Hercules in Emblem Books’, 79–81. Adams, Oenone and Paris by T.H., xxxix. See James Fowler, ‘On Mediæval Representations of the Months and Seasons’, Archaeologia 44 (1873): 137–224. See Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (Toronto, 1973), 119–60. Some pastoral iconography entered the labours of the months late in the tradition, which was predominantly agricultural. In later calendars, June is the month of sheep-shearing. See Henisch, Medieval Calendar Year, 85–106, esp. 96–103. Ibid., 209–10. Heywood may be drawing on Heroides 2.3–6, where Phillis complains that the moon has gone through four phases since Demophoon promised to return. Heroides 16.91–2. Heroides 5.33–4. Henisch, Medieval Calendar Year, 156–9, 190. See Chaucer, The Franklin’s Tale, 901–12, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). See also Pearsall and Salter, Landscapes and Seasons, 131, 142. This tradition offers a way of understanding the locus amoenus into which Satan leads the Son of God in Paradise Regained (PR) 2.285–301. Jesus’ thirtieth year would have coincided with the month of May in a schema of the ages of man. See Henisch, The Medieval Calendar Year, 135–65, 192. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 102. The Orator’s Education, 2.4.18. As with all of the progymnasmata he discusses, Quintilian assumes a familiarity with the basic forms on the part of his readers. His treatment is better seen as a commentary than as a stand-alone account. Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, sigs. L5r–M4v. Ibid., sigs. L6r–L6v. Ibid., sig. L5r. See ll. 55–6, 113–14, 145, 281–2, 315–18, 329, 473–4ff., 595–6, and 741–2. Willow: ll. 36, 84; brook: l. 740; echo: l. 763–8. Scillaes Metamorphosis, sts. 110–16, in Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., Elizabethan Minor Epics (London, 1963), 43–4.

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58. Elizabethan Erotic Narratives. 59. Keach’s reading of an epyllion unencumbered by commentary participates in a critical reevaluation of Ovid and reflects his undisguised antipathy to ‘scholarship’. See Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, 3–4, 33. 60. Ibid., 32–3, 40.

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Chapter 5

Narratio and Confirmatio: Forensic Performance in Lucrece

In the English epyllion, adolescence is figured both as a crossroads and as an initiation into a discipline. Heywood, as shown in the previous chapter, represents Paris’ coming of age in both senses. Looking back musingly on his notorious judgement, Paris narrates and confirms the decisive moment, his choice of pleasure with infamy instead of virtue with labour. Although he has made his decision for pleasure and infamy, Paris is still nonetheless in transition. Quite literally en route to Troy with his new-stolen bride, he returns to the scene of his boyhood to practise his themes for the unimpressed nymph Oenone. These rhetorical performances are no less signs of his age than his dream vision, for while the Judgement of Paris is the more obvious breaking point with his past, being one that could supply schoolboys with a moral theme, Heywood nonetheless also represents his adolescence as something of a process, a becoming adolescent through a series of exercises in the scene of rhetoric. In Lucrece, Shakespeare similarly represents adolescence as both crisis and process, but he divides the two versions between the protagonists, isolating adolescence as a single crisis of moral deliberation in the person of Tarquin, and exploring adolescence as process or initiation in the person of Lucrece, who performs the first exercises of rhetoric in the second half of the poem.1 Lucrece is neither an adolescent male nor an allegory of the schoolboy, and I do not wish to argue that Lucrece is an allegory of the boy’s initiation into the study of rhetoric. Nonetheless, because of Shakespeare’s citation of the first exercises, the poem has something vital to tell us about the social process inscribed in the progymnasmata. Beginning with her invectives against night, opportunity, and time, which immediately follow her rape by Tarquin, Lucrece prepares to narrate the rape and confirm her narration in the presence of her husband, father, and other Roman lords. In discursive terms, her predicament is like that of a schoolboy rising to adolescence – she must

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speak in an alien social context. Martialled in the ranks of Tarquinius Superbus’ army, uniform in speech and dress, and exclusively male, her audience hails from the scene of rhetoric, a homogeneous site with set forms of verbal competency. Shakespeare’s rhetorical imagination of this group is evident from the beginning of the poem, which recounts the occasion of Tarquin’s lust: the after-dinner speeches of the Roman lords in praise of their wives. As shown by Nancy Vickers, epideictic rhetoric is among the constitutive practices of this group as imagined by Shakespeare.2 Drawing on Shakespeare’s extensive use of forensic rhetoric in Lucrece’s speeches, and expanding upon Vickers’ study of Petrarchan rhetoric, I wish to explore the pervasive technical school rhetoric that informs the representation of Lucrece. This technical rhetoric constitutes, in my view, a social process. If it is epideictic rhetoric by which Lucrece is alienated from the group (as an unchaste wife), it is forensic rhetoric by which she is ritually reintegrated (as a violated woman). The rhetoric of exclusion is therefore potentially the rhetoric of inclusion. But it is a strictly defined set of forms and practices by which the scene of rhetoric can accommodate an individual whose status has irrevocably changed. I do not wish to press the analogy between Lucrece and a schoolboy; what I wish to demonstrate is a homology between her use of the progymnasmata and their ritual function in the humanist grammar school. To illustrate the ritual process of the progymnasmata, I begin with what is probably the first modern textbook of the progymnasmata, Petrus Mosellanus’ 1523 Instructions for the First Exercises with the Rhetorician (De Primis apud Rhetorem Exercitationibus Praeceptiones). A rewriting of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata for the express purpose of integrating adolescent students into a humanist culture of rhetorical performance (the declamations), the First Exercises represents not only a graduated series of exercises but also a number of specific disciplines of the scene of rhetoric. The textbook has a particular relation to Shakespeare’s theme in Lucrece, for one of the themes that Mosellanus recommends for confirmatio is ‘that Lucretia killed herself in despair over lost chastity’. But it is equally important for its representation of adolescent study and style. Based on Quintilian’s precepts for the first exercises in The Orator’s Education 2.4, Mosellanus limits the scope of adolescent exercise. Especially in comparison with Camerarius’ Elements, the First Exercises is a highly disciplined battery of themes, channelling students’ verbal resources into well-defined rhetorical scenarios. Belonging to a group, defined in part by the exclusion of others, is furthermore thematic in a number of the narrative exercises that

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Mosellanus illustrates, and so the textbook offers a very illuminating introduction to the arena into which Lucrece is brought in the second half of Lucrece. Turning to Lucrece, I begin with Lucrece’s narration of her rape because it best illustrates the motivation of her declamatory speeches in the second half of the poem. In comparison with Paris’ narration in Oenone and Paris, furthermore, it vividly illustrates the disciplinary divide between grammar and rhetoric in humanist discourse. If Paris’ narration is exercised with leisure, in a green space, and with no apparent audience (at least Paris seems oblivious of his audience), Lucrece’s narration of her rape has a clear urgency, audience, and purpose. It illustrates in particular two disciplines of the scene of rhetoric: circumstantial reasoning and status theory, or the theory of issues. Her speech reflects a sophisticated and controlled deployment of these disciplines, and they vividly illustrate discursive correction in the scene of rhetoric. Lucrece’s forensic performance at the end of the poem makes sense of her rhetorical performances that lead up to it. In retrospect, the seemingly gratuitous declamations and ruminations have a clear instrumentality and further illustrate not only the disciplines of rhetoric but also the historical process of becoming proficient in the adolescent study and style. Read as exercises, they reflect a narrative dimension of coming of age that is almost entirely obscured in Tarquin’s experience.3 Reduced to a point without extension (partly by commonplace amplification of the fleetingness of pleasure), Tarquin’s decisive moment, his choice of infamy, is represented as timeless. It is known instantly, and its consequences, made moot by the known history of his ‘everlasting banishment’, are also a foregone conclusion. Lucrece’s experience is the experience of the self in history, or the self of history: the self that is shaped and known by culturally specific practices and performative roles. These practices and roles are prescribed but not determinative. In fact, it is the very narrative dimension of Lucrece’s integration into the scene of rhetoric that opens up a space for resistance. Parallel to her rhetorical performances is a series of allusions to her suicide, which is described as an alternative to rhetorical representation. Her suicide, I show, marks a decisive turn from Livy’s text, the source of Shakespeare’s rhetorical representation of Lucrece, to Ovid’s version of the story, told in the cultic context of the Fasti. The turn from rhetoric at the poem’s climactic moment also represents a turn from secular, annalistic history, which has dominated Lucrece’s speech until this point. Her suicide may then be taken as a sign of her disaffection – her defection, so to speak, from one of the major disciplines of rhetoric. It is a protest against what Brinsley refers to as the ‘special rules and directions’ of the scene of rhetoric. It

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is the first of three such defections illustrated in this and the following chapters.

Adolescent Study and Style For Quintilian, the foundation of the first exercises is narration (narratio), and unlike the Greek rhetoricians who preferred fabulous stories as introductory models, he recommends historical narratives exclusively.4 So while Greek rhetoricians started the student with an erotic myth, such as Ares’ jealousy of Adonis and the passionate advances of Aphrodite, Quintilian recommends that the student begin with the more sober stories of republican Rome, because historical stories (defined simply as accounts of what happened) lent themselves more readily to the kinds of controversy students should perform. After writing narratives, the student should proceed to exercises in confirmation (confirmatio) and refutation (confutatio), the arguments on either side of the legal question ‘Did the alleged events occur?’5 Quintilian foregrounds these exercises, which are shadows of prosecution and defence, because they are the most difficult kinds of oratory. Like other authors of progymnasmata, he goes on to discuss exercises that anticipate the other two genres of oratory, demonstrative and deliberative. Petrus Mosellanus’ Instructions for the First Exercises with the Rhetorician, the first modern textbook of progymnasmata, is a rewriting of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata inspired in part by Quintilian’s earlier, Roman account of adolescent exercise. The author, teacher of rhetoric at Leipzig from 1517 to 1524, writes in a dedication that when he lectured on Aphthonius in the summer of 1522, he found it too painstaking to be worth an adolescent’s study, and too exotic (alienius) to be useful in current discourse. So he decided to ‘rewrite the entire work of Aphthonius and to make it new’. There is in the First Exercises a strange rivalry with the Greek sophist. As articulated in a prefatory letter by Mosellanus’ colleague Christoph von Carlowitz, these exercises are an improvement on the Greek sources from which they spring: At my earnest request, this best of men Petrus Mosellanus, with whom I studied for three years, acquired these for our language from Greek sources. I assure you that you will profit more from these, than if you were to go yourself to the Greeks, for these are more suited to the capacity of our men, our mores, our times, and our spirit.6

The First Exercises are not, therefore, written in veneration of Greek eloquence. They have a practical application in contemporary affairs,

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and it is for this reason that Mosellanus addresses them to adolescents, not boys. They are an induction into contemporary modes of discourse, a preliminary training for a particular kind of competency. The First Exercises is a chastened battery of progymnasmata for the humanist tribe and its initiates, and this must in part explain its success. It went through twenty editions between 1523 and 1568 and would no doubt have remained in print longer were it not for the eventual, near universal adoption of Lorich’s edition of the Progymnasmata.7 Lorich’s rehabilitation of Aphthonius represents not the end, however, but an extension of Mosellanus’ influence, for Lorich incorporated a good bit of the First Exercises into his supplemental pages. The First Exercises illustrates major characteristics of the adolescent style, giving us a vocabulary for describing the rhetoric of Lucrece and for understanding its continuity with certain discursive arcs begun in Venus and Adonis. If the boyhood style of the latter reflects a festival opening up of discursive possibilities, the adolescent style of the First Exercises entails a closing off, a correction of discourse for the sake of performance in a normal social context. Its corrective function is illustrated first by its relative brevity. At just under eighty octavo pages – and that with generous margins – the textbook is a fraction of the length of Camerarius’ Elements. In a coda, Mosellanus explains his brevity: ‘In the Greek progymnasmata I found other exercises, including chreias, maxims, and comparisons, but I didn’t think it worthwhile to retain our youth, destined to the greater labour of declamation, too long in these rudiments.’8 Even though it shares several exercises with the Elementa, the First Exercises is not open-ended. So fabula has ‘serious’ uses as well as academic uses (and its serious use is laconic). Narratio is open to embellishment but exclusive of fabulous myths. Confutatio and confirmatio ‘proceed’ to the topics of declamation (the honest, useful, possible, and necessary). Locus communis is treated as common places – the amplifications to be inserted into actual discourse. And so on. Contrary to the open-ended elements of boyhood rhetoric, copia, and eloquence, the adolescent study and style is motivated and directed to a particular social proficiency: eloquence in the declamations, which Mosellanus would fain see blossom in the academies of Germany. The disciplinary quality of the First Exercises is illustrated by its theme as well as form. A number of the stories that Mosellanus tells are stories precisely about various inclusions and exclusions of individuals from a social group. Who is in and who is out are recurring themes and reflect, I think, the process of socialisation at work in the adolescent study and style. Take, for instance, Mosellanus’ two selections for narratio. The first is taken from the first book of Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights

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and recounts a dinner party hosted by Herodes Atticus at his country house.9 In attendance is a boorish young man who boasts at length his adherence to the Stoic discipline (sectator disciplinae Stoicae). Wearied by the young prattler and his pretentiousness, Herodes finally calls for a volume of the Discourses of Epictetus, ‘in which that venerable old man with just severity rebukes those young men who, though calling themselves Stoics, showed neither virtue nor honest industry, but merely babbled of trifling propositions and of the fruits of their study of such elements as are taught to children (puerilium isagogarum)’.10 In moral terms, the story echoes Mosellanus’ example of the ‘serious’ use of fable, Aesop’s fable of the crow strutting with borrowed plumes, and it similarly warns adolescents against a precocious display of eloquence. More generally, it distinguishes a true discipline from a false copy, circumscribing a group of true Stoics and defining their practices. The same is true of the second example of narratio, drawn from Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta, in which Cicero defends the Roman citizenship of a foreign-born poet. Mosellanus quotes Cicero on Archias’ training or apprenticeship to a literary career, which takes place between his schooling and his donning of the toga virilis.11 Quite unlike the false Stoic of Gellius’ story, the outsider Archias is welcomed and honoured wherever he travels in something like a grand tour of the Roman republic. So the story complements the moral lesson of the earlier story, but it also continues the theme of social inclusion: Archias is Roman because he acts (and speaks) like a Roman. These stories pointedly illustrate the purpose of the First Exercises: to draw adolescents into a well-defined social practice – and not just the appearance of that practice. Becoming part of this group is a process of training for a clear goal, the declamations. Who is in are the disciplined youths, included like Archias because of their study, not their birth. Who is out are the dissolute or the undisciplined, like the loquacious adolescent at Herodes’ banquet. (He is joined in his ostracism by other dissolute figures in subsequent exercises, including the passionate Dido, a stereotypical drunkard, and Philip of Macedon, who ‘persisted in his depravity of life in the midst of Greek institutions’.12) The first exercises therefore induct the student into a certain regimen of speech and behaviour. If Erasmus’ Copia evokes the banquet as a site for cultivating the boyhood style, Mosellanus’ First Exercises tellingly ends with a theme defending abstinence: ‘Approval of the law, observed by the Swiss, that no one invited to drink be compelled.’13 It is a fitting period to the sequence of exercises, a subtle reminder of the disciplines one has put on. Having put boyhood and its excesses behind him, the adolescent is at liberty to refuse a description, digression, figure of speech, or a Swiss pint.

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For the exercise in confirmation, Mosellanus recommends episodes from the history of the Roman republic, including the foundational story of Lucretia’s suicide: ‘that Lucretia killed herself in despair over lost chastity’.14 That is a mature theme, to say the least, when compared with the mythical episodes suggested by Greek authors. Aphthonius recommends an episode with a similar theme, Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne, but one without the physical violence, legal controversy, or political ramifications of Livy’s account of Lucretia. Arguing the case on both sides, he mostly defends Apollo’s honour, alternately blaming and praising the poets. Another standard author on the progymnasmata cites the Daphne, Narcissus and Arion myths in his outline of refutation.15 No such recreations for Mosellanus and his studious youth: ‘Histories ancient and modern will furnish a number of examples for the studious.’16 Exercise is to be drawn from reality, or at least the textual records of history, the closest proximation of the variability of experience. To this extent, Mosellanus is representative of the humanist practice of confutatio and confirmatio. In his edition of the Progymnasmata, Lorich includes Mosellanus’ confirmatio of Dido’s suicide and rehearses the additional suggestions he makes – with one exception. He decorously omits the controversy over Lucretia’s suicide. It was simply too ambitious and too restricted for the more complex program of study and style he conceived. At one remove from the Roman declamations, where fictional scenarios of rape were commonly debated in the controversiae, the debate over Lucretia’s chastity represents Mosellanus’ most aggressive appropriation of the progymnasmata for adolescent study and style.17 In the rhetorical curriculum, the Lucretia theme represents the very boundaries of exercise and practice, preparation and action, fiction and history. The student declaiming on this theme is just on the verge of going public, and stands at the end of a long, arduous sequence of preliminary exercises.

Lucrece’s Narratio The most striking instance of Shakespeare’s reworking of his sources in Lucrece is his amplification of Lucretia’s report of the crime as told in Livy.18 In Livy’s account, Lucretia gives a spare account of an atrocity: I am hardly well. What weal is there for a woman bereft of her chastity? The traces of another man are in your bed, Collatinus. My body may be violated, but my mind is intact. Death will be my witness. But pledge by your right hand that you will not let Sextus Tarquinius go unpunished for adultery. He came last night a guest and left an enemy, taking by force a pleasure that, if you are men, will plague him.19

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Although a clear enough indication of the crime, the report is less an account of facts than a series of antitheses: mind–body, guest–enemy, pleasure–plague. In this way, Livy writes an artfully indirect narration. Ovid, by contrast, does not record Lucretia’s narration of the deed at all, emphasising rather her inability to speak.20 Chaucer and Gower likewise briefly pass over the narration, leaving it unspoken.21 Even Coluccio Salutati, in an early humanist declamation, in which narration would ordinarily play a critical role, leaves it as background.22 When compared with the brevity of its source, not to mention its omission in other accounts, Lucrece’s final speech in Shakespeare’s poem is the most elaborate of his embellishments of the story. It is as striking a piece of oratory as any in the poem. Shakespeare’s version of the speech retains the outline, as well as some of the language, of the first half of Livy’s text. What Livy covers in three phrases, however, Shakespeare expands to fifty-seven lines. The main sources for his amplification are the topics of invention, outlined in several contemporary rhetorical textbooks, some of which were printed with Mosellanus’ First Exercises.23 Topical invention was the strategy of finding arguments by running through various ‘places’ of argument for each of the sections of an oration, and scholars have shown its importance for humanist rhetoric and logic in the sixteenth century.24 A central fixture of rhetorical pedagogy, topical invention gave Shakespeare much of the content, as well as the shape, of Lucrece’s speech. Shakespeare signals the formal construction of Lucrece’s speech in her first public words, which draw on the topics of a prologue: ‘Few words’, quoth she, ‘shall fit the trespass best, Where no excuse can give the fault amending. In me moe woes than words are now depending, And my laments would be drawn out too long To tell them all with one poor tirèd tongue.’ (1613–17)

Here, Shakespeare borrows two places of invention for the formal prologue, which was supposed to capture the audience’s good will, attention, and patience. The most obvious part drawn from the topics of the prologue is Lucrece’s mention of brevity, a requisite topic for securing the audience’s patience. The second topic concerns Lucrece’s case more particularly. An influential school rhetoric, presented in table form for the most basic introduction, says that in capturing the good will of the audience, ‘we sometimes use even anticipation (insinuatio), when we excuse the sordidness that appears in the case.’25 In Konrad Celtis’ epitome of Ciceronian rhetoric, printed in nine editions

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of Mosellanus’ First Exercises, Lucretia’s is the paradigmatic case of a ‘sordid matter that cannot be excused without infamy, as the crime of Sextus [Tarquinius] against Lucretia. In this case we use insinuatio.’26 Accordingly, Lucrece captures the requisite good will of the audience by refusing to excuse ‘the trespass’.27 Finally, before going on to narrate the deed, she gives a summary of the whole matter in the next stanza (1618–24) with an appeal to her husband’s attention in particular, another strategy for making the hearers patient.28 Given the urgency of her summons to her husband and father, not to mention her distressing appearance, Lucrece hardly needs rhetorical artifice to keep her audience’s attention. Yet Shakespeare is intent on signalling a commitment to formal oratory. The forensic nature of Lucrece’s report of the deed is clear in her deployment of the ‘circumstances’, or the six topics covered in a narratio: who, what, where, when, how, and why.29 These supplied the headings of the Aphthonian theme, and they represent a more disciplined kind of narratio than described by Erasmus and illustrated by Paris (see above, Chapter 4). But Shakespeare’s use of the circumstances reflects an even more advanced practice; he seems to deploy the circumstances as dictated by ‘status theory’, an influential method of reducing controversy to a limited number of strategies and arguments.30 When arguing a mock trial, students prepared their arguments by running through three questions: conjecture, legality, and quality. The paradigmatic case study was Orestes’ murder of his mother Clytemnestra.31 His legal defence was used to exemplify the third legal issue of quality, also known as the juridical issue. Orestes admitted murdering Clytemnestra, so there is no argument from the first issue, conjecture (that is, whether or not the deed was done). He murdered his mother, so there is no question of legality (the second issue of legality addressed ambiguities in the law, which was rather unambiguous on matricide). Thus, the only defence remaining to him is the issue of quality, an exculpatory argument based on mitigating circumstances. In Orestes’ case, the matricide is revenge for Clytemnestra’s murder of his father Agamemnon, and Apollo himself commanded him to kill her. Orestes’ arguments follow from these circumstances.32 In a conjectural case, the circumstances were especially important, for the fact of a crime was established by arguing that the accused had both the will and the ability to do the deed.33 An epitome of rhetorical topics notes, ‘ability is established in the circumstances of the case.’34 Lucrece dispatches several of these in the first three lines of the narratio, leaving only the question of ‘who’ unanswered until after the lords have already sworn revenge:

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For in the dreadful dead of dark midnight, With shining falchion in my chamber came A creeping creature with a flaming light, And softly cried, ‘Awake, thou Roman dame.’ (1625–8)

The name of the agent is a glaring omission in a speech that is otherwise fastidious in noting the time and instruments of the deed. As in Livy’s version, Lucrece leaves her assailant temporarily anonymous. In Shakespeare’s version, however, she evokes his character by performing a paraphrased version of his threat, ‘softly cried’ (1628).35 The most artful part of Lucrece’s report of ‘the trespass’, this imitative speech amplifies the quality of the ‘creeping creature’, an argument used to establish the will of the accused in the conjectural case. After thus arguing his will, Lucrece declares her assailant’s ability. Expressing an argument the narrator had earlier made (1261–7), she establishes her relative weakness: ‘Mine enemy was strong, my poor self weak / (And far the weaker with so strong a fear)’ (1646–7). Along with other circumstances, strength (vires) was a topic used to argue ability.36 Taking murder as the deed in question, Thomas Wilson describes the topic as ‘comparing of the strength of the murderer with the other man’s weakness’.37 Lucrece’s employment of this topic builds on the circumstances of the narration and suggests her position as an accuser. She proceeds, however, to seek out arguments in her defence. Desperate to find some ‘refuge’ (1654), she begs, ‘O teach me how to make mine own excuse’ (1653). Her plea of ignorance about how to make an excuse occurs immediately following the narratio, and exactly when she should begin ‘confirming’ her narrative. She manages just one argument – the famous distinction, drawn from Livy’s account, between her mind and body. This is, in fact, where Shakespeare breaks with his source. The speech is interrupted by Collatinus’ hyperventilation, ‘his untimely frenzy’ (1675). Lucrece then solicits a pact of revenge, to which she binds the lords with chivalrous terms. But far from being her primary motive, revenge is a distraction, and Lucrece, ‘that yet her sad task hath not said’ (1699), returns to her legal defence (cf. 1618). This persistent return to the formal speech of defence marks Shakespeare’s most explicit departure from Livy, for whom the revenge oath is paramount. Lucrece’s motive is clear: ‘“O speak”, quoth she, / “How may this forcèd stain be wiped from me?”’ (1700–1). Despite her protest of ignorance, Lucrece employs the terms of the law as it was practised in the rhetorical curriculum of the sixteenth century. The charge is adultery and, like the archetypal defendant Orestes, she has proceeded through the three issues standard in status theory. There is no defence on the first issue, conjecture, for she does not deny Tarquin’s deed. The second

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issue, the legal definition of adultery, offers her little in the way of clearing herself. She does not take refuge in ‘cleanly coined excuses’ (1073), such as a quibble over the definition of adultery, and invite the sophistic irony of Augustine’s declaimer.38 The only defence left to her is the third question, the issue of quality. The terms of rhetorical legal theory leave Lucrece in a pitiful position, first to acknowledge an offence of adultery and then to plead circumstances. In spite of the bitter terms, she makes the cool calculus and asks the appropriate question: ‘What is the quality of my offence, / Being constrained with dreadful circumstance?’ (1702–3). Her penultimate question is ‘May any terms acquit me from this chance?’ (1706); at this juncture, she tells the parable of a poisoned fountain as an example of her ability to recover innocence (1707–8). Yet the example’s hackneyed nature and her facility in producing it make it unsatisfactory. In words that Shakespeare paraphrases from Livy, Lucrece attempts to remove her case from legal precedent: ‘“No, no”, quoth she, “No dame hereafter living / By my excuse shall claim excuse’s giving”’ (1714–15). In Livy’s account (1.58.10), Lucretia denies unchaste women the chance ‘to live by her example (exemplum)’, a phrase ambivalently meaning either deliberate choice or legal defence.39 Shakespeare restricts Lucrece’s statement to an exclusively legal context by substituting ‘excuse’ for ‘example’ and repeating it in order to emphasise the legal nature of Lucrece’s predicament.40 Livy’s account leaves open the possibility of reading Lucretia’s statement as a refusal to be an example to unchaste women; Shakespeare’s Lucrece explicitly denies future defendants any avoidance of punishment. In her last words, she is still thinking in terms of legal rhetoric, even as she denies herself the use of those terms.

Night, Opportunity, and Time In light of Lucrece’s ‘excuse’ at the end of the poem, her earlier speeches on night, opportunity, and time take on a meaningful instrumentality. These speeches, which immediately follow the rape, anticipate the terms and arguments of Lucrece’s final speech, and they figure in Shakespeare’s narrative as the heroine’s preparation to make her case. Often called ‘declamatory’, they should be studied for their employment of the technical terms of the declamations. A comparison with complaint literature, with which Lucrece has drawn frequent comparison, is instructive. On the one hand, the use of topical invention in complaint literature serves to distinguish Lucrece’s more urgent rhetorical motive,

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which draws on different topics. On the other, the rhetoric of complaint also shows the flexibility and ubiquity of topical invention in the scene of rhetoric, exposing Lucrece to the very terms of praise and blame that she is seeking to elude. In the complaint, a speaker typically uses time as a structure on which to develop a refrain of tragic irony. Speaking always after some disappointment or catastrophe, the complainer compares a miserable present with a happy past, and uses this comparison as a basis for anticipating (with apprehension) the future.41 In the English complaints of the 1590s, which frequently take fallen women (and sometimes fallen men) as subjects, the recollection of the speaker’s fortunate past often takes the form of self-praise, structured neatly according to the topics of encomium (introduced above, Chapter 4, and explored further in Chapter 6, below). In Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond, the model for many subsequent complaints, Rosamond rehearses her pedigree: ‘The blood I staind was good and of the best, / My birth had honor, and my beautie fame . . . / My education shew’d from whence I came.’42 Thomas Lodge’s Complaint of Elstred (1593) begins with Elstred’s encomium of her native land and hymn to her birth, dropping mention along the way that her father was ‘a Germaine peere’.43 Such self-praise swiftly reached absurd heights. In Michael Drayton’s Legend of Piers Gaveston (1595), the unfortunate lover of Edward II begins by praising at length the English court, evidently to depict an earthly paradise sufficiently worthy of his own miraculous birth, which he describes after an encomium of his father. Thomas Churchyard, who introduced a low-born speaker into the otherwise royal company of the Mirror for Magistrates, anticipated the convention by having Jane Shore speak disparagingly of her birth: ‘Of noble bloud I can not boast my byrth.’44 In most cases, self-praise serves to magnify the fall of the speaker, who is ‘more accurst’ because of auspicious beginnings.45 The enigmatic Lover’s Complaint, which has been attributed to Shakespeare and often compared with Lucrece, is exceptional in this regard. This late example of the female complaint was printed with the first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) and has, until recently, received scant critical attention apart from a longstanding controversy over its attribution.46 The scandal of A Lover’s Complaint, announced in the title, is the speaker’s anonymity. Her lack of circumstance makes it difficult for the author to set up, and for the reader to appreciate, her disappointment. There is nothing anterior to her present condition – no family, education, or expectation – that would constitute a blessed state before her ‘fall’. Instead, the woman speaks of her past with selfreference only: ‘I might as yet have been a spreading flower, / Fresh

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to myself, if I had self-applied / Love to myself, and to no love beside’ (75–7). Echoing some of the ‘selfish’ language with which the poet of the sonnets rebukes the youth for his neglect of marriage, she pretends independence from social bonds. In lines that mimic the nostalgia of other complaints, she furthermore elaborates her lost freedom in a metaphor of absolute ownership (‘fee-simple’), the only allusion to her social position in the poem: ‘My woeful self that did in freedom stand, / And was my own fee-simple (not in part)’ (143–4). Qualifying her figurative title as ‘not in part’, she emphasises that she is bound to neither spouse nor sibling, neither tenant nor lord.47 Even her loss of the fee-simple (subject to forfeiture on charges of treason) is lamented at the end of the poem as a kind of self-treachery.48 Imagining the seductive wiles of the youth, she speculates that a renewed assault by him ‘Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed, / And new pervert a reconcilèd maid’ (328–9). The assumed repeatability of the offence implies its inconsequentiality; with infinite regress to her self, she is the only victim of a self-betrayal. By leaving the ‘Lover’ anonymous, the author of A Lover’s Complaint makes a thematic counterpoint to the historical circumstances with which most female complaints begin. The topics of praise in the female complaint underscore the academic forms in which Shakespeare characterises the scene of rhetoric in Lucrece, for encomium and complaint critically inform his representation of male speakers. Tarquin, the Petrarchan suitor in the first half of the poem, is later the first complainer, who ‘Like to a bankrupt beggar wails his case’ (711).49 Having seen Tarquin in this mode, Lucrece, in a litany of curses, calls on time to perform its office of torture in his ongoing complaint: ‘Let him have time to tear his curlèd hair; / Let him have time against himself to rave; / Let him have time of Time’s help to despair’ (981–3). As her curse implies, the complaint is Tarquin’s rhetorical fortune, and she even supplies some topics for the imagined complaint of his exemplary fall. In a similar way, Lucrece’s speeches are juxtaposed with the ‘relenting dew of lamentations’ (1829) of her husband and father after her death. When they weep competitively for daughter and wife, they rehearse, in effect, the social nodes of praise – the circumstances – that were basic to the female complaint. Especially instructive as a foil to Lucrece’s rhetoric is a speech by her father: O Time, cease thou thy course and last no longer, If they surcease to be that should survive. Shall rotten death make conquest of the stronger, And leave the falt’ring feeble souls alive? The old bees die, the young possess their hive. (1765–9)

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The apostrophe echoes Lucrece’s earlier, longer set speech against time and sets in relief the different rhetoric informing it. The father’s short exclamation depends on the tragic irony of the complaint, in which time functions as a measuring rod of reversals and other events contrary to expectation. For Lucrece, time is not a lackey to fortune’s reversals. Occasionally looking back on a distant, irrecoverable past, she more often fixates on the recent, almost immediate past. In her declamations, night, opportunity, and time represent the temporal circumstances that occasioned her rape by Tarquin. Time and opportunity were, in fact, topics of invention for confirmatio. In his influential rhetoric, first printed in 1553 and reprinted several times in the next two decades, Thomas Wilson identified eight ‘places of confirmation’ under the ‘power’, or ability, of the accused to do the deed. The first, location, is followed by ‘time, whether it was early in the morning or late at night’, and opportunity (occasio), ‘whether he was there about that time or no’.50 Consistent with these topics, Lucrece rails against night, opportunity, and time as the circumstances that gave Tarquin the ability to rape her. She blames the three figuratively as co-conspirators with Tarquin; they are the ‘whisp’ring conspirator’, ‘foul abettor’, ‘accessary’, and ‘copesmate’ to the crime (769, 886, 922, 925). In her personification of the circumstances, Lucrece goes so far as to speculate about their past behaviour, employing one of the most lethal arguments – that from ‘will’.51 Although the full usefulness of the circumstances of the crime for her argument is not clear until the final scene, when she retells the story in the context of a forensic oration, this immediate fixation on the temporal circumstances anticipates her rhetorical situation as that of a pleader in a criminal case. The circumstances of topical invention appear to offer Lucrece a robust accusation of Tarquin, and this is the trajectory of the Night, Opportunity, and Time speeches. But topical invention cuts both ways. The same circumstances deployed in accusation of Tarquin will be used, as we have seen, in defence on charges of adultery. The topics of arguing the quality of the deed, which is Lucrece’s line of defence, are to show that first, she acted ‘not willingly but unwares and by chance’;52 second, that the fault lay in others; and third, that it was by force. Lucrece explicitly blames night, opportunity, and time for a crime she persists in attaching to herself: ‘O hear me then, injurious shifting Time, / Be guilty of my death, since of my crime’ (931–2; see also 772, 876ff.). After using one of the subheadings of the issue of quality – removal – Lucrece prepares to transfer her supposed guilt to other parties.53 It is imperative to appreciate the terms of status theory in order to fully recognise Lucrece’s judicial dilemma: whether to accuse Tarquin or

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defend herself. Shakespeare thoroughly exploits topics of both the conjectural and qualitative issues to portray the ambivalence of rhetorical argumentation.54 Rhetoric’s great strength – its utility on all occasions, is also its vulnerability. It offers Lucrece a means of integration, but not in absolute terms, and not without compromise. Circumstantial reasoning, furthermore, was flexible not only across different issues that arise in the declamations, but also across genres. Lucrece’s cultivation of topical invention within the forensic genre exposes her to the very circumstances of praise and blame that she wishes to avoid. Nancy Vickers has interpreted the suicide as an escape from the encomiastic tendencies of the orators.55 Given the ubiquity of topical invention across genres, we can see the more comprehensive and pervasive technical rhetoric that threatens Lucrece’s integrity.

Troy and the Perjured Self If the declamations on night, opportunity, and time begin Lucrece’s training in circumstantial narration, the intervening scene, which takes place in the morning after she has summoned her husband and father, makes explicit the reference to the techniques and practices of the grammar school. The Troy tapestry has long been recognised as the great achievement of Shakespeare’s Lucrece. Lucrece’s identification with Troy, the impregnable city now violated, has been of great psychological and political interest, and scholars have discovered numerous metaphorical meanings for the city. Troy functioned more than metaphorically in the Renaissance, however, especially in the classroom, where the Trojan War was an object of rhetorical exercises. Along with Helen, a perennial object of controversy, Hecuba and Sinon were important fixtures in the rhetorical education of the sixteenth century, and it is these latter two in particular whom Lucrece encounters. Shakespeare makes the tapestry scene the supreme moment of Lucrece’s rhetorical education, for the tapestry becomes a vehicle for Lucrece to perform the popular exercise of ethopoeia, in which a student impersonated a legendary character for the sake of matching style to character, or borrowing that person’s misfortune for the sake of feeling his or her emotion.56 Aphthonius, author of the most influential account of the rhetorical exercises, defines the varieties of ethopoeia: ‘Some characterizations are pathetical, some ethical, some mixed. Pathetical are those showing emotion in everything; for example, what words Hecuba might say when Troy was destroyed.’57 In addition to the famous player scene in Hamlet, Aphthonius’s example calls to mind Lucrece’s perusal

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of the Troy tapestry. She ponders many faces represented there, but it is Hecuba’s face on which she dwells: On this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes, And shapes her sorrow to the beldam’s woes, Who nothing wants to answer her but cries, And bitter words to ban her cruel foes. (1457–60)

The silent tapestry gives Lucrece occasion to impersonate the grief of Hecuba, and even to speak on behalf of the painted face. Lucrece imagines herself in Hecuba’s place, performing her sorrow in words and facial expression: ‘So Lucrece, set a-work, sad tales doth tell / To pencilled pensiveness, and coloured sorrow; / She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow’ (1496–8). Thus, although the tapestry set piece is often described as an example of ecphrasis, it is equally an instance of ethopoeia, a name better reflecting its function in Lucrece’s integration into the scene of rhetoric. This example of ethopoeia has important work to do for Lucrece.58 Perhaps her first interest in the tapestry is sympathy: she finds it suited to her emotional state, and she may even find comfort in its representation of grief.59 But it is important to realise just how artificial a form of lamentation Shakespeare imports into his narrative. Recognisably a school exercise, the ethopoeia must be seen for its rhetorical purpose. It was a commonplace of classical rhetoric that to make an audience weep, the orator had to first feel sorrow.60 Lucrece’s channelling of grief through the image of Hecuba should perhaps be seen, then, as another preparation for her impending rhetorical performance. But the pedagogical exercises also inform Lucrece’s encounter with another, unlikely exemplar, Sinon. Like Hecuba, Sinon was used as a model of oratory in sixteenth-century schools. In influential manuals on rhetoric and dialectic, George of Trebizond and Agricola both cite Sinon’s report of the Greeks’ departure in book 2 of the Aeneid as an example of a persuasive narratio, one that forms the core of a forensic oration.61 Since Agricola finds the story implausible in itself, he uses Sinon’s success to demonstrate the force of ‘argumentation’ over simple ‘exposition’. Sinon’s narrative demonstrates a mastery of the circumstantial points of confirmation and refutation – the artistic means of proof. Lucrece understands Sinon’s tale just as humanists did – as an effective, if entirely fabricated, narratio. She calls Sinon ‘perjured’, characterising his tale in legal terms (1521). Furthermore, she scolds Priam, the ‘credulous’ king, for being deceived by Sinon’s ‘enchanting story’ (1522, 1521), for not seeing through Sinon’s performance: ‘Look,

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look how list’ning Priam wets his eyes / To see those borrowed tears that Sinon sheds’ (1548–9). Her complaint against Priam is a brilliant example of displaced anger, for of course she blames herself as she laments the king’s folly. Lucrece finally compares Sinon to Tarquin. As Sinon deceived Priam, so Tarquin deceived Lucrece with ‘excuses for his being there’ (114). Like Sinon, Tarquin used narrative: ‘He stories to her ears her husband’s fame’ (106). Lucrece’s subsequent disparagement of Sinon is an act of complex motivation, reflecting the range of her anger, which is directed both at Tarquin and herself, a Priam-like figure taken in by a persuasive but false narratio. Lucrece’s critique of Sinon reflects her increasing dissatisfaction with rhetorical persuasion, for she finds in Sinon the master of the art of performance she has hitherto practised. Sinon’s ‘borrowed tears’ recall Lucrece’s own ethopoeia: ‘She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow’ (1498). If at first the Troy tapestry offers her a means by which to explore the arts of rhetorical representation, it finally turns a mirror to her own performance. The image of Sinon and the memory of Tarquin telling enchanting tales move Lucrece to a troubled scepticism about representation, since words and looks can be borrowed for the sake of deception. To embellish her story with these means of proof, no matter how effective they are, is an act contrary to herself, she who ‘never practised how / To cloak offences with a cunning brow’ (748–9). The declamatory speeches represent a fall from candour into rhetorical performance; to make an excuse, Lucrece must try on unaccustomed forms of persuasion. Her set speeches not only anticipate her judicial argument before the Roman lords, but also demonstrate the compromises and vulnerabilities inherent in such an argument. Making explicit references to terms and forms of rhetorical persuasion throughout her speeches, Shakespeare leaves many problems of Lucrece’s accusation and/or defence unresolved and so builds dramatic tension leading into the final scene.

Lucrece’s Confirmatio Throughout the second half of the poem, Shakespeare shows Lucrece becoming increasingly impatient with rhetorical practice. With striking frequency, she refers to her blood as an alternative to rhetorical performance. In the first mention of her blood, which follows her declamatory speeches on night, opportunity, and time, she weighs rhetorical exercise in the balance with suicide: ‘This helpless smoke of words doth me no right. / The remedy indeed to do me good / Is to let forth my foul defilèd

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blood’ (1027–9). Her next reference picks up on a motif from Ovid’s Heroides – the last will and testament. Lucrece enumerates her gifts: ‘My stainèd blood to Tarquin I’ll bequeath, / Which by him tainted shall for him be spent, / And as his due writ in my testament’ (1181–3). But the efficacy of blood is made most explicit in Lucrece’s final allusion to her suicide: ‘My blood shall wash the slander of mine ill’ (1207). These allusions to Lucrece’s suicide constitute an appeal to a different tribunal than the scene of rhetoric, a religious tribunal suppressed as long as Shakespeare followed Livy’s secular, annalistic account of the rape of Lucretia.62 The ability of blood to provide legal testimony has a strong tradition in early modern Christian thought. William Perkins’ Cloud of Faithful Witnesses, a commentary on Hebrews 11, provides an elaborate theological justification for the use of blood in criminal investigations, a common procedure in the sixteenth century. For Perkins, the legal testimony of blood is established in the archetypal story of Cain’s murder of Abel. He paraphrases and comments upon the words of God in Genesis: thou must know, Cain, this thy fact is as euident to me, as if Abell had told me: I know thou kill’d him: and if thou wonder how I knowe, I tell thee his bloud told me; for it cried in my eares, & yet it crieth out against thee: for though Abell be dead, his bloud yet speaketh. As this is true of Abels, so of all mens bloud: and as of bloud, so of all other oppressions, though done by neuer so great men. Murders, oppressions, and all wrongs done to Gods children, they cry to God against the oppressors, though the poore oppressed men dare scarce name them.63

Perkins goes on to enumerate secret crimes perpetrated by the strong, which are brought to light by divine justice. A divine witness is especially important for ‘secret sinnes’ for which there is no evidence. Although he does not mention rape, Perkins’ focus on the ‘Tyrant’, a type notorious for violating women, implies the crime. The discovery of these crimes by unusual means points to a providential God, who is ‘able to disclose them by strange meanes’.64 The best indication that Shakespeare imagined Lucrece’s suicide in this economy of divine justice is an earlier reference to the Ovidian story of Lucretia. In Ovid’s Fasti (2.821–2), Lucretia is unable to speak when her husband and father appear. Distressed by her grief and trying to console her, they ‘pray for a sign’. Shakespeare had borrowed the line to embellish Lavinia’s tragic case in Titus Andronicus, when Titus implores her Give signs, sweet girl – for here are none but friends – What Roman lord it was durst do the deed.

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Or slunk not Saturnine, as Tarquin erst, That left the camp to sin in Lucrece’ bed? (4.1.61–4)

Impatient for justice, Titus’ brother Marcus demonstrates the use of a staff to write on a ‘sandy plot’ (69). It is clear from his instructions to Lavinia, however, that this is not simply a strange form of writing, for he invokes divine testimony, saying ‘Write thou, good niece, and here display at last / What God will have discovered for revenge’ (73–4). With its reference to the hidden nature of the crime against Lavinia and its appeal to divine retribution, this scene anticipates Shakespeare’s rewriting of Lucrece’s suicide as a discovery of Tarquin’s crime written in her blood. Lucrece’s confidence in her blood to give testimony to her innocence, as well as to Tarquin’s guilt, is vindicated in the narrator’s description of her blood: ‘Some of her blood still pure and red remained, / And some looked black, and that false Tarquin stained’ (1742–3). This description of Lucrece’s blood giving unusual witness to Tarquin’s rape is Shakespeare’s invention. By portraying her blood as staining Tarquin (the verb can take Tarquin as its subject or object), Shakespeare makes her blood eloquent and gives Lucrece a fatal form of argument. Drawing on an early modern discourse of rape, illuminated in a groundbreaking article by Coppélia Kahn, scholars have read this description of Lucrece’s blood as a metonym for Collatine’s family, and ‘stain’ as a threat of illegitimacy posed by Tarquin.65 But given the judicial motive of Lucrece’s rhetoric and her numerous references to her blood as a solution to her rhetorical dilemma, the blood demands to be interpreted as an alternative form of self-representation. Lucrece’s turn to blood as proof changes, in no negligible way, the terms of her judicial speech, because the evocation of a secret crime introduces the legal discourse of murder into her case.66 Although the theological discourse of vengeance encompassed all kinds of oppressive sins, it was especially manifest in murder trials, in the phenomenon of cruentation, where the bleeding of a corpse after death was thought to signal the presence of the murderer.67 Perkins reports that not occasionally but ‘in our daily experience God magnifieth himselfe mightily in reuealing murders. For, bring the murtherer before the dead corps, and vsually it bleedeth, or giueth some other testimonie, whereby it speaketh euen as Abels bloud did, This is the murtherer. Nay more: for, Abels bloud spake to God, but here euen to men also.’68 As Malcolm Gaskill has shown in a study of early modern trial depositions, testimony about the unnatural flow of blood from a corpse was admissible as evidence of murder in Elizabethan criminal courts.69 By drawing blood, Lucrece

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changes the trial from a trial of adultery to a trial of murder. Perhaps it is in this context that we should interpret her description of her suicide as a homicide caused by Tarquin (1721–2). The accusation of murder is pertinent because, while there were no comparable practices for detecting secret rape in early modern England, cruentation provided a legally authorised way of detecting secret murder. When Lucrece changes her position from defendant to accuser, it is Tarquin who ends up figuratively on trial. The charge of murder serves, then, as a substitute for a charge of rape. Such evidence of murder, propped up by theological discourse, furthermore vindicates Lucretia in terms of Christian justice from which she had been barred since Augustine’s posing of the ‘dilemma’. Michael Drayton describes blood evidence as the resolution of an irresolvable academic controversy: Plain path’d Experience the vnlearneds guide, Her simple Followers euidently shewes, Sometime what schoolemen scarcely can decide, Nor yet wise Reason absolutely knowes: In making a triall of a murther wrought, If the vile actors of the heinous deede, Neere the dead bodie happily be brought, Oft hath been prou’d, the breathlesse coarse will bleed.70

With some irony, Drayton holds the spoken word of the academics up to the visible sign of the people. The appeal of the bleeding corpse, as he describes it, is certainty. By comparison, rhetorical persuasion is constructed to deal with uncertainties and can aspire to probable knowledge only. Shakespeare’s representation of Lucrece seems to turn on a similar comparison of the means of persuasion in a case where uncertainty and probability are entirely detrimental to the persuader’s interests. The rhetoric of defence is especially threatening in a case that, as Celtis wrote, ‘cannot be excused without infamy.’ Drayton’s juxtaposition of the schoolmen and the unlearned resonates with the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion implied in scene of rhetoric and its ritual practices. Especially as introduced by Petrus Mosellanus in the First Exercises, the progymnasmata are a means of separating the learned from the unlearned, the disciplined from the undisciplined, the men from the boys. But in Mosellanus’ presentation of the exercises, as with his models Quintilian and Aphthonius, the progymnasmata are not just symbolic but processual, initiating the student into a certain kind of social and rhetorical competency. Shakespeare’s citation of the forms in Lucrece focuses on their processual, not symbolic value. Lucrece’s trials of representation are those of the subject in history, the subject

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whose story unfolds not from a single act of moral deliberation but from schooling in the disciplines of rhetoric.

Notes 1. In ‘The Politics of Lucrece’, Hebrew University Studies in Literature 8 (1980): 66–76, Richard A. Lanham observes that a major discursive shift happens midway through Lucrece. In an allegorical reading of the poem, he argues that Lucrece’s voice represents the awakening of self-consciousness, or ‘politics’, which follows hard on the heels of chivalry, represented by Tarquin in his sack of Lucrece. While agreeing that a major discursive shift happens midway through the poem, I attribute this to a change in the rhetorical genre – from deliberative to judicial rhetoric. The first half of the poem is concerned with the future, the second half with the past; it is the rape that orients both halves of the centripetal poem. 2. ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985), 95–115. 3. Although the narrative dimension of Tarquin’s rites de passage is simple, the psychological and moral complexity of his representation (underwritten in large part by the figures of speech) has been the object of several important studies. See Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, 1987), 117–28; Joel Fineman, ‘Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape’, Representations 20 (1987): 25–76; Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 66–82. 4. The Orator’s Education, 2.4.2. 5. See Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton (Leiden, 1998), §1122. 6. De Primis apud Rhetorem Exercitationibus Praeceptiones (Augsburg, 1549), sig. A3r. 7. RRSTC, 19, 86, 393. 8. De Primis, sig. F5v. In the 1549 Augsburg edition, the printer Philipp Ulhart detained the adolescents just a little longer, supplying the text of Aphthonius’ chreia (in Latin translation) to fill up some remaining pages in the last gathering (sigs. F5v–F7v). 9. Noctes Atticae 1.2, in The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, trans. John C. Rolfe, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1927), 1.9. 10. Noctes Atticae 1.2.6. 11. Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta III.4–III.8, in The Speeches, Pro Archia Poeta, etc., trans. N. H. Watts (Cambridge, MA, 1923), 10–15. 12. De Primis, sig. D3v. 13. Ibid., sigs. F3r–F5r. 14. Ibid., sig. C4r. 15. Agricola, Lucubrationes, fol. 82.

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16. De Primis, sig. C4r. 17. On the Roman declamations, see Bonner, Roman Declamation. More recent, and of particular interest for its attention to rape cases, which were frequently debated in the declamations, is Kaster, ‘Controlling Reason’. 18. On the literary sources of Lucrece, see Baldwin, Literary Genetics, 97–107. 19. Ab urbe condita 1.58.7–8 (my translation). My text is Livy, From the Founding of the City, trans. B. O. Foster, 13 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1919). In his paraphrase of Livy, William Painter translates the speech straightforwardly. See The Palace of Pleasure (London, 1566), sig. B2r. 20. Fasti 2.819–26. 21. See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, ed. Janet Cowen and George Kane (East Lansing, MI, 1995), ll. 1835–8; The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols (London, 1900–1), book 7, ll. 5040–9. 22. In Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington, 1989), Stephanie H. Jed situates Salutati’s Declamatio Lucretiae in humanist habits of reading and writing. Her study includes a text and translation of the declamation. 23. RRSTC, 86. 24. For topical invention in the schools, see Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 39–40, 67–8; and Baldwin, Small Latine, 2:84–90, 288–354. The anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium supplies topics for each of six parts of the oration. [Cicero,] Ad C. Herennium De Ratione Dicendi, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA, 1954), book 1, chapter 3, section 4 (1.3.4). Baldwin identifies the Rhetorica ad Herennium, generally attributed to Cicero in the Renaissance, as the standard grammar school rhetoric; see Small Latine, 2:70. 25. P. Mosellani Tabvlæ de Schematibvs et Tropis in Rhetorica (London, 1573), sig. B7v. 26. Konrad Celtis, Epitoma [sic] in Rhetoricam Ciceronis Utranque ([Ingolstadt], 1532), sig. B2v. 27. Her description of her case as one ‘where no excuse can give the fault amending’ very nearly translates Celtis’ description of cases which call for insinuatio by plain apology. 28. ‘We shall have a patient audience if we briefly tell a summary of the case and capture their attention, for the only patient audience is one that desires to listen attentively.’ Rhetorica ad Herennium, 1.4.7 (my translation). 29. Baldwin, Small Latine, 2:310–21. 30. Originally a simple set of procedures that allowed either side of an argument to find arguments (inventio), status theory developed, during the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’, into an elaborate tool of analysis. For an introduction to status theory, see George A. Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, 1963), 303–19. The most influential work on status theory, by the second-century sophist Hermogenes, has been translated and richly contextualised in Malcolm Heath, Hermogenes On Issues: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoric (Oxford, 1995). 31. This example is taken from Rhetorica ad Herennium, 1.16.26. 32. The three standard issues of status theory were typically not made explicit in the progymnasmata, where cruder kinds of arguments were essayed. In

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38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

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his Rhetorica, Erasmus Sarcerius unusually applies the issues in his presentation of model forensic themes. Leonard Cox, The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (London, 1532), sig. E2r; and Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, 125. Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis, sig. C1v (my translation). Such a speech in character was the celebrated sermocinatio, categorised under the figures of hypotyposis or enargeia, which used words to bring evidence ‘before the eyes’ of the audience. See Lausberg, §820, 1107. Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis, sig. C1v. Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, 126. In Lucretius’ and Collatinus’ efforts to acquit Lucretia, Salutati employs the comparison of nudity and armor: ‘You were sleeping, unguarded and nude, as one fearing nothing from such a youth, armed for murder, prepared for adultery’ (translated in Jed, Chaste Thinking, 150). In a notorious chapter in The City of God, Augustine mimics or quotes a declamation: ‘A wonderful tale (Mirabile dictu)! There were two and only one committed adultery’; Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. George E. McCracken, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1957), 1: 85. I discuss Augustine’s handling of the Lucretia theme at length in ‘“O teach me how to make mine own excuse”: Forensic Performance in Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 424–30 (421–49). See also Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, 1982). ‘For my own part, though I acquit myself of the sin, I do not absolve myself from punishment; nor in time to come shall ever unchaste woman live through the example (exemplo) of Lucretia.’ See A. D. Cousins, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Narrative Poems (Harlow, UK, 2000), 52. The temporal order is codified in ethopoeia, the school version of complaint. Aphthonius writes, ‘Instead of headings, there is a division into the three periods of time: present, past, and future.’ Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 116. Lamenting her abandonment by Theseus, for instance, Ariadne recalls her parentage and betrothal, compares them ruefully with her present vulnerability on a deserted island, and chants a list of wishes to undo the string of events that led to her current situation: ‘What will I do? Where can I go?’ Ovid, Heroides, trans. Harold Isbell (Harmondsworth, 1990), 91. Samuel Daniel, The Complaint of Rosamond, in John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford, 1991), 164–90, esp. 167 (ll. 78–9, 82). Thomas Lodge, The Complaint of Elstred, esp. l. 62, in Thomas Lodge, Phillis . . . (London, 1593), sig. I1r. Thomas Churchyard, Shores Wife, in Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 111–24, esp. 114 (l. 64); see also Kerrigan, 111 (on Mirror). Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, l. 84. The attribution to Shakespeare has been contested recently by Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, and John Davies of Hereford (Cambridge, 2007). See also Shirley Sharon-Zisser and Stephen Whitworth, ‘Introduction: Generating Dialogue on Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: Suffering Ecstasy, ed. Shirley Sharon-Zisser (Burlington, VT, 2006), 1–53, esp. 3–9.

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47. See B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary (London, 2000), 120–2, s.v. ‘fee-simple’. 48. Sokol and Sokol, 372–3, s.v. ‘treason’. Land held in fee-simple, typically acquired by gift, inheritance, or purchase, was the most unrestricted form of ownership in late medieval England; it was also the most vulnerable to seizure, since there were no other claims upon the land, such as tenancy, jointure, or use. See C. D. Ross, ‘Forfeiture for Treason in the Reign of Richard II’, English Historical Review 71 (1956): 560–75. 49. The transition from Tarquin’s to Lucrece’s condition is made clear in a pointed, alternating comparison of the two characters’ immediate responses to the crime (ll. 736–49). 50. The Art of Rhetoric, 126. Wilson’s places are adapted from the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Compare Cox, sig. E5v: ‘To proue that he might do it: ye must go to the circumstance of the cause / as that he had leyser ynough thereto / and place conuenient and strength withall.’ 51. Rhetorica ad Herennium, 2.3.5. 52. Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, 132. 53. On ‘removal’ (remotio), see Rhetorica ad Herennium, 1.15.25: ‘The case stands on removal of the crime, when we separate from ourselves not the crime, but the blame, which we transfer to another person or attribute to some thing’ (my translation). 54. In an explication of Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice, Baldwin (Small Latine, 2:76–84) shows Shakespeares’s mastery of the conjectural and legal issues, which he knew from the Rhetorica ad Herennium. 55. Nancy Vickers, ‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’, 110. 56. On ethopoeia, see Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 115–17; Hutson, ‘Ethopoeia, Source-Study and Legal History.’ 57. Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 116. 58. The tapestry scene is also an important site for the construction of the authorial voice. See Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body, 164–7, 182–7; and Amy Greenstadt, ‘“Read it in me”: The Author’s Will in Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006): 45–70. 59. See, for instance, ll. 1576–82. 60. The classical source of this commonplace was Horace, Ars Poetica, 102–3; see Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA, 1939), 459. 61. See Mack, Renaissance Argument, 193–5. Sinon, taken captive and pretending to be exiled from the Greek camp, tells the Trojans tales to make them believe that the Greeks have departed (Aeneid 2.57–198). 62. Shakespeare makes allusive references in Lucrece to the cultic context of its telling in Ovid’s Fasti, the Regifugium, or ‘flight of the kings’. In an illuminating source study of Lucrece, Jane O. Newman has persuasively argued that Shakespeare evokes the ceremonial and political rituals of the Regifugium. Tarquin is the polluted king who must be expelled, and in allusions to Philomela, Shakespeare suggests that Lucrece might be the one to take violent revenge on the king figure. But he alludes to the spectre of ritual violence against the king only to reject it in favour of a more conventional, self-sacrificial Lucretia. In Newman’s reading, traces of the Regifugium in Lucrece record Shakespeare’s ideological suppression of the cultic history

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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of female violence. ‘“And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness”: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 304–26. William Perkins, A clovd of faithfvll witnesses, leading to the Heavenly Canaan (London, 1607), sig. E4v. Ibid., sig. E5r. Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45–72. See also A. Robin Bowers, ‘Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 1–21, esp. 4. On cruentation, see Patrick Dandrey, Les tréteaux de Saturne: Scènes de la mélancolie à l’époque baroque (Paris, 2003), 27–34. Perkins, A clovd of faithfvll witnesses, sig. E5r. Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England’, Social History 23 (1998): 1–30. Sonnet 46, in Poems: By Michaell Draiton Esquire (London, 1605), sig. Cc4v.

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Chapter 6

Encomium: Antinous as Lord of Misrule in Orchestra

Among the progymnasmata, the exercise encomium is uniquely important because it supplies a conceptual framework in which to understand all of education, including exercises like the progymnasmata. In the Aphthonian scheme, encomium had three main headings through which the writer developed the life of the subject: origins, education, and accomplishments. Falling as it does between origins and accomplishments (genus and res gestae – background and career, in modern terms), education stands conceptually as the midwife of greatness, complementing the heading of origins as a prognosticator of accomplishments. As a topic of praise, education had a newfound importance in the sixteenth century, and it is likely that humanists, particularly those of obscure or middling birth, privileged it over and against the topic of origins.1 A humanist spin on the panegyric mode is evident in the prologue to the ‘Praise of Demosthenes’, a model encomium in Lorich’s Progymnasmata: ‘Those who rise from an obscure birth to renown because of their own virtue deserve more praise than those who boast in the nobility of their ancestors. Greater is the glory to strive for your own excellence than to be puffed up with that of others.’2 Praise of learned persons easily devolved in the humanist classroom into praise of learning; indeed, the longest encomium in Lorich’s Progymnasmata is in praise of his own University of Marburg. Encomium thus had a particular significance; for many grammar school students of obscure birth, it validated their hard-won nobility, eked out of conjugations, declensions, and themes.3 But the humanist spin on encomium as praise of learning did not go uncontested, and the stakes of the contest were especially acute in the case of ‘exercises’, one of the topics of education. In humanist encomium, exercises (exercitia, disciplinae) came to be associated with the life stage of adolescence. As a transitional set of practices between formal education and accomplishments (Wilson’s ‘prowesses’), exercises

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differentiated youths, placing them on irreversible paths, and it was under this heading of the formal encomium that some went on to be soldiers, some to be orators, some to be poets, and some to blend various arts. Exercises therefore constituted a training that shaped an adolescent for proficiency in a particular scene of performance. For Petrus Mosellanus, considered in the previous chapter, the ‘first exercises’ had an explicit purpose: proficiency in the declamations. Trying to reclaim the ancient use of the progymnasmata as training for public oratory, Mosellanus strictly limited the scope of adolescent exercises, circumscribing a space of rhetorical mastery buttressed against the barbarians outside the walls of the university. The progymnasmata therefore had a very different effect from the rudiments of eloquence explored in Part I. If the rudiments were about opening up possibilities of expression and socialisation, the first exercises were about closing them off. Exercises were a zero-sum game. The contest over what exercises would attend adolescence is beautifully illustrated by Thomas Wilson’s paraphrase of Erasmus Sarcerius’ chapter on encomium (see Chapter 1 above). Sarcerius’ description of adolescentia reflects a schoolmasterly disposition: Studies and skills consist in the exercises by which mind and body are exercised. These include the liberal arts and whatever is related to them, for instance the martial arts and musical arts. By studies I mean all those for which each person is suited by nature. Skills on the other hand describe those external, manual products and exercises.4

Wilson’s paraphrase of adolescentia (‘the stripling age or spring tide’), though it follows the order of Sarcerius’ text closely, reflects an entirely different social imaginary, one far removed from the cramped confines of the German school house and at home in the illustrious courts of the well-heeled aristocracy: By knowing what he taketh himself unto, and wherein he most delighteth, I may commend him for his learning, for his skill in the French, or in the Italian, for his knowledge in cosmography, for his skill in the laws, in the histories of all countries, and for his gift of enditing. Again, I may commend him for playing at weapons, for running upon a great horse, for charging his staff at the tilt, for vaulting, for playing upon instruments, yea, and for painting, or drawing of a plat, as in old time noble princes much delighted therein.5

Such a cosmopolitan imagination of the ‘exercises’ of the adolescent male was not entirely compatible with the more studious portrait of youth described by the humanist Sarcerius. In the attempt to frame the life story of male subjects in terms of the liberal arts, humanist schoolmasters like Mosellanus, Sarcerius, and Lorich inevitably came

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into conflict with aristocratic notions of the ‘stripling age’ and its exercises.6 By paraphrasing Sarcerius so freely, Wilson, hardly an antagonist to the liberal arts or the humanist program, was pushing back, attempting to frame literary study within a more generous description of social competency.7 In Orchestra Or a Poeme of Dauncing (1594), Sir John Davies likewise pushes back, but in a more sinister fashion.8 Davies, who studied briefly at the Westminster grammar school before entering Winchester College and later Cambridge University and the Middle Temple, represents in this poem a court that speaks the language of the humanist tribe. In a feast of misrule at Ithaca, he melds two worlds – schoolhouse and palace, encomium and panegyric, adolescens and gallant – into an enigmatic site of performance. Set at a dance at Ithaca during Odysseus’ wanderings, the poem consists almost entirely of a dialogue between the suitor Antinous and the reluctant Penelope, here prudently described as ‘The Widdow’.9 Despite the precaution, nothing transpires that would sully her reputation for chastity, and she roundly refuses Antinous’ invitation to dance. The whole scenario appears, in fact, to be a pretext for the suitor’s copious display of eloquence. As stated by the narrator following his invocation of the ‘light Muse’, the theme of Orchestra is ‘one onely nights discourse’, an indication that Davies is actually representing speech and not just producing it (Orch. 6.1, 7.1). The longest speech, at the centre of the poem, is a seventy-stanza encomium of dancing, an encomium that marks Antinous as an adolescent. The poem, which in other ways resembles contemporary epyllia, thus also shares with them humanist discourses of boyhood and adolescence.10 (What sets Orchestra apart from the other epyllia is the length of the symbolic exercise, which takes up more than half the poem.) The speech in praise of dancing effectively appears as a substitute for the dance, replacing an exercise of the youthful aristocracy with an exercise of a decidedly humanist form.11 At issue in Orchestra is the question of what exercises would define adolescentia. What practice would channel the learning of education into profitable employments? Would the cultural prestige of humanist learning totally dominate this stage of life, making adolescence a time of rhetorical training only? What would become of adolescent exercises in the martial and courtly arts, which had a major place in the training of the aristocracy? What of the poetic arts, which Sarcerius dismisses as ‘externa illa et manuaria artificia’ and Wilson rehabilitates as painting and drawing? What, in a word, would constitute adolescent practice? As I will demonstrate, Antinous’ speech flouts several humanist discourses of adolescentia. On the one hand, his praise of dancing very much tracks not only the form of the Aphthonian exercise but also

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a particular use or strategy of encomium forwarded by Quintilian and developed by humanists. To this extent, Antinous reproduces the rhetoric of the schools. On the other hand, his speech parodies the very disciplines he is ostensibly putting on display. In his ‘gaudie’ disguise as Spring, and in his description of an androgynous milieu in Love’s academy of dancing, he ridicules the humanists’ chauvinist appropriation of encomium for an exclusively male milieu. Furthermore, he exercises copious invention without subjecting it to critical judgement; he has his rhetorical cake and eats it. While this is not as obviously transgressive as his costume, it represents an affront to one of the major disciplines in the scene of rhetoric. Finally, by making mythography one of his main speech genres, Antinous flouts several epistemological disciplines associated with encomium. In the final analysis Orchestra is a parody of humanist encomium and like any good parody, it vividly illustrates the discourses that it ridicules. As argued by Philip J. Finkelpearl, the poem may have been written as an entertainment for the revels of the Middle Temple. Set against the humanist disciplines of encomium, it certainly fits Finkelpearl’s description of that setting: ‘What gives the Middle Temple’s revels their special character . . . is the superimposition onto a set of traditional institutional complacencies of the attitudes and actions of a group of satirists, rhetoricians, and disorderly wits.’12 It is such a setting that makes most sense of the wit, rhetoric, and irony of Orchestra. Conjuring the conditions of a feast of misrule as an occasion for satire, Davies ultimately subjects the humanist disciplines of rhetoric to a poetic critique. And there is a serious, constructive side to the critique. In Antinous’ encomium, he imagines the dance as an alternative order to the prevailing rule of rhetoric. By filling the encomium with poetic fictions (effectively as substitutes for res gestae), he challenges the prevailing genealogical model of adolescent development, where res gestae are a natural consequence of good parents, teachers, and studies. Finally, with the art of dancing, he introduces the circle as a more benevolent discipline. His performance of rhetoric thus celebrates the ritual space it inhabits, a space where poetic production is temporarily liberated from the disciplines of rhetoric, a world turned upside down where the disorder of rhetoric is subjected to the government of poetry.

Aphthonian Man The headings of encomium are some of the most recognisable in literary discourse.13 We have already encountered them in Heywood’s

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paraphrase of the pseudo-Ovidian Heroides 16, ‘Paris to Helen’. In an article entitled ‘Shakspere’s Aphthonian Man’, T. W. Baldwin shows Shakespeare’s precise, formulaic use of these headings in Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.14 Arguing the school origins of the ‘Ideal Man’ theorised by Alfred Harbage, he concludes his essay: If the reader will trouble to examine the section on praise and dispraise (laus et vituperatio) in the school Aphthonius, he will find also the same kind of literary flesh which Shakespeare had used. If he will further familiarize himself with the medieval and renaissance thinking which lies behind the school Aphthonius, he will then be able better to understand its ‘Ideal Man’. But he will still need to explain why this ‘Ideal Man’ as presented by the school Aphthonius proved to be only for an age while Shakspere’s men, never ‘ideal’ and frequently quite otherwise, are for all time.15

Baldwin is right about the ubiquity of the Aphthonian headings. He is indifferent, however, to the contexts in which Shakespeare cites these headings, not to mention the speakers who use the headings and their objects of praise. The first example comes from Capulet’s rather peeved defence of Paris in Romeo and Juliet act 3, scene 5, and the second from Olivia’s cool evaluation of Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night act 1, scene 5. It seems to me that in these instances the Aphthonian encomium does not appear as the ‘skeleton’ on which Shakespeare put the flesh of his creative genius, so much as the barren formulas on which some of his least imaginative characters depend.16 Shakespeare’s citation of Aphthonius is just that – a citation, intentional or perhaps instinctual, of the place of rhetorical formulas in social discourse. In his description of ‘Aphthonian man’ as a skeleton, Baldwin also did not take into account the influence of Quintilian on the humanist tradition of encomium. In his treatment of the first exercises, the Roman rhetorician describes a strategy of encomium that would transform the humanist reception of Aphthonius: The pupil will then gradually begin to attempt more ambitious themes: Encomia of famous men and Invective against the wicked. This is useful in more ways than one: the mind is exercised by the variety and multiplicity of the material; the character is moulded by the contemplation of right and wrong; a wide knowledge of facts is acquired, and this provides the speaker with a ready-made store of examples – a very powerful resource in all sorts of cases – which he will use when occasion demands.17

The usefulness of encomium to supply a ‘ready-made store of examples’ for use ‘in all sorts of cases’ was not lost on humanists, particularly Northern humanists in the wake of Rudolf Agricola, whose De Inventione Dialectica had laid the groundwork for a new rhetorical

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practice centred on topics of invention or ‘commonplaces’.18 Following Quintilian’s suggestion and Agricola’s lead, humanists went to work making of encomium a workshop in commonplace argument. By the end of the sixteenth century, Aphthonian man was no longer a skeleton; stuffed with commonplace logic, he was positively fat. In Lorich’s edition of the Progymnasmata, the three headings and ten subheadings of the Aphthonian theme were supplemented by no fewer than 132 ‘places’ of amplification. All were taken from a work by German schoolmaster Gerardus Bucoldianus entitled De Inventione et Amplificatione Oratoria (On Rhetorical Invention and Amplification, hereafter DIA), first printed in 1534.19 It went through several editions, being printed in numerous cases with Petrus Mosellanus’ First Exercises (see above, Chapter 5). But undoubtedly it owes its widest impact to Lorich, who in his edition of Aphthonius, in the chapter on encomium, quotes some twelve pages on amplifying praise of people and fourteen pages on amplifying praise of cities.20 A very particular take on the art of rhetoric, the DIA presents the entire discipline through the lens of topical invention. The first book, which introduces the art of rhetoric, is entirely given to Bucoldianus’ theory of the topics (loci) and the commonplaces (loci communes), drawn from Melanchthon, Erasmus, Agricola, and Quintilian. Books 2 and 3 proceed to treat the demonstrative and deliberative genres. In both books, Bucoldianus proceeds through the five duties of the orator (invention, disposition, elocution, delivery, and memory) specific to the genre.21 But in both cases he spends most of his energy on invention. More than half of the treatment of the duties in book 2 is given to the topics of praise; following a cue from Melanchthon, Bucoldianus even revisits the topics of invention in his treatment of the figures of thought (which appear in the section on elocution). Almost all of book 3 is given to discussion and examples of the topics of the deliberative genre. If Aphthonius’ purpose was to give students a basic outline and some starting points for encomium, Bucoldianus’ purpose is to leave no possible source of argument untapped. He organises the places of amplification into the three objects of praise identified by Aphthonius: goods of fortune, of body, and of soul.22 Each of these, furthermore, he subdivides into the three Aphthonian headings (birth, education, accomplishments). Within these, however, he runs pell-mell through a number of topics of amplification, drawn mostly from Quintilian’s treatment of amplification in The Orator’s Eduction book 3, chapter 7, though at times he supplements these with Erasmus’ directions for copia and Melanchthon’s theory of the loci communes.23 He also frequently reminds the student of the logical categories (substance,

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quantity, quality, relation, and so on) and circumstances (who, what, where, when, why, and how), the pliable topics of invention that can be used to further unfold a single topic. Consequently, the hundred or so topics that Bucoldianus explicitly mentions for the Aphthonian headings could be further analysed, extended, and compared for further ‘topics’. Summing up his exhaustive run through encomium, he finishes with a prudential gasp for air: Thus we have demonstrated the method of praising persons from fortune, body, and mind, including those things that go before, those that are concurrent, and those that succeed them. Those that go before are nation and parents; those that are concurrent are all goods of fortune, body, and mind; those that follow are the funeral obsequies and the judgements of famous men. We have revealed a single method by which these might be set forth and amplified by the places. Not indeed that all of these, which we have covered briefly, should be rashly adduced in the praise of every man whatsoever (for what end would there be?), but rather so that, the use of topics being demonstrated, whoever wishes may seek out abundance according to his needs. We have not given directions for what ought to be done, but what might be done.24

I am not sure which is more revealing: Bucoldianus’ suggestion that there is anything brief about his handling of encomium or his parenthetical aside in which he imagines the tediousness of a more thorough treatment. But this is the age when Joannes Susenbrotus enumerated 132 figures of speech for use in the schools, and when Erasmus demonstrated 192 ways of saying ‘your letter pleased me greatly.’ Following the remarks on copia and amplification by Quintilian, Erasmus, and Melanchthon, humanist schoolmasters like Bucoldianus saw their most urgent task as equipping their students with a bottomless fund of verbal resources on which they could readily draw.

Tedious Praise Antinous’ longest speech, beginning in stanza 27 and continuing through stanza 96, is a formal encomium of dancing, and its integrity as a unit of discourse is indicated by the headings birth, education, and accomplishments. Antinous’ use of the Aphthonian headings is evident in the prologue to his speech, in which he personifies Dancing in much the same way that Aphthonius personifies Wisdom. Replying to Penelope’s dispraise of dancing, he frames his speech as an encomium: But for you think our dauncing base of birth And newly borne but of a brainsick head

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I will forthwith his antique Gentry read, And for I love him, will his Herault be And blaze his armes, and draw his Petigree. (27.3–7)

In a mythography that resembles the speeches in praise of Love in Plato’s Symposium (where there is a similar controversy over the antiquity of the god), Antinous tells of Dancing’s ‘original’ in a mythical cosmogony.25 After creating the world and teaching it to dance (28.3), Love spies a ‘rude disordered rout . . . Of men and women, that most spightfullie / Did one another throng, and crowd so sore’ (29.4–6). He is not pleased, and so sets out ‘another shapeless Chaos to digest’ and ‘another world to frame’ (30.2–3). Terrifying them with his blazing appearance, he proceeds to lecture them in a speech of twenty-nine stanzas on the theme of dancing. This inset speech, a prosopopoeia of Love, begins with a regrettable pun on ‘world’ and then runs through the various parts of the cosmos. The spheres, the elements, the rivers, all things dance: By why relate I every singular? Since all the worlds great fortunes and affaires Forward and backward rapt and whirled are, According to the musick of the spheares: And Chaunce her selfe, her nimble feete upbeares On a round slipperie wheele that rowleth ay, And turnes all states with her imperious sway. (59.1–7)

A mise-en-abîme of Antinous’ speech on the same subject to Penelope, it puts nearly half of that speech in the mouth of another character. Speaking again in his own voice at the numeric centre of the speech, Antinous tells how Love then instructed the rabble rout in the various forms of dancing. Rubricated by the printed marginal note ‘How Love taught men to daunce’, this section corresponds to the second major heading of the Aphthonian encomium, ‘education’. Antinous describes several forms of dance before closing this section of the speech: ‘Thus Love taught men, and men thus learnd of Love / Sweet Musicks sound with feete to counterfaite’ (76.1–2). The remaining twenty stanzas of the speech are rubricated by the printed marginal note ‘The use and formes of Dauncing in sundry affaires of mans life.’26 A probable translation of res gestae, the third and ‘most important’ of the headings of encomium, ‘sundry affaires’ reminds the reader of the Aphthonian genre with which Antinous began. Antinous credits dancing with all known endeavours, including the musical arts, gymnastics, sex, religion, war, public solemnities, and the liberal arts, a catalogue of which concludes the speech. In his praise of dancing, Antinous thus begins

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with the standard topic of the rhetorical formula, birth and ancestry (sts. 27–61), proceeds to education (sts. 62–76), and finishes with accomplishments (sts. 77–95). Although it is framed by the Aphthonian headings, the praise of dancing in Orchestra resembles the strategies of Lorich’s praise of the University of Marburg. Davies mercifully does not run dancing through 132 places of amplification; perhaps he saw 70 times 7 lines of verse the absolute limit on his reader’s indulgence. Instead, he fills the Aphthonian headings by a single topic: division. One of his friends, John Hoskins, a schoolmate from his days at Winchester College and later a fellow Middle Templar when Davies wrote Orchestra, identified the strategy. In his unpublished work on rhetoric, Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), Hoskins cites the poem as an example of division, a figure of rhetorical amplification: ‘This only trick made up J.D.’s Poem of Dancing: all danceth, the heavens, the elements, men’s minds, commonwealths, and so by parts all danceth.’27 The ‘trick’ of division was no secret, being the first method of amplification that Erasmus lists in book 2 of De Copia. The first method is perhaps the easiest and the most resourceful; it is simply the elaboration of a brief statement.28 Curiously, most of Erasmus’ examples for this method are of the epideictic genre. His first two examples, ‘He wasted all his substance in riotous living’ and ‘He completed a thoroughly comprehensive education’, supply the basis for speeches in invective and encomium, respectively.29 Erasmus’ next example, ‘Endowed with every blessing of nature and fortune’, is none other than a summary of the bookend headings of encomium, birth and fortune.30 Consequently, there is a natural link between the genre of encomium and this ‘trick’ of invention. Davies’ use of the trick is plain enough. One need look no further than the marginal notes, which indicate the various parts of the cosmos through which Davies runs his theme, to detect the basically Erasmian strategy. The ‘topics’ of praise begin, in fact, as literal places in the cosmos (topos and locus both have a metaphorical sense in their rhetorical and logical use). It’s a crude beginning, but eventually Antinous varies his strategy and divides the world into its elements before proceeding to further categorical divisions. Running dancing through nothing less than the cosmos, he ranges far and wide until his encomium becomes a virtual encyclopaedia, a treasury on which he could borrow for the next occasion of praise.31 The speech thus reveals the inventiveness but also the limitations of topical invention. Any number of themes, including more trivial ones than dancing, could be run through the same topics and places and turn up the same amount of abundant praise.32 ‘But why relate I every singular?’ asks Antinous.33 The rhetorical ques-

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tion alludes to the strategy of copia that he is performing, but it also raises a legitimate question about the point of the strategy. Much like Erasmus uses the standard headings of encomium as a springboard to the digressions, repetitions, and general logorrhea of The Praise of Folly, Antinous (whose name suggests a kind of folly) ranges freely in the zodiac of his own wit, turning everything, including seventeen myths, into ciphers for dancing. In the last stanza, an epilogue, he rehearses some of the Aphthonian headings, perhaps in an attempt to restore some semblance of formal integrity to his copious speech: Loe this is Dauncings true nobilitie. Dauncing the child of Musick and of Love, Dauncing it selfe both love and harmony, Where all agree, and all in order move; Dauncing the Art that all Arts doe approve: The faire Character of the worlds consent, The heav’ns true figure, and th’earths ornament. (96.1–7)

The allusion to the heading of birth and ancestry reminds not only of the Aphthonian formula, it reminds how much Antinous has amplified, in good humanist fashion, his theme.

Misrule There is a madness to Antinous’ method, however, and to see Davies’ representation of humanist discourse, not just his production, we must look beyond form to consider the social context in which the speech appears. From his introduction it appears that Antinous is masking in a feast of misrule: One onely nights discourse I can report, When the great Torch-bearer of heaven was gone Downe in a maske unto the Oceans Court, To revell it with Tethis all alone; Antinous disguised and all unknowne Like to the spring in gaudie Ornament Unto the Castle of the Princesse went. (7.1–7)

The fictional circumstances of the discourse at first appear less than extraordinary: the sun goes down below the horizon to ‘revel it with Tethis’, a periphrasis for sunset. But it is emphatically ‘one onely night’ that occasions the speech, suggesting that this is an unusual sunset. Here the sun’s vacancy in the court of the sky figures as a vacancy of authority and government, suggesting that the dance is a festival occasion, where

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entertainers take extraordinary liberties of both speech and gesture. Antinous’ disguise certainly fits the occasion, and it is instructive to consider his performance in the context of early modern misrule. Revels, masks, and other entertainments were frequent occurrences at the Inns of Court, where Davies, like John Hoskins, was in residence when he wrote Orchestra. Revels at the Inns gave students ample opportunity for composing poetry, formal orations, and masques, as well as singing, playing, and dancing. In fact, the revels proved occasions that very much blended humanist and aristocratic exercitia. They were, unsurprisingly, conceived of as ‘exercises’ as well as forms of entertainment by some of their defenders, and they cannot have been entirely in jest.34 Describing the serious aspect of the festival ceremonies, Finkelpearl writes, ‘Frequently Inns writers and lawyers acted as though they lived in a separate kingdom. It is a habit of mind in which they had had training.’35 Lordless Ithaca in Orchestra may be just that – a separate kingdom that simultaneously mirrors and distorts the serious disciplines of the Inns. When we look more closely at Wilson’s and others’ instructions for copious encomium, as well as disciplines of the humanist adolescens, we will see that Antinous is breaking all the rules. First, Davies flouts the disciplines of sex and sexuality in humanist encomium. Humanists made an unabashedly chauvinist appropriation of the rhetorical exercise. Certain of the Aphthonian headings of invention, such as ‘fatherland’ (patria) and ‘fathers’ (patres), already framed the exercise in gendered terms, but humanists would make of encomium an exclusive training ground for men. Among the 132 topics of amplification, Bucoldianus does not apply one to the praise of women, and he refers to no woman as an object of praise in his twelve pages on encomium. Likewise, in his biographical arrangement of encomium into life stages, Sarcerius identifies boyhood, adolescence, and adulthood (translated by Wilson as ‘the mannes state’) as headings of praise. The use of the ages of man to organise the genre had the effect of excluding the praise of women, and made even the analogous praise of personifications more complicated. In his Art of Rhetoric, written when Edward VI was on the throne, Thomas Wilson was explicitly chauvinist in his instructions for encomium. In his table of topics, which is comprehensive in other respects, Wilson makes ‘whether the person be a man, or a woman’ the only topic under the heading of birth and infancy.36 When he comes to unfold this topic, he writes, ‘To be born a manchild declares a courage, gravity, and constancy. To be born a woman declares weakness of spirit, neshness (frailty) of body, and fickleness of mind.’37 This was not altered in the second edition of the Art of Rhetoric, published in 1560, when Elizabeth I was monarch.

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In Lorich’s Progymnasmata, the encomium of the University of Marburg describes a strictly homogeneous milieu. The audience, repeatedly addressed throughout the declamation, is composed of men and young men (viri et iuventus). The founders of the school are likewise men, and the first several pages of the declamation are in praise of the Philip I of Hesse. The topography and weather are prime for rearing manly men. Even the city where the school finds its home styles itself after the fashion of a man: ‘But indeed like the noblest of queens, the city of Marburg . . . bears herself so skillfully that she nearly seems to approach the figure of a man and the shadow of manliness (simulachrum virtutis).’38 Later sections praise the Spartan discipline of the students and the moderate diet of their masters, who are favourably compared with Sybarites (one of several such comparisons made to amplify the speech). In a revealing digression of the encomium of the University of Marburg, the speaker responds to an objection concerning those young men who leave the school for ‘some outlandish company’ (ad sodalitium nescio quod exoticum): To this I respond with Agesilaus, who had an apt response to the question, why did the followers of other sects defect to the Epicureans, while no Epicurean defected to other sects? He said, because eunuchs (Galli) are made of men, not men of eunuchs. By eunuchs he meant those slaves of pleasure who despise discipline and virtue. Likewise in our school the men who remain are those who do not mind labouring and sweating for the love of discipline and virtue. Indeed, they would not mind being trained more harshly. But the dropouts are real eunuchs. Like the suitors of Penelope, or the idlers of Alcinous, they are simply more inclined to pleasure than to labour. They freely prostitute themselves to their stomach, and throwing off the yoke of good disciplines, they serve their bellies. They will come to no good. So what if they go abroad? They get a change of scenery, but keep the same character.39

Once again, we see Hercules at the crossroads: the choice between discipline and dissolution facing every student in the humanist grammar school. As for the virtuous young men of the University of Marburg, they derive pleasure from discipline, exercise, and difficulty. As Lorich says earlier, in praise of their diligence, ‘the youth (adolescentes) are so enamored of their teachers that they undertake voluntarily whatever duties they prescribe. There is never a need to spur them on; indeed, as Socrates said of Theopompus, there is more need to apply the reins.’40 Throughout the encomium, the academy stands as an exemplary exception to the general lassitude of the day, and leads the universities for excellence in discipline (and the disciplines – of law, medicine, and theology).

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There is no small irony in the fact that Davies makes Antinous, the arch-suitor of Penelope, his mouthpiece for an encomium of dancing (which happens to be the main activity of the Phaeacians, those ‘idlers of Alcinous’ in Homer’s The Odyssey). In a direct challenge to the Spartan scene that Lorich praises in the University of Marburg, Antinous describes in the central section of his encomium an educational scene that is emphatically androgynous. Not only is dancing the main exercise of Love’s academy; dancing puts the sexuality of Love’s men in doubt. This is evident in the dances that Love teaches. Like George Puttenham had personified the figures of rhetoric in his Art of English Poetry, Davies personifies the ‘formes of dauncing’.41 And although ‘Galliards’, ‘Currantoes’, and ‘Lavoltaes’ have not been thoroughly naturalised (they are Englished as a ‘gallant daunce’, ‘currant travases’, and ‘a lofty jumping, or a leaping round’), they are clearly imagined as dancers, complete with ‘feet’ (a pun on the metres of dance), ‘spirit’, and gendered pronouns. The ‘gallant daunce’ is a manly ‘she’, the ‘currant travase’ is a light-footed ‘he’, and the ‘lavoltaes’ are an ambiguous pair, exemplified on the one hand by the twin brothers Castor and Pollux, on the other by the lovers Mars and Venus. The personifications thus destabilise sexual roles in progression from two androgynous forms to the lavoltas, a paired dance that may be either homogeneous or heterogeneous.42 After the representative, prototypical list of three, Antinous alludes to the invention of innumerable ‘various formes’, which follow almost as if a fecund effect of the lavoltas: These various formes of dauncing, Love did frame, And beside these, a hundred millions moe, And as he did invent, he taught the same With goodly jesture, and with comly show, Now keeping state, now humbly honoring low. And ever for the persons and the place He taught most fit, and best according grace. (73.1–7)

Davies outdoes Puttenham’s personifications by incarnating the forms of dancing. The dances go forth from Love’s academy not as disembodied names but as shapely students, and they are, like their cousins, Puttenham’s figures of rhetoric, remarkably decorous, knowing just the right time and place for cutting a rug.43 Davies’ carnal imagination of dancing is even more pronounced in the following section, the section of res gestae, where the accomplishments of exemplary dancers are feats of sexual transformation. Beginning with Proteus, the paradigm of change, Antinous proceeds to rationalise the myths of Caeneus and Tiresias, two men who once became women. The

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myths, he explains, sprang from dances where these men took both the man’s and woman’s parts. In this context, a metamorphosis of Venus continues the sexual transgressions of dance: So to a fish Venus herselfe did change, And swimming through the soft and yeelding wave, With gentle motions did so smoothly range As none might see where she the water drave: But this plaine truth that falsed fable gave That she did daunce with slyding easines, Plyant and quick in wandring passages. (84.1–7)

Given that the fish was a common metaphor for the penis, and given the preceding mythographies of sexual transformation, we cannot avoid the ‘plaine truth’ of Antinous’ allegory, the most erotic of his speeches (probably delivered in the all-male setting of the Inns of Court with a lewd panoply of gestures). Recalling that in the context of the encomium he is enumerating the res gestae of dancing, nor can we avoid Antinous’ audacious parody of humanist disciplines. True, he will go on to attribute seemlier accomplishments to dancing, including religion, government, and the liberal arts, but these are thoroughly coloured by his earlier insinuations. It would be no exaggeration to call this parody an assault.44

Poetic Rule The antinomian sexuality of Antinous’ speech is only the most obvious – and perhaps most aggressive – way in which he parodies humanist disciplines. But there are other signs of the derring-do of the Inns revels, ‘the bravado of young men trying to pass as devil-may-care rakes’.45 Another discipline that he flouts is illustrated by Thomas Wilson’s prologue to his encomium of the Brandon brothers, the 2nd and 3rd dukes of Suffolk, in the first book of his Art of Rhetoric. Starting with a dichotomy between truthful and fabulous encomia, Wilson fulminates against the mock encomiasts: Better or more wisely can none do than they which never bestow praise but upon those that best deserve praise, rather minding discreetly what they ought to do than vainly devising what they best can do, seeking rather to praise men such as are found worthy than curiously finding means to praise matters such as never were in any. For they which speak otherwise than truth is mind not the commendation of the person but the setting forth of their own learning. As Gorgias in Plato praising unrighteousness, Favorinus the philosopher extolling the fever quartan thought not to speak as the cause required

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but would so much say as their wit would give, not weighing the state of the cause but minding the vaunt of their brain, looking how much could be said, not passing how little should be said.46

For Wilson, the truth of the encomium is to be looked for not just in what ‘is’ but also in ‘the cause’ and ‘the state of the cause’, the rhetorical issues considered above, in Chapter 5, that dictate ‘how little should be said’, a clear constraint upon what can be said, the unlimited, undisciplined domain of copia. Status theory, which was to rhetoric what judgement was to logic, functions as a check on invention, limiting the speaker to a genre, a select number of questions, and even a predetermined series of topics for invention and commonplaces for amplification. It is the major discipline to which copia was supposed to be submitted in the scene of rhetoric. According to Wilson, the mock encomiasts are guilty not so much for taking the wrong side on a matter, as for flouting the disciplinary side of rhetoric, exploiting the arts of invention and neglecting those of judgement.47 Antinous’ praise of dancing illustrates almost all of the excesses of mock encomium against which Wilson inveighs. As we have seen, his invention leaps over judgement into style and performance. Instead of following the rules of decorum urged by Erasmus, Bucoldianus, and Wilson, Antinous exploits what he can say on his theme, not what ought to be said. Then, where Wilson enjoins truth as the standard for narration in encomium, Antinous revels in fictions, beginning with the mythopoeia of Love’s invention of Dancing and digressing, at the end, with no fewer than seventeen poetic fables of the gods. Appearing in the section of res gestae, the ‘most important’ section of the encomium according to Aphthonius, these fables are a provocation of the humanist educator.48 They may be seen as attempts to reclaim rudimentary, undisciplined kinds of speech for rhetorical exercise. Davies squanders the resources of his education not ‘to praise men such as are found worthy’ but rather to ‘set forth’ his own learning. In the dedicatory sonnet to his friend Richard Martin, another Middle Templar, Davies describes the poem as ‘this dauncing Poeme . . . This suddaine, rash, halfe-capreol of my wit’ (Poems, 89). He equates his rhetorical skill with the courtly skill he is praising – the two are interchangeable, since rhetorical amplification is here practised as a performance, not a logical kind of analysis. Furthermore, the performance of rhetoric overshadows the argumentative content of the poem. If ‘dancing’ is the theme of the poem, it is only provisionally so; it is more transparently a figure for Antinous’ performance of persuasion (which may have been accompanied by an actual dance or pantomime if performed at the Middle Temple).

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With these disciplines of truth in mind, I wish to look again at the encomium and trace Davies’ frequent evocations of order, discipline, and rule to show that Orchestra has a serious critique to make of humanist rhetoric as an epistemological discipline. By juxtaposing two types of rule, one authoritarian and artificial and the other egalitarian and natural, Davies reclaims a poetic kind of truth over and against the rhetorical construction of truth. Recall that Love, when he first appears on the chaotic earth, introduces order in the figure of a circle: ‘He cuts the troups, that all a sunder fling, / And ere they wist, he casts them in a ring’ (Orch. 30.7). By describing the ‘rude disordered rout . . . of men and women’ as ‘troups’, Davies hints that they are chaotic not because of a lack of order but because of a false, military order. The circle or ‘ring’ represents a new regime, an alternative to the hierarchical organisation of society into classes or ‘troups’ (like the grammar school). Love’s order is based on the natural order, which appears again later as an antinomy of the social order: ‘Thus when at first Love had them marshalled / As earst he did the shapelesse masse of things, / He taught them rounds and winding Heyes to tread, / And about trees to cast themselves in rings’ (64.1–4). A possible allusion to the Maypole in the last line characterises Love’s rule as the suspension of conventional rules, like that observed during seasonal festival. Likewise, Love’s regime is Saturnalian, ‘long time before high thundering Jove / Was lifted up to heav’ns imperiall seate’ (76.3–4). The next stanza enumerates panegyric occasions, which furthermore characterise the holiday or festival ‘rule’ of Love and his minion dancing. Together they govern all things that occur in cycles: seasons, years, and lives. In this light, when we review the catalog of res gestae, we can see it not only as the parody of humanist discipline that it is, but also as an expression of dancing’s alternative discipline, which governs cyclical events and affairs. Unlike res gestae in humanist encomiums, which represent the ‘fruit’ of a student’s hard labour in the grammar school and proceed along a linear chronology, the affairs of dancing are oriented exclusively within cyclical frames of reference: religion, with its sacred year; war, marching forth and returning in parade; the human life, with its weddings and funerals. Even government is described for its solemnities, ‘Most comly order in their Sessions’, the annual assemblies or courts, a possible reference to the fasti by which the Roman calendar was arranged (91.4). From dancing’s praise emerges a praise of true order, but an order that opposes the arbitrary regimentation of life into ranks, files, and classes. Antinous’ speech ends with a review of the liberal arts, which are, like everything else in his cosmos, cast as students of the ‘new’ Art of

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dancing. It is in this review that the agon between a poetical and rhetorical rule is finally decided, for although Antinous praises rhetoric, he makes an interesting spin on its position within the disciplines. Drawing on some classical topoi, Davies fashions rhetoric not as the governor or discipliner of poetry, but rather as the chaotic, disordered rout that must be disciplined by poetry: For Rhetorick clothing speech in rich aray In looser numbers teacheth her to range, With twentie tropes, and turnings every way, And various figures, and licentious change: But Poetry with rule and order strange So curiously doth move each single pace, As all is mard if she one foote misplace. (93.1–7)

It is a perfect reversal of the narrative I have been telling in this book. Instead of copious poetry being submitted to the discipline of rhetoric, here rhetoric is the wanton discourse that needs order and discipline. Here rhetoric is the rhetoric of the elementa, the rude heterogeneous rout of late boyhood, while poetry (that is, versification) sits in the seat of adolescentia, the age of government, rule, exercise, and discipline. This is Davies’ ‘separate kingdom’, a world turned upside down, where the order of things is temporarily suspended for a feast of misrule. In Orchestra, Davies takes up the epideictic genre of oratory and makes it an occasion to write a mythographic cosmogony. Birth and education, the first two parts of epideictic, are invaded by an etiological myth, the invention of dancing by Love, and the invention of everything else by dancing. Accomplishments, the most important section of encomium, is overrun by a series of allegorised retellings of myth. In this way, poetic narration and its auxiliary exercises usurp the sterile places of encomium. Orchestra is a party-crasher in the scene of rhetoric, putting new wine in old sacks, filling the empty ‘seats of argument’ with ingenious myths and allegories. The poem’s posture with respect to the scene of rhetoric anticipates a later epyllion (not considered here), Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, which forestalls the adolescent’s entry into the scene of rhetoric with an endless series of digressive etiologies and allegories, the last rites of Hermaphroditus’ boyhood. Antinous’ performance of encomium shows him in a similarly transitional state. Although he is clearly an adolescent – in ‘the stripling age or spring tide’ – he still performs in a manner worthy of a boy, and his ingenious use of mythology may be read as an affront to the scene of rhetoric, an act of resistance to its formal disciplines. Orchestra is a mock encomium, and like all exercises in the genre, it

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is an excuse to show off the author’s brilliance by taking up a hopeless case.49 But for Davies, unlike Phavorinus, Lucian, or Erasmus, other famous encomiasts of the trivial, the hopeless case that he takes up is not only the object of praise but also the manner of praising. Of course, it takes some wit to interpret the cosmos and all its parts as a dance, but the real challenge of Orchestra was to write an Inns of Court entertainment using the strict form and discipline of a humanist rhetorical exercise. Essentially, Davies had to take Lutheran schoolmasters with names like Sarcerius Erasmus, Gerardus Bucoldianus, and Reinhardus Lorichius, and make them dance. The solution he found was sublime – he dressed them in drag, putting their discourses in the mouth of Antinous, disguised ‘like to the spring in gaudie Ornament’ (Orch. 7.6). It was a superb invention. To represent a foppish adolescent channelling the discourses of the school was a wickedly funny thumb in the eye of the humanist schoolmaster.

Notes 1. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), 674. See also Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago, 1954), 149–51. 2. Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, sig. Q7r. 3. Under the heading ‘qualities of mind’, which follows the heading ‘education’, the ‘Praise of Demosthenes’ continues, ‘In the first season [of manhood] he gave a brilliant example of his intellect. His marvelous eloquence saved the commonwealth.’ Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, sig. Q7v. 4. ‘Studia et cognitio vitae agunt de exercitiis, quibus mens, atque adeo totum corpus humanum exercitari potest, ut sunt artes liberales, et quae eis cognatae sunt, veluti gladiatoria, testudinaria, etc. Et vocantur hic studia ea omnia, ad quae natura quis propensus est. Conditio vitae magis respicit ad externa illa et manuaria artificia seu exercitia.’ Sarcerius, Rhetorica, sig. a5v. 5. The Art of Rhetoric, 56. 6. Caspari gives some lively illustrations of the conflict in Humanism and the Social Order, 136–8. Within a few generations in the sixteenth century, the aristocracy embraced humanist learning, but for practical ends and always as part of a broader training in culture. See Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 678–80, 694–6. 7. In his model encomium of Henry Brandon, 2nd duke of Suffolk (1535–51) and his younger brother Charles, 3rd duke of Suffolk (1537/8–1551), Wilson further juxtaposes the two worlds. The elder brother is a paragon of both arts, the courtly arts of riding and tilting as well as the liberal arts of speaking. The younger, more given to studies, ‘[kept] his book among the Cambridge men’ (58).

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8. Orchestra, entered into the Stationers’ Register in June 1594, exists in three versions: (1) The earliest version was copied by Leweston Fitzjames of the Middle Temple in 1595. This is the shortest of the versions, but the most complete from a thematic and narrative point of view. It includes, with only minor variants, stanzas 1–108 and 127–31 of the first edition (the basis of the modern text). The Leweston Fitzjames commonplace book is now in the Bodleian (MS Add. 97). (2) The first edition, entitled Orchestra Or a Poeme of Dauncing (London, 1596), includes an interpolation of eighteen stanzas (sts. 109–26), which appears to be an attempt to turn an Inns of Court revels entertainment into a panegyric for Elizabeth I. (3) Davies edited Orchestra for a second edition in the 1622 volume entitled Nosce Teipsum, cancelling stanzas 127–31 and replacing them with new stanzas. See commentary by Robert Krueger and Ruby Nemser in The Poems of John Davies, Robert Krueger, ed. (Oxford, 1975), 357–61. P. J. Finkelpearl agrees with Krueger and Nemser’s assessment that the manuscript version is the most satisfactory, and that stanzas 109–26 represent an interpolation. Review of The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger, The Modern Language Review 73 (1978): 391–6. 9. Orchestra, in Krueger’s edition of The Poems of John Davies, stanza 5, line 4. All references to Orchestra are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 10. I am not the first to recognize in Orchestra a contribution to the epyllion vogue of the 1590s. Drawing attention to the subtitle of the 1622 edition, ‘A Dialogue betweene Penelope and one of her Wooers’, G. A. Wilkes describes it as ‘allied to the Elizabethan school of mythological and amatory verse.’ Wilkes also makes an important rejoinder to E. M. W. Tillyard’s earnest reading of Orchestra. ‘The Poetry of Sir John Davies’, Huntington Library Quarterly 25 (1962): 283–98. 11. Davies exploits throughout the poem an analogy between oratory and dancing. 12. Philip. J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 61. 13. For the historical development of the topics of encomium, see Pernot, La rhétorique de l’éloge, 1:134–78. For their use in the Renaissance, see O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (1962, repr. Westport, CT, 1973), 29–32. 14. T. W. Baldwin, ‘Shakspere’s Aphthonian Man’, Modern Language Notes 65 (1950): 111–12. 15. Ibid., 112. 16. His use of topical invention in John of Gaunt’s praise of England in Richard II, a more felicitous speech, is an exception. See William C. McAvoy, ‘Form in Richard II, II. i. 40–66’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 54 (1955): 355–61. 17. The Orator’s Education, 2.4.20. This passage (‘This is useful . . . is acquired’) is quoted in a marginal note in Progymnasmata (Frankfurt, 1578), sig. P1v. It is one of many citations of Quintilian in the notes. 18. In Renaissance Argument, Mack provides a compelling account of a peculiarly ‘humanist’ logic. In Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

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York, 1961), Wilbur Samuel Howell does not distinguish ‘scholastic’ and ‘humanist’ in his treatment of English logic, which changes directly from scholastic to Ramist. Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958, repr. New York, 1974), describes an intermediate between scholasticism and Ramism in ‘Agricolan logic’. See also Terrence Heath, ‘Logical Grammar, Grammatical Logic, and Humanism in Three German Universities’, Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1971): 9–64; Lisa Jardine, ‘The Place of Dialectic Teaching in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge’, Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): 31–62. De Inventione et Amplificatione Oratoria: seu Usu Locorum Libri Tres (Cologne, 1535). Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, sigs. P4r–Q1v, T1v–T8v. These excerpts represent about a quarter of book 2, on the demonstrative genre. Bucoldianus appears to have left a fourth book, on the forensic genre, unfinished. These all arise ‘from the place of adjuncts alone.’ De Inventione et Amplificatione Oratoria, sig. d6r. See also Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, §245. Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, sig. Q1r. In a study of the philosophical and rhetorical structures on which Davies borrows for his praise of dancing, Sarah Thesiger notes Davies’ use in this passage of the Lucianic dialogue The Dance. ‘The Orchestra of Sir John Davies and the Image of the Dance’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 277–304, esp. 289–90. The Poems of Sir John Davies, 111. Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton, 1935), 23. ‘We may include here the kind of example where some whole made up of subordinate parts rather than a group of disparate items is separated out into its parts.’ CWE 24.574. Ibid., 24.572. Ibid., 24.573. The Erasmian strategy is preserved also within the printed text, where italicised lines indicate sententiae and invite the reader to discover, mark, and copy commonplaces. These include ‘Time the measure of all moving is’ (Orch. 23.2); ‘For of Loves Maze it is the curious plot, / And of mans fellowship the true-love knot’ (Orch. 116.6–7). Other italics appear to indicate rhetorical figures. See, for instance, circumlocution in ‘this great faire wight’ (the world, Orch. 28. 1); etymology (and pun) in ‘Behold the World how it is whirled round, / And for it is so whirl’d, is named so’ (Orch. 34.1–2); enumeration in ‘The motions seaven that are in nature found, Upward, and downward, forth, and back againe, / To this side, and to that, and turning round’ (Orch. 62.2–4). Thesiger describes parallels with contemporary encomia of love and music. ‘The Image of the Dance’, 288–95. On the example ‘He completed a thoroughly comprehensive education’, Erasmus writes, ‘You can unfold this general statement if you go through each discipline (singulas disciplinas) and individually (singillatim) through every kind of learning.’ ASD I-6, 198. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple, 33. See also pp. 52–3:

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35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

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Untutored Lines ‘For those students who availed themselves of the opportunity, such exercises provided unparalleled training for the well-rounded gentleman and would-be courtier as well as the prospective lawyer.’ Ibid., 41. Quintilian had made ‘sex’ one point of amplification – i.e., favourably comparing manhood with womanhood – under the heading of ‘birth’. The Art of Rhetoric, 56. This is a paraphrase of the paternalistic topic described by Sarcerius: ‘Sex may be used to extoll the gravity and constancy of men, and to excuse women for their frailty and inconstancy.’ Rhetorica, sig. a5v. Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, sig. R7r. Ibid., sigs. S7v–S8r, my emphasis. Ibid., sig. S3r. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, 2007), book 3. Cf. Thesiger, who reads these dances as commonplaces of order. ‘The Image of the Dance’, 297–8. On the dance as an image of decorum and prudence, see ibid. 281–5. Compare also Lucian’s enumeration of the modes of flute-playing, quoted and translated by Erasmus in De Copia as an example of the first method of amplifying matter. CWE 24.574. For the sexual joking at the Inns revels, see Finkelpearl, 42–3, 56. Ibid., 56. Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, 57. In his ‘Fustian Answer to a Tufftaffata Speech’, delivered at the Prince d’Amour Revels, Hoskins derides undisciplined rhetoric. ‘For you are able in Troops of Tropes, and Centuries of Sentences to muster your meaning: Nay, you have such Wood-piles of words, that unto you Cooper is but a Carpenter, and Rider himself deserves not a Reader.’ Directions for Speech and Style, 111. Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 108. The paradoxical encomium may be seen not as a rupture but as an extension of the inherent qualities of epideictic rhetoric. ‘Because the demonstrative (or epideictic) oration makes no such demands on its audience [to make a decision, as with a forensic and deliberative oration], it is considered by Aristotle, and later by Cicero, as a display piece designed mainly to please or to entertain.’ James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 40.

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Chapter 7

Thesis: Controlling Speech in Cephalus and Procris

The tragedy of Cephalus and Procris, narrated in book 7 of the Metamorphoses, was prime real estate during the vogue of the English epyllion.1 The story begins with a beautiful young man, Cephalus, resisting the sexual advances of the goddess Aurora, for he is married and has vowed mutual chastity with his wife Procris. Smarting from his obstinate refusal, Aurora causes Cephalus to mistrust his wife’s chastity. At her suggestion, he tests Procris by disguising himself and seducing her. Only after bribing her with a small fortune does he finally succeed; he berates his wife for her inconstancy. Ashamed, Procris flees to the woods and ‘plies Diana’s trade’.2 Cephalus immediately rues his foolish jealousy and seeks her out; he repents, and they are reconciled. But Procris in turn catches wind of Cephalus’ alleged inconstancy with a nymph in the woods named Aura (aura, ‘breeze’). So she hides in some bushes, hoping to catch him with his mistress while he is resting from the hunt. But she rustles some branches, and Cephalus, thinking that an animal lurks in the bushes, unwittingly kills her with a charmed spear. The denouement has a particular irony in that the spear was a gift of Procris herself – the very gift, in fact, by which she reconciled herself to her husband. Little more than a month after Venus and Adonis was printed, a poet staked his claim. On 22 October 1593, a book entitled ‘Procris and Cephalus’ was entered in the Stationers Register, and in 1595, Thomas Edwards’ Cephalus and Procris was printed by John Wolfe along with Narcissus, the only other known work by the otherwise unknown poet.3 In 1595, the poems were almost certainly marketed to capitalise on the popularity of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Although Shakespeare’s narrative poems had not been printed together in a single volume, John Wolfe’s edition draws on their implied companionship. The title page gives the titles of both Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus, separated by a decorative border and followed by the motto ‘Dawn is poetry’s

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friend’ (Aurora musæ amica). The edition thus mimics the titles, epigraph, format (quarto), and even some of the ornamentation of Richard Field’s 1593 and 1594 editions of Shakespeare’s poems. The edition includes several inverted commas to mark sententiae or noteworthy passages, a feature found in Field’s edition of Lucrece, and it concludes both poems with the word ‘finis’. As in early editions of Shakespeare’s poems, the name of the poet does not appear on the title page of Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus, but rather at the end of a verse dedication and again at the end of a prefatory letter addressed ‘To the Honorable Gentlemen and true favourites of Poetrie’. In the verses ‘To the Right worshipfull Master Thomas Argall Esquire’, Edwards refers to ‘these cloudy lines’, a phrase that finds a parallel in Shakespeare’s apologetic ‘my unpolished lines’ (Venus and Adonis) and ‘my untutored lines’ (Lucrece).4 In the letter he refers to ‘these twoo imperfect Poemes’, which testifies to his awareness of their joint publication and may suggest a complementary relationship, each poem being imperfect without the other. Alternatively, the description may allude to the unfinished (and yet unpublished) state of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, or to Shakespeare’s description of Lucrece as ‘this pamphlet without beginning’. These things, not to mention numerous allusions to Venus and Adonis and parallels with both of Shakespeare’s poems, give good evidence that they were written in dialogue with each other.5 No one who had been paying attention to the literary scene in London in the previous two years could have missed the analogy. There is much to suggest, however, that the two poems were transposed in their publication. For although the present order supplies an analogy with the titles and, in the case of Lucrece and Narcissus, the verse forms of Shakespeare’s epyllia, the present order transposes the two sets of poems in subject matter, motif, and style, forming a chiasm with Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. True, the complaint mode of Narcissus forms an analogy with the second half of Lucrece, but a clearer analogy is found in the rape scene and subsequent night-time invectives of the victim in the second half of Cephalus and Procris. Procris’ song of experience, sung ‘as though she had / Bene ravisht’, is closer to Lucrece’s declamations than is Narcissus’ song of innocence (Cephalus and Procris 599–600). Likewise the reluctant boy motif of Venus and Adonis finds an obvious parallel not in the violent jealousy of Cephalus but in Narcissus’ troubled self-wooing. Edwards makes numerous allusions to Adonis and Leander in Narcissus; these boys go unmentioned in Cephalus and Procris. Indeed, in the L’Envoi to Narcissus, Edwards specifically names Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis among the models that he is emulating.6 In the proem, finally, he seems to allude to a graver labour.7

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The clearest evidence of a transposition of the poems, however, is in the discourses of boyhood and adolescence that mark Narcissus and Cephalus and Procris. (The latter poem’s focus on the young man is evident on the title page, where ‘Cephalus’ appears in the same font as ‘Narcissus’ – a larger font than ‘Procris’. The smaller printing of ‘Procris’ undoubtedly mimics the similar reduction of ‘Venus’ in Field’s edition of Venus and Adonis.) In one respect, these discourses are in plain view. Narcissus is repeatedly referred to as a ‘boy’, Cephalus as a ‘man’.8 But there are a number of ways in which Edwards fills out these mere names, and one of his most important sources is the humanist grammar school. Focusing on Cephalus and Procris in this chapter, I argue that the first exercises of rhetoric in the upper forms are focal points of Cephalus’ adolescence. On the model of Marlowe’s Neptune and Shakespeare’s Venus, Aurora appears in the role of a master, initiating the youth into the disciplines of adolescence, which centre on an exercise called thesis, a kind of cross-examination between master and student that was the penultimate exercise of the progymnasmata. This scene is erotically charged, as Aurora simultaneously tests and tempts Cephalus, and it leads up to, indeed provokes, the pivotal scene in which Cephalus seduces his betrothed, Procris, in the disguise of a merchant. Drawing on the complaint mode, Edwards casts this scene and its aftermath (the second half of the poem) as the rape and complaint of a ravished woman. Aurora’s instruction is thus a grim success; more than any other poet considered in this study, Edwards represents a causal relationship between the discipline of the grammar schools and the physical violence of the adolescent male. The violence of Cephalus is the focal point of a number of discourses of correction that emerge from a consideration of Edwards’ sources and his use of those sources. The first that I will discuss is his choice of a non-Ovidian version of the Cephalus and Procris myth for the plot of the poem. Making only occasional use of the better-known accounts of the legend in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 7 and Ars amatoria 3, Edwards keeps very close to the outline of the story given by the Virgilian commentator Servius in a gloss on book 6 of the Aeneid.9 Like Shakespeare based Venus and Adonis on a school version of the myth, filling it out with an Ovidian paraphrase (see above, Chapter 3), so Edwards sought out a more obscure, textbook version of the Cephalus and Procris myth. Appearing in a commentary, it is written with an explicitly didactic aim, and in an epic context, it represents a higher level of pedagogy – in the English grammar school, the Aeneid was read in the upper forms.10 Servius’ version is also significant for what it omits. Glossing the Cephalus and Procris myth for a didactic occasion, Servius appears to

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suppress a ‘shameful’ episode, related by the mythographer Hyginus and alluded to by Ovid, in which the young man consents to be sodomised as a ‘boy’ by a ‘young man’ – actually his wife Procris in disguise.11 Servius not only omits the episode but removes its traces from his account. The well-known episode similarly informs Edwards’ telling of the history of Cephalus and Procris. Numerous passages in the poem, including the central scene in which Cephalus effectively rapes Procris, may be seen as prophylaxes against or corrections of the transitional state of late boyhood, with its inversions and heteronomies. Reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Adonis in the first half of the poem, Cephalus is initiated by Aurora into a violent adolescence modelled in part on Marlowe’s Leander, who violently, ‘greedily’ consummates his betrothal to Hero at the end of Hero and Leander. From there, Cephalus and Procris proceeds as an effective continuation of Marlowe’s unfinished poem. Unlike Chapman, who would later introduce the allegorical figures of order and remorse to correct Hero and Leander, Edwards introduces an elven bawd, Lamie, to teach Procris how to gloze her deed, alternately blaming and excusing Cephalus. Furthermore, whereas Chapman would rectify Leander’s violence by reintegrating him into a heterogeneous milieu through the liturgy of marriage, Edwards separates the lovers and places them in strictly gendered milieus, most evidently in the maenadic raving of Procris.

‘Methinks the Man Amendeth the Matter Much’ The reader expecting from its title page to find in Cephalus and Procris an Ovidian mythological poem on the model of Venus and Adonis would be disappointed. To be sure, there are the obligatory allusions, imitations, and thefts, but only after a lengthy prologue of learnedly obscure – nearly illegible – verse. Edwards has adopted the heroic couplets of Marlowe’s weightier Hero and Leander instead of the sixains of Venus and Adonis. Stylistically, the couplets of Cephalus and Procris are even more reminiscent of Chapman’s bombastic debut, Shadow of Night (1594). Where Field’s edition of Venus and Adonis made an elegant and generous use of negative space in the presentation of the poem, the margins of Cephalus and Procris are cluttered with explanatory notes of the poem’s rhetoric and learning. These too are reminiscent of Chapman’s, not Shakespeare’s, debut.12 Labouring for obscurity, Edwards very nearly found oblivion. A single complete copy of Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus survives, and it is the only known edition – indeed, the only known trace of the poet.13

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We have seen Heywood emulate and censor the wanton first lines of Venus and Adonis in Oenone and Paris, where he exchanges the abstract chronography of Shakespeare’s poem for a zodiacal description of time. Edwards’ Cephalus and Procris also begins with a chronography, albeit a disorienting one, shrouded in mythography and allusiveness. In the opening lines, Cynthia, goddess of the moon, is in a melancholy mood for her lover Endymion and so leaves her circuit in the sky to wander among ‘washing waves, rebellious clouds’ (12). Apollo, chafed by his sister’s rebellion, and not to be out-teenaged, began ‘to post foorth . . . another Phaeton’ (21), that is, to play the adolescent as well as Cynthia. Aurora, who plays a major role in the ensuing tragedy, wakes early and eventually intercedes with her father Apollo on behalf of her forlorn aunt. Unmoved, the father, who has himself been playing the brat, compares his daughter to a spoiled child: Like to the uncorrected headstrong childe, That never felt his parentes strokes but milde, Growne up to ryper yeares, disdaines a checke: (For nature overgon comes to defect.) (41–3)

This rebuke sends the peeved Aurora to earth ‘Lawlesse, as twere sans thought or any dread, / Like to banditos mong’st the mountaine heard’ (61–2). In sum, the heavens are in disarray at the beginning of Cephalus and Procris, thanks largely to teenage acts of disobedience. It is a strange chronography, but one that appropriately sets the stage for the theme of the poem: the coming of age of Cephalus. Rebellion and discipline are revealingly the terms in which Edwards frames the ensuing tragedy of the ‘man’ Cephalus. A day in the life of the dysfunctional Titans, complete with allusions to the violence with which cosmic rebellion is corrected, is a fitting prelude to the violent discipline that solemnises the adolescent’s entrance into maturity. The rites of integration, which complete the circuit of the rites de passage, are ‘rites of redress’, correcting the liberty that the student has momentarily enjoyed in the transition from grammar to rhetoric, from the lower forms to the upper forms, and from boyhood to adolescence. Edwards begins Cephalus and Procris by alluding to conditions of anarchy that accompany the rites of transition in a liminal space uncontrolled by social group, a space undefined by disciplines, exercises, and nomoi. But these conditions of anarchy and licence are, of course, followed by the humiliation of entry into a new social status. Though he begins by evoking rebellion and cosmic anarchy, Edwards appears to be more interested in Cephalus and Procris in the ritual redress that follows and, in a sense, occasions the very liberties that it corrects. Like Shakespeare,

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who followed the banquet of Venus and Adonis with the violence of Lucrece, he is not content to inhabit the green world of late boyhood or merely eulogise it. Cephalus and Procris is his Lucrece, his song of experience. After setting the stage with this prologue, which is not found in his sources, Edwards follows closely the events reported in Servius’ commentary on Aeneid 6.445. The following is my translation of the Latin text that appeared in numerous early editions of Virgil: ‘Procrinque.’ The daughter of Iphicles, she was the wife of Cephalus. He was an avid hunter and was accustomed to go to a particular spot to rest from the sport. There he would call for Aurora to come to his refreshment. Because he did this frequently, he caused Aurora to love him. She gave him the swiftest of hounds, named Laelaps, and two spears that never missed their mark, and asked for his embrace. He replied that he had made a vow of mutual chastity with his wife. On hearing that, Aurora replied, ‘Change yourself into a merchant so that you can test your wife’s chastity.’ He did so, and went to Procris, gave her gifts, had intercourse, and then confessed that he was her husband. She was ruing this when she heard from some backwoodsman that he loved Aurora, whom he frequently called for. She takes to the woods and hides in the bushes, with an animal skin hoping to surprise her husband. When she heard him call on Aurora in his ordinary way, Procris tried to emerge and rustled the bushes. In hopes of a quarry, Cephalus throws the unwavering spear and unwittingly kills his wife.14

Edwards draws on Ovid’s two accounts of the tale (in the Metamorphoses and the Ars amatoria) to verbally embellish this spare account, but he does not depart significantly from the narrative events of Servius’ gloss, introducing only two lengthy ‘parentheses’ or narrator’s asides and one digressive episode with the elven bawd Lamie. Notably, it is Servius’ version that accounts for two anomalies of Edwards’ version: Aurora’s instruction of Cephalus to disguise himself as a merchant and the omission of the Aura episode. First, with the exception of Servius’ commentary, all versions of the legend record Procris’ misunderstanding of the word ‘aura’ (a homonym, both ‘air’ and the name of a nymph). In numerous editions of Virgil’s works, however, Servius’ gloss on ‘Procrinque’ includes the variant reading ‘aurora’ for ‘aura’, resulting in the simpler version of the tale that Edwards tells. Second, more straightforwardly, Servius is the only mythographer to specify that Aurora instructs Cephalus to disguise himself as a merchant to test his wife’s chastity, and Servius is explicit about the adulterous act.15 It is not insignificant that Servius’ version of the myth is occasioned by Virgil’s ‘field of weepers’, the camp where Dido, Phaedra, and other

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forlorn women make their eternal complaints. The lemma for the gloss is ‘Procrinque’, which occurs in a catalogue of female names: Here secret hills hide those ravaged by fierce love, and myrtle shrouds the wood. Even in death their care doesn’t sleep. Among them he sees Phaedra and Procris and Eriphyle, showing the wounds of her cruel son, and Evadne and Pasiphae. Companion to these is Laodamia, once a beautiful young man, now a woman, then Caeneus, now turned back by fate into her old appearance.16

With the exception of the transgendered Laodamia, it is a homogeneous scene in which Edwards finds the shade of Procris. Here her name appears fatefully bound to names of other tragic women. (The word Procrinque, the ultimate source of Edwards’ tale, may be echoed in his title ‘Cephalus and Procris’, which reverses the usual order of names in English epyllia.) In the neighbourhood of tragic heroines, Procris thus appears within a literary commonplace, a site of female complaint that would basically inform Edwards’ representation. Ovid’s version of the story, narrated by a maudlin Cephalus in the male context of an Athenian embassy to Aegina in book 7 of the Metamorphoses, evokes a very different scene of performance. Leading an embassy to ask King Aeacus for aid against the invading Cretans, an embassy that is a rousing success, Cephalus is welcomed, fêted, and eventually asked about his unusual spear. Apparently lost in thought, Cephalus remains mute while one of his companions praises the spear, which never misses its target. Pressed by his host Phocus (Aeacus has retired to bed by this point), who wishes to know how he came by such a treasure, Cephalus commences a lengthy narration of his tragedy.17 But he omits a key episode in this narration: ‘He answers his question, though he suppresses for shame the price at which he got the spear.’18 The price, as related by the mythographer Hyginus, was his sexual favours (Ovid apparently knew in some version the story that has come down to us from Hyginus). According to this version of the myth, Procris, instructed by her divine protector Diana, avenged herself on Cephalus by disguising herself as a young man and challenging him to a hunting contest. After she wins, Cephalus begs her to give him the charmed spear and swift hound by which she beat him. She finally relents but only on the condition that ‘he give what boys are accustomed to give’.19 He agrees, and she reveals herself only after they have already climbed the bed. It is a nearly symmetrical humiliation of Cephalus, who had earlier shamed his wife, gaining her consent to adultery through bribery. Finally, Procris gives him the spear and hound, and they are reconciled.

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This untold story remains in the background of Cephalus’ version at the banquet in Aegina, but it is conspicuously in the background. Cephalus himself alludes to the version when he confesses, ‘I rued my crime and confess that I too might have succumbed to such offerings, provided the gifts were as great’ (Met. 7.748–50).20 The shameful story was known in the Renaissance, and there is no reason to think that Edwards did not know it.21 According to Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses, the shameful story is ‘knowne apparantly’: Duke Cephal answerde his demaund in all points (one except) The which (as knowne apparantly) for shame he overlept: His beautie namely, for the which he did receive the Dart.22

In his moralising and occasionally explanatory translation, Golding hazards a gloss on the untold story, making it clear that Duke Cephal was once courted for his beauty, and that he received the phallic ‘Dart’ in that courtship. His two parenthetical asides represent typographically the decorous containment of the story and gesture rhetorically to the knowing reader. (Edwards’ two ‘parentheses’ in Cephalus and Procris may be indebted at some level to these lines.) Likewise, in A Petite Pallace (1576), in a version of the story removed to the modern court, George Pettie omits the shameful story but probably alludes to it. Early in the story, the lady Procris praises Cephalus for his storytelling: ‘Pro[cris] seemed to preferre the histories of Cephalus, both for that (saith she) his discourses differ from the rest, and beesid[e]s, that mee thinkes the man amendeth the matter mutch.’23 Spoken in earshot of Cephalus, there is a devastating irony in the lady’s praise. As we have seen, Ovid’s Cephalus does indeed amend the matter, omitting in the company of men the story of how he was shamed by his wife and how he received the charmed spear at the ‘price’ of his beauty. Told only in Hyginus’ Fabulae, which was printed numerous times in the Renaissance, the shameful episode was thus the subject of decorous omission and ironic allusion by Ovid and his Renaissance imitators. In Servius’ version, written as a didactic gloss to a school text, we find a more aggressive suppression of the shameful story. Near the beginning of Servius’ gloss, the spear in question is a gift of Aurora, and it is not one but two spears. The difference is more than numeric – Servius’ two spears obliterates the iconic ‘dart’, fraught with phallic overtones and a history of shame. The duplication of the spear also makes it something less than extraordinary, obviating the need to ask where it came from. Including two spears also deprives the one spear of its symbolic place in the tragic denouement, where it pierces Procris just as she had threatened to pierce Cephalus. For good measure, Servius omits the

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scene of reconciliation between husband and wife, making Procris’ sudden jealousy for her fiendish husband (who carries out the adultery with her) something of a mystery. It is this aggressively censored history that Edwards follows, and, as I hope to show, his poem advertises its allegiance to Servius’ corrective version over and against Ovid’s allusive account.

Man, Horse, and Dogs The setting of Cephalus and Procris complements the bizarre chronography considered above. Exiled from heaven, Aurora makes an undisciplined circuit of the world before finally taking refuge on the ‘Silvan shore, / Where Satyres, Goat-herdes, Shepheards kept of yore’ (137–8). It takes a while to get here, but it is in the end a recognisable place; it is the festival world that we have seen in Marlowe’s Abydos, Heywood’s Ida, and Davies’ Ithaca. It is the scene of culture, a topsy-turvy world that occasions the appearance of Cephalus, who is introduced in the guise of Shakespeare’s Adonis, riding and hunting, though married (or perhaps only betrothed) to Procris: Man, horse, and dogs, pleasd th’inamoured Procris: But how with him Aurora was in love, A richer braine the taske would highly move. (156–8)

Here, as elsewhere, Cephalus is emphatically ‘man’, which distinguishes him from the boys Leander and Adonis, whom he resembles in other respects. Like Leander, his ‘tresses [were] ne’er yet cut’ (207), but quite unlike Leander, he does not need instruction in the arts of love. He has put off the ignorance of a Leander and will soon put on the all-too-knowing suspicion of an Othello. Like Adonis, he eludes the groping hands of a lusty goddess in order to hunt the boar, but quite unlike Adonis, he is successful: he ‘gashly did wound the Boare couragiously’ (277). Although Edwards imitates lines from both Marlowe and Shakespeare’s epyllia to introduce the narrative, he does not explicitly compare Cephalus with these boys, as he does in the case of Narcissus. He evokes the hair-cutting ceremony and the boar hunt to signal the theme, but where Marlowe left Adonis in transition and Shakespeare eulogised the boy Adonis, Edwards will see his hero through to adolescence. But not before surfeiting his reader with lines stolen from Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis – lines that have a cloying effect, one that makes the reader glad for Cephalus’ imminent triumph over the

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boar. A representative sampling will suffice to show the poet’s utter lack of conviction in this part of the narrative: She wringes his hands, and hugges him twixt her armes, (Apes die by culling) yet he tooke no harme. (207–8) He striving to be gone, she prest him downe: She striving to kisse him, he kist the growne. (215–16) And therewithal, she whispers in his eare, Oh, who so long, is able to forbeare! (223–4)

The first third of the poem imitates whole passages of Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, particularly effictiones (for example, 71–88) and mythographies (99–118). The purpose of these citations of Marlowe and Shakespeare appears to be far different from similar citations in other epyllia. Where other poets cite these passages to prolong the eulogy of late boyhood, particularly through the use of serial mythography, Edwards appears eager to dispense with such genres, to move his man beyond mythography into the precincts of history. The clearest signal of this move is the first of two narratorial asides, later called a ‘parenthesis’: Heere could I tell you many a prettie storie, Of some eterniz’d by an others glory, Of men transfourm’d to apes, of womens evils, Of fiends made Angels, and of angels divels, Of many brave knightes done to shame, and more, How schollers favourites waxe over poore, But oh faire Muse, let slip to treate of such, A taske thou hast, that tyres thee too too much, And none (Gods know) thy boldnesse will out backe, But naked trueth, that garded coates doth lacke. (175–84)

In place of the digression so typical of the mythological epyllion (Edwards may allude in line 180 to the major digression of Hero and Leander), he inserts a critical aside, a ‘parenthesis’ in which he satirises contemporary fashion and signals his intention to abandon the Ovidian register with which he begins Cephalus and Procris. After the lines quoted, he proceeds to eulogise Sidney ‘the Arcadian’ and encourages Spenser to complete his epic poem. For Edwards, the Arcadia and Faerie Queene appear to represent certain graver labours in service of ‘naked truth’, a truth not indeed of historical veracity but of moral and perhaps political instrumentality. This is not the voice of a poet who would go on to write Narcissus. It is the voice of a minor poet grown weary of the minor muse.

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The first parenthesis, a priamel signalling the poet’s flight from mythography, begs to be read in comparison with Metamorphoses 7, where Cephalus omits his well-known shameful story. Edwards effectively makes the shameful story symbolic of the entire Ovidian mode of the English epyllion. He demurs to tell not just of one man’s shaming but ‘of many brave knightes done to shame’. Cephalus thus becomes metonymic for the gentlemen gallants to whom Edwards addresses his story, the ‘Honourable Gentlemen & true favourites of Poetrie’ of the prefatory letter. To protect Cephalus’ honour by following Servius’ corrected version is conceivably to protect the honour of an entire social group, probably the homosocial milieu of the Inns of Court. Contrary to the evidence of Lodge’s Scilla and other epyllia written for that milieu, Edwards takes it as shameful to tell wanton tales of pretty, reluctant boys. More generally, and more comprehensively, the parenthesis disavows poetic myth, such as the catalogue of myths named in Aurora’s periegesis of the globe (95–118). It thus marks the beginning of a symbolic turn from mythography to history, a major ‘corrective’ moment in the boy’s entry into the school of rhetoric. Before looking at the central exercise (thesis) that solemnises that turn, I wish to consider further ways in which Edwards writes prophylaxes against the shaming of his hero. The boar hunt and the rape scene, the two major episodes of Cephalus and Procris, are conspicuous places of vindicating Cephalus’ manhood and fending off shame. In a genre where nothing much happens, Cephalus and Procris is unusual in having two major actions. The boar hunt, which Edwards narrates in a set piece of sixty lines (233–92), inaugurates Cephalus’ rite of passage, and because obscurity takes a holiday and vivid description goes to work in these verses, they are some of the poem’s more delightful. But the vividness of these lines and the reader’s delight in them is soon implicated in the sparer description of Cephalus’ rape of Procris. Jealous of his wife’s chastity, which has been put in doubt by the insinuations of Aurora, he puts on a ‘merchants weeds’ and seduces his wife. His seduction is no less predatory – and successful – than his pursuit of the boar. In fact, it is with a more infuriated passion that he prosecutes his wife’s chastity. ‘Drown’d in a sea of overswelling hate’, he only manages to play the gallant by suppressing a primal rage (391). Then he consummates his rage in a way that makes Othello’s murder of Desdemona look charitable by comparison: At first content to parley hand in hand, After steale kisses, talke of Cupids band, And by degrees applied the tex so well, As (cunning counter-feite) he did excel,

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And what but now gently he might obtaine, O what but now, she wisht cald back againe. (447–52)

The amorous language in which the rape scene transpires does not cover its violence; it may serve to magnify it, suppressed as it is behind Cephalus’ mask. The disguise as a merchant evokes the contemporary description of rape as theft and chastity as a treasure, a good belonging first to a maiden and then to a husband. In terms of an early modern discourse of rape, Cephalus does nothing less than despoil himself of his most valuable treasure.24 It is in this context that we can understand Procris’ subsequent turn to ‘mournefull complaintes, out-cries, and languishment’ (472).25 Where other forlorn women of the complaint tradition have typically been either abandoned or raped, Procris has effectively suffered both injuries, and both at the hands of her husband. Where other poets typically look to a single event to give definition to the rhetoric that makes up most of the epyllion, Edwards places two events – boar hunt and rape scene – in thematic juxtaposition. These actions flank the numeric centre of the poem; comparison of them is inescapable.26 They represent an arc of violence, a setting out and returning home in violence, and set in motion an irreversible separation of husband and wife. The boar hunt, so central to pagan rites of passage, tells only part of the story of adolescence in Edwards’ version. Critically, even Cephalus finds something wanting in his triumph over the boar: The master proude at such a stately prize, Fils his high thoughtes, and gluts his greedie eies, He bathes himself, (as twere) in Seas of blisse; But what is victorie, where no praise is? (281–4)

The rite of passage, necessarily accomplished in solitude (separation), is incomplete without the formal solemnity of praise. Indeed, given the prominence of praise among the ‘first exercises’, we might say that what Cephalus desires in his triumphant return is not just an audience but an encomium. Cephalus is tellingly described at the moment of his triumph over the boar as ‘master’, a conspicuous word in this symbolic context. It resonates with the discourses of mastery in the grammar school, where students of the upper forms temporarily suspended their progress in order to display their mastery of grammar, ‘turning’ to instruct the boys in the lower forms.27 Mastery could also be demonstrated in the grammar school in an oral examination of the student by the schoolmaster. Whether the student adopts the role of the teacher or enters into a dialogue with a teacher, ‘mastery’ represents a significant advance over the

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earlier drills in memorisation, repetition, and even composition, which frequently took the form of imitation, not true invention. The language anticipates Cephalus’ second encounter with the goddess Aurora, ‘friend of the muse’, who will put him through his rhetorical paces, a continuation of the ritual process set in motion by the killing of the boar.

On Contrarieties He Answer Made The rhetorical performances that we have seen so far in the English epyllion are monovocal. They tend to take the form of set pieces in oratory, as is natural when the form being imitated is a written form. But the last two of the progymnasmata introduce a second voice, the voice of an adversary who contradicts the student. As Aphthonius writes of thesis, ‘This is the first of the progymnasmata to include antithesis.’28 Thesis, like legislatio (‘introduction of a law’), the last of the first exercises, is almost entirely constructed upon three antitheses and their ‘solutions’ (solutiones). In Aphthonius’ example, ‘Whether one should marry’, the antithesis takes the form of reported speech. After a prologue that runs through some topics of praise, a second voice is quoted: ‘“Yes,” he says, “but marriage is a cause of misfortune.”’29 It is hard to overstate the significance of this eruption of a voice from the fabric of the progymnasmata. So far, the student has been engaged in writing mocked-up speeches, solo enunciations of a theme, narrative, or argument. But now the student must respond as if in rebuttal – must even produce the arguments to which he responds. Of course, the spontaneity of antithesis is contrived, just as all of the progymnasmata are contrived. But it nonetheless represents a major cognitive step, a significant move from the formulas of the earlier themes to something like the extempore give and take of the assembly and law courts, the public venues undoubtedly mimicked in thesis and legislatio. It also gives a more dramatic shape to these exercises. Of course, the drama of rhetoric – that is, the eye to actual performance of rhetoric – is implicit from the very beginning of the progymnasmata, in the imitation of character in the animal fable. But the disembodied voice of antithesis is something new. It is the voice of another, an adversary, who dictates for the first time the terms of response. The discipline of thesis is not, then, just to refute the arguments of another – that we have seen in confutatio and confirmatio – but more importantly to reclaim the discourse from another voice, to respond without losing control over the terms of the controversy. It is in this light that we can appreciate the reiterative form of thesis and introduction of a law, where three antitheses and their

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solutions reflect not indeed an exhaustive examination of the subject, but rather the persistence of the speaker in controlling and reclaiming discourse.30 In the central dialogue of Cephalus and Procris, Aurora appears in disguise and attempts to seduce the young man. Using words where before she had used her body, she makes three short speeches to which the young man replies in longer rebuttals. It is an amorous scene made academic by the formality of Cephalus’ replies: ‘And evermore on contrarieties / He aunsweare made, unto her Deitie’ (218). Even the narrator finds the debate, torn between elegiac solicitations and academic solutions, somewhat tedious: ‘So is our Theame now quicke, and then a dying’ (292). The striking thing about Cephalus’ speech in Edwards’ poem is that it occurs only in response to Aurora’s three verbal assaults on his wedding vow. He is given no words that are not in rebuttal to the goddess, and it is precisely when he fails to respond to her but instead adopts her language that he is driven to the violence of rape. His first speech answers her request for a kiss. Admittedly, Aurora’s amorous request does not hail from the school and its discourses (antithesis: ‘a kisse hath not undone thee’), but Cephalus’ response is very much that of a ‘bold sharp sophister’: Admit that woemen have preheminence, To make men love; yet for so foule offence, As for to violate the marriage bed, Were over much to be inamored; ... Admit the contrary, is it no sinne, In love to end, where I did not begin? Oh tis a fault, a sinne exceeding any! Then pardon me, for I scorne to love many! (307–10, 313–16)

Cephalus responds as one well schooled in the give and take of thesis. In the course of eighteen lines, he anticipates two arguments of Aurora and pretends to concede to them (‘Admit’) before solving them. His speech generally reflects practice in arguing on either side of a question, a hallmark of humanist pedagogy, but it specifically takes the form of thesis, with its antitheses and solutions. His next speech is likewise a response to Aurora’s second attempt, a longer speech that includes a brief blazon of Cephalus: These curled, and untewed [uncut] lockes of thine, Let me but borrow upon pawne of mine. These (oh immortall) eies, these sacred handes, Lend me I pray thee, on sufficient bandes. (331–4)

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In his response, Cephalus selectively answers Aurora’s fifteen-line speech, responding only to the four lines quoted above and answering for each part of himself with reference to his betrothal to Procris. He thus appears in full control of his discourse, anticipating Aurora’s arguments in his first speech and strategically reducing her arguments in the second. These two speeches reflect twin strategies of controlling speech, for to selectively respond no less than to anticipate is to control the terms of debate. Cephalus’ disciplined speech is reflected above all in its paucity – as already mentioned, his only words are in response to Aurora. But his discursive control seems to depend on an adversarial relationship with his interlocutor: ‘And evermore on contrarieties, / He aunsweare made.’ It is precisely when he fails to respond that he proves vulnerable to Aurora’s speech. Changing tack after her first two attempts, Aurora insinuates the infidelity of Procris, ‘inferring more to prove her argument, / That woemen cannot be with one content’ (381–2). The next couplet marks the numeric centre of the poem, and it begins with the telling non-response: ‘Cephalus as now unto her speech gave heede’ (383). It is the turning point of the dialogue, and indeed of the poem, for it is when he gives heed to the speech of another that Cephalus loses control of his own. Instead of responding, he gives ear to Aurora, who proceeds to instruct him in a scheme by which he can prove his wife’s fidelity. The hook sinks in deep. By the time he speaks, he has lost all reason: ‘Sometimes he cals her faire, chast, wise, and grave, / Anon with too too wrathfull tauntes he raves’ (395–6). His cool logic turns to furious invocation, as he seeks out the guardians of hell, including ‘Just Radamanth’, to come to his revenge. The young man’s loss of reasonable discourse is all the more evident in comparison with Ovid’s representation of the same scene, where Cephalus deliberates as if writing a suasoria.31 It appears that it is Cephalus’ failure in his disputation with Aurora that results in the violent scene that follows. As long as he can respond to Aurora’s speeches in order to reclaim his own discursive integrity, his vow and his wife’s chastity appear to be safe. And when he can manage no response, his imagination runs wild and his tidy solutions give place to foaming invectives. In this light, the school exercises appear to be a check on adolescent violence, a means of self-control. But the order of the scene suggests another relationship between rhetorical discipline and physical violence: that the violence enacted against Procris is not so much a consequence of Cephalus’ loss of discursive control as a desperate strategy to reclaim it. He certainly loses discourse (and reason) momentarily, but he also quickly regains it, not least in his convincing

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performance as an Ovidian elegist, who ‘by degrees applied the tex so well, / As (cunning counter-feite) he did excel’. We have to ask ourselves, does Cephalus in his violence resemble more the disciplined or the undisciplined speaker in the dialogue with Aurora? He does resemble his former self, but imperfectly. Here he plies the derivative arts of the Ovidian lover, a parasite on the rhetorical training of the schools, and here, too, he fails, ultimately resorting to the bribe, a humiliating plan B for the once promising orator. Such aberrancy is a risk inherent in the training of adolescents in the scene of rhetoric. Practised from the beginning in the dramatic imitation of character, the eloquence of the male adolescent is a portable, adaptable, and variable skill. The temptation of Cephalus is not abstract, in a dream vision like the Judgement of Paris, but takes place within a ritual process. The crisis of the male adolescent stems from that process, showing it to be a fragile, incomplete, and contingent exercise. Cephalus enters the poem in the supreme confidence of a ‘man’, but in short order he becomes a stereotype of the jealous husband, a feckless Ovidian elegist, and finally a hermit.

Secret Muse A writer on the Cephalus and Procris theme faces a choice at this moment in the narrative: whether to follow Procris in her flight or to remain with Cephalus, for in all accounts Procris leaves. Ovid naturally remains, for it is Cephalus telling the story, and there is an interesting way in which the young man describes his reaction to his wife’s flight to the woods (where she becomes a huntress): ‘Then after I was abandoned, a violent flame consumed my bones.’32 For the writer of the Heroides, this is a telling description; it echoes the circumstances of many a forsaken woman. It is one of several inversions of convention in Ovid’s account, which begins with Cephalus being ‘abducted’ (raptus) by Aurora. This latest inversion seems to stem not from Cephalus’ beauty, however, but from his incomplete reckoning of chastity, which eludes his control even at the moment when he thinks to have tested it.33 Far from forfeiting her chastity, Procris simply renegotiates its terms, ‘plying Diana’s trade’ (studiis operata Dianae), according to Ovid and actually joining Diana’s troop of virgins according to Hyginus.34 Following Servius, though, Edwards’ interest at this point is not in Cephalus or his ‘abject confession’, as Richard Tarrant aptly describes it, but rather in the nocturnal lamentations of a fallen woman. Servius is rather brief on this score but supplies the necessary cue: ‘She was

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lamenting (dolens) for this when she heard from some backwoodsman that he loved Aurora.’ Edwards spends twelve lines describing Procris’ complaints, which ultimately drive her to leave at sunrise. The narrator then emphatically leaves Cephalus behind, echoing the language of abandonment in Ovid’s account: ‘Cephalus we leave unto his secrete muse’ (479). Through a number of digressions that capture the turbulence of Procris’ flight, Edwards postpones at length the discovery of Cephalus’ fortune. ‘Viragon-like, Procris the woods containe’ (708). Edwards thus follows Procris into the woods. His shamed Procris, is not, like Ovid’s, a devotee of Diana or the hunt, but a more feral and unpredictable woman. Drawing on Ovid’s description of Procris’ jealousy, a cautionary set piece in the third book of the Ars amatoria, Edwards describes a furious maenad: Thus in distressefull wise, as though she had Bene ravisht, wounded, or at least halfe mad, Like a Thessalian Metra, of our storie To have no part, nor rob us of our glory, She fiercely raves, and teares in careless sorte, The lovely flowers (God wot) that hurteth not. (599–604)

These appear to stem from the following lines of the didactic-elegiac experiment of the Ars amatoria: When she revives, she tears the soft clothing from her breast and bathes her undeserving knees in filth. Without hesitation, intoxicated, she strays along the open roads, as if possessed by the Bacchic thyrsus.35

Of course, describing the complaints of a forsaken or ravished woman, Edwards could have collected these details from a number of places, and he need not have resorted to a text at all. But the Ars amatoria probably supplied him with a picture of a raving Procris – something alien to the comparatively cool Procris of the Metamorphoses. The maenad figure evoked here, before Procris has even learned of Cephalus’ inconstancy, raises the spectre of revenge and represents a greater threat to Cephalus than even the ‘viragon-like’ huntress, and the narrator clearly perceives a threat to both his narrative and ‘glory’ in the entrance of the raving woman. In yet another effort to contain his story within the bounds of masculine, historical discourse, like his earlier parenthesis, he describes her only in order to ward off both voice and gesture. The bacchante thus represents not only a physical threat to the story’s hero but also a discursive threat to narrator and reader alike. In the second half of Cephalus and Procris, Procris is condemned to

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a protean existence. The woman, far from haunting Diana’s groves or Virgil’s fields of mourning, has a series of chance encounters with marginal figures, first an elven bawd named Lamie and then an uncivil swain who ‘seems to have wandered in from The Faerie Queene’.36 Both play tutor to the ravished woman in different ways, and both seem to make erotic overtures, which are only explicit in the case of the rustic. These encounters ostracise Procris, denying her a place within a peer group, whether the virgin hunters or the bacchantes. Although Lamie coaches Procris how to excuse her deed and blame Cephalus, she clearly does not represent the kind of sanctioned discourse in which Lucrece is exercised. She is inspired more by Ovid’s Praeceptor amoris than by Quintilian’s schoolmaster. And the episode with the rustic, who represents yet another threat of rape, keeps Procris within the amorous, elegiac world that brought about her fall, a world of deceit and disguise. Edwards is comparatively reticent about the fate of Cephalus. As we have seen, he leaves the young man ‘to his secret muse’, not to return to him until the fateful encounter with the jealous Procris at the end of the poem. The question of where Cephalus is to be found is a major one for understanding his rites de passage. A number of questions are raised by the adolescent’s coming of age – the fullest account, as we have seen, of a young man’s initiation into the disciplines of rhetoric. What exactly is the telos of the progymnasmata? What social practice emerges from rhetorical exercise? What norms and behaviours follow on the disciplines of speaking? What accomplishments follow education? Wandering with Procris, peering into the recesses of the forest, we finally discover with greedy eyes where the man Cephalus spends his time and, more importantly, what he is doing: Nymphes, Driades, and Satyres many mo Then I can tell you, would full oft most trim, Like gliding ghoastes about his cabine swim, As what might seeme to imitate delight, Sweete thoughts by day, and musicke in the night, Causing the one so to confirme the other, As Revels, Maskes, and all that Cupids mother, Could summon to the earth, heere was it done, A second heaven, (aie me) there was begunne. (722–30)37

This is, to say the least, a strange regression in the social narrative outlined in the progymnasmata. The narrator who earlier renounced myth and invoked the example of Spenser and Sidney now sighs for an enchanted grove and the ‘sweet’ entertainments of Cephalus. Day and night the young man is found in a state of retirement, a far cry from the labour to which humanist exercise of poetry would appear to tend. His

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mastery of discourse has not resulted in the vir bonus peritus dicendi that the progymnasmata would seem to groom, but rather in a passively reclined bondsman of his secret muse, who is again alluded to in this passage but not named.38 His discipline of speech for the sake of competition in the courts of law or the assembly is utterly relaxed, and he gives audience to the amorous verses of Cupid’s mother. One wonders that the fateful hunting spear, without which the poet cannot end the narrative, is so ready at hand. The final portrait of Cephalus leaves us in doubt about the poet’s (or the narrator’s) success in this programme of discipline. Inhabiting a charmed space of nocturnal, festival, and amorous music, Cephalus appears to be irrevocably disengaging from the disciplines of rhetoric at the end of the poem. There is an indication of a similar disengagement in Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses. In the second half of the Cephalus and Procris epyllion, when husband and wife have been reconciled, Cephalus returns to the hunt ‘in the manner of a young man’ (iuvenaliter). To Marilyn Pechillo, this indicates ‘a failure to accept the responsibility of a vir, that is, his obligations as Procris’ husband’.39 In Edwards’ account, the young man’s failure is not a failure in terms of the husband’s marital obligation. Rather, Cephalus fails his schoolmaster Aurora, who initiated him into manhood. His secret revels leap over adolescence back into the shady groves of late boyhood, an inglorious obscurity that is enjoyed for its own sake, without end and without correction. In Narcissus, which follows Cephalus and Procris, Edwards takes the apparent regression of Cephalus even further, into a perpetual and pointless late boyhood.40 In his obstinate self-regard, Narcissus is not an unworthy inheritor of Cephalus’ secluded reveries. He sings a doleful, tragic complaint in place of Cephalus, and he appears to channel the tragic muses invoked at the end of Cephalus and Procris. I suggested above that the joint printing of Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus transposes the poems thematically, forming a chiasm with Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. That may not be entirely accidental. The chiasm places focus on the violence of adolescence in the two central poems about rape, with portraits of terminal boyhood on either side. The boy whose adolescence is prevented by some type of emasculation (literal in the case of Adonis, figurative in the case of Narcissus) draws attention to some aspect of the ‘successful’ adolescent in the centre.41 Cephalus’ narrative is one of decline and fall. He is most successful, most disciplined, when he kills the boar and seeks out praise. On the one hand, Narcissus is a cautionary parable. Narcissus is the ‘well-painted idol’ that Venus complains of in Venus and Adonis; he

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cultivates the flower but not the fruit of boyhood, and his immaturity is described in sexual terms. In a bawdy understatement he compares his reluctant self, beleaguered with amorous suits by young women, with Priapus under similar circumstances: ‘[Priapus] would a little more have done then toy’d’ (108). But Narcissus’ sexual inexperience is only one dimension of his immaturity. The signs of his boyhood are on display throughout his speech, which he calls ‘the none-age of my voice’ (408). The lengthy monologue itself is symptomatic of boyhood. Singing in a largely female genre, Narcissus actually appears in drag, having decked himself out with the jewels his female suitors have given him as favours. In its effusive rhetoric, full of parallels, exempla, figures of speech, and dramatic gestures, the complaint of Narcissus complements his physical ornamentation and reflects the undisciplined copia of language cultivated in the advanced exercises of the grammar school. In the humanist program, as we have seen, words are allowed to flow unchecked so that there might be something to harvest in the school of rhetoric. Inopem me copia fecit. Narcissus’ famous paradox from the Metamorphoses had a special edge in the context of humanist literary pedagogy. Without the discipline of rhetoric, his abundant speech is sterile, unprofitable, and tedious. ‘So I a woman turned from a boy’ (308). There is no remaining in the copia of late boyhood; one turns man or woman. One takes his seat among the male banqueters or gives comfort to Laodamia in the field of mourners. On the other hand, Narcissus represents the potential for revolt against the discipline of rhetoric – fruitless revolt, to be sure, but revolt nonetheless. Forming a chiasm with Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus interrupt and reverse the linear construction of Shakespeare’s portrayal of adolescence. If Shakespeare’s narratives move speech inevitably from the didactic, enigmatic emblem towards the discourses of legal controversy and persuasion, from the banquet to the bar, Edwards’ narratives in their printed order undo most of that work. Cephalus begins as a competent ‘resolver’ of Aurora’s sophisms but then uses his verbal competency (ineffectively) to seduce his wife. After he resorts to bribery to defeat her, he goes silently to his revels until he reemerges one last time to deliver a brief outburst in the complaint mode. The complaint mode, in which the entirety of Narcissus is written, aptly characterises an irrevocable disengagement from rhetorical education. There is something final about the complaint, which does not typically lead to any resolution or change but simply records a misfortune. (Echo is therefore an appropriate audience for Narcissus’ complaint. There is some form of echo in most complaints; hearing your words imperfectly repeated to you perfectly illustrates the

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ineffectiveness of the genre.) The complaint is not just a literary mode, it is the last resort of someone whose legal resources are exhausted. It thus represents a rhetorical terminus. There is no diplomatic future for the young man who raises his voice in complaint; his only hope for securing speaking engagements is to find a host as magnanimous (and as drowsy) as Aeacus. The obscurity of his verse notwithstanding, ‘to soveranize on schollers idle howres’ was evidently not Edwards’ intention in writing Cephalus and Procris (124). Rather, as is suggested by the dedications, envoys, and parentheses of the printed edition, he addressed this amorous poem and its companion piece to what he saw as an emerging cohort of poets creating a non-dramatic body of literature for the English nation.42 The prolonged closing of the theatres in 1592–4 may have represented to him a window of opportunity not only for himself to secure literary patronage but also for English non-dramatic verse to get off the ground. Watson, Daniel, and Shakespeare, praised for their narrative verse, represent the company into which Edwards wishes to be admitted; Edmund Spenser, repeatedly invoked, represents a fairy godfather to the fledgling group; Sidney and Marlowe, both eulogised, represent a tragic loss.43 If he fell short of these poets for both wit and grace, Edwards nonetheless shared with them a common cultural inheritance, the use of poetry in the service of rhetoric in the humanist grammar schools. No poet could ignore the legacy of the rhetorical curriculum. On the one hand, as a rival with the medieval arts curriculum, it liberated new avenues of thought and expression, particularly through the practice of imitation. As each of the poems considered above demonstrates, far from being a servile form of obeisance to textual authority, Renaissance imitation was a various and fertile source of invention. Rhetoric also gave new prestige and currency to the small kinds, including myth, fable, epigram, and anecdote. And it secured a place for verse composition among the exercises of late boyhood. On the other hand, rhetoric represented a burdensome legacy. Rhetoric and its genres could seem a crutch for the unimaginative, or a tedious mode of dilating material for the uncritical. It could seem to colonise areas of discourse that do not have an obvious rhetorical occasion. But the less obvious and perhaps more burdensome legacy of the rhetorical curriculum was the social narrative it told, largely through the progymnasmata, of what it was for a boy to become an adolescent (and implicitly what it was for an adolescent to become a man). Through its disciplines of historical narration, legal argumentation, and topical invention, the progymnasmata made poetry, particularly poetry of the mythographic sort, purely instrumental, a storing up of copious discourse against correction and subsequent disciplined uses

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in public settings. It was a cultural use of poetic composition that did not leave a lot of room for a career poet, much less for his undisciplined and uncorrected use of word, speech, and image.

Notes 1. Met. 7.690–756, 796–852. The story is interrupted by a digression typical of an epyllion. Marilyn Pechillo describes the Cephalus and Procris episode, like the Aeacus and Cephalus episode of which it is a part, as an epyllion in ‘Ovid’s Framing Technique: The Aeacus and Cephalus Epyllion (Met. 7.490–8.5)’, The Classical Journal 86 (1990): 35–44. Ovid uses the epyllion to juxtapose genres and create ‘a tension between the inset and framing genres’ (35). 2. ‘studiis operata Dianae’. Met. 7.746. 3. Thomas Edwards, Cephalus and Procris. Narcissus, ed. W. E. Buckley (London, 1882), iii–iv. 4. Elsewhere he addresses the poems to a third readership. In a forty-line ‘parenthesis’ near the end of Cephalus and Procris (667–706), he pays tribute to the poets Sidney, Spenser, and Drayton. In the ‘L’Envoy’ to Narcissus he makes a fuller roll call of England’s Parnassus, including nods to Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Edwards thus addressed his verse alternately to an aristocratic patron, a body of gentleman gallants (presumably at the universities and Inns of Court), and a laureate body of English poets. He thus combines strategies employed separately by Shakespeare, Heywood, and Chapman. 5. Ellis writes, ‘If Narcissus is Edwards’ tribute to Marlowe, Cephalus and Procris is his tribute to Shakespeare.’ Sexuality and Citizenship, 122. 6. Although the complaint genre and rhyme royal of Narcissus diverge from these mythological epyllia, it is to be recalled that the ur-epyllion in the English tradition, Lodge’s Scilla, is likewise cast as a complaint. See Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 113. 7. The narrator, addressing the reader, says, ‘if it do you pleasure, / No doubt there will be better done at leisure’ (27–8). 8. Narcissus, 105, 140, 171, 218, 308, 612; Cephalus and Procris, 147, 170, 252, 308, 326, 389, 424, 430, 541. 9. The commentary is on Aen. 6.445, in Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii, ed. Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen, 3 vols (1881–7, repr. Hildesheim, 1986), 2.68. 10. Wallace situates the grammar school reading of the Aeneid at a critical pedagogical juncture in Virgil’s Schoolboys, 163–4, 178–227. 11. Fable 189 in Fabularum Liber (1535, repr. New York, 1976), p. 52 [sig. e2v]. 12. In the second of two hymns that make up The Shadow of Night, Chapman praises Cynthia, whom Edwards also apostrophises in the opening lines of Cephalus and Procris. See George Chapman, Poems, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York, 1941). Several other features suggest that Edwards was seeking admittance into a school of night.

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13. Edwards may nonetheless have enjoyed a brief period of fame, at least if we are to believe William Covell’s complaint in Polimanteia ([Cambridge], 1595), sig. Q4r: ‘Zepheria, Cephalus and Procris (workes I dispraise not) like water men pluck every passinger by the sleeve.’ Besides, scarcity of a text is no evidence against its popularity, and Katherine Duncan-Jones, citing the 1593 entry of a Procris and Cephalus in the Stationers’ Register, writes that ‘it seems probable that a previous edition or editions have vanished’; ‘Much Ado with Red and White’, 491. 14. Latin text in Virgil, Universum Poema (Venice, 1558), sig. l4r. 15. Of the mythographers, only Boccaccio mentions the disguise of a merchant, but in his version it appears to be Cephalus’ idea: ‘Aurora said to him, “I suggest that you test Procris’ chastity.” So he disguised himself as a merchant, promised her gifts, and bent her to his will. Distraught, he confessed that he was her husband.’ (Cui Aurora (ait) castimoniam Procris quaeso transformatus experiaris. Qui cum se mercatorem finxisset, et munera ingentia promisisset, eam in suum desiderium flexit, et turbatus se maritum confessus est.) Genealogias Deorum Libri Quindecim (Basel, 1532), fol. 347. 16. Aeneid 6.442–9. 17. Modelled partly on Aeneas in Carthage, Cephalus is pointedly called ‘heros’ (Met. 7.863) as he tells his tragic tale, and his narration includes a digression that separates its two main episodes. 18. Met. 7.687–8, in Georgius Sabinus, Metamorphosis Seu Fabulae Poeticae (1589, repr. New York, 1976), sig. Q5v. Tarrant, the Oxford Classical Texts editor of the Metamorphoses, believes these lines, which have several variants in the manuscripts, to be interpolated. See ‘The Silence of Cephalus: Text and Narrative Technique in Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.685ff.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 125 (1995): 99–111. 19. ‘da mihi id quod pueri solent dare.’ Fabularum Liber, sig. e2v. 20. In ‘Roads Not Taken: Untold Stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 54 (2005): 65-89, Tarrant describes these words, which seem like ‘a sort of Freudian slip on Cephalus’ part’, as ‘a particularly bold example of Ovidian reinterpretation’ (84). 21. Edited by Jacob Mycillus, the Fabularum Liber of Hyginus was first printed in Basel in 1535. 22. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567 (1965, repr. Philadelphia, 2000), 7.881–3. 23. A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, ed. Herbert Hartman (Oxford, 1938), 188. 24. See Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.’ 25. It is only later in her complaints that the violence of the scene is compared to rape: Thus in distressefull wise, as though she had Bene ravisht, wounded, or at least halfe mad ... She fiercely raves, and teares in carelesse sorte, The lovely flowers (God wot) that hurteth not. (599–600, 603–4)

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26. The killing of the boar, not narrated in Edwards’ sources, anticipates the second crime against Procris at the end of the story. Cf. Cephalus’ confession in a contemporary epigram by Faustus Sabaeus: ‘I have destroyed you by a double stroke, now wounding your breast with a spear, previously testing your faith with a bribe’ [Te duplici fato, feriens, tentansque peremi: / Pectora nunc iaculo, munere et ante fidem]. Picta Poesis Ovidiana (Frankfurt, 1580), sig. L2r. 27. Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, and Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys, explore the discourses of mastery in the early modern classroom. 28. Kennedy, Progymnasmata, 121 (my emphasis). 29. Ibid., 122. 30. In the Son of God in Paradise Regained, Milton will represent a sublime and utterly serene form of such discursive control. 31. Met. 7.714–21. On the rhetoric of this episode, see Pechillo, ‘Ovid’s Framing Technique’, 40. 32. Met. 7.747–8 (my translation). 33. For my reading of Procris’ negotiation of chastity, I draw on Kathryn Schwarz, ‘Chastity, Militant and Married: Cavendish’s Romance, Milton’s Masque’, PMLA 118 (2003): 270–85. 34. Met. 7.746. According to Hyginus, whose account includes the adulterous act, Procris is at first scolded by Diana but later pitied when she tells of her husband’s abuse. 35. Ars amatoria 3.707–10. 36. Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 126. 37. In Ars amatoria 3.687–94, Ovid provides a vivid description of the locus amoenus in which Cephalus takes his rest from the hunt and where he calls fatefully upon aura. This passage may inform Edwards’ description quoted here. 38. The sources indicate that this is ‘Aurora’ or a nymph named ‘Aura’. But Edwards simply refers to one ‘That in the skie sits honoured as a Starre’ (718). 39. ‘Ovid’s Framing Technique’, 42. 40. For Ellis, Edwards’ cross-dressing Narcissus, in love with the shadow of a woman and not woman-in-the-flesh, is a negative exemplum of the emasculating effects of Petrarchan rhetoric. Sexuality and Citizenship, 109–18. 41. ‘Come, come Adonis, let us meete each other’, cries Narcissus, ‘though we both were haplesse boies together’ (169, 171). 42. Parodying Marlowe’s mighty line, still in vogue in dramatic literature of the early 1590s, Edwards eschews tragic verse at the beginning of the second parenthesis, addressed exclusively to Edmund Spenser: The staring massacres, blood-dronken plots, Hot riotous hell-quickeners, Italian-nots: That tup their wits with snaky Nemesis, Teate-sucking on the poyson of her mis, With ougly fiendes ystalked let them bee, A milder fury to enrich seeke wee. (667–72) 43. Ellis writes of Cephalus and Procris, ‘In Aurora’s travels from the Hesperides to England, the poem suggests there is both a geographical and

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literary continuity from classical literature to English verse, from Homer and Ovid to Spenser. Edwards’s arguments for the national importance of poetry, and for a canon of English poets, are related to the main narrative of rhetorical mastery.’ Sexuality and Citizenship, 132.

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Epilogue

Jesus’ First Exercises in Paradise Regained

Milton’s representation of the Son of God in Paradise Regained (1671), his epic retelling of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, is known to draw on an array of scriptural, classical, and Christian literary traditions. The book of Job is foremost among the models of imitation, but within the general outline of the Job narrative, Satan and the Son of God recite a number of other literary and historical figures.1 This literary background, a veritable pantheon of heroes and villains, seems to be part of the narrative that Milton is telling. The Son of God, a passionate student of Scripture, appears to be sorting out, over the course of his dialogue with Satan, a rich and diverse history of types and anti-types, not least in order to come to some measure of self-knowledge and begin his long maturing office of self-proclamation.2 The reader will be relieved to hear that I do not wish to nominate the boys and adolescents of the English epyllion for entrance into this already crowded gallery. My interest in Paradise Regained is not as a late imitation of the Elizabethan vogue but as a poem that takes up, indeed centres on, the very process represented in the English epyllion: the transition from study to action. I wish to briefly show Milton’s citation of humanist disciplines and consider their meaning in the poem’s drama. At the beginning of the poem, God describes his intention for the Son: But first I mean To exercise him in the wilderness; There he shall first lay down the rudiments Of his great warfare, ere I send him forth To conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes, By humiliation and strong sufferance.3

To read the temptation sequence as ‘exercise’ was not original with Milton; it was a common reading among Protestant preachers, who saw

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in Jesus’ wilderness experience a preparation for the ministry.4 Richard Baxter writes, ‘Fasting and tryal by temptations were great preparatives to Christ’s exercise of his prophetick office.’5 The temptations were therefore preliminary exercises, to be imitated by the Christian divine in fasting, prayer, and spiritual discipline. If Protestant divines placed the gospel episode in a meaningful biographical context, as a moral example to follow, Milton drew on the humanist disciplines to represent ‘exercise’, as well as the formation of character, within more historical terms. Becoming ‘perfect man’ was not, for Jesus, a matter of making a right decision in a moment of crisis, but a patient endurance of extempore rhetorical exercises. David Norbrook elegantly summarises the drama: Jesus has regained Paradise not by ritualistic sacrifice but by an expert deployment of rhetoric: he, rather than Satan, is the master of seizing the occasions of argument, and he does so in order to proclaim a principled resistance to earthly monarchy without prematurely compromising his mission.6

My only quibble with this summary is Norbrook’s antinomy of ritual and rhetoric, for as I have argued, rhetorical exercises constituted a ritual process in the humanist grammar schools. In the arena of the school no less than the life of the student, the entry into adolescence represented a crisis, and rhetorical exercises functioned as a means of interpreting and redressing that crisis. So Milton’s choice to depict the redemption of man in the wilderness was not necessarily a choice against drama or ritual; it was a choice of a different ritual scene, less dramatic and less violent, to be sure, than the passion, but one that nonetheless enacted a parallel drama of violence: the submission of verbal plenitude to disciplinary correction. The Son of God, who begins as the incarnate word of God and proceeds to the violence of the passion, represents a singular example of adolescent initiation. Milton may even represent the Son of God performing the decisive exercise in the humanist rites de passage. Jesus’ first appearance in the brief epic is significant. He is Musing and much revolving in his breast, How best the mighty work he might begin Of saviour to mankind, and which way first Publish his godlike office now mature.7

Milton’s emphasis is on Jesus’ solitude, his departure from society, and his contemplative mood. The melancholy of the scene is evocative of the iconic youth, lost in thought, typically under a tree or resting from the

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hunt (see above, Chapter 4). The introduction of Jesus in this manner resonates with his later comparisons to Hercules, including a nonScriptural sequence drawn after the famous ‘Hercules at the crossroads’ legend.8 As shown above, this exemplary narration of coming of age was frequently compared with the analogous Judgement of Paris, and visual representations of the two scenes reinforced the analogy. In the context of his musings, Jesus’ narration of his birth and baptism is analogous with Paris’ narration of his judgement. For Paris that episode represented his break with the past, and his entry into a new identity, while his narration of the episode represents the process of becoming an adolescent. For Jesus, the baptism episode is no less decisive, for it involves a new revelation of his identity, and his narration likewise inaugurates a ritual process, the temptation sequence. Lost in meditation when Satan finds him (an echo of Mercury’s appearance to Paris), the Son is vulnerable to the interrogation and instruction of other voices. Caught between his study of the prophets and his ‘Godlike office now mature’, he does not face a moral choice, but a series of trials that will test his resolve and perseverance. As widely recognised, Jesus’ mastery of argument and debate is a key part of Milton’s narrative of redemption. His ‘expert deployment of rhetoric’ is understandably viewed, moreover, as a triumph leading up to Satan’s iconic fall. But what this interpretation may obscure is the suffering that such expertise or mastery entails. In the discourse of the humanist grammar school, the first exercises of rhetoric (Milton’s frequent use of threefold sequences in the poem is especially evocative of the threefold exercises in thesis and legislatio, the last of the first exercises) are above all forms of discipline, correcting exuberance and channelling unbridled discourse into prescribed forms. Consequently, if the first exercises of rhetoric do inform Milton’s representation of Jesus, then far from being an unmitigated triumph, his studied persuasions may in part be strategies of submission and eventual defeat. In this regard, Paradise Regained has more in common with the passion than allowed by critics who make Milton’s location of redemption in the wilderness problematic vis-à-vis the passion. As in Erasmus’ celebration of the Boy Jesus, whose hymns were still sung at St Paul’s when John Milton was a schoolboy (though his portrait had long since been removed), Jesus’ entry into ‘perpetual adolescence’ is an irreversible submission to alien forms of discipline. The verbal triumph in Paradise Regained, a practical straightjacketing of the eternal logos, is no less paradoxical or enigmatic, then, than the incarnation, or even the passion.9

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Notes 1. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski demonstrates the significance of the book of Job in her influential study, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of ‘Paradise Regained’ (Providence, RI, 1966); for a critical reassessment of what the book of Job means for reading Paradise Regained, see Victoria Kahn, ‘Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained’, ELH 76 (2009): 625–60. 2. Lewalski comments on Milton’s negotiation of type and history: ‘This use of typology poses as part of Christ’s puzzling intellectual task in the temptation the problem of how he ought to relate himself to history, how far the past provides a fit model for his actions and wherein he is to redefine its terms in order to become himself the model for the future’ (181–2). 3. PR 1.155–60. 4. See Ken Simpson, ‘Lingering Voices, Telling Silences: Silence and the Word in Paradise Regained’, Milton Studies 35 (1997): 179–95, esp. 187–9. 5. Quoted in Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 187. 6. David Norbrook, ‘Republican Occasions in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes’, Milton Studies 42 (2003): 142–8. 7. PR 1.185–8. 8. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 227–41. 9. ‘Just as divinity and humanity are joined in the Son, so ineffable presence and human words are joined in his preaching; he has shown, by the end of the poem, that he is worthy of speaking, as well as being, God’s Word and can proceed to “Publish his Godlike office now mature”.’ Simpson, ‘Lingering Voices, Telling Silences’, 180–1.

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Appendix

Narratiuncula Exposita versibus elegiacis1 Si quem forte rosae delectant, iam magis illas Ut nitida Idalii germina floris amet. Nam Venus una deas inter pulcerrima cunctas, Vertice quot gemino clarus Olympus habet, Hunc sibi delegit florem, propriumque dicavit, Quo nullus verna pulcrior exit humo. Hunc etiam sancto rubefecit diva cruore, Cum laesit niveos impia spina pedes. Quidam etiam affirmant ipsum rubuisse, priusquam Scinderet aeternam spina scelesta cutem. Iamque Cupidineo quidam aiunt sanguine cretum, Tam variat dubiae fama vetusta rei. Hunc tamen Idaliae florem suxisse cruorem, Non facit ambiguam fabula certa fidem. Infamis Cinyrae proles formosus Adonis, Quem genuit diro crimine facta parens. Maternis crebro iuvenis dum saltibus errat, Immenso Cnidiam cepit amore deam. Seu quod dum properat nimis oscula figere nato, Laesisset nudos prona sagitta sinus. Seu quod erat iuvenis teneris peramabilis annis, Carpsit et aetatis diva proterva decus. Non modo tardipedis sprevisse cubile mariti, Sed fertur Thracem posthabuisse deum. Solus Adoni tenes. Sine te non vidit Apollo, Non vidit tremula nocte Diana face. Saepe immortali detracta est copula dextra, Et canibus saepe est copula nexa tuis.

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Saepe fera vocem est conspecta voce secutus Foemineo arguti clamor ab ore soni. Cumque fuit medii iam pars transacta diei, Phoebeoque ardens aestuat igne polus, Ilice sub nigra niveis complexa lacertis, Detinet in gremio te Venus alma suo. Narrat et historias, rerum facunda priorum Argumenta quibus suppeditasset Amor. Et monet, audaces pugnaque lacessere promptas Ut fugias cautus sollicitare feras: Ursos, fulmineumque aprum, et genus acre leonum, Et quae caussa metus sit docet illa sui. Fata vetant parere virum, vix abstitit illinc, Congrediturque fero comminus ille sui. Fixus aper candente ferit pulchra inguina dente, Mortiferumque infert vulnus Adoni tibi. Incoeptos gemitu clamores Myrrhina proles Finit, ad hos velox Cypria versa redit. Per loca currentis sylvae, qua semita nulla est, Et faciente viam, qua via nulla, metu. Saevae immortali rubuere in corpore sentes, Fixit et ambrosios spina nefanda pedes. At bona coelesti tellus contacta cruore, Et pulcro Paphiae sanguine tincta deae, Surgere purpureum iussit de termite florem, Percutiente Venus quo madefecit humum.

30

[35]

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3 Deas 7 sancto] fuso 10 aeternam] Idaliam 13 Hunc tamen Idaliae] Attamen hunc Veneris 14 certa] prisca 17 errat (1564)] erat 18 Gnidiam 21 Seu (1564)] Sed 31 Dumque 37 promtas 43 pulcra A short narrative elaborated in elegiac verse2 If roses delight anyone, let him love them even more as the bright buds of the Idalian flower. For Venus, alone the most beautiful of all the goddesses that glorious Olympus holds on its twin peaks, has cherished this as her flower, and has called it her own, more beautiful than any that rises from the spring earth. She even purpled this with her sacred blood, when the impious thorn wounded her snowy feet. Some even

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say the flower itself blushed before the wicked thorn cut her immortal flesh. Others say that it grew from Cupid’s own blood – so various is the report of antiquity on this doubtful matter. That this flower of Idalia sucked in gore, however, a true fable leaves beyond question. (1–14) The offspring of notorious Cinyras was beautiful Adonis, whom she bore who was made a mother by a wicked act. While the youth wandered frequently in his mother’s groves, he captured the Cnidian goddess with an enormous love. Whether because when she was too hasty to kiss her son an arrow, bent forward, had wounded her naked bosom, or because the young man was extremely adorable in his tender years, the wanton goddess plucked the glory even of his youth. She is said not only to have spurned the bed of her lame husband, but to have put the Thracian god after him [Adonis]. (15–24) You alone possess her, Adonis. Apollo never sees her without you, nor ever Diana by her trembling light at night. Often the leash is drawn by your immortal right hand, and the leash is often fastened on your dogs. Often, when the prey is sighted, the clamor of a shrill sound from feminine lips answers voice with voice. (25–30) When the middle of the day has now past, and the burning pole blazes with Phoebus’ fire, under a black holm oak mild Venus restrains you in her lap, holding you in her snowy arms. She tells you stories, too, eloquent about former things for which Love had supplied the plots. And she warns you to cautiously avoid provoking wild beasts who are fierce and swift to pursue with a fight, bears, and the thundering boar, and the savage race of lions; and she teaches what reason she has for her fear. (31–40) The fates prevent the man from obeying. Scarcely has he departed from there, when he meets a wild pig in close range. The wounded boar strikes the pretty groin with his shining tusk, and brings a mortal wound to you, Adonis. (41–4) The offspring of Myrrha ends with a groan what began as shouts; turning to these, the Cyprian returns swiftly, through regions of the swiftly passing forest where there is no path, and with fear making a way where there is no way. Fierce briars purpled in the immortal flesh, and the wicked thorn pierced the ambrosial feet. But the good earth, touched with heavenly gore, and dyed with the beautiful blood of the Paphian goddess, commanded a purple flower to spring from the very branch by which Venus was wounded and sprinkled the earth. (45–54)

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Notes 1. Joachim Camerarius, Elementa Rhetoricae (Basel, 1545), sigs. A6r–A7r. Variant readings, listed following the text, are from Elementa Rhetoricae (Leipzig, 1564), sigs. a2v–a3v. 2. I am indebted to Julie Hejduk, who made several improvements to my translation.

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Index

adolescentia, 149–50, 164 Adonis, 2, 56, 64, 70–3, 76, 80–4, 86–8, 199–201 Aeacus, 9, 175, 189 aenigma, 49, 74, 76 Aesop, 28, 30, 31, 48–51, 54, 73, 76, 128 aetiologia, 74 Agricola, Rudolf, De Inventione Dialectica, 152–3 allegoria, 74 Antinous, 2, 10, 150–1, 154–8, 160–5 antithesis, 181–2 Aphthonius, Progymnasmata, 70–2, 111, 137, 148, 154–8, 162, 181 compared with Quintilian’s progymnasmata, 28–32, 34–6, 73–6 in grammar school statutes, 25–6 Renaissance reception of, 14, 17–23, 151–4 Aristotle, 20, 100 Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, 105 Bacchanalia, 8–9, 88–9, 185–6 Baldwin, T. W., 25, 32, 40n, 47, 152 Barksted, William, 8–9, 13n Bathsheba, 58 Battle of the Frogs and Mice, The, 50, 53–4

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Battle of the Weasel and Mice, The, 50 Baxter, Richard, 196 Beaumont, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 164 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, 104 Bourdieu, Pierre, 4, 79 Boutcher, Warren, 66–7n Braden, Gordon, 47 Brinsley, John, Ludus Literarius, 16, 25–6, 35–6, 83–4, 125 Bucoldianus, Gerardus, De Inventione et Amplificatione Oratoria, 153–4, 158, 162–3, 165 Burrow, Colin, 85 Caesar, Gallic Wars, 77 Calame, Claude, 4, 6 Camerarius, Joachim, Elements of Rhetoric, 71–8, 81–3, 84–5, 125, 199–201, 202n Cave, Terence, 85–6, 100 Celtis, Konrad, 130–1, 142 Cephalus, 2, 9, 169–70, 173–89 Chapman, George, 61 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 130 Cheney, Patrick, 86 chreia, 18, 23, 26, 28, 31, 70–90, 127 Churchyard, Thomas, 134 Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta, 128 circumstantial reasoning, 34, 36, 125, 131–8, 154

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Index

commonplace logic see topics of invention comparatio, 19, 75 complaint, 64, 80, 95–7, 108–9, 113–14, 133–6, 139, 170–1, 175, 180, 185, 187–9 confirmatio, 34, 111–12, 123–43 confutatio, 19, 126, 129 controversiae, 19, 35, 129 copia, 29–30, 47, 85–6, 110, 127, 153–4, 157, 162, 188 Daniel, Samuel, Complaint of Rosamond, 134 David, king of Israel, 58 Davies, John, Orchestra or a Poeme of Dauncing, 9–10, 148–68 declamation, 19, 21, 50, 55, 97, 114, 125, 127, 130, 133, 136–7, 159 declamatiuncula, 59, 61 Demetrius of Phaleron, On Style, 20 Diaconus, Ignatius, 50 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ars Rhetorica, 20 Dolven, Jeff, 5 Drayton, Michael, Legend of Piers Gaveston, 134, 142 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 88 Durham, cathedral school, 25–6 ecphrasis, 19, 56, 73, 84–5, 89 Edwards, Thomas Cephalus and Procris, 8–9, 169–93 Narcissus, 187–8 effictio, 36, 56, 59, 178 enargeia, 33, 85, 100–4 encomium, 19, 21, 23, 36, 99–100, 134–5, 148–65, 180 Enterline, Lynn, 5, 80 epithalamium, 62 Erasmus, 7, 21, 24, 50–5, 73–6, 85–6, 96–7, 101–2, 153–4, 162 Adages, 51 Apothegms, 32 De Conscribendis Epistolis, 25–6, 32

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De Copia, 32, 83, 101, 128, 156 De Ratione Studii, 1, 29–30, 32 Praise of Folly, 1, 157 Sermon on the Boy Jesus, 1–2, 10, 10n, 78, 197 ethologia, 28, 36, 75–6 ethopoeia, 19, 31, 80, 137–9; see also prosopopoeia Eton school, 24–5, 32, 48 exempla, 22–3, 33, 82, 111–12, 133, 188 exergasia, 36 fabula, 18, 23, 26, 28, 47–65, 73 Feast of Adonis, 49, 56, 57–8, 65, 88, 95 Ferrari, Gloria, 6 Finkelpearl, Philip J., 151, 158 first exercises, 6, 15, 32, 34–5, 123–90; see also confirmatio; confutatio; ecphrasis; encomium; ethopoeia; locus communis; narratio; prosopopoeia; thesis; vituperatio Foucault, Michel, 4, 37n Froben, Johann, 48, 50–1, 54 Ganymede, 63–4 Gaskill, Malcolm, 141 Gellius, Aulus, Attic Nights, 127–8 Gower, John, 130 Grafton, Anthony, 70 grammar school, organisation of, 16, 23–6 grammaticus, 3, 18–19, 33–4, 73 Green, Lawrence D., 20 Harbage, Alfred, 152 Hercules, 105, 112, 159, 197 Hermaphroditus, 64, 88 Hermogenes Ars Rhetorica, 19–22 Progymnasmata, 54 Herodotus, 77 Heywood, Thomas, 8, 29 Oenone and Paris, 8, 94–119, 123, 173 Troia Britanica, 117n Homeric Hymns, 65

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Index Hoole, Charles, 31 Horace, 100 Hoskins, John, Directions for Speech and Style, 156, 158 humanists, 15–16, 22–3, 48 discursive practices of, 59–62, 74–6, 87, 124–5, 148–53, 161–5, 189, 196–7 division of grammar and rhetoric, 7, 15–17, 109–11 ideals of, 79, 148 and literary curriculum, 22, 36, 48, 51, 63, 81, 105, 138, 188 methods of teaching, 21, 33, 48, 61, 78, 85, 159, 182 Hyginus, Fabulae, 172, 175–6, 184 hypotyposis, 101 initiation, 6–7, 27, 32, 35, 56, 123 Inns of Court, 3, 9, 114, 158, 161, 165, 179 Jardine, Lisa, 70 Jesus, 1–2, 10, 56, 195–7 Judgement of Paris, 95, 98–101, 103–5, 107, 109–11, 123, 184, 197 Kahn, Coppélia, 141 Keach, William, 96, 113–14 labours of the months, 106–8 Lanham, Richard A., 143n Leander, 2, 48–9, 54–65, 73 legislatio, 18–19, 181, 197 letter writing, 26, 75, 78, 96–7 Lily, William, 22, 30–1 Livy, 77, 125, 129–30, 132–3, 140 locus communis, 19, 76 Lodge, Thomas Complaint of Elstred, 134 Scillaes Metamorphosis, 64, 113, 179 Lorich, Reinhard, Progymnasmata, 20, 26, 127, 129, 148–9, 153, 156, 159 Lover’s Complaint, A, 134–5

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217

Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, 103, 109 Manutius, Aldus, 20, 47, 49–51 marginalisation, 3, 9, 49, 59 Marlowe, Christopher, 5, 8–9, 25, 27, 29, 48–9, 73, 114 Hero and Leander, 8–9, 47–69, 79, 86–8, 95–6, 98, 101, 170, 172, 177 maxim see sententia Melanchthon, Philip, 22, 153–4 Milton, Paradise Regained, 2, 195–7 More, Thomas, Utopia, 30–1 Mosellanus, Petrus, Instructions for the First Exercises with the Rhetorician, 22, 111–12, 124–31, 149, 153 Murphy, James J., 20, 34 Musaeus, Hero and Leander, 47–8, 51, 54–5, 62, 101 Narcissus, 64, 187–8 narratio, 23, 31, 33, 35–6, 70, 73, 84, 99–101, 103–4, 110–12, 123–43 narration, 33–4, 36, 82, 96–104, 129–33; see also narratio; narratiuncula narratiuncula, 28, 31, 36, 48, 64, 71–2, 94–115, 199–201 Newman, Jane O., 146n Norbrook, David, 196 Ong, Walter, 3–5 Ovid, 47, 61, 80, 86, 114, 130 Amores, 58, 79 Ars amatoria, 79, 171, 174, 185 Epistolae ex Ponto, 77 Fasti, 125, 140 Heroides, 47, 59, 96–109, 113, 140, 152, 184 Metamorphoses, 9, 31, 71–3, 77, 79, 88–9, 169, 171–2, 174–6, 179, 185, 187–8 Panofsky, Erwin, 104 parabola, 57, 60, 81

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Index

paraphrase, 101–3 parenthesis, 174, 176, 178–9, 185 Paris, 2, 94–5, 97–100, 103–15, 123, 125, 197 Pechillo, Marilyn, 187 peer groups, 4–5, 8, 49, 186 Perkins, William, Cloud of Faithful Witnesses, 140–1 Petrarch, 53, 55, 57–8, 112, 124, 135 Pettie, George, A Petite Pallace, 176 Plato, Symposium, 155 Poliziano, Angelo, 70 primordia dicendi see rudiments of eloquence Priscian, Praeexercitamina, 19, 22, 52 progymnasmata, 3, 5–7, 10, 14–36, 49, 95, 97, 109–10, 123–4, 126–7, 142, 181, 186–9 prosopopoeia, 33, 56, 75, 155; see also ethopoeia Puttenham, George, Art of English Poetry, 160 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 21, 111, 151–4 on boundaries of grammar and rhetoric, 16, 33–4, 48–50 on correction, 27 on enargeia, 101–4 on the first exercises, 126 on the rudiments of eloquence, 27–9, 31, 73–6 Rainolde, Richard, The Foundacion of Rhetorike, 20–1 res gestae, 36, 148, 151, 155, 160–3 rhetor, 3, 18–19, 28, 33–4, 111 rites de passage, 3–7, 29, 59, 65, 73, 90, 105, 112, 173, 179–80, 186, 196 rites of integration, 6–7, 9 rites of redress, 7, 10 rites of separation, 6, 8 rites of transition, 6–8, 29, 32 Romanticism, 36 rudiments of eloquence, 6, 8, 28–32, 34–6, 47–115; see also chreia; fabula; narratiuncula; sententia

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St Paul’s School, 1, 10n, 31 Salutati, Coluccio, 130 Sarcerius, Erasmus, Rhetorica, 21, 149–50, 158, 165 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 47, 62 scene of culture, 8, 29, 57–9, 61, 73, 89, 96, 114, 177 scene of performance, 8–9, 59, 61, 86, 96, 113–14, 149, 175 scene of rhetoric, 8, 32, 57, 59, 65, 94–6, 112, 114, 123–5, 134–5, 138, 140, 151, 162, 164, 185 schoolmaster, 9, 24–7, 32, 35, 48, 73, 76, 80–1, 84–5, 149, 154, 165, 180, 187 Second Sophistic, 19, 97 sententia, 28, 31, 73, 75, 81, 127 Servius, 174, 176–7, 184 Shakespeare, William, 5, 8, 27, 29, 114 Hamlet, 137 Lucrece, 8–9, 32, 80, 123–47, 170, 175 Romeo and Juliet, 152 Sonnets, 134 Titus Andronicus, 140–1 Twelfth Night, 152 Venus and Adonis, 8, 56, 64, 70–93, 94, 98, 104, 127, 170–4, 177 Sherry, Richard, 33 Spenser, Edmund, 86 Daphnaïda, 70 Faerie Queene, The, 186 Shepheardes Calender, The, 52, 54–5, 101 Stapleton, M. L., 80 status theory, 125, 131, 136, 162 Susenbrotus, Joannes, 154 Tarquin, 2, 32, 123–5, 131–2, 135–6, 139, 141–2 Tarrant, Richard, 184 Theon, 34–5, 74, 76 Theseus, 9 thesis, 18, 72, 169–190, 197 topics of invention, 35, 83, 130, 133–7, 153–4, 156, 162, 189 topographia, 97, 101–2

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Index

219

Trussell, Thomas, 9 Turner, Victor, 4, 6–7, 29, 32

vituperatio, 19, 36 Von Carlowitz, Christoph, 126

usher, 9, 24–5

Wilson, Thomas, Art of Rhetoric, 21–2, 132, 136, 149–50, 158, 161–2 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 23–4 Woudhuysen, W. D., 88

Van Gennep, Arnold, 5–7 Vickers, Nancy, 124, 137 Virgil, 86 Aeneid, 77, 109, 138, 171, 174 Eclogues, 77 Georgics, 77, 79, 82

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Xenophon, Memorabilia, 105

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