European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance 9781442674684

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION. 'Jog on, jog on': European Career Paths
One. Greek Lives and Roman Careers in the Classical Vita Tradition
Two. From Cursus to Ductus: Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity (Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Bede)
Three. Medieval Literary Career
Four. Authority and Influence - Vocation Anxiety: The Sense of a Literary in the Sentimental Novel and Celestina
Five. Versions of a Career: Petrarch His Renaissance Commentators
Six. Judging a Literary Career: The Case of Antonio de Guevara (14807-1545)
Seven. Arms versus Letters: The Poetics of War and the Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain
Eight. Divine Poetry as a Career Move: The Complexities and Consolations of Following David
Nine. 'Novells of his devise': Chaucerian and Virgilian Career Paths in Spenser's Februarie Eclogue
Ten. Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel: The Portrayal of a Literary Career
Eleven. Epic Violence: Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes
Twelve. Renaissance Englishwomen and the Literary Career
Works Cited
Contributors

Citation preview

European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance

This page intentionally left blank

European Literary Careers The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Edited by Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2002 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4779-3

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: European literary careers : the author from antiquity to the Renaissance Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8020-4779-3 1. European literature - History and criticism. 2. Classical literature - History and criticism. 3. Literature - Authorship. I. Cheney, Patrick Gerard, 1949- II. De Armas, Frederick Alfred PN151.E87 2002

809

C2002-901025-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

AUTOLYCUS: Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way. And merrily hent the stile-a; A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a. Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

This page intentionally left blank

contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction 'Jog on, jog on': European Career Paths 3 Patrick Cheney 1 Greek Lives and Roman Careers in the Classical Vita Tradition 24 Joseph Farrell 2 From Cursus to Ductus: Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity (Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Bede) 47 Mark Vessey 3 Medieval Literary Careers: The Theban Track 104 Robert R. Edwards 4 Authority and Influence - Vocation and Anxiety: The Sense of a Literary Career in the Sentimental Novel and Celestina 129 James F. Burke 5 Versions of a Career: Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 146 William J. Kennedy 6 Judging a Literary Career: The Case of Antonio de Guevara (14807-1545) 165 Kathleen Bollard de Broce

viii

Contents

7 Arms versus Letters: The Poetics of War and the Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 186 Anne J. Cruz 8 Divine Poetry as a Career Move: The Complexities and Consolations of Following David 206 Anne Lake Prescott 9 'Novells of his devise': Chaucerian and Virgilian Career Paths in Spenser 'sFebruarie Eclogue 231 Patrick Cheney 10 Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel: The Portrayal of a Literary Career 268 Frederick A. de Armas 11 Epic Violence: Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes Alvaro Molina 12 Renaissance Englishwomen and the Literary Career 302 Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay, with Elaine Beilin and Anne Shaver Works Cited 325 Contributors 363

287

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

European Literary Careers grew out of a summer institute, The Artist in an Age of Imperial Culture: Careers in the Early Modern Period/ held at Perm State University in June 1998 and codirected by the volume editors. We are grateful to our funding agencies at Perm State: the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies; the Dean's Office, College of Liberal Arts; the Research and Graduate Studies Office, College of Liberal Arts; the Program Innovation Fund, Continuing and Distance Education; and Special Programs and Faculty Involvement, Office of Summer Sessions. We are also grateful to sponsorship from the Departments of English, Spanish/Italian/Portuguese, and Comparative Literature, as well as Don Bialostosky, Leon Lyday, and Caroline D. Eckhardt. During the institute, Peter Thomson served as a conscientious Research Assistant, rescuing us and the institute participants on countless occasions. We are grateful for his cheerful help. We are also grateful to the institute participants themselves, several of whom have contributed essays to this volume. Finally, we would like to thank the Visiting Faculty from the institute: Judith H. Anderson, Albert Russell Ascoli, Leonard Barkan, Anne J. Cruz, Joseph Farrell, and Anne Lake Prescott some of whom also contributed essays. Three research assistants helped with various phases of manuscript preparation, and we thank each in turn: Amy Barber; Colin Fewer; and Elizabeth Gross. At the University of Toronto Press, we would like to thank Suzanne Rancourt, for shepherding the project along a very complex route; Barb Porter, for presiding over the publication phase; and Miriam Skey, for copy-editing a very complex manuscript.

x Acknowledgments

Special thanks go to Robert R. Edwards, who offered judicious advice and generous help throughout the entire project; and to Janel Mueller, Dean of Humanities at the University of Chicago, for her generous support of the book project. Finally, we thank our intrepid band of contributors, who have weathered a long process with great patience and scholarly skill.

EUROPEAN LITERARY CAREERS

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION

'Jog on, jog on': European Career Paths Patrick Cheney

The essays collected in this volume explore various paths of European careers. Primarily, the careers are literary, but occasionally a nonliterary path crosses over them; the terrain is traversed by men as well as by women, from classical antiquity through the Renaissance, principally in Italy, France, England, and Spain, in poetry and in drama, in prose fiction and in nonfiction. The key word here is 'explore/ for the ground is not merely vast and intricate; it remains largely underexplored. In fact, 'career criticism' has emerged almost exclusively in English Renaissance studies, and primarily in studies of Edmund Spenser, Renaissance England's first national poet. As Jerome S. Dees put it in 1997, 'Critical concern with Spenser's "career" has of late become a growth industry.'1 Indeed, during the last few decades this industry has spawned no fewer than three books and over twenty essays, several of them seminal in the field.2 The reason for such industrial growth in Spenser in particular is perhaps worth exploring in another place; here we need mainly to register the impetus for the present volume: Frederick de Armas and I hope that what has proved so fertile in Spenser studies might profitably take root in other fields. As the specialists from classics, medieval studies, women's studies, and Renaissance studies in Italy, France, and Spain assembled here know, they are breaking new ground with their essays. Joseph Farrell might well speak for many of them when saying that classicists have never even asked the question, 'What led Virgil and so many of his readers to find in the shape of his oeuvre the trajectory of a well-defined career?' Previous criticism has not failed to discuss the 'careers' of Virgil and his European heirs, from Dante and Petrarch to Ronsard and Cervantes.

4 Patrick Cheney

Effectively, most critical overviews of these and other authors can be construed as a version of 'career criticism/ while familiar professional topics in commentary on them - authorship and agency, influence and intertextuality, genre and gender, ideology and nationhood - either bear on career criticism or are its principal instruments. Accordingly, today we might be hard-pressed to pick up a piece of criticism and not find the word 'career' in it (including in studies of Shakespeare, who is popularly known not to have had a literary career).3 Yet if so much criticism bears on notions of 'career' - does in fact contribute to our understanding of a writer's career - how can it be that the topic is under-explored? The answer has to do with what 'career criticism' by definition is, has been, or has become. In turn, such criticism depends naturally on the notion of a literary career itself. While each essay in the volume responds individually to these questions, we might try to 'tie their intrinsicate knot' here at the outset. As we shall see, the relation between the two supplies us with the fundamental axiom for the volume as a whole: career criticism is a relatively recent form of literary discourse that attempts to describe - and usually to argue the value of understanding - the idea of a literary career for a given writer or group of writers. By 'literary career/ what do we mean? In trying to define this complex idea, we might not find it unwise to resort to what Walter Bagehot said of nation-building in 1887: 'We know what it is when you do not ask us, but we cannot very quickly explain or define it.'4 Alternatively, we might recall our axiom, hoping to proceed to a more satisfying answer by relying on the practice of the inventors of career criticism, each working in a different field, with different authors, and with different methodologies: Lawrence Lipking, a specialist in eighteenthcentury English studies, who registers a comparatist grasp of the canonical literary tradition from Virgil and Dante, to Goethe and Keats, to Rilke and Mallarme; and Richard Helgerson, a specialist in the English Renaissance, who is also a comparatist but who focuses on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English studies. In 1981, Lipking published The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers, and then in 1983 Helgerson published Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jo Milton, and the Literary System. Working independently of each other, Lipking and Helgerson basically invented career criticism; they are its principal pioneers. For obvious reasons, however, Helgerson has been more influential in English Renaissance studies than has Lipking.5 In The Life of the Poet, Lipking observes that 'the life of the poet - the

Introduction 5

shape of his life as a poet - has not been exhausted. Indeed, it has hardly been studied' (viii). Since 1981, things have changed some, but not much, especially outside Spenser studies. Specifically, Lipking declares that his book is 'about the life of the poet: poetic vocations, poetic careers, poetic destinies. It traces a number of great poets through the crucial moments of their development and tries to discern what problems and solutions they have in common. By listening carefully both to what poets say about their works and to what works say about themselves, it hopes to arrive at a clearer understanding of the way that a poem can constitute the experience of a life. And it also hopes to offer new ways of reading poems' (ix). Accordingly, Lipking structures his book around three points: 'the moment of initiation or breakthrough; the moment of summing up; and the moment of passage, when the legacy or soul of the poet's work is transmitted to the next generation' (ix). Lipking's key methodology is thus to read the poems of great poets, including Virgil, Dante, Jonson, Blake, Yeats, Goethe, Whitman, Auden, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Keats, and Rilke, for evidence of their self-conscious sense of vocation or destiny, their idea of a literary career. If Lipking seeks a great poet's process of self-discovery, Helgerson in Self-Crowned Laureates seeks the poet's process of self-presentation. As Helgerson himself puts the difference in a footnote: 'Lipking's book, which I saw only after mine was in the hands of its publisher, is concerned with many of the same issues (though not, for the most part, with the same texts) that interest me here. Lipking, too, writes of what he calls "great careers," careers of the laureate sort. But where I direct my attention to the outer workings of both careers and texts - that is, to the system of differences by which a poet might make his status known - Lipking directs his to the inner development of both. He emphasizes the individual poetic utterance, the parole; I emphasize the literary system, the langue. The books are thus complementary accounts of the same phenomenon' (153). Rather than reading poems per se, especially to discover the points at which poets inscribe one of the three phases of self-discovery, Helgerson examines three structural points in the poets' texts, especially those in which poets present themselves: 'I thus talk often of proems, prefaces, and prologues. Pressure falls too on endings and on intermediate passages of transition or challenge, when the role seems no longer to fit the world, and these will also demand attention' (13). That is, whereas Lipking looks at three phases of the poet's maturation over the course of his career, Helgerson looks at three corresponding points of self-presentation in the poet's works. Moreover,

6 Patrick Cheney

whereas Lipking's study is diachronic and comparatist in scope and methodology, ranging from classical to modern, Helgerson's study is synchronic, looking at just the English Renaissance 'literary system' itself. To Lipking's three stages of inward initiation, summing up, and passage, Helgerson uses his methodology to introduce a three-part classification of English Renaissance poets, although his book focuses on the first: laureates, amateurs, and professionals. Laureates are the national writers, like Spenser, Jonson, and Milton (or Daniel, Drayton, and Chapman): those writers who present themselves as national leaders throughout their careers. The amateurs are the writers of pastime, like Sidney and Donne: those who write poetry as a toy in their youth and then 'repent' in their maturity, turning to other forms of national service, whether for church or state. The professionals are primarily the public playwrights, like Shakespeare or Middleton: those who write because they need to make a living. What both studies share may help us begin to answer the second of our questions: What is career criticism? Helgerson and Lipking both produce a holistic commentary on an individual writer's work: a criticism that tries to come to terms with the total oeuvre of a writer, from beginning to end. This practice differs from most criticism on individual writers, which looks at a single work, a single genre, a single topic, theme, metaphor, myth, problem, representation, or whatever. Such holistic commentary also differs from other overview accounts by emphasizing the category of the literary (rather than, say, the biographical, which often includes the non-literary, such as a writer's interest in backgammon, her attendance at church, or his sexual experience). Initially, then, we can define career criticism as a form of commentary that looks holistically at the literary dimension of a writer's life, especially as that life is grounded in his or her works. Such commentary is not without its dangers, especially today, with our profession-wide commitment to dissident writers and our interest in critiquing especially those who are not; as Lipking candidly reveals: To view a poet's work as a whole is to commit an act of totalitarianism. The muse herself is democratic' (xii). If for Lipking as for Helgerson the totalitarian (or at least totalizing) critic lies at the centre of career criticism, for both scholars the corresponding centre for the idea of a literary career is that of a totalizing authorial self-agency (one that did not suddenly appear in the seventeenth century but emerged in classical and medieval culture, as several essays in the volume verify).6 In Lipking's terms, 'poems (at least since

Introduction 7

the time of Hesiod) have always confided something about the life of the poet: not necessarily his personality or even his individuality, but his sense of a vocation and a destiny... [E]very major Western poet after Homer, I believe, has left some work that records the principles of his own poetic development' (viii). Thus, Lipking 'accepts the testimony of poems as decisive evidence about the way that poets conceive, or invent, their careers ... [T]he poet... claim[s] to have achieved an identity, to have shaped his life into art' (x). Similarly, Helgerson writes that 'the something of great constancy at the center of the laureate's work is easily defined. It is the poet himself. His deliberately serious poetic is grounded on a serious, centered self (40). Accordingly, Helgerson's book is 'about three poets whose ambition preceded and determined their work, three poets who strove to achieve a major literary career and said so ... [T]he ambition not only to write great poems but also to fill the role of the great poet - shaped everything these three men wrote ... As well as presenting poems, masques, plays, and pamphlets, they were always presenting themselves' (1-2). Unlike with the amateur or the professional writer, the laureate's national service depends, for Helgerson as for Lipking, upon the power of an inward core: 'The laureate mediates between the eternal realm of perfect form and the temporal realm of death and birth... [S]uch a poet presents a self whose authority derives from inner and outer alignment with the unmoving axis of normative value. His laureate function requires that he speak from the center' (Self-Crowned Laureates 12). By focusing on how great poets self-consciously shape their career, both Helgerson and Lipking turn naturally to Virgil, 'who supplied the pattern of a career to so many later poets' (Lipking xi). This Roman author, who necessarily plays a centralizing role in the present volume, transacts his famous progression from lower to higher forms of pastoral, georgic, and epic, and was understood to have done so by his own contemporaries. Indeed, many of the essays use the famous Virgilian triad - known during the Middle Ages as the rota Vergiliana or Wheel of Virgil - quite literally as a vehicle for tracking later poets, especially during the Renaissance (as William J. Kennedy does on Petrarch, Patrick Cheney on Spenser, Anne Lake Prescott on Du Bartas, or Frederick A. de Armas on Cervantes), while the first essay, by Farrell, traces the evolution of the Virgilian career idea from Greek and earlier Roman notions of the poet's life and canon. As Farrell and others show, the Virgilian career model supplies us with yet another feature for our definition of both the idea of a literary career and criticism on it: the

8 Patrick Cheney

stable authorial centre emphasized by Lipking and Helgerson is also in motion, progressively maturing from lower to higher forms along a temporal life span. For many contributors here, a 'life' becomes a 'career' when a writer can be seen to plot his time on earth through a sequence of literary works that stage both his and the work's development. As Lipking remarks, a poet like Virgil, 'who lives with such responsibility has only one way to meet it: planning ahead. To husband destiny, finally, one must be able to think in terms of decades, perhaps generations ... The master plan, like scaffolding, holds everything in place' (79-80). The origin of the English word 'career' emphasizes this particular feature of our definitions. As the Oxford English Dictionary reveals, the word occurs first in the sixteenth century; thus, it is a Renaissance coinage. But rather than referring to 'A person's course or progress through life' (which is an invention of the early nineteenth century (Def. 5), the word 'career' derives from the specific arena of the athletic event, in particular horse racing: 'The ground on which a race is run, a racecourse' (Def. 1). Accordingly, during the Renaissance the word can also mean the career 'Of a horse: A short gallop at full speed' (Def. 2); 'By extension: A running course' (Def. 3); and, figuratively, 'Rapid and continuous "course of action, uninterrupted procedure"' (Def. 4). The sixteenth-century definition of 'career' as athletic 'course,' however, derives from the Latin word cursus, the course of a chariot-race, which writers like Virgil and Ovid used repeatedly to represent their maturation as poets. Ovid, for instance, concludes the Amoves by announcing his turn from elegy to tragedy: T am come to the last turning-post my elegies will graze.'7 With even more fanfare, Virgil opens Book III of the Georgics with his imagined triumphal entry into Rome to greet Caesar on his shrine: 'In his honour I, a victor resplendent in Tyrian purple, will drive a hundred four-horse chariots beside the stream.'8 As Leo Braudy writes in The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, 'Although the Latin cursus remains most obviously in the English course, it shares a more intriguing metaphorical relation with career: Both are words that first applied to horse races and later to the stages of professional development.'9 Braudy is referring to the cursus honorum, or the tripartite progression through the stages of a Roman political career, as practised most famously by Cicero and Julius Caesar. As Braudy also suggests, the political cursus was important to literary history because it supplied the progressive track for the literary career of Virgil, and because, in turn, a

Introduction 9

few centuries later St Augustine relied on the literary cursus of Virgil and his Roman heirs to form the subsequent pattern of Christian development (61, 65-6, 80-9, 161-80). Quite remarkably, the 'career' of the writer, the sportsman, the politician, and the divine are all historically linked; such a link may help explain why writers often work from a single career idea that unfolds generic, amorous, political, and religious dimensions. The idea of a literary career, then, foregrounds the poet's public role in the multi-sphered life of the nation, especially its institutions of family, state, and church. An originary case is Ovid, who genially permits us to look more concretely at what we might call a career document - a text or a passage in a text that represents an author self-consciously reflecting on the progressive idea of a literary career. As has long been recognized, such documents are historically important because they provide information on an author's own sense of his or her project - whether in the form of self-discovery or self-presentation or both. The Ovidian document is not arbitrary (Ovid himself would not allow that), for the passage from Book I, Elegy I.xv, of the Amoves may well be the second oldest surviving representation of a literary career that is simultaneously a piece of career criticism: Tityrus et segetes Aeneiaque arma legentur, Roma triumphati dum caput orbis erit. (Ovid, Amoves I.xv.25-6)

Tityrus and the harvest, and the arms of Aeneas, will be read as long as Rome shall be capital of the world she triumphs o'er.

In his own inaugural volume of poetry, Ovid delivers his great paean to poetic fame in part by inscribing the Virgilian career model, which he astutely unfolds in generic, political, erotic, and philosophical terms. First, Ovid represents the tripartite Virgilian progression from the Eclogues to the Georgics to the Aeneid in its proper order. Second, he dutifully situates the generic progression within a political context: the Empire of Augustan Rome. Third, he identifies the high imperialist telos of this model: fama. And fourth, he even sublimates an erotic, sexual, or gendered dimension to the program by presenting the idea of a male poet singing the praise of a female city. This representation thus identifies our four primary elements of the Virgilian career model - or more accurately, of Ovid's understanding of the Virgilian model: a progres-

10 Patrick Cheney

sion of genres, a political context, a philosophical telos, and a gender dynamics. For Ovid, Virgil's model of pastoral, georgic, and epic serves the feminized Empire in order to secure her fame and that of her male poet.10 Yet Ovid would not be Ovid if he were as reverent toward his great precursor as this account makes it seem. In particular, his use of the conjunction dum (while) suggests slyly that he may be deauthorizing Virgil by subtly restricting and even playfully ending the temporal telos of Rome.11 Ovid's distich does not merely afford a rare opportunity to witness one major poet representing - and even parodying - another major poet's career; it is itself fixed intertextually between other important career documents. Thereby, it forms a historical genealogy, consisting for our purposes here of one earlier document that Ovid is himself imitating, and two later ones that translate and then re-translate his original. The document Ovid imitates is the famous originary text not merely for European literary careers but also for European career criticism: the four-line verse prefacing early editions of the Aeneid: Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono, Gratum opus agricolis; at nunc horrentia Martis. I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, then, leaving the woodland, constrained the neighbouring fields to serve the husbandmen, however grasping - a work welcome to farmers: but now of Mars' bristling.

As Gian Biagio Conte notes, Ovid imitates these verses in the very opening lines of the Amores (I.i.1-4).12 Many students of the Renaissance know that these verses were 'prefixed to the opening lines of Renaissance editions of Virgil's Aeneid/ as well as that Spenser famously imitates them in the Proem to Book I of The Faerie Queene.13 Yet, as Conte reminds us, the verses 'must have been published no later than the age of Tiberius' (A.D. 14-37), and Ovid's imitation of them reveals that by the time he wrote the prologue to the second edition of the Amores the verses 'must have ... [existed] in a contemporary edition of the Aeneid' (85,87). The pseudo-Virgilian verses are the first evidence we possess of a Virgilian cursus. They are, in other words, the oldest evidence we possess of 'a Roman idea of a literary career/ and signifi-

Introduction 11

cantly they appear to be a versified form of literary criticism itself. Ovid's ability both to represent and to parody this document suggests how well he himself understood and could command the Virgilian career idea. Sixteen hundred years later, when Christopher Marlowe produces the first complete translation of the Amores in any European vernacular (probably about 1585), we can witness a curious yet important afterlife for Ovid's intertextual exchange with the Virgilian career model. For in his translation of Ovid Marlowe collapses the Virgilian triad into pastoral and epic, eliding the georgic; he scrambles the sacred generic order, putting epic before pastoral; he minimizes the high ring of poetic fame designed to valorize the poet of Empire; and perhaps not surprisingly, he neuters the principals, as if to deauthorize Virgil even more than Ovid dared to allow: Aeneas' war, and lityrus shall be read, While Rome of all the conquered world is head.14

The motive driving Marlowe's (mis-)translation here may appear lost, but most likely he is trying to deauthorize the figure in his own literary system known by his contemporaries as England's Virgil: Edmund Spenser. Both Marlowe's elision and his implied disrespect are what Ben Jonson erases in his own translation (published alongside Marlowe's in the early editions of Ovid's Elegies), proving that the shortness of the English heroic couplet in comparison with the Latin elegiac couplet was no excuse for the erasure: Tityrus, Tillage, Aeney shall be read, Whilst Rome of all the conquered world is head.15

The historical career document genealogy here, which traces from Virgil's original three-part career, to the pseudo-Virgilian verses prefacing early editions of the Aeneid, to Ovid's imitation of these verses in the Amores, to Marlowe's translation of this imitation, and finally to Jonson's retranslation, provides another feature to the idea of a literary career and criticism on it - one indeed addressed by most essays in this volume: intertextuality. The particular intertextual succession here intimates how one writer's idea of a literary career often derives from the career idea of another, and specifically how the famed Virgilian Wheel is able to travel a considerable distance, both in mileage and in time, long after

12 Patrick Cheney

the writer's own death. Among the essays, Robert R. Edwards especially charts this travelogue principle, speaking of a 'Theban Track/ with specific stops in Statius, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate. Indeed, most of the essays see the idea of a literary career and practise career criticism consistently in terms of a cohesive template, and here we can untie our knot concerning our twin questions: career criticism is a special branch of critical theory that attempts to delineate a writer's self-conscious inscription of a pattern of genres, which itself responds to the careers of other writers, in order to pursue literary, political, religious, and sometimes erotic goals. Authorship and agency, genre and genre patterning, imitation and intertextuality, politics and religion, sexuality and gender - all become part of a complex template for defining criticism on the idea of a literary career. Yet career criticism need not restrict itself to this definition or template. It need not, for example, limit itself to its energizing core: an author's self-conscious patterning of genres over a temporal span to achieve a set of personal or professional goals. Take the case of the world's most famous author. Neither Lipking nor Helgerson has much to say about Shakespeare. Lipking restricts his discussion to Jonson's memorial poem on Shakespeare, while Helgerson remarks that Shakespeare is not a 'laureate' like Spenser (nor an 'amateur' like Sidney) but a 'professional' because he is a 'writer ... who made ... [his] living from the public theater' (Self-Crowned Laureates 4-5): Tor two decades in comedy, history, tragedy, and romance, Shakespeare explored the indirect ways by which his playful mimetic art touched on a grace beyond the reach of the professors of seriousness' (39). Beyond the reach. In fact, it is in the 'involvement of the poet as conscious prosecutor and unconscious defendant that such passages [as he has been looking at] differ from an otherwise similar episode in Shakespeare, the rejection of Falstaff. Shakespeare does not get rid of Falstaff; Hal does. Judgment comes from within the play as a function of Hal's kingly office, not from without as a function of Shakespeare's poetic one. Shakespeare is simply not there. The laureates are' (10). Helgerson is referring to the famous dictum that while colleagues such as Marlowe chronically insert themselves into their works, Shakespeare reticently does not. When critics do allow Shakespeare to enter the conversation on 'careers,' as Peter Thomson does, they examine only the material constraints of his 'professional career' in the theatre. On the one hand, it would be possible to find in the Shakespeare canon the kinds of career documents we have examined: the two Virgilian-based dedicatory epistles

Introduction 13

to the earl of Southampton prefacing Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, for instance, or even the pastoral Sonnet 102 and the epic Sonnet 106, or most substantially the recurrent metapoetry and metadrama throughout the plays.16 On the other hand, it could still prove profitable to examine Shakespeare's 'career' holistically without insisting on his intentionality in fashioning the kind of literary career ascribed to such national writers as Virgil and Spenser. Simply in terms of genre fertility, Shakespeare's canon is noteworthy for being among the most sustained combinations of dramatic and poetic forms on record: forty extant plays, spread across the forms of tragedy, comedy, history, and romance; and five substantial poems, spread across the forms of minor epic, sonnet sequence, medieval complaint, and philosophical hymn. Since the late nineteenth century, critics have been obsessed with tracking Shakespeare's 'development' in his canon, but almost exclusively the canon has been limited to the plays, neglecting the important contribution of the poems, and few would be willing, given Shakespeare's famous reticence to show himself in his works, to imagine the great bard riding one career car or another, whether Virgilian, Ovidian, or otherwise. In fact, what seems required of Shakespeare's career - unlike, say, Spenser's - is precisely a methodology that fuses authorial intentionality with social construction. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare himself appears to stage an early modern version of this fusion in the figure of Autolycus. As a professional thief, Autolycus begins the play committed to his own will power, as he tries to rob the simple Bohemian shepherds of their money, as he himself confesses to the audience at the outset: 'My traffic is sheets ... With die and drab I purchas'd this caparison, and my revenue is the silly cheat.'17 Yet, as the strange and wondrous action of the play unfolds, Autolycus finds himself mysteriously swept along by events he no longer can control, until he is haplessly forced to admit, in a state not devoid of gleeful perplexity: 'I have done good ... against my will' (V.ii.124). Of self-conscious literary origin - 'litter'd under Mercury' (IV.iii.25) - this engaging trickster, who often quite literally steals the show in performance, looks conspicuously like a kind of parody of his witty creator. Specifically, both Shakespeare and Autolycus, during their respective careers of creation and crime, enact what is fundamentally a sixteenth-century form of authorship, not seen since the closing of the theatres in antiquity, and only then in intermittent form: the sustained combination of poetry and drama within a single career. Importantly for Shakespeare, this hybrid

14 Patrick Cheney

practice traces to ancient Rome, and most importantly for this Ovidian poet par excellence, as for Marlowe and Jonson, to the great Naso, the author not merely of the Metamorphoses but also of the tragedy Medea (extant in two lines). As we will recall, the Amores ends with Ovid's career 'meta' from elegy to tragedy - a career route he traverses also in Il.xviii and IILi.18 Just as Shakespeare himself wrote Richard II and Venus and Adonis, Love's Labors Lost and The Rape ofLucrece, Romeo and Juliet and The Sonnets, as Francis Meres so astutely observed in 1598 (qtd Riverside Shakespeare 1970), so Autolycus routinely sings erotic songs and acts out parts in dramas of his own devise. The first time we see this child of Mercury he is singing an erotic song, 'When daffadils begin to peer/ which he tells us 'Are summer songs for me and my aunts, / While we lie tumbling in the hay' (IV.iii.1-12). Immediately following, Autolycus tricks the Old Shepherd's son, the Clown, by playing the part of one who has been robbed by a 'servant of the Prince' (87) - a figure at court who has 'compass'd a motion of the Prodigal Son' (96-7) - staged a puppet show - and who has now taken Autolycus's clothes and dressed him in his own 'garments' (of course, this figure is Autolycus himself!). While Autolycus routinely combines such theatrical trickery with erotic singing, Shakespeare situates this Ovidian generic activity in a locale that is distinctly Virgilian: first, the pastoral landscape of Bohemia; and later, the courtly kingdom of Sicilia. Quite literally, the Ovidian Autolycus sings songs and puts on plays along the Virgilian path of pastoral and epic. He is at once an Ovidian poetplaywright and a Virgilian shepherd-courtier. Equally to the point here, he is a figure of both authorial agency and (not so much social construction as) cosmic construction, and we might profitably speculate that it is such a model for the writer, so clearly cast in response to such selfdriven authors as the Virgilian Spenser and the Ovidian Marlowe, that innately appealed to Shakespeare. While the essays in this volume tend not to track such a model of authorship and literary career, we could make other caveats as well. For instance, the volume does not narrate a formal or continuous history of literary careers from the Greeks through the Spanish Golden Age; such an enterprise is impossible, certainly here, but probably anywhere. Regrettably, we could not include many writers, topics, and works, including some major ones who played an important role in the story the volume tells. While we present one essay focusing on the careers of women writers (by Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay, with Elaine Beilin and Anne Shaver), and three on the intersection of literary

Introduction 15

and non-literary careers (by Mark Vessey, Anne J. Cruz, and Kathleen Bollard de Broce), we could have done more than we did in both categories. Finally, we could have explored the categories of sexual orientation and race: homoeroticism, for instance, or Jewishness, or blackness. As a consolation, we would recall that one of the primary goals of the volume is not to circumnavigate the career globe but simply to open it up for expansion. The essays assembled here nonetheless gather together a general thesis: that the idea of a literary career evolves slowly yet significantly, that Virgil is central to it, and that the principle of periodization from classical, medieval, and Renaissance cultures helps to elucidate the details of that evolution. The essays that follow often correlate an author's sense of a career to the period of history in which he or she is writing. Consequently, we hope that the volume will facilitate an enriched understanding of the relations among an author, his or her works, and the period in which he or she lived. Along our own exploratory route, we have also discovered a unifying thread: the idea of travel, the metaphor of journey, and in particular the writer in motion, whether jogging like Autolycus down 'the footpath way' in search of song, dance, and purse; wandering like Don Quixote along the myriad roads of Spain in search of knightly adventure in honour of Dulcinea, the most beautiful woman in the world; or driving like Virgil in his splendid triumphal chariot down the imperial highway to Rome. The story the volume tells may begin in ancient Greece, but it moves quickly westward to Rome, from whence it spokes northward along diverse routes, especially those leading to Paris, Madrid, and London. In a sense, though, all roads do lead to Rome: they lead up to it; they lead out of it; they circle round it (like ring roads in rural England or beltways in metropolitan America); and occasionally they even lift divinely off in flight from it. The distance travelled, whether horizontal or vertical, turns out to take three interrelated forms: narratival, as when figures in a fiction set out on their own quests; selfrepresentational, as when authors travel a certain career path; and finally periodic, as when critics track the evolution of historical eras in the wide gap of time. Pursuing the centralizing metaphor of travel and trajectory, we divide the volume according to a general route of historical chronology, from antiquity and the early Christian era through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the opening essay, 'Greek Lives and Roman Careers in the Classical Vita tradition/ Joseph Farrell traces the trajec-

16 Patrick Cheney

tory from the Greek tradition of the author's life to the Roman idea of a literary career, which he finds consolidated in and around Virgil and his famous three-part generic progression. Greek poets, Farrell suggests, had lives, but Roman poets had careers. Looking at such Greek poets as Archilochus and Pindar, Theocritus and Callimachus, and such preVirgilian Roman poets as Livius Andronicus and Ennius, Lucilius, and Catullus, Farrell argues that 'the idea of a literary career took shape in Rome under the specific influence of the careerist ideology of the patron class/ with its progressive political paradigm, the cursus honorum. The next three essays take us into the early Christian and medieval era. Mark Vessey, in 'From Cursus to Ductus: Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity (Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Bede),' divides his essay into two major parts. The first examines three 'themes in the experience and reflection of intellectuals - above all, Christian intellectuals - of the late Roman period': literary profession and spiritual progress; literary oeuvre and the idea of literature'; and literary authorship and figures of writing. Beginning from this 'groundplot/ Vessey proceeds to his second part, 'a detailed inquiry into the genesis of one of the most distinctive features of late ancient and medieval Christian ideology: the figure of the author as scribe/ He suggests that the 'fiction of authorship' that he has discerned 'stands at a significant distance from the visions of literary career entertained by Roman poets of the Augustan age and revived by their Renaissance imitators': 'Whereas the career model emphasizes hierarchies of genre and personal status, the scribal model abolishes both types of distinction in favour of manual fidelity to a "common text" inscribed at God's behest.' More specifically, Vessey suggests that for the 'professionally aspiring language of the cursus/ the scribal model 'substitutes a professedly humble habit of the ductus, the pen's obedience to a line already traced in the mind, if not on the page.' Acknowledging that the 'temporal processes of this substitution are difficult to reconstruct,' he nonetheless fixes its 'main coordinates' with 'reasonable accuracy': 'they lie, on the one hand, in the political and bureaucratic protocols of the late Roman Empire and its successor states, and, on the other, in the institutional imaginary of the biblical-ascetic Christianity that established itself in the West between the fourth and seventh centuries/ Next, Robert R. Edwards, in 'Medieval Literary Careers: The Theban Track/ suggests that if the Roman career idea was one of 'program/ the medieval idea was one of 'practice' - a dynamic movement through various genres rather than a teleological, hierarchical progression from

Introduction 17

lower to higher forms. Edwards initially shows how Dante transposes the Virgilian triad to their respective topics and forms: ardour in love to lyric; control of the will to didactic lyric; and prowess in arms to epic. Then he locates the medieval idea in Marie de France, focusing on the author's 'succession' and 'textual genealogy': 'Writers have careers to the extent and in the way that they position themselves with respect to literary tradition.' Finally, Edwards focuses on a specific genealogy of four European writers from Rome, Italy, and England - Statius, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate - who all organize their literary careers around a Theban track/ the story of the siege of Thebes and its 'emblematic tale of internecine rivalry': 'They thereby align complex authorial rivalry and intertextual poetics with a narrative topic that radically questions the heroic culture celebrated most clearly in the epic.' Lastly, James F. Burke, 'Authority and Influence - Vocation and Anxiety: The Sense of a Literary Career in the Sentimental Novel and Celestina,' focuses on a prose genre perfected by Fernando de Rojas's medieval masterpiece, in order to suggest what may have led to the development of 'an emerging sense of literary individuality, of the personal "literary career/" in sixteenth-century Spain, especially Cervantes' Virgilian selfpresentation. What Burke finds 'here at the outset of modern Hispanic prose can only be viewed as an 'anxiety of influence' in a mode opposite to that described by Harold Bloom': 'Rojas does not completely resent the fact that he is forced to use traditional language, images, and themes ... Rather he is anxious in regard to asserting his independence.' The remaining essays in the volume take us into the European Renaissance of Italy, Spain, France, and England. William J. Kennedy, in 'Visions of a Career: Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators/ suggests that Petrarch's oscillation between poles of confident idealism and diffident contingency 'shapes the profile of his career for later commentaries in early printed editions of the Rime sparse, thereby consolidating a Petrarchan career paradigm throughout Europe until the seventeenth century. Looking at such idealizing career documents as the 'Letter to Posterity/ the 'Coronation Oration/ and the programmatic statements about poetry in Petrarch's Virgilian pastoral, the Bucolicum carmen, and his epic, the Africa, Kennedy shows how this founding father of the Renaissance could at times present himself as a Virgilian poet pursuing a confident and set career pattern. Looking at various collections of letters, however, Kennedy discovers a 'less predictable view': 'Here Petrarch represents the pattern as a progressive journey toward self-understanding on paths by no means obvious

18 Patrick Cheney

or direct but rather oblique and only half-perceived.' Thus, such fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Petrarchan scholars as Antonia da Tempo, Alessandro Vellutello, Fausto da Longiano, Giovan Andrea Gusualdo, Bernardino Danielle, and Ludovico Castelvetro process these oscillations, revealing that Petrarch's career had come to figure many possibilities. Kathleen Bollard de Broce, in 'Judging a Literary Career: The Case of Antonio de Guevara (14807-1545)/ follows up on one of these possibilities - in fact, an important part of career criticism already introduced by Vessey: often a writer pursues a literary career while simultaneously pursuing a non-literary career. Taking this phenomenon as her principal topic, Bollard de Broce discusses the religious career ladder in the literary works and public career of Guevara. This public official, she observes, 'follows neither a Virgilian nor an Ovidian model/ alternatively selecting a 'genre patterning' of 'biographies, manuals for courtiers, devotional works, and collections of letters, and devotional works': 'Guevara drew his authority to address Charles V not from an established literary career, but from his various professional roles as preacher in the royal chapel, official chronicler, commissioner for the Inquisitor General, courtier, and bishop. Political, religious, and literary rhetoric inseparably create his career.' Anne J. Cruz, 'Arms versus Letters: The Poetics of War and the Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain/ extends the principle relating literary to non-literary careers by looking into the poetics of war in the career of the early modern Spanish poet, including Garcilaso, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes. Cruz contributes to 'the diverse aspects of literary careers studied in this collection' by centring on 'the changes in the perception of both arms and letters as possible dual professions in the two centuries known as Spain's Golden Age/ as well as on the way in which 'those changes were themselves inscribed in - and as - literature.' Specifically, she shows that letters, represented by various literary genres, but above all in Don Quixote, 'have shifted and deviated as much from the lyrical poeticization of war as from its historicizing narrative.' Anne Lake Prescott, in 'Divine Poetry as a Career Move: The Complexities and Consolations of Following David/ also expresses interest in the intersection of literary and non-literary careers. She argues that her genre, especially as represented in the psalm, can function as an 'alternative' to more traditional career patterns, especially the Virgilian. Focusing on the Renaissance representation of the divine singer David as a counter-career poet, 'whose taste in genres and topics shows no evolution' - that is, it is exempt of a 'rota Davidica' - Prescott suggests

Introduction 19

that such French poets as Marot and Du Bartas and such English poets as George Wither 'show that leaving a secular career path could lead a poet through briars and rocks, along a highway to the palace, or to not much of anywhere/ Patrick Cheney, in "'Novells of his devise": Chaucerian and Virgilian Career Paths in Spenser's Februarie Eclogue/ picks up Prescott's track into England, but reroutes it in terms of Edwards's Chaucerian path and Farrell's Virgilian one. Specifically, he shows how Spenser in his 1579 pastoral poem surveys available career routes, especially the two dominant ones identified in the title, in order to show how the amateur English poets of the late sixteenth century failed to follow the ambitious patterns of these great twin national precursors, and then how Spenser himself cleared a path for his own Christianization of the Virgilian and Chaucerian models with his own program of pastoral, love lyric, epic, and hymn. Frederick A. de Armas, 'Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel: The Portrayal of a Literary Career,' follows one of Cheney's paths in order to emphasize the Virgilian. De Armas argues that Cervantes selfconsciously shaped his writing career around the Virgilian model, especially its progression from pastoral to epic, but adapted from the poetic genre to one of prose fiction. Specifically, de Armas argues that Cervantes begins his career with the pastoral fiction La Galatea, continues with an apprenticeship in his epic novel, Don Quixote, and concludes with an epic novel, Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. But finally, de Armas adds, Cervantes overgoes Virgil by imagining for himself, late in his career, 'the second wheel to his chariot where he will again follow the Virgilian author and thus become twice greater than his model.' Then Alvaro Molina, in 'Epic Violence: Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes/ takes us into the Virgilian epic genre opened up by de Armas in order to examine the 'rhetoric of violence' in the context of empire. Molina discovers 'a certain evolution in Cervantes' epic rhetoric of violence': 'Virgilian celebration appears unscathed in the surface early on/ represented in La Numancia; in certain parts of Don Quixote the 'historical narrative of power and military glory' continues; but elsewhere in the Quixote and in the Persiles, 'the seriousness and elevated tone of Virgil are abandoned in favour of some clear complications and humorous subversion of epic forms and ideology.' Thus, Molina joins de Armas and others in suggesting how Cervantes used the Virgilian career model as the foundation for his radical reconception of the Spanish author. Closing the volume is 'Renaissance Englishwomen and the Literary Career.' Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay, working with Elaine

20 Patrick Cheney

Beilin and Anne Shaver, offer the observation that 'English Renaissance women writers were not Virgilians who styled their lives from low to high, Horatians who taught by delighting, self-crowned laureates who sought a formal place in "a system of authorial roles" which "emerg[ed] in late sixteenth-century England" (Helgerson, Self-Crowned 2).' Rather, they suggest, 'Women's voices and self-presentations were visible both in the more confined traditions of manuscript circulation and the increasing ubiquity of the printed book, the two systems by which "authors" were published, made public, in the early modern period.' Accordingly, they aim to 'outline some of the more common motives asserted by Renaissance Englishwomen, followed by a brief survey of four women writers who, in various terms and various stages of their writing lives, presented themselves as authors: Anne Dowriche (fl. 1589), Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621), Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (162373).' Each of these writers, they suggest, 'has some claim to be a "first" in the history of women writers in English.' While we hope that this chronological routing of the volume will help readers discern a narrative that is as diverse as it is continuous, we would note that some readers may wish to pursue their own reading path. For a quick primer in each of the three periods covered, readers might try the essays by Farrell, Edwards, and Cheney. For sorties into each of the four countries, they could try the essays by Kennedy, Cruz, Prescott, and Woods/Hannay/Beilin/Shaver. Some readers might be particularly interested in seeing how non-literary careers intersect with literary ones; here the essays by Vessey, Bollard de Broce, Cruz, and Prescott will be of special interest. If, however, readers wish to investigate careers within a single national boundary, they could try the essays on England by Edwards, Cheney, Prescott, and Woods/Hannay/Beilin/ Shaver. Or on Spain by Burke, Bollard de Broce, Cruz, De Armas, and Molina. Other routes also suggest themselves - such as a Virgilian one, which would include the essays by Farrell, Edwards, Kennedy, Cheney, and de Armas. Some routes expressly cross the Virgilian path, in intriguing ways, such as the essays of Prescott and Woods/Hannay/ Beilin/Shaver. Whatever track readers follow, European Literary Careers admittedly covers a vast terrain in a short trip. The primary goal is to sketch a preliminary map of European career paths from antiquity and the early Christian era through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Such a

Introduction 21

map might prove timely, because the profession of literary studies appears to be moving out of its revisionist phase of criticism to one we might term post-revisionist. Nowhere is this more evident than in the conversation on the topic central to the present volume: authorship. For the revisionist phase, Michel Foucault had asked, 'What is an author?' while Roland Barthes found the resonant answer in 'the death of the author.' Marxist principles of social construction replaced traditional ones of intentionality. In the last few years, however, leading Renaissance critics, especially revisionist ones themselves, have been expressing discontent with the direction the field is taking, and strikingly it is over the body of the author that again the battle line is being drawn. Louis A. Montrose (92), for instance, sets what looks like a new course for a kind of linking criticism, one that connects traditional with revisionist notions of authorship and career, but along the way he strives to discover something new and uncharted: Foucault's own anti-humanist project is to anatomize the subject's subjection to the disciplinary discourses of power. I find this aspect of Foucault's social vision - his apparent occlusion of a space for human agency - to be extreme. In other words, my intellectual response is that his argument is unconvincing, and my visceral response is that it is intolerable. However, in responding to Foucault's provocation, I do not seek to restore to the individual the illusory power of self-creation; nor do I wish to remystify the social production of the text, to reassert its status as an expression of the autonomous author's singular creative genius ... Any meaningful response to Foucault's provocative concept of the 'author function' will commence, not by rejecting it, but rather by expanding and refining it, by giving greater historical and cultural specificity and variability both to the notion of Author and to the possible functions it may serve.

Helgerson is himself even more succinct, when he says of Shakespeare: 'He helped make the world that made him/19 For Helgerson as for Montrose (and for many others like Lipking), the author is neither dead nor simply a function of ideology; he or she is a mysterious creature we are still trying to discover. As a new phase of linking or post-revisionist criticism gets underway during the new century, we hope that readers will find the myriad paths of European Literary Careers both a part of an inaugural enterprise and a trip worth taking for its own pleasure.

22 Patrick Cheney Notes 1 Dees 124, review of Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight. 2 In addition to Cheney (note 1 above), the books include Bernard; and Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career. Readers will also want to know about Oram, Edmund Spenser, which includes a chapter called 'Spenser's Career.' The seminal essays include Helgerson, 'The New Poet Presents Himself; D.L. Miller; Loewenstein, 'Echo's Ring'; Alpers; Montrose; and Rambuss, 'Spenser's Lives, Spenser's Careers.' 3 Thus, C. Burrow can write without explanation that 'several of the Sonnets are very likely to have been composed at the start of Shakespeare's career, and the whole sequence should be thought of as something approaching Shakespeare's life's work' (17; emphasis added). 4 Quoted in Hobsbawm 1. 5 The chronology of this dual origin, however, is more complicated than it looks, since Helgerson published two essays that eventually formed part of Self-Crowned Laureates before Lipking's book appeared, while Lipking published one essay that formed part of The Life of the Poet before either of Helgerson's essays appeared. See Lipking, 'Blake's Initiation'; and Helgerson, 'The New Poet Presents Himself and 'The Elizabethan Laureate.' Helgerson's work grows out of his earlier book, The Elizabethan Prodigals, and so he might join Lipking in saying, 'The idea of a book on poetic careers ... has been in [his]... mind since [he]... first began to think seriously about poetry.' 6 Just published on this topic is a collection of essays titled Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by Coleman, Lewis, and Kowalik, which explores 'conceptions of the self as they emerge from the biographical and autobiographical writing of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Europe' (1). Concentrating on the vita tradition, the volume takes little if any interest in the allied career tradition. As we shall see, several contributors to the present collection intertwine life and career as part of a European history of the self and of authorship. 7 Ovid, Amores IH.xv.2: 'raditur hie elegis ultima meta meis.' In Ovid in Six Volumes, trans. Showerman, vol. 1. All quotations from Ovid will be from this edition, unless otherwise indicated. On Ovid's use of the chariot as a trope for his poetry, see Kenney 206. 8 Virgil, Georgics IH.17-18: 'illi victor ego et Tyrio conspectus in ostro / centum quadriiugos agitabo ad flumina currus.' In Virgil, trans. Fairclough, vol. 1. See also Georgics II.541-2. On Virgil's use of the chariot as a trope for his poetry, see Hardie 100-1.

Introduction 23 9 Braudy61n4. 101 use this four-dimension career model throughout Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession; the book is the source of the information presented in slightly different form here. 11 See Braudy 136 on Ovid's view of Rome in the Metamorphoses. McKeown observes that Ovid here 'is echoing Verg. Aen 9.446ff.' (1: 45), where Virgil uses dum (IX.448). In Elegy II.xxxiv.61-84, Propertius inscribes the Virgilian cursus, but he puts the Aeneid first, the Eclogues second, and the Georgics third, and he does not place the triad in the context of either Rome or fame. D.W.T. Vessey thinks that Ovid may have Propertius, Elegies II. 34 in mind. We think Propertius wrote his poem around 26 or 25 B.C. Alan Cameron states that Ovid wrote 'the first book of the first edition of the Amores c. 25 B.C.' ('First Edition' 326); he remarks that 'there is no particular reason to suppose that the general character of the first edition was significantly different from the second' (325); and he thinks that '1.15 may well have been ... included ... in the first edition' (333). 12 Conte85. 13 Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene 27. On the pseudo-Virgilian verses, see Austin. 14 Marlowe, Ovid's Elegies I.xv.25-6, in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Orgel. 15 Chrisopher Marlowe, ed. Orgel 136. Jonson joins Marlowe in minimizing Virgilian fame and in neutering the principals; this may be in keeping with his own critique of Spenser. Jonson includes his translation in Poetaster (I.i.43-84). On Jonson's detached attitude toward Virgil, see Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates 113-16; toward Ovid, see 111-12; toward Spenser, see 110-22. Marlowe may have 'ousted' georgic in keeping with Renaissance practice (A. Fowler 31) - as Spenser did in his own career - but his scrambling of the sacred Virgilian order looks suspicious, and appropriately Jonson restores it 16 On Shakespeare's literary career, see the four essays by Cheney in the Works Cited list. The present discussion of Shakespeare is indebted to these essays, which form parts of a book-length study titled Shakespeare's Poems and Plays: The Making of the National Poet-Playwright, 1593-1623, forthcoming. 17 Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale IV.iii.23-8, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Evans, et al. 181 lay out the details of this Ovid - the poet-playwright - in Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession. 19 Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood 215.

ONE

Greek Lives and Roman Careers in the Classical Vita Tradition Joseph Farrell

For later ages, Virgil's gradual ascent from humbler to grander genres was generally regarded as defining the ideal poetic career. Virgil himself did something to encourage the view that his three major works comprise a hierarchy of both styles and subjects and, at the same time, a unified whole.1 This view quickly took root and bore fruit: almost from the moment of Virgil's death, poets appear to begin defining the shape of their own careers in imitation of or in distinction to a Virgilian norm. Many of the essays in this volume will explore the ramifications of this tradition. This essay will look for its source: What led Virgil and his followers to find in his oeuvre the trajectory of a well-defined career? This is a question that has never before been asked, probably because the idea of the career becomes, after Virgil, such a common element of poetic self-representation. But Virgil not only provides our chief paradigm of the ideal poetic career, he is in fact the first poet of classical antiquity who claimed or was acknowledged to have had a career in the usual sense of the word. Why did such a thing never happen before, and what new conditions made it possible? To gain some purchase on these questions, we must consider a rather different idea, that of the poetic life, as represented in the Greek vita tradition and its Roman derivatives. It is now appreciated how much the Vitae Vergilianae owe to a genre that freely mingles reliable information with imaginative inference based on the poet's own work.2 The continuities between the biographies of the Greek poets and those of Virgil are undeniable. What I will argue here, however, is that the most distinctive and influential aspect of the Virgilian lives, namely their emphasis on the rising generic trajectory of Virgil's career, is something

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 25

that cannot be found in the Greek vita tradition, but that can be traced in the writings and the experience of earlier Latin poets working within a specifically Roman cultural milieu. The vita tradition is useful to us not because it is historically reliable; in fact, it is anything but. As Mary Lefkowitz puts it, Virtually all the material in the lives is fiction/ and 'only certain factual information is likely to have survived, and then usually because the poet himself provided it for a different purpose.'3 But many of the fictions contained in an ancient poet's vita can be traced back to specific passages in his work. In Virgil's case, the lives confidently assert that the poet was dispossessed of his farm in the land redistributions that took place during the civil wars of the 40s BC but regained his property through the intervention of powerful patrons.4 Few if any modern scholars accept this statement at face value, because it looks too much like an inference based on an allegorical reading of the first Eclogue, in which a shepherd named Tityrus first loses his holdings and then regains them by applying to a godlike young man generally assumed to be the future Augustus.5 The process of mining a poet's work for 'evidence' of this kind was standard practice on the part of the ancient biographer. In Virgil's case, we can see clearly what gave rise to the idea that the poetry is about the poet's career. Within the Eclogues, a self-reflexive voice that is shared among several characters, including the Eclogue poet, comments intermittently on the process of artistic initiation and growth through instruction and experience. At the end of Eclogue 5, for instance, Menalcas rewards Mopsus for a song by giving him a pipe that, as he puts it, taught him a pair of songs.6 When he specifies the songs by quoting the incipit of each, they prove to be none other than the second and third Eclogues themselves. Thus Eclogue 5 looks back on two previous poems in the collection from the perspective of an accomplished poet contemplating his earlier work. Self-reflexion often takes on a generic character, as at the beginning of Eclogue 6, where Tityrus - here as in Eclogue 1 a putative stand-in for Virgil himself - reveals that he once essayed heroic epic, but was advised by Apollo to confine himself to the bucolic mode.7 Contrariwise, in Eclogue 4 the narrator calls for a higher strain, one worthy of a consul.8 And Eclogue 10, which presents itself as the Eclogue poet's final effort in bucolic verse, concludes with the image of a shepherd finishing the basket he has been weaving and rising from the shady spot in which he has been passing his time.9 A metapoetic reading of this imagery suggests clearly that the narrator's

26 Joseph Farrell

rising involves an intention to quit the sheltered world of pastoral for some more elevated genre describing a more realistic world; and Virgil's subsequent work, the Georgics, answers this description nicely. Little wonder that the vita tradition - which does not shrink from recording a number of supernatural wonders that attended the poet's birth - was able to weave these and other gestures of poetic self-reflexion into a coherent and thoroughgoing image of the ideal poetic career.10 If we compare the ancient lives of Virgil with those of the Greek poets, we find that they are all part of a recognizable genre, one that possesses distinctive topoi and that is informed by the same methods of handling 'evidence.' One clear difference, however, stands out. According to this tradition, Greek poets did not have careers, but lives. The Greek vita betrays hardly a trace of any tendency to shape its narration of the poet's experience as a career. Because these lives base themselves in the first instance on the work of the poets themselves, one is forced to assume that the idea of a career, such as we do find in nuce within Virgil's oeuvre, played no significant part in the Greek poets' strategies of self-representation. Where their work survives in extenso, we can verify this assumption; and because the vita tradition tends to scour a poet's work in search of anything that might be used as biographical evidence, we may regard the absence of careerist thinking from the vitae as a strong indication that there were few if any careerist gestures in the lost works, either. The evidence of the vita tradition therefore suggests that the sources of what eventually became the ideal poetic career are to be found not in Greek, but in Roman literary culture. To understand the pronounced differences that existed between Greek and Roman models for representing the poet's experience, we must consider two additional factors that shaped the vita tradition: ancient genre theory in general, and the respective social milieu within which Greek and Roman poetry was created and circulated. In genre, the decisive factor was the Hellenistic revision of classical genre theory, a revision that introduced a system of genres that was more flexible than the classical system. The Roman poets inherited the Hellenistic system and used it to develop innovative apologetic strategies in response to the specifically Roman social conditions within which they worked. Here the most important factor was a perceived need on the part of the poet to define his relationship with a particular patron. It is in the conjunction between Hellenistic genre theory and the social concerns of the Roman patron class that the idea of the poetic career is born.

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 27 Considerations of Genre

The first point to make is that Greek poets of the archaic and classical periods each worked primarily in a single genre. Alcaeus wrote lyric monodies for private symposia; Pindar wrote lyric victory songs for choruses to perform on public occasions; Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote tragedies; Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes wrote comedies. There is certainly evidence that these and other poets worked in forms besides those for which they are chiefly known. Many poets, for instance, wrote epigrams; but it is Simonides who is especially known for his epigrams. Simonides also wrote victory songs, like those of Pindar; but Pindar, who may also have written epigrams, is remembered as pre-eminent in the victory song. In general, it is accurate to say that Greek poets before the Hellenistic period tended in fact to specialize in one genre, and that many cultural forces conspired to associate them almost exclusively with their respective specialties. The vita tradition drew heavily on the poet's own words as the basis of its biographical portrait. But it did not regard the poet's own words with anything like a critical spirit. Consider the example of Archilochus, an iambic poet of the seventh century BC.11 His work survives only in fragments, many of them quite brief; but even in their mutilated state, they convey a vivid and various impression of character. The vita tradition, however, remembers Archilochus rather one-dimensionally as a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed, oversexed coward, drunkard, and brawler. In doing so, it relies heavily on passages in which Archilochus presents himself as nursing a grudge, abusing an enemy, seducing a girl, fleeing from battle, guzzling wine, and so on. But the goal of the vita tradition is clearly not to represent Archilochus just as his poetry represents him. The tradition did not borrow even-handedly in an attempt to achieve a rounded portrait; caricature rather than character was the genre's stockin-trade. Significantly, the vita tradition systematically ignores those passages of the poetry that we happen to possess that do not corroborate its argument that Archilochus was merely a violent, ill-tempered, vindictive, base-minded misanthrope. To quote Lefkowitz, 'only the most destructive aspects of his poetry survive in his biographies; there is no trace of the Archilochus who consoles his friend Pericles (fr. 13 W = 10 T), disdains riches (fr. 19 W = 22 T), or reveres the gods (fr. 26,30 W = 30, 94 T).'12 In this way, the vita tradition reveals itself as a mechanism not only for imagining the poet's biography on the basis of his work, but even for distorting the poet's self-representation in the inter-

28 Joseph Farrell

est of emphasizing only certain aspects of his supposed character, and thus obtaining a simpler and more consistent biography. The reason for this distortion is to be sought in classical genre theory. Because Archilochus writes in the first person, it used to be thought that his chief value was as a reliable witness to lived experience in his times. Now, however, scholars are more likely to emphasize the conventional elements of apparently autobiographical passages and to situate them within a strategy of poetic self-representation dictated by the requirements of genre. According to this approach, Archilochus's apparently personal reflections are meant to tell us nothing about the poet's own character as an individual, but to establish his expertise in the genre of blame poetry, and thus to assure his audience that they are listening not to just anybody, but to a master of the form. Thus when Archilochus represents himself as caring nothing for a fine-looking general and as preferring one who is ugly, but successful (fr. 96 Tarditi = 114 West), he is not expressing a personal opinion so much as advertising the qualities of plain-spoken, effective pugnaciousness that his audience may expect to find in his own verse. The generic and conventional aspects of poetic self-representation appear with great clarity when poets contrast themselves with one another. In his victory odes, Pindar was concerned to represent himself as a praise poet worthy to celebrate distinguished patrons. He did so partly by drawing distinctions between himself and Archilochus: God achieves his every aim exactly as he wills god, who overtakes the eagle flying and passes by the dolphin skimming through the sea. And he curbs the man whose thoughts soar on high and gives to others ageless glory. But I must shun the crowding bite of bitter speech, for in the distance I have seen bilious Archilochos often in distress, swollen with harsh words of wrath. To prosper in accord with heaven's will, is wisdom's finest flower.13

Pindar's motive here is obviously not to characterize Archilochus fairly and completely. Rather, it is to use Archilochus as an archetype of the

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 29

blame poet and thus as an antitype of the praise poet that he himself claims to be. The contrast that is drawn here involves Pindar and Archilochus as individuals to an insignificant degree in comparison with the contrasting generic forces that these names represent. It obviously will not do in such a context to dwell on Archilochus's capacity to comfort a friend, eschew wealth, or revere the gods. These, if anything, will be characteristics that Pindar will want to claim for himself. His Archilochus is merely a foil that serves to throw his own qualities - i.e., the qualities of a generic praise poet - into flattering relief. Such a passage tells us nothing about the actual personality of either man; rather it illustrates the antithetical relationship between the poetry of praise and the poetry of blame.14 Classical genre theory thus assumes that there exists a perfect congruity between a poet's character and his work. This theoretical position was sufficiently widespread and well appreciated that it might be deliberately taken to ridiculous extremes. According to Satyrus's Life of Euripides, Aristophanes said that the tragedian 'is like what he makes his characters say.'15 In the Thesmophoriazusae of 411 BC, Aristophanes shows exactly what this means. The play stages a male anxiety-fantasy about what happens when women are allowed to congregate in large numbers without any men to observe them and combines parody of legal institutions with literary criticism. At the Thesmophoria, a festival in honour of Demeter and Persephone, a group of women plan to try Euripides for traducing women in his tragedies. Euripides enlists the services of a fellow tragedian, Agathon, in his defence. When Agathon enters for the first time, he uses the mechane (or, in Latin, machina), the stage device that occasionally brought on a deus ex machina at the end of the play to resolve an impossible situation.16 Agathon is dressed, however, not as a god but as Cyrene, a heroine from one of his tragedies; and when he speaks, he does so in paratragic verses, alternating between the roles of actor and chorus.17 After taking in this performance, Mnesilochus, a relative of Euripides and his fidus Achates in this play, wonders whether Agathon is a man or a woman.18 At this point, Euripides asks Agathon to infiltrate the Thesmophoria and speak on his behalf; but Agathon demurs: T am too much like a woman, and they will think I have come to poach on their territory.'19 What drives all this action, of course, is the assumption that a poet's work is an accurate expression of his character. Not only Euripides, but all tragedians 'are like what they make their characters say.' Euripides stages the disgraceful actions of heroines like Medea and Phaedra:

30 Joseph Farrell

therefore, he is a misogynist. Agathon's heroines are sympathetically drawn: therefore, he is effeminate himself. The modern critic recognizes here the workings of a generic convention, not reliable evidence for the biographer. Nevertheless, passages like these regularly became the raw material out of which ancient poet's lives were written: witness Satyrus's citation of Aristophanes, 'as if summoned as a witness for this very purpose/ on Euripides' character.20 Ancient literary theory provides the intellectual context for this tendency. In keeping with the idea that poetry is a mimetic art, and that mimesis is a natural capacity of all human beings, Plato takes it for granted that different individuals will work in the genres suited to their respective characters. In the Republic, he makes Socrates base an argument concerning the natural capacities of 'guardians' in his ideal state on what he apparently regards as a widespread belief that the same person could not write both tragedy and comedy, or indeed even act in both kinds of drama.21 Aristotle actually explains the origin of genres with reference to the same belief: We have, then, an innate instinct for imitation and for tune and rhythm for meters are obviously sections of rhythms - and starting with these instincts men very gradually developed them until they produced poetry out of their improvisations. Poetry then split into two kinds according to the poet's nature. For the more serious poets imitated the noble acts of noble men, while those of a less elevated nature imitated the acts of base men, at first writing satire just as the others at first wrote hymns and eulogies.22

These are the earliest explicit theoretical statements that we have connecting the poet's choice of genre with his character. In light of the apologetic and literary critical practices of poets from the archaic and classical periods, however, it seems clear that there is nothing innovative in Plato and Aristotle's ideas on this score. From the beginning of the poetic record down into the fourth century BC, a belief that the choice of genre was a perfect reflection of the poet's character was implicit in Greek culture. If we return to the vita tradition, we find that it agrees with classical genre theory in every particular. Indeed, we must conclude that it agrees very closely not only with our earliest explicit theorists, but with the practice of poets themselves, in linking genre so closely to character. More than this, we must also admit that the vita tradition follows the

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 31

lead of the poets themselves by focusing on what are regarded as the most generically relevant aspects of their respective oeuvres. There is more to Archilochus, as we have seen, than a low-minded proclivity to blame everyone and everything. In his overt programmatic statements, however, Archilochus does indeed focus on his capacity to revile his enemies - to present himself as the master of a particular genre.23 Conversely, Pindar frequently uses blame in order to throw his praise into higher relief. He even in effect blames Archilochus for being a blame poet by way of asserting his own competence as a praise poet; and the result is that Pindar is remembered for praise, not for blame. The demands of genre cause all poets to exaggerate the dominant aspect of their work. In Aristophanes' parody of Euripides, style rather than genre is at issue, but the idea that style reflects character is still very much in evidence. In view of the fact that parody is Aristophanes' aim, of course, the criticism can hardly be taken at face value: the joke depends on taking a standard belief to ludicrous lengths. In short, it is clear that many forces which shaped the critical discourse about poets in Greek antiquity conspired to edit the character of a poet down to its bare essentials, and this was so because the discourse was informed by implicit belief in a simple, direct relationship between genre and character. Throughout archaic and classical Greek culture, a poet's life is his work, and both are functions of the character with which he is born and which remains unchanged until he dies. The vita tradition, too, is based on these same assumptions. It is constant in representing the poet's life as a clear and direct reflection of his work and in presenting the essential characteristics of both the life and the work as fixed and unchanging. Many key elements of the poet's life and experience are based on inferences drawn from the poet's own work and from what other poets, for their own generically mandated purposes, say about them. In this way Pindar becomes an authoritative source for the character of Archilochus, as does Aristophanes for Euripides. Thus do the Greek poets become, in the vita tradition, little more than allegories of the individual genres within which they worked, or of their own distinctive style within that genre. So far we have been considering the lives of archaic and classical Greek poets, i.e., those who lived before the death of Alexander the Great in 322 BC, the traditional beginning of the Hellenistic period. This is not the place to rehearse the essential differences ushered in by the Greek cultural revolution of the third and second centuries. It is well known that poets during this period - especially in Alexandria and

32 Joseph Farrell

Pergamum, where they had access to magnificent research centres assembled by dynasts anxious to advertise the patronage of Greek culture- combined their poet's calling with that of the scholar, the bibliophile, and the librarian. They became professional, something that archaic and classical poets either were not in fact, or liked to pretend they were not. In this atmosphere, the idea that one's poetry was perfectly commensurate with one's life gave way to an attitude that poetry is a vast field to be explored, one that presents the skilled practitioner with many and varied possibilities. This development has many facets, but the one that concerns us now is, again, that of genre. The Hellenistic poet, unlike his archaic or classical predecessors, did not restrict himself to a single genre. He might instead construct a new genre out of elements drawn from several others, as Theocritus did in creating the bucolic genre.24 Or he might, like Callimachus, aim at omnicompetence by composing in virtually all known genres. In either case, the Hellenistic poet lost no sleep over the question of whether the same man could write both tragedy and comedy. Rather, the poet who was not at home in all the genres might be counted as no poet at all. As for hierarchy, the Hellenistic poets inherited from their classical predecessors the idea that some genres were more 'exalted' than others. Homer's unique prestige ensured that epic enjoyed pride of place within any hierarchy. Pindar, in the passage discussed above, clearly implies that his victory songs are of a nobler sort than Archilochus's invectives. Fifth-century comedy regularly represented itself as the poor relation of contemporary tragedy. Examples of such relationships could easily be multiplied. Within genres, too, clear distinctions of style might be drawn. Aristophanes' Frogs places Aeschylus on a higher plain than Euripides because of the two tragedians' respective styles (as well as, of course, the innate personal characters which their literary differences are taken to reflect).25 The idea that genres as well as styles might be ranked on a gradient from high to low was thus familiar to Hellenistic poets. The most important of these, however, applied the idea of generic hierarchy in a sophisticated, even paradoxical way. Poets associated with the Library of Alexandria, such as the aforementioned Theocritus and Callimachus, certainly did not aspire to write major epic poems. They may well have accepted the idea that Homer's epics were the ultimate literary achievement, but they definitely regarded frank and open imitation of Homer not as flattery, but as folly. Their strategy involved imitating Homer in the most indirect and inconspicuous ways possible.26 In Theocritus's case, this meant inventing

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 33

a new genre, the pastoral, that uses the epic metre almost exclusively (the closely related elegiac couplet also occurs) and constantly imitates Homeric language and motifs, but does so in order to delineate a world not of kings and heroes, but of shepherds and goatherds, where prestige is measured not in terms of victories and wealth, but of song. For Callimachus, imitating Homer meant not 'singing a song as great as the stream of Ocean' but 'drawing a trickle of water from the purest stream.'27 Like Theocritus, Callimachus worked mainly in miniatures. His contribution to epic, the Hecale, was measured in hundreds, not thousands of lines; and its main character is not the hero Theseus, who appears briefly in the poem while en route from one to another of his labours, but an old woman, Hecale, who gives him shelter for a night.28 The fabric of such a poem might (and did) weave together many strands of Homeric epic, especially its rarities: unusual diction, alternate readings, and other such scholarly treasures. In its general effect, however, this poetry disguises its debt to Homer from all but those whose scholarship is adequate to discern the intricacy of the relationship. Thus it would not be incorrect to say that for these poets, Homeric epic represented the summit of poetic achievement, and that accurate imitation of Homer was the mark of a master poetic craftsman. But to say that they conceived of anything like a gradual approach to epic grandeur by means of incremental steps through a variety of lesser genres would be to miss the point entirely. Even the humblest of their poems might be as Homeric or more so than their grandest, and even the most ambitious would ostentatiously wear its 'humility' with pride. In Callimachus's case, we may have evidence about the way in which the poet represented his life's work. A papyrus of about AD 100 contains a Diegesis (or narrative summary) of Callimachus's major poetic works in the following order.29 First comes the Aetia, a collection of elegiac narratives in four books; then the Iambi, thirteen poems on a variety of topics, including invectives (as the title would lead one to expect: the last poem, significantly, attacks those who believe a poet should confine himself to writing in a single genre!); miscellaneous lyrics, elegiacs, and other genres; the aforementioned Hecale, a miniature epic; and six Hymns to various divinities in epic or elegiac metre.30 It is not certain that this list represents a complete edition by the poet of his life's work, but at least one consideration suggests that this is in fact the case. At the end of the Aetia, the poet indicates his intention to move on to a more pedestrian genre; and what follows in the Diegesis is the markedly 'lower' Iambi. The great editor of Callimachus, Rudolf Pfeiffer,

34

Joseph Farrell

suggested that these words indicate that the order of the Diegesis does indeed correspond to Callimachus's own arrangement of his works.31 The suggestion cannot be proven without more evidence. Here I simply note that we have no reason to think that Callimachus represented his life's work either in chronological or reverse-chronological terms or in terms of a gradual progression through a hierarchy of genres; and that at the end of the Aetia, we may in fact have the opposite of both these schemes, i.e., an achronological movement from a higher genre to a lower. This is exactly the converse, I note en passant, of what Virgil will give us at the end of the Eclogues. Roman Poetry and Society The Hellenistic poet was an avowed professional, and part of his professionalism involved the exploration of several genres. Here, it would seem, are the essential ingredients of an actual poetic career, as opposed to a poetic life. But in fact we have no real suggestion that Hellenistic poets did fashion their experience in terms of careers; and their biographies maintain the same perspective familiar from the lives of earlier poets.32 It was only when Hellenistic literary culture was transplanted to Roman soil that poets felt the decisive stimulus to fashion their experience in terms of a career. This stimulus was the product of three forces, which I shall consider in the following order: 1 The position of the poet in Roman society 2 The dynamics of patrocinium and clientela 3 The habits of self-fashioning observed by the patron class 1. The position of the poet in Roman society contrasts sharply with anything that we find in archaic or classical Greece or in the Hellenistic world. In the Greek world, the poet is a respected member of society, a citizen, and sometimes a leader of his polis, often of propertied or even aristocratic family. Even in the professionalized culture of the Hellenistic court, the poet was not simply an employee or dependent of his patron, but, at Alexandria for instance, a priest in the Museum, which was not merely a cultural centre but an actual temple of the Muses, to which the famous Library was an appendage. In Rome, the situation is far different. Rome's first poets were slaves, freedmen, and foreigners. More than a century passed before a member of the upper class, Gaius Lucilius, made literature his main pursuit.33 After another century,

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 35

even so great a poet as Horace reflected on the stigma that followed him in his youth because he was himself the son of a former slave.34 Poetry, then, was generally produced in the context of highly unequal social relations between poets and their patrons. 2. The dynamics of patrocinium and clientela imposed a rigid hierarchy and a definite system of obligations on Roman social relations. Although poets of the late Republican and early Imperial periods addressed patrons not from the position of a client but from that of a friend (amicus), the obligations of amicitia in situations where the friends were not social equals were, in effect, equally clear. Generally speaking, a poem was something that a social inferior might offer a social superior in return for considerations of various kinds and magnitudes.35 3. The habits of self-fashioning observed by the patron class were informed by a strict careerist ideology. The life of the Roman aristocrat was dominated by competition for prestige in the eyes of his peers. This competition expressed itself in terms of wealth, military accomplishment, and, particularly, in the accumulation of political offices. Eligibility for these offices, or honores, came in a strict sequence, the cursus honorum, which was defined by law and very seldom violated.36 Within this system, poets and poetry played a very clear and not unimportant role. The rise of literature as an institution coincides with the middle period of the Roman Republic (roughly, from 287 to 133 BC). It was during this period that the oligarchic system of competition for honours within a closed circle of eligible men seems to have functioned in a manner conducive to domestic stability. In this milieu, literature began to be cultivated in the context of service to the state and of enhancement of the aristocratic career. It is thus not surprising to find the poets gradually fashioning for themselves careers modelled on those of their aristocratic patrons. The beginning of this process involves a Greek freedman named Lucius Livius Andronicus.37 Born at Tarentum in about 272 BC, Livius first comes to the historian's notice in 240 when he presents (significantly?) both a comedy and a tragedy at a public festival. His next datable achievement occurs over thirty years later in 207 during the second consulate of his patron, Marcus Livius Salinator. On this occasion the poet produced a partheneion or hymn for a chorus of girls, sung in this case to Juno in response to a moment of crisis in the Second Punic War. The success of the hymn was such that the poet was voted public honours and inducted into a professional 'college' of poets and actors (collegium scribarum histrionumque), which was installed at this

36 Joseph Farrell

time in the Temple of Minerva on the Aventine. The partheneion is lost and the dramatic works, which include some thirteen titles, are in fragmentary tatters.38 Nevertheless, the information that we have about Livius usefully illustrates the early stage in the development of the Roman literary career. His poetry is valued for its service to the state, and its reception is to be seen in the context of reciprocal benefit exchanged between patron and client. Livius's poetry received a hearing because it was sponsored by a consul, and its favourable reception redounded to his patron's credit as well as his own. Moreover, his generic versatility, which contrasts with the practice of archaic and classical Greek poets, all of whom confined their work almost entirely to a single genre, places him firmly within a Hellenistic intellectual and aesthetic milieu. For Livius Andronicus, and even more for those who followed him, the circumstances of dramatic production implicate poets directly and routinely in the careerism of the patron class. The reason for this is that one of the first duties of a young man embarked on the cursus honorum was to stage public entertainments at four of the main religious festivals in the Roman civil calendar.39 This duty was entrusted chiefly to those who held the office of aedile, the least of the three major magistracies, but one that secured for its holder membership in the Senate. The aediles acted as impressarios at these festivals, staging races, exhibitions of exotic animals, blood sports, and other diversions. These games were important to the career of a young politician: staging them impressively was not only expected, but it was one of the principal ways by which he might ingratiate himself with the voters who, he hoped, would later elect him to the next office of the cursus, that of praetor. After Livius's debut in 240, dramatic productions became an important part of these occasions, with the result that the interdependence of poets and their politically ambitious patrons came to be institutionalized. Thus Livius sets the pattern for Roman poets during most of the Republican period. Most of those about whom we have information were foreign-born freedmen, and most worked in several genres, focusing chiefly on the stage. In spite of these facts, however, Livius is best remembered for quite another fragmentary work: an Odusia, which is a Latin translation of Homer's Odyssey. Why he produced this work is unclear. We are informed that Livius worked as a grammaticus in the home of his patron, and the translation may have been in the first instance a teaching text, something that Livius would have used to train his young charges in

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 37

Latin (and, perhaps, to facilitate their reading of Homeric Greek as well).40 This would probably mean that he produced it fairly early in his career. Whether or not this is so, there is nothing in the record to suggest that either he or anyone else viewed this epic as the high point of his career. That honour would seem to belong to the pariheneion, a poem that performed a specific service to the state, reflected honour upon its patron, and won for the poet official recognition of the community's esteem, and that reflected better than the Odusia Livius's lifetime of serving the state by producing dramas for official state festivals. How then did writing an epic come to be not the sort of thing one might do to facilitate one's work as tutor to the children of an important patron, but rather the pinnacle of a Roman poet's literary career? The answer to this question - an important part of it, anyway - is provided by the career of Quintus Ennius (239-169 BC). Like most poets of his day, Ennius was versatile - more versatile, in fact, than almost any other Latin poet, before or since. Ennius was prolific in tragedy, in satire, in didactic, epigram, and other genres.41 His generic versatility finds a parallel in his linguistic facility: a native of Tarentum, he was fluent in Greek and Oscan as well as Latin, and he described himself as a philologist as well as a poet.42 Like Livius, Ennius relied on the sponsorship of the patron class. In 204 BC he was brought to Rome under what circumstances we do not know - by Marcus Porcius Cato, the future censor. During the subsequent fifteen years he established his reputation as a tragedian, and he continued to be active in tragedy until late in life. Between 189 and 187, however, he accompanied the proconsul Marcus Fulvius Nobilior on his military campaigns in Greece. Apparently, Ennius's role was to serve as a kind of staff poet, gathering material for subsequent celebration of his patron's accomplishments. The tour of duty culminated in the Battle of Ambracia, and upon his return to Rome, Ennius staged a tragedy in honour of this victory - over the objections, by the way, of Cato, Ennius's former patron. Such an event illustrates clearly that poets like Ennius were not disinterestedly answering a collective need for plays fuelled by the official calendar of public entertainments, but were capable of taking a direct part in the ambitions and rivalries of their patrons. It was Ennius himself, I believe, who set in motion (whether deliberately or not) the process of fashioning a poetic career on the model of the military and political careers of his patrons. This I infer from the example of his epic poem, the Annals, which was the last and grandest work of the poet's life. We have seen in the case of the tragedies that the

38 Joseph Farrell

poet's field of endeavour is virtually coextensive with that of his patron: the poet celebrates in verse the accomplishments of the patron in the battlefield, or (as in the case of Livius's partheneion) serves as his patron's lieutenant, offering in his name a poem that will heal the community in time of distress. Ennius's epic takes this process a step further. In the first place, its title, Annals, usurps the name of the Annales Maximi, the official state records kept by the pontifex maximus.43 Like them, it purported to record the entire history of Rome from the beginning. Like them, it presented itself as a continuous record down to the present day. Originally, Ennius's plan was to compose an annalistic poem in fifteen books, probably concluding with Fulvius Nobilior's success in the Battle of Ambracia and his consequent establishment in Rome of a new cult imported from the site of his victory, a cult of Hercules of the Muses.44 This conclusion and this cult seem designed to celebrate in parallel the career of the patron and that of the poet. Hercules is a perpetual type of heroic achievement in the vocabulary of military panegyric, while the Muses self-evidently represent poetic accomplishments. Just as Fulvius literally brought back in triumph vanquished peoples and plundered wealth - including, not incidentally, the cult-statues of Hercules and the Muses - so Ennius figuratively brought the Greek Muses back to Rome in his poetic triumph. Earlier poets, starting with Livius, had called the Muses 'Camenae' after a group of native Italic nymphs.45 They had composed in a native Italic verse-form, the Saturnian, so-called because it was supposed to be as old as the Golden Age, when Saturn ruled in Italy. Ennius associated this form wiihfauni, a kind of Italic wood-spirit, and with vates, a word that means something like 'soothsayers.' Ennius rejected all of these precedents, invoking not Italic Camenae but Greek Muses, composing in dactyllic hexameters, the same epic verse used by all Greek epicists since Homer, and introducing into Latin the Greek loan-word poeta, 'maker,' a word that emphasizes craft rather than involuntary, inspired utterance.46 Thus, Ennius could claim a victory over the Greeks in the cultural realm very similar to what his patron had achieved on the battlefield. Ennius's career, which begins on the stage, expands to include additional genres, and culminates in an expansive and triumphant epic, marks an important step on the way toward full articulation of the ideal poetic career. But the shape of this career is contained within and in some sense obscured by the more spectacular claims that Ennius makes about his life. In a sense, Ennius's career is merely an instantiation of

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 39

abiding qualities that inform not only his life, but his experience in several lives. At the beginning of the Annals, Ennius relates a dream in which he discovers why he is suited to write such a poem. In this dream, he is visited by the shade of Homer, who delivers himself of a Pythagorean discourse in order to explain that the soul that had once inhabited Homer's body now resides in that of Ennius: the Roman poet is, in fact, Homer reborn.47 It is this metaphysical 'reality' that qualifies Ennius to become the epic poet of the Roman state, just as he had earlier, in the guise of Homer, been the epic poet of all the Greeks. On this view, then, it is apparent that epic was not a genre towards which Ennius had to make his way after honing his skills on lesser genres. Rather, it is the genre to which he was born - indeed, for which he was destined from before his birth. And this beginning looks forward to the poem's end. According to Ennius's original plan, the culmination of the epic, as noted above, is the victory of his patron in the Battle of Ambracia, which is celebrated in Book 15. But this plan was later adapted when Ennius in his old age extended the poem to eighteen books, stopping, so far as we can tell, only with his death.48 The extremely fragmentary condition of the Annals of course makes detailed analysis impossible, but it seems reasonable to infer that the original, patron-centred climax of the epic was later trumped by a plan that identified the end of the poem with that of the poet's life. Neither the dream nor any other passage in Ennius's poetry explains the relationship between the epic and previous work in tragedy, satire, and other genres. If we seek to understand this relationship - and here we can do no more than speculate - we must rely on the widespread belief that Homeric epic is the source of all other poetic genres. The Herodotean life of Homer quotes examples of Homeric epigram. A collection of hymns has come down to us under his name. In antiquity, Aristotle regarded Homer as the first poet of both tragedy and comedy.49 Ancient critics and rhetoricians, too, drawing inferences from the fact that virtually all Greek poets draw upon Homeric language, imagery, and plot, saw Homer as the source of all other genres. It probably makes sense to think of Ennius's generic diversity in this light as well, with one exception. If the Iliad and Odyssey are the springs from which all other genres flow, Ennius's epic is instead the great river into which empty the various tributaries of his earlier career. Ennius, then, marks an important stage in the prehistory of the Virgilian rota. In the Annals, his achievements in the field of poetry are

40

Joseph Farrell

implicitly compared to the martial deeds of his patron. The epic itself, as the poet's final and grandest accomplishment, clearly takes on the character of a chef d'oeuvre. What mainly prevents our viewing it as a fully developed instance of the career motif is its obvious congruity with the main contours of the Greek vita tradition. The Annals certainly appears to us as the culmination of a career; but in its overt apologetic statements and in its ultimate design, it unmistakably presents itself as an expression and as an emblem of the poet's life. Poetic and Public Careers at Rome, 169-19 BC A century and a half separate the completion of the Annals from the publication of the unfinished Aeneid. In some ways, little seems to have changed during that time in the social function of Roman poetry. Virgil, like Ennius, was a provincial who made his career at Rome. Both poets worked in various genres before producing a masterpiece of heroic epic. Both these epics mix myth and history; both explicitly rival Homer. Both praise the military achievements of a powerful patron. But these similarities, while real and important, should not be allowed to mask the fact that the role of the poet changed considerably during the years that saw the Roman Republic give way to Empire. The changes that occurred can be understood through the different forms of relationship that existed between poetic and public careers during this period. One important development that starts during the second century is that men of great social and political prominence begin writing verse. By 100 BC, the former consul Q. Lutatius Catullus had produced elegant erotic epigrams in the style of Callimachus.50 Some years later Marcus Tullius Cicero produced a body of poetry, much of it now lost, that seemed both thematically up to date and technically accomplished.51 On the whole, of course, men like these treated poetry as a leisure-time pursuit rather than as a career. Cicero's brother Quintus, while on military service under Julius Caesar in Gaul, in one infamous period of sixteen days became the author of four tragedies.52 It is no wonder that Brooks Otis exclaims over 'the ease, the flippant ease with which [Cicero] contemplated and undertook such projects.'53 But one cannot blame them too much. To run the entire cursus honorum and attain the consulate required an almost single-minded devotion to the political and military activities on which a successful public career was founded. It seems at first glance a paradox that a consular man like Catullus should portray himself in his poetry as a heartsick lover, sighing over a pretty

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 41

young boy who was hardly aware of his admirer's existence. The sense of paradox largely disappears, however, once we realize that this poetry was written purely for recreational purposes. Its raison d'etre was to provide relief from the ubiquitous pressures of a political career. It therefore contains not a single hint of those careerist pressures from which it was meant to offer momentary escape. The surviving fragments of this poetry are on the whole admirable, but we should not assume that their relatively high quality is at all representative, or judge too harshly those passages that seem to fall short of professional standards. Men like Catullus, however accomplished some of them may have been, were dabblers, writing poetry for recreation, not for the ages. The proof of this statement lies in the fact that when they wanted a serious poem for a serious purpose, they turned to professionals; this means that, like most of their aristocratic forebears, they engaged with Greek or provincial Italian poets who were their decided social inferiors. Cicero himself, the foremost man of letters of his day, was first and foremost a career politician. His greatest pride was to have streaked through the cursus honorum and to have become the first man of his family to attain not only the senate, but the consulate as well. To celebrate the momentousness of this event, he tried in vain to enlist a professional poet in the composition of an epic on the subject. Failing, he fell back on his own resources and composed an epic on his own consulate - a poem which posterity has not treated kindly, and which survives in part only because Cicero himself quotes from it at length in one of his prose works. Not every member of the patron class was a mere dabbler, however. The satirist Gaius Lucilius (d. 102 BC) represents an important departure in Latin poetry.54 Unlike Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Plautus, or any previous Roman poet, Lucilius was a gentleman. Not that he was absolutely the first member of his class to try his hand at poetry (though before Lucilius we have only a few names and titles). The point is that he was the first member of the patron class whose contribution to Latin literature stands comparison with that of any professional. Later poets and critics, most notably Horace, credited him as the founder of a new genre (despite the fact that Ennius, as we have seen, previously wrote satire). What is especially important, however, even revolutionary about Lucilius is that there is no place in his satires for a patron. He was born to a senatorial family, and might have had a senatorial career. Instead, he chose to remain an equestrian and to live as an independent man of letters. When the politically powerful appear in Lucilius's satires, they

42 Joseph Farrell

appear as the poet's social equals, and often in unflattering guises. One famous passage parodies the Roman Senate by invoking the conventions of the epic council of the gods, a typical scene in Homer which Ennius or some other epic poet might have turned - perhaps bathetically - to the serious purposes of institutional panegyric. Lucilius deflates both the pretensions of the epic genre and those of Rome's most august deliberative body. In other passages he writes mainly about his own activities and opinions, including great and small events: an account of a journey to Sicily, of the poet's culinary preferences, the skewering of a pretentious social climber, something on Lucilius's own love life. In one passage he gives us what looks very much like a personal motto, but one to which later satirists also subscribed: 'I get my poetry right from the heart!'55 Here the satirist stands in sharp contrast to the poet who fashioned his career as a progression through ever more exalted genres in the service of powerful patrons. Indeed, there seems to be no place in his poetry for even the idea of a career. Nevertheless he marks a crucial stage in the development of the literary career at Rome. Before Lucilius, the poet's career was mainly a function of the patron's. This situation reflected the poet's social position, which was always inferior to and dependent on that of the patron. But Lucilius was of the patron class. By choosing poetry as his occupation, he implicitly rejected the standard career path for men of his class. The effect of this rejection was to establish that poetry might be a viable career choice for a man of position, an alternative to the official cursus honorum - even as a kind of anti-career. In this sense, Lucilius was an important precursor to poets like Catullus. As a member of the provincial aristocracy, Catullus writes frequently about his own experiences and those of his friends as they take their first steps in public life. He does so, however, mainly to express his boredom and exasperation with that life in comparison with one of cultivated leisure.56 He mentions the great politicians of his age Caesar, Pompeius, Cicero, and others - often enough, but usually in order to dismiss or ridicule them.57 His main subjects, those for which he is read and remembered - preeminently, of course, his affair with Lesbia - not only are unconnected to the concerns of public life, they are diametrically opposed to them. Catullus is taken as representative of the Neoteric movement, but he is the only poet associated with it whose work survives in more than the merest scraps. From what we can tell, Gaius Licinius Calvus and

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 43

Gaius Helvius Cinna, friends of Catullus about whose work his praise is fulsome and enthusiastic, wrote poetry that much resembled Catullus's own. On the other hand, they seem not to have shared his apparent disdain for public life: Calvus was a noted orator who actually held elective office, while Cinna went at least as far with his public career as did Catullus. Others of Catullus's circle, such as Gaius Asinius Pollio, enjoyed distinction both in letters and in politics. One should also remember that Cornelius Gallus, long thought to be a crucial link between the poets of Catullus's generation and those of Virgil's, was remembered as the founder of the Latin love elegy even as he suffered damnatio memoriae for his military adventurism in Egypt under Augustus. If these men share Catullus's literary principles, they may resemble Cicero more closely in their combination of a literary with a political career. The Catullan paradigm, however, remains important. It is Catullus, whatever we may conclude about his contemporaries, who adopts and extends the Lucilian idea that poetry itself might be a sufficiently challenging and rewarding career for a member of the governing class. Like Lucilius, Catullus writes poetry in preference to pursuing the political cursus. Unlike Lucilius, he writes in a variety of forms and genres - but, like Callimachus (one of his most important stylistic models), he does nothing to define his career as progressing over time through a hierarchy of genres. To the extent that Catullus viewed poetry as his career, it is a career that he fashioned to be as different as possible from the cursus honorum to which so many young men of his class submitted themselves. By the end of the Republic, then, Roman poets had defined a spectrum of relationships between the literary and the political career. In all cases, the career of the patron class is the standard of reference against which the literary career defines itself or is judged. The two careers might be complicitous in working for the same ends, as in the case of Livius Andronicus and Marcus Livius Salinator. There might be an additional element of competition, as emerges when Ennius caps his patron Fulvius Nobilior by writing a new ending for his Annals, in effect making the conclusion of Roman history not Fulvius's triumph but Ennius's death. The two careers might be complementary, as in the case of most men of the patron class who wrote poetry in their leisure time and had the good taste not to write in praise of their own achievements. Finally, the literary career might be an alternative to the political, as in Lucilius, or even antithetical to it, as it was for Catullus. Against this background, we can see more clearly that Virgil's ideal career did

44 Joseph Farrell

not appear suddenly ex nihilo, nor are the statements of his contemporaries and immediate followers to be understood as reactions to the Virgilian pattern alone. When Horace cites Lucilius as a literary model, he marks his own choice of poetry as an alternative to the political career that he might have had.58 When he compares his refusal to write epic with Maecenas's refusal to embark on the cursus honorum that would elevate him from the equestrian to the senatorial order, he develops the parallelism betwen the two paths. When Propertius trumpets his preference for the life of love to that of the soldier, he has Catullus on his mind as much as Virgil. And Ovid, whose intricate involvement with Virgilian precedent demands separate treatment, makes frequent use of these and other patterns. More might be said about many of the points raised in this essay. I hope, however, to have shown that the idea of the literary career took shape in Rome under the specific influence of the careerist ideology of the patron class. Notes Translations cited in this paper are my own unless otherwise noted. On basic matters of Greek and Roman literary history not specifically addressed herein, the reader may wish to consult Easterling. 1 For literature on the Virgilian rota or 'wheel' and for a sensitive critical reading of Virgil's oeuvre as a putative whole, see Theodorakopoulos. For a detailed assessment of our sources on Virgil's life, see Horsfall 1-25. 2 The basic study of the Greek vita tradition is Lefkowitz. 3 Lefkowitz viii. Lefkowitz's emphasis on the fictiveness of the vita tradition has been challenged by some: see, for example, Alan Cameron, Callimachus. 4 The details vary in different lives: see the passages cited by Brungoli-Stok 285 s.w. 'Vergilii agri veteranis distributi' and 'Lis de Vergilii agris.' 5 The inference is drawn by Servius Ed. 1.42. 6 Ed. 5.81-90. 7 Ed. 6.1-5. On Tityrus as Vergil's occasional alter ego, see the conveniently flexible principle articulated by Servius ad Ed. 1.1: 'we should assume that Vergil [speaks] in the character of Tityrus in this passage as well, but not everywhere: only where the sense requires it' (my translation). 8 Ed. 4.1-3. 9 Ed. 10.1, 70-7.

Greek Lives and Roman Careers 45 10 For the wonders that attended Vergil's birth see Brugnoli-Stok 283 s.w. 'Vergilii mater praegnans eiusque somnia' and Traesagia in nativitate Vergilii.' 11 Critical editions West; Tarditi. 12 Lefkowitz25. 13 Pythian 2.49-56, tr. Nisetich. 14 On this passage and on archaic genre theory in general, Nagy is fundamental. 15 Hunt 152,176-7 (#1176, fr. 39.9.4-32). 16 Thesmophoriazusae 95-6. 17 Thesmophoriazusae 100-29. 18 Thesmophoriazusae 130^5. 19 Thesmophoriazusae 202-5. 20 See note 15 above. 21 Plato, Republic (394e-395b). At the end of the Symposium (223b-d), Socrates is reported to have argued that it was in fact possible for the same man to write both tragedy and comedy. But in view of the fact that he is portrayed there as, in effect, dueling with unarmed men (since his interlocutors, drunk and sleep-deprived, are unequal to the demands of rigorous dialectic), it seems likely that the argument was intended as a joke at his friends' expense. 22 Aristotle, Poetics 1448b. 23 In his Epodes, for instance, Archilochus revels in his ability to turn his enemies into laughing stocks: see fr. 168 West = 162 Tarditi 172 West = 163 Tarditi. 24 On Theocritus's invention of the pastoral genre, see Halperin. 25 On the beginnings of stylistic criticism, see O'Sullivan. 26 On the allusive character of Alexandrian poetry, see Farrell 13-17, with further references. 27 I summarize the end of Callimachus's Hymn to Apollo; see Williams 85-97. 28 Edition and commentary: Hollis. 29 The Diegesis is most conveniently consulted in Pfeiffer. 30 Callimachus was also an accomplished epigrammatist (Pfeiffer 2: 80-99), but the Diegesis does not mention this genre. 31 Pfeiffer 2: xxxvi. 32 Lefkowitz 117-35. 33 Conte 112-17. 34 Horace, Satires 1.6.45-52; Oliensis 30-5. 35 On literary friendship between poets and their patrons, see White. 36 On the cursus honorum, see Brennan.

46 Joseph Farrell 37 The name indicates that he was originally the slave and later the freedman of a Lucius Livius, who is unknown to us. As far as we know, he remained under the patronage of the Livii for his entire life, and was closely associated with M. Livius Salinator in particular (see below). 38 In one of the most frustrating passages of classical literature, the historian Livy informs us that he had access to a copy of the Partheneion, but that he refused to transcribe it because of its stylistic inferiority (27.37). For a critical edition of Livius's Odusia, see Morel, Buechner, and Blansdorf; for the dramatic works, Ribbeck; for a Latin/English text, Warmington 2:143. 39 For the development of the Roman theatre in its social context, see Beacham 1-26. 40 On Livius as a grammaticus see Suetonius, De grammaticis 1. 41 Critical edition: Vahlen; Latin/English text: Warmington 1:1-465. For the tragedies, see Jocelyn; for the Annals, Skutsch. 42 Trilingualism: Aulus Gellius, NA 17.17.1. Philology: Annals, fr. 208 Skutsch. 43 Skutsch 6-7. 44 Skutsch 6, 553. 45 Livius fr. 1 Morel, Buechner, and Blansdorf = Warmington 2: 24-5; Naevius fr. 64 Morel, Buechner, and Blansdorf = Warmington 2:154-5. 46 For the context and discussion of the relevant particulars, see Skutsch 366-78. 47 See Skutsch 147-67, with further references. 48 On the contents of books 16-18 see Skutsch 563-5. 49 Poetics 1448b. 50 Morel, Buechner, and Blansdorf 95-6. 51 Plutarch (Life of Cicero 2) even states that Cicero expected to be remembered as the first poet of his day, as well as the first orator. He may indeed have made significant contributions to metrical technique and enriched the poetic vocabulary, but the verdict of posterity has not been kind. 52 Cicero ad Quintum fratrem 3.5.7. The two titles given (Electra, Troades) suggest that these efforts were translations or adaptations of classic Greek dramas. 53 Otis 25. 54 Critical editions: Marx and Krenkel; Latin/English text: Warmington: vol. 3. 55 Ex praecordiis / ecfero uersum (fr. 590-1 Marx = 626-7 Krenkel). 56 See, for example, poems 10, 28. 57 See, for example, poems 29,57,93. 58 On this topic see Lyne.

Two

From Cursus to Ductus: Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity (Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Bede) Mark Vessel/

In the chapter 'Christianity and the Fame of the Spirit' in The Frenzy of Renown Leo Braudy begins to explore the changes to ancient Roman concepts of public service, career, and reputation brought about by the christianization of the Empire in the century after Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge in AD 312. Writing, books, and literature occupy a prominent place in an account centred (aptly, if predictably) on the career, ideas, and works of that most voluminous of Latin Church Fathers, Augustine of Hippo. In fact, as Braudy observes, Augustine's books, both those he read and those in which his writings were transmitted, were likely to have been parchment codices rather than the more traditional papyrus rolls (volumina). The ascendancy of this protomodern form of book, index of the growing prestige of Christianity in the fourth century, can be used to represent a larger transformation of the relations between writing and power in the later Roman period. The normally cheaper and more portable Christian book, Braudy argues, 'embodied [an] alternate empire, where authors and authority were both invisible, and words served to bring the Word to men.' In just a few decades, Roman imperial dominion was converted into a democracy of letters, a 'community of exegesis... founded on the existence of a common text, the Bible.'1 Well supported by scholarship of the time when he was writing (1986), Braudy's deftly sketched theses on literature, politics, and Christianity in the age of Augustine deserve to be evaluated in the light of a proliferating science of the literary, rhetorical, and bibliological culrure(s) of late antiquity. With respect to the subject of the present volume, two large questions can be posed: What models of authorship were pro-

48 Mark Vessey

duced by the convergence of Roman state with Christian church in late antiquity? And how did they affect the forms of literary career in the West? Although the history of authorship and literary careers is only a secondary concern for Braudy, his chapter supplies a number of useful hints. We shall develop them here in two phases. The first part ('Famous Men') addresses three sets of themes in the experience and reflection of intellectuals - above all, Christian intellectuals - of the late Roman period, namely 1 literary profession and spiritual progress 2 literary oeuvre and the idea of 'literature' 3 literary authorship and figures of writing Working from the groundplot indicated by these preliminary soundings, we shall proceed in the second part ("The Spirit of the Letter') to a detailed inquiry into the genesis of one of the most distinctive features of late ancient and medieval Christian ideology: the figure of the author as scribe. This fiction of authorship, it will be clear, stands at a significant distance from the visions of literary career entertained by Roman poets of the Augustan age and revived by their Renaissance imitators.2 Whereas the career model emphasizes hierarchies of genre and personal status, the scribal model abolishes both types of distinction in favour of manual fidelity to a 'common text' inscribed at God's behest. For the professionally aspiring language of the cursus, it substitutes a professedly humble habit of the ductus, the pen's obedience to a line already traced in the mind, if not on the page.3 Although the temporal processes of this substitution are difficult to reconstruct, its main coordinates can be fixed with reasonable accuracy: they lie, on the one hand, in the legal and bureaucratic protocols of the late Roman Empire and its successor states and, on the other, in the institutional imaginary of the biblical-ascetic Christianity that established itself in the West between the fourth and seventh centuries. Part One: Famous Men Literary Profession and Spiritual Progress: The Singular Career of Augustine The career of Augustine (354-430) is deemed important enough by Braudy to be considered directly after that of Jesus himself. As a well-

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 49

educated provincial youth, this ambitious mother's son sent a copy of his (lost) work De pulchro et apto ('On the Beautiful and the Fitting') to a certain Hierius, orator at Rome, known for his eloquence as far away as Carthage (Con/. 4.14.21). Such men were publicly salaried and privately feed to deliver panegyrics on ceremonial occasions (such as imperial visits or anniversaries) and to teach rhetorical skills to the male offspring of the elite. They were the most prominent literary 'professionals' of their day, honoured in some cases with statues in the forum alongside those of the senators with whom they shared an oratorical stage. In a similar class, if less highly esteemed, were the grammarians or teachers of literature. Grammarians and rhetoricians together instilled the knowledge of the classical auctores that distinguished the better sort of Roman citizen and opened the way to careers in the higher ranks of the civil service.4 As writers of textbooks, model speeches, or commentaries, some teachers of grammar and rhetoric became minor or secondary auctores themselves, copied and studied in their turn. 'Authorship' - in the sense of composing texts to be disseminated beyond an immediate circle of colleagues or friends - was not their profession, however. They were not usually rewarded for it, nor was it primarily constitutive of their social identity. It would, in fact, be difficult to prove that there was any such thing as a literary career-path in the late Roman West, if by that is meant a widely recognized alternative to other kinds of professional activity or public office-holding.5 When professional men of letters composed and published in genres or on occasions outside those dictated by their pedagogical and ceremonial functions, they did so as 'amateurs.' At that point they joined a much larger company of liberally educated persons who, in hours of repose or in retirement from their public functions, sometimes turned a hand to versification, historiography, or philosophy. These activities had their public aspect, it is true. The cultivation of a studious and artistic leisure had long been taken for one of the marks of an upper-class lifestyle, as can be inferred from the depictions of 'men [and women] of the Muses' that appear on many funerary monuments from the second through the fourth century.6 The same patrician or high-bourgeois social self-consciousness routinely expressed itself in more or less elaborate exchanges of epistolary courtesy. These cultural manifestations of an off-duty elite confirmed the status acquired and maintained through other kinds of performance. They made no claims for their subjects qua authors or for literary activity as a course of life in its own right. When the Roman senator Q. Aurelius Symmachus (c. 340-402) began to prepare a collection of his familiar correspondence

50 Mark Vessey

in the mid-380s, he may have had in mind the example of the Younger Pliny, and doubtless hoped to be admired for the epigrams included in it. It would, however, have been beneath his dignity to affect the praise or reputation for such essentially private effusions that his equestrian predecessor had once craved for his verses. The official letters that the same Symmachus wrote to the emperor during his tenure as Prefect of the City of Rome, and the speeches he delivered at the imperial court, were another matter; these formed an integral part of a senatorial career.7 The sometimes complex relationship between professional and amateur literary activity in the late Roman West is nicely illustrated by the case of Ausonius of Bordeaux (c. 310-93/4), one of the very few Latin poets of the fourth century to make a name for himself, as a poet, beyond his native province. On seeing Ausonius's Mosella, Symmachus instantly hailed him as another Virgil (Ep. 1.14.5), a tribute in which the respective parts of admiration, condescension, and self-delusion are now hard to separate. Well read in Latin literature of earlier ages, fluent across a wide range of poetic metres and genres, ambitious of all but epic, not averse to programmatic statements of literary intent, careful of his poetic legacy, Ausonius produced an oeuvre as variously coloured and contoured as the landscape of his best-known poem. Some if not all of his works can be dated, and the manuscript tradition offers challenging evidence of their possible authorial arrangement. Yet it would be an ingenious critic who discerned in the opuscula Ausonii either the plan of a life's work or any rationale for poetic activity besides genteel distraction. By contrast, Ausonius's public career is one of the most conspicuous and meteoric of any chronicled in the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire. A grammarian and rhetorician by profession, he was already in his fifties when summoned from Bordeaux to the imperial court at Trier to serve as tutor to the young emperor Gratian. From that beginning, he was propelled through a series of honours and offices culminating a decade and a half later in the consulship. His speech of thanks to the emperor for this last accolade belongs to his public life; apart from the correspondence with Symmachus, it is the only substantial prose work of his to survive. Otherwise, his writings inhabit a realm of their own, their points of intersection with the public and official sphere signalled now and then in prose prefaces. In the verse preface To the Reader' intended for a collection of his poems, Ausonius proudly narrates his progress from the grammarian's to the consul's chair in twenty-five lines, before concluding in two: 'Such, then, is Ausonius:

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 51

and you, on your part, do not despise me because I ask your favour for these songs of mine, without your seeking/ Of course we are not deceived by his false modesty. A writer who alludes to the epitaph of Ennius when promising fame to a river was clearly not indifferent to the glory poetry can bring.8 At the same time, it seems fairly certain that Ausonius's well-developed epigraphic sensibility did not include any idea of a public cursus for poets. Poetry for him was a professional avocation, not a career.9 Augustine's big career break, like that of his older contemporary Ausonius, whose social origins as a member of the 'curial' or local office-holding class were similar to Ms, also took him to a capital of the Western empire. On the recommendation of Symmachus as Prefect of the City of Rome, he was appointed in 384 to the post of public rhetorician at Milan (Con/. 5.13.23). There he taught class and from time to time delivered speeches on court occasions. For other young men keen on emulating Hierius, this might have been satisfaction enough, but not for one as enthralled as Augustine still was by questions of the beautiful and the fitting. In the autumn of 386 he resigned his chair in Milan and retired to the nearby country estate of an affluent patron, there to discourse with friends on philosophical topics. The Ciceronian dialogues which he composed at that time are pure amateurism, the devices of a man who had discovered, to his evident relief, that it was possible to be a catholic Christian while remaining a gentleman.10 Four decades later, as he approached the end of his days as bishop of Hippo in his native Africa, he placed the same works at the head of the chronologically ordered, annotated catalogue of his writings, the Retractationes or 'Reconsiderations/ This autobiobibliographical inventory has no near precedent or obvious analogue in Latin literature. A comparison with Ausonius's preface to his collected poems helps to reveal its singularity. The two men were exponents of the same rhetorical and professional culture, had similar opportunities for amateur literary activity, and were separated by no more than a long generation. Yet what a difference appears in their retrospectives! While the former consul offers his poetic opus as something extraneous to his public career, the bishop of Hippo presents his entire literary output in prose from the time of his conversion onwards (treatises, letters, sermons) as the continuous record of a new kind of 'professional' development. The profession in question is no longer that of a rhetorician, however much of a rhetorician Augustine may have remained. It begins with the demise of that old social identity and the decision to take on another in

52 Mark Vessey

the profession or 'confession' of Christian baptism. (We note the importance of the public baptismal professio of another prominent rhetoricia Marius Victorinus, in the conversion narrative of Con/. 8.) The bishop's writings on and for the faith are no more a part of his civil career than Ausonius's poems were a part of his. They are, however, conceived by Augustine as 'curricular' in senses both autobiographical and pedagogical, as markers of the process of divinely enabled learning-andteaching that he elsewhere calls doctrina Christiana. Tor the cursus honorum of the Roman civil service,' Braudy suggests, Augustine 'substitutes a course of Christian development, a spiritual journey.' He goes on: 'The Augustinian sense of the individual as a voyager in the world and of the Christian in search of a home in heaven is ... imaged in the writer's relation to his work, whose goal is ... to discover the soul, the true self.'11 In like manner, the reader is invited to discover a true self (in God) by entering the processual theology of Augustine's texts.12 Fittingly, the first biography of the saint, produced soon after his death by his disciple and colleague Possidius of Calama, provides a narrative 'Reader's Guide' to the complete works (a systematic list of which was originally appended to it). This conjunction of biography, bibliography, and public profession of the faith in writing signals the creation of a new style of literary career in Latin late antiquity, one we might call the 'Augustinian cursive/ New and distinctive as it was, it was also exceptional. Augustine's instinct for theological narrative and his powers of self-narration were far out of the ordinary. Other Christian bishops, priests, monks, and pious laypeople of his and following generations could and did make writing and publishing a part of their religious profession and public identity, without textualizing the course of their spiritual and intellectual development as he did his. We do well, then, not to overestimate the immediate impact of Augustine's example on Western conceptions of literary career, the more so since no particular idea of 'literary career' in the Augustan or Renaissance application of that phrase seems to have been current in late antiquity. To be sure, the Augustinian pattern of the writerly life-and-work 'in progress' would make an impression on later literary (including poetic) careers. Without it, Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, and Wordsworth - to name only obvious cases - might never have made the ascents they did. For several centuries after Augustine's death, however, other conceptions of the Christian literary oeuvre held sway.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 53

Literary Oeuvre and the Idea of'Literature': The Monumental Works of Jerome As one of those who shared the young Augustine's sense of the career possibilities attending on literary ability, Braudy mentions Jerome (c. 347-419/20), 'who [in his Letter 22] tells of a dream in which God accuses him of being not a Christian but a Ciceronian.' He adds: 'At the end of the [fourth] century, Jerome published a book called Concerning Illustrious Men - a chronicle of short notices of 135 writers, based in format on Suetonius's account of the Latin poets - while pagan authors were offering the Aeneid in competition as a pagan Bible.'13 The instances are well chosen. Jerome's dream and his chronicles of literary fame were to have a resonance in Western culture easily equal to that of Augustine's spiritual journey. Indeed, probably no Christian writer of the early centuries has had a more uncommon influence on Western literary theory and practice than the man known chiefly as 'author' of the Vulgate. First of all, it was Jerome who enforced the canonical distinction between 'sacred' and 'secular' literary learning and literary texts, turning the occasional anxieties of well-educated late antique Christians about their inherited values and artistic tastes into a quasi-exclusionary dogma which shaped literary consciences and library collections for over a millennium. Like Keats's and Milton's Adam, Jerome had a dream (or vision), and the Latin world awoke to find it true. 'What has Horace to do with the Psalter, Virgil with the Gospels, Cicero with the Apostle?' he asks in Letter 22 (written c. 384 at Rome), and then launches into the famous story of his almost dying a pagan martyr for refusing to give up the books of his youth.14 It is a finely calculated delirium. Others would have answered the question differently, had they even thought of putting it. No previous Christian authority, Greek or Latin not even Tertullian (c. 160-225), whose phrasing Jerome here imitates had gone so far as to make the rejection of non-Christian reading matter an article of the Christian faith. Despite the presence of rigorist elements within it, the Greek church largely escaped this cultural schism. Various reasons have been given for the hardening of Christian attitudes toward pagan culture in the West in the final decades of the fourth century (the period in which the term 'pagan,' as thus applied, became current.) Although its representativeness may have been exaggerated in modern scholarship, Jerome's need not have been a com-

54 Mark Vessey

pletely isolated case. Other traditionally educated men of his generation, especially those of an ascetic stripe whose previous training and careers had made them shine but not for God, apparently felt similar impulses to redefine themselves by revising their habits of reading, writing, and public speech. Ausonius's talented protege, the GalloRoman senator and poet Paulinus, later of Nola (c. 353-431), is often cited in this connection; the verse letters in which he informs his old mentor of his desertion of the cult of the Muses for the cult of Christ provide, if not the model of a Christian literary career, then a rich array of tropes for its beginning stages.15 The Hispanic poet Prudentius (c. 348-410) cuts a similar figure, in a preface to his collected poems which may also owe something, by reaction, to Ausonius.16 These men appear natural company for Jerome. They were also among his earliest readers. Even if they spoke from the heart, we may still suspect that the frequently dramatic, if not traumatic quality of the dissociation of literary sensibilities evoked in Latin 'conversion' narratives from the last decade of the fourth century onwards (including Augustine's Confessions, with its impassioned critique of Cicero, Virgil, and the Roman theatre) is at some level always a testimony to the aspirations of Jerome of Stridon as a highly literate, dedicated Christian in search of a public identity, social role, and economic support. The last requirement deserves emphasis. If our notion of literary career includes the ideas of patronage and remuneration, Jerome has perhaps the best claim to have pioneered the career of Christian author in the West.17 He seems to have done so in full consciousness of the act and with a powerful presentiment of his own place in future literary histories. Following the loss of much of the Suetonian collection De viris illustribus (On Famous Men) and the writings of Varro on which Suetonius probably depended for the Republican period, it is Jerome who provides us with the indispensable elements for our chronology of the earliest centuries of Latin literature. One of his first works, a translation and expansion of the early fourth-century Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, produced c. 380 while he was living in Constantinople, incorporates a long series of notices (mostly derived from Suetonius) on Latin literary figures from Ennius and Livius Andronicus to the Younger Pliny. No other Latin writer of late antiquity, pagan or Christian, shows a like concern for this body of literary-historical material. Jerome's interest, it may be conjectured, was more than merely antiquarian. His lingering survey of Rome's famous men of 'pagan' letters, as notable here for their hardships and foibles as for their honours, achievements, and

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 55

(especially appealing to Jerome) funerary memorials, could only sharpen the question of his own career and reputation. What opportunities of enduring fame were there now, outside the cursus of the civil administration which he had abandoned at the moment of embarking upon it, for one of his training and ambitions? Having run through whatever family assets may have financed his first experiments in ascetic living, Jerome needed to make his own way in the world. In his early thirties by this time, a priest detached from the church of his ordination, itinerant for much of the decade and a half since his school days in Rome, he appears to modern eyes as the precocious member of a class of wandering Latin scholars (clerici vagantes) who would not be accredited until several centuries later, and then only doubtfully. Closer counterparts in late antiquity might have been the Greek sophists chronicled by Eunapius of Sardis, or the wandering Egyptian poets studied by Alan Cameron, among whom Claudian (c. 370-c. 404) was to pursue a brilliant and exceptional career in the West.18 But neither of these careermodels was likely to be cited by Jerome.19 Instead, as he approaches his own time in the Chronicle, he makes space for a series of rhetoricians like Augustine's Hierius (not included) and Ausonius's colleagues from the schools of Bordeaux (several of whom are).20 Certain persons known to him for their works as Christian writers are also mentioned. With a few, temporally remote exceptions (Tertullian, Origen), almost all were either teachers by first profession (grammarians, rhetoricians) and/or bishops.21 The social homology between public orator/rhetorician and Christian bishop, soon to be exemplified by the double career of Augustine in his own narration, would have been as plain to Jerome as it is to us. Despite his rhetorical abilities and zeal for Christian teaching, he himself never mounted a bishop's throne. That circumstance, however to be explained (unwillingness? unfitness? scandal?) is heavy with consequence for Western ideas of literature and literary productivity. A little more than a decade after his updating of the Chronicle, having returned to Rome, left again under duress, and finally settled in Bethlehem, Jerome compiled (392/3) a catalogue of Christian writers and their works, in chronological order, beginning with St Peter and ending with himself. His main generic model, as Braudy notes, was Suetonius's De viris illustribus, by which title Jerome's work is also generally known, though he himself allowed the variant De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (On Ecclesiastical Writers). For information on authors of the preConstantinian period he again relied on Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius, by commemorating in his Ecclesiastical History (1.1) those 'who in each

56 Mark Vessey

generation were the ambassadors of the word of God either orally (agraphos) or in writing (dia sungmmmaton)/ may be said to have inaugurated Christian literary historiography. However, it was Jerome's adaptation of the Roman (ultimately Alexandrian) model of the collective biobibliography that cast the mould not only for the memorializing of Christian writers throughout the Middle Ages but for western literary history in general down to the sixteenth, if not the eighteenth century.22 Whereas Suetonius divided his subjects by profession (poets, orators, rhetoricians, grammarians, etc.), Jerome made a single sequence of all who had 'left something to posterity on the Holy Scriptures' (qui memoriae aliquid prodiderunt de scripturis sanctis) (Vir. prol.). At a stroke, he thereby created a category of 'literature' - in the first instance, 'Christian literature' - which for its combination of objective determinacy (all Christian writing worthy of the name is writing on scripture, i.e., on a text) and generic indeterminacy (as inventoried by Jerome, writing on scripture takes many forms and arises in many different contexts) had no exact equivalent in the classical Latin universe of letters. The latter was defined, on the one hand, by perimeter (litterae = the total written resources of a culture) and, on the other, by internal differentiation, whether professional-generic (oratory, philosophy, history, poetry, etc.) or formal-generic (epic, comedy, satire, panegyric, dialogue, etc.).23 Our modern conception of literature,' which emphasizes the fictional, affective, and rhetorical qualities of a particular, if variable, class of textual artifacts, is taken for an eighteenth-century invention. But it was not invented ex nihilo. Whatever contents are assigned to it, the category of 'literature,' in order to function as a category, requires at once a specificity and objectivity that the classical Latin litterae lacked and a breadth of reference that the classical system of professions and genres precludes. (The once commonplace equation, 'literature' = 'poetry/ seems to mark the limit of accommodation between classical and modern taxonomies.) Only by analogy can Jerome be called the inventor of 'literature' in the modern sense. It is certain, however, that his definition of a separate class of Christian writers played a significant part in the prehistory of that contested concept, particularly with regard to the division of (literary) fiction from (non-literary) non-fiction, for which the antithesis of 'literature' (lies) versus scripture (Truth) serves as a kind of shorthand in medieval and early modern European culture. The opposition of the Bible to the Aeneid, which Jerome made polemi-cally current before Augustine told of weeping for Queen Dido (Con/. 1.13.20-1), is a metonym for this larger discourse of difference.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 57

In theory, as we have seen, Jerome defined Christian writing both negatively as a class of texts apart from the corpus of pagan literature (litterae gentiles/saeculares, now reified in a way it had not been before) and positively as an elaboration of the Bible. In practice, he defined it as his own life's work. The prior tradition of collective lives and works of the de viris illustribus kind excluded authors who were still living at the time of compilation. Though aware of this principle, Jerome freely flouts it, not least by including the long notice on himself with which his catalogue ends (Vir. 135). At first sight, that entry reads like a miniature version of the personal stock-taking Augustine would carry out thirty-five years later. Jerome's Famous Men caught Augustine's eye at an early stage in his own career as a publishing Christian writer and may have helped shape the Retractationes. But the differences between the two men's strategies are as striking as any overall similarity. In the first place, though he can be forgiven for not knowing it at the time, Jerome was accounting for his works in mid-career; he would live almost another thirty years, writing to the end. More to the point, he was announcing them in mid-career. Unlike Augustine, whose earliest, amateurish sense of Ciceronian-Christian literary vocation was eventually subsumed in an official ministry of the Word, Jerome remained a freelance writer at all times, dependent on contacts and commissions for the dissemination of his work and on patronage and gifts for the upkeep of his monastic household. He therefore rarely missed an opportunity to refer the reader of one of his books (or letters) to others that he had written or meant to write. His 'bibliographic ego' is one of the most highly developed in all of Graeco-Roman antiquity.24 His Famous Men carries the principle of authorial self-reference to its logical conclusion. Secondly, Jerome's notice on himself, rather than standing alone like Augustine's Retractationes, completes a series designed to exemplify the possibilities of Christian literary culture as he defined it. Implicitly, moreover, it fulfills those possibilities. Incomplete as it is, Jerome's own oeuvre already represents the practical telos of Christian writing. This sense of realized or foreshortened teleology governs the contents of the notice itself, whose chronological arrangement enables the modern biographer - if he wishes - to reconstruct the author's progress from the multigeneric adventures of his earlier years to the prodigious investment in biblical translation and commentary (especially on the Old Testament prophets) that characterizes the period from his installation in Bethlehem in 386 until his death. Generous as Jerome's criteria for writing 'on the Holy Scriptures' needed to be for the sake of the impres-

58 Mark Vessey

sion he wished to create with the catalogue as a whole, his own practice was by this time firmly oriented on the letter of the biblical text, beginning (to the scandal of Augustine and others) with the 'Hebrew truth' of the Old Testament. With this fixation on the text of scripture, Jerome's literary oeuvre became fixed too, massively immobile in its ceaseless productivity. That is the third vital difference from the Retractationes. 'I have written many other things on the works of the Prophets,' Jerome concludes, 'which I now have in hand and which are not yet finished' (Vir. 135). They would never quite be finished. Even so, the outline and dimensions of his total life's work were clear. "Si monumentum requiris,' Jerome could have said, 'circumspice.' By the early 390s, after long years of physical and intellectual wandering, he had chosen the literary monument by which he meant to be remembered, and taken up permanent residence in it. Despite its date of composition, the final notice of the Famous Men already has a posthumous air. Some manuscripts bear signs of updatings which a modern editor is tempted to attribute to the author. In reality, there was little to add and nothing that Jerome would have changed. Always loath to retract an opinion, he shows no interest even in 'retractating' or revising in the Augustinian manner. His autobibliography is an advertisement of work done and in hand; only in a relatively weak sense can it be described as a report on work 'in progress/ Although Jerome may have continued developing, both as a writer and a Christian, the revelation of that process is no part of his writerly intent or self-fashioning. Instead, he gives us the coruscating image of a man converted at a crash from Ciceronian to Christian readings, whose whole life thereafter was devoted to a painstaking and self-mortifying exegesis of scripture. Herein lies a paradox for the study of Christian literary careers in Latin late antiquity. The individual who most plainly made a literary reputation for himself and a profession of writing outside the civil and ecclesiastical career-structures, Jerome of Stridon, Rome, and Bethlehem, never set forth any idea of 'literary career' that we can recognize as such. For him, Christian writing is an occupation to which one gives oneself unsparingly, a task for which one must be trained over many years, an activity that consumes one night and day. That is the burden of his frequent praises of Origen, and of his instructions to Paulinus of Nola in a letter (Ep. 53) which was later to serve as a general preface to the Vulgate. Like the life of Paul the hermit as Jerome tells it, the life of the Christian writer has a well-defined beginning and end, but no middle that can be spoken of.25 Strictly speaking, it is no

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 59

career at all. Beginning with the near-death experience of his literary conversion, Jerome's literary life entombs itself; indeed, Epitaphium w the title one contemporary reader gave to the Famous Men.26 As Michel Foucault pointed out in a famous essay, Jerome is an exemplary theorist of the authorial oeuvre. Foucault was wrong, however, to imply that the De viris illustribus offers a precedent for modern critical use of 'the principles of evolution [and] maturation' as a way of defining authorial 'unities of writing.'27 While those principles apply naturally to the style of career that we have called Augustinian cursive, they are radically alien to an oeuvre that declares itself on every page to be 'Hieronymian monumental.' Literary Authorship and Figures of Writing: The Rise of the Scribe

"The bishop/ writes Braudy, 'had transubstantiated the Roman public man; the hermit in the desert denied him any value at all.'28 The monument of Jerome's works, like that of Shelley's Ozymandias, rises abruptly from a desert landscape, the landscape in this case being a studio canvas sketched out and filled in over the years by a writer who spent his whole life in or close to major cities of the Roman Empire. The ideological opposition between desert and city was none the less real for that.29 For ideas of literary activity in the Christian Middle Ages it was to be crucial. After Jerome, and in no small measure owing to his initiative, the fictively desert space of the monk's cell became a privileged locus of writing in the West. As the stylite atop his dizzy column dominated the Eastern hagiographic imagination in the fifth and sixth centuries, so the Christian writer pen-in-hand would acquire a profile in verbal and pictorial representations emanating from the empire's former pars Occidentalis. For the Eastern tradition, Peter Brown's studies of the late antique 'holy man,' with their emphasis on affinities between the charismatic dissidence of the ancient philosopher and that of a new class of Christian ascetic, have set the tone of much recent scholarship.30 However, the philosopher as social critic and healer was only one type of culture hero available for imitation and travesty by ambitious Christians. Both for the 'genealogy of fame' that Braudy is interested in tracing and for the genealogy of literary careers that is the project of this volume, other and broader models need to be adduced. Brown provides these too: It is not surprising that pagans and Christians fought so virulently through-

60 Mark Vessey out the fourth century as to whether literature [sic!] or Christianity was the true paideia, the true Education: for both sides expected to be saved by education. The man who had chiselled and polished himself like a statue through devotion to the ancient classics was the highest ideal. He is shown on his sarcophagus, gazing quietly at an open book - a 'man of the Muses/ a saint of classical culture. Soon he will become a saint: the Christian bishop with his open Bible, the inspired Evangelist crouched over his page, are direct descendants of the Late Antique portrait of the man of letters.31

The first succession in this compact genealogy - from 'man of the Muses' to Christian bishop as biblical expositor - is amply attested in our fourth- and fifth-century Latin sources and has been well documented in modern research. Augustine, the lover of poetry, teacher of rhetoric, and self-taught philosopher who became the 'professional' minister of the Word encountered in the Confessions and Retractationes, is its paradigmatic instance. 'In the first surviving portrait of him [a sixth-century fresco at the Lateran],' writes Brown, 'we see him sitting, a typical educated man of his age, his eyes fixed on a book.'32 The second succession - from 'man of the Muses' to writing-Evangelist figure - has also been widely invoked by scholars. Most significantly for our purposes, it has been incorporated in a line of descent that leads down the Middle Ages to the figure of the early modern author as originator, creator, and putative owner of his or her own written work. How secure is this derivation? And, if it is reliable, what bearing does it have on the history of literary careers in late antiquity? Miniatures of authors in the act of writing with their own hands appear in vernacular European manuscripts from the late fourteenth century onwards, with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pisan among those first presented in this guise. This new image of the writer, writes Roger Chartier, broke with time-honoured conventions in representations of the process of writing, both the convention that equated writing with listening to a dictated text and copying it (for example in the traditional iconography of the Evangelists and the Fathers of the church figured as scribes of the Divine Word) and the convention that thought of writing as a simple continuation of an existing work (as in the case of the scholastic practice of the gloss and the commentary).33

The trend in vernacular representations of the author was anticipated

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 61

by a parallel shift in Latin literary culture, which has been connected by Paul Saenger to the rise of silent reading in monasteries and cathedral schools, changing habits of scholastic commentary, and the development of a cursive script. Thanks to the new cursive, Saenger argues, authors came increasingly to 'regard ... their compositions with pride as works which flowed originally from their own pens.' Visual evidence provides material for the longer genealogy referred to above: From the ninth to the twelfth century and to a lesser degree in the thirteenth century, authors were customarily shown dictating their works. God as the true author of Holy Scripture was depicted whispering to Old Testament prophets and dictating to the evangelists serving as secretaries taking down the written word. The church fathers of antiquity and the early Middle Ages ... were drawn either as scribes recording divine dictation or as authors in their own right dictating to secretaries ... In the thirteenth century, scenes of literary composition began to change. The evangelists were no longer exclusively shown taking down dictation, but were often portrayed silently copying the divine text from an exemplar usually held by an angel... Similarly, Saint Jerome, depicted throughout the twelfth century both as a dictator and as a scribe taking dictation, was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries regularly painted writing his own works. Authors of antiquity, frequently portrayed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were also shown writing their own compositions.34

On such accounts, proto-modern literary production appears as doubly autographic: (1) the text is the author's own creation, and (2) it is inscribed - ideally, if not literally - by his or her own hand. (We should note that this model does not exclude the idea of inspiration by God or the Muses, both freely summoned by Renaissance poets. The physical act of writing is enough to guarantee 'authorship' in the modern iconography, whatever supernal ministers may be in attendance.) Contrastingly, pre-modern or earlier medieval literary production is taken to be invariably heterographic in one or both of two senses: (1) the content of the text, if not its graphic form, is attributable to a source outside the mind of its ostensible producer, who is then thought of as inspired (the case of the evangelists and Church Fathers as 'scribes of the Divine Word'), and/or (2) the text is inscribed by a hand other than that of its ostensible producer (the case of the Church Fathers as dictators of their own works). Both possibilities are captured by the illuminator of a tenth-century manuscript of the letters of Gregory the Great,

62 Mark Vessey

where the pope is shown expounding the Bible in words intimated by the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove perched on his shoulder, while, unseen by him on the other side of a screen, a servant takes down his 'text' on wax-tablets.35 To put the matter at its simplest: whereas autograph writing in the modern period denotes the text-originating author, the act of writing sua manu in medieval iconography denotes the text-transmitting scribe. Clear as it is in outline, this scheme takes for granted the earlier stages of the long genealogy of Western authorship. In particular, it offers no account of the rise of the scribe. The dictating author is present in all periods of Western literate culture through the Renaissance. Wherever he goes, so in practice does his amanuensis, the scribe. But these two mutually dependent figures have sharply divergent public profiles. While the author (e.g., poet, philosopher) enjoys a more or less continuous verbal, visual, and plastic representation from the fifth century BC forward, the scribe's career in art and the verbal imaginary is not at all distinguished before the Christian Middle Ages.36 How did the figure of the 'divine scribe,' the type of one who writes with his own hand but not simply from his own mind, become established in the West? As we shall see, the statement that he is the 'direct descendant of the Late Antique ... man of letters' (Brown cited by Braudy) leaves a certain amount still to be explained. In most of their essentials, it has long been recognized, the types of the evangelist in medieval manuscript illumination conform closely to late classical images of poets and philosophers.37 Full-length statues of notable intellectuals were an integral part of the Greek civic landscape from early Hellenistic times. While the Romans favoured portrait-busts for their statuary, full-length images survive in mosaic pavements of the imperial period and must have existed in less durable media as well. Varro's collection of seven hundred portraits in book form, the Imagines, was probably composed of medallions of a kind known to have adorned collections of poetry in the (later) classical age. Other styles of portrait were also current in books. A frontal image of Virgil, comfortably seated, roll in hand, with a capsa or book-box on one side of him and a lectern on the other, appears at three places in the late fifthor early sixth-century codex known as the Vergilius Romanus, an arrangement that has been taken to show that such seated portraits were already a feature of copies executed in the older format of the volumen or roll, where any extended work would require several volumes. Another type of portrait, represented by mosaics and manuscript illuminations from late antiquity, as well as in medieval copies, shows the

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 63

author attended by his muse.38 When Christian illuminators began to decorate codices of the Gospels with images of their human authors, these were the idioms within which they worked. The circumstances in which that development occurred, and the relation between the first evangelist portraits and (prior?) depictions of biblical prophets in papyrus rolls, are matters of opinion. Conceivably, portraits of the evangelists were already a feature of the Christian Gospel-book de luxe by the late second or early third century.39 In this area of artistic expression as in others, however, new styles are likely to have emerged in the fourth century, as part of a larger adjustment between Christian traditions and the elite culture of the late Roman Empire.40 'Late antique' as he thus genuinely is in most respects, the 'inspired Evangelist crouched over his page' is in one main point quite unlike the poets and other authors who preceded him in Greek and Latin bookart. He writes. He applies a pen to a surface on which letters appear. So far as can be judged from the considerable evidence available, no book illuminator in the ancient Graeco-Roman world ever presented a nonbiblical author in that situation.41 The sign of the author in late ancient art is the book-roll, not the pen. When the poet appears with his muse, work complete or still in progress, he is not writing. The ideological implications of this iconography are plain enough. Applying the distinction made earlier, we can say that late classical authorship - in any case, the idea of poetic composition entertained by amateurs of literature in the late Roman Empire, and promoted by the artists whom they commissioned to adorn their books and homes - is not doubly autographic in the sense widely assumed for the modern European author from the fifteenth century onwards. Rather, it is doubly heterographic. As represented in late antique monuments, literary composition is the work of a mind, not a hand, and of a mind guided by a higher power, hence no longer simply the author's own.42 The figure of the prayerful Church Father dictating to a scribe, for which the writings of Jerome and Augustine among others provide illustration, fits comfortably into this mould. Between this doubly heterographic, late classical mode of authorial representation and the mixed mode of the inspired evangelist writing with his own hand, our scholarly genealogy is forced to posit a missing link. Was it because they knew that their evangelists, as scribes, could never be mistaken for classical authors that late antique Christian artists and their patrons felt free to stylize them, in other respects, after the fashion of the poets and philosophers? Did the terms in which the

64 Mark Vessey

writers of the Gospels presented themselves as writers demand that conventional poses be suitably adapted?43 On these and related points the ancient sources offer little or no guidance. We do not know when it was that a gospel-writer was first seen pen-in-hand in late antique art; it may not have been before the fourth century.44 Nor do we know how long it took for such figures of writing to migrate from the parchment page to other media; there are few signs of any wide dissemination before the sixth and seventh centuries.45 Contemporary writers do not seem to have discussed this (to us) important innovation, any more than they did the celebrated (and related) shift from roll to codex. If it is true that 'the unfolding history of the seated evangelist portrait exhibits the conquest of the ancient author by the medieval scribe,/46 we must also concede that much of that history unfolds outside our field of vision. Yet if it did occur, the demise of the author in late antique Christianity should be of some consequence for the longer history of western literary careers. With regard to such a history, our preliminary and selective survey of late antique conceptions of literary profession, literary oeuvre, and literary authorship has yielded a number of probabilities and problems. It may be helpful if we recapitulate them here, before beginning the second stage of this inquiry. First of all, we have found no evidence that ordinary Latin literaryrhetorical culture of the late imperial period offered its adepts any articulate notion of the 'literary career' as an alternative to the kinds of civil cursus they would otherwise follow. So far as such notions were encoded in curricular texts of the period (those of Virgil and Horace, for example) they would have been recoverable. They had, however, largely ceased to be relevant. The political and cultural topography of the late Empire in the West - leaving aside for a moment its specifically Christian dimension - did not provide the space for public experiment and expression in which late Republican and Augustan poets, many of them from humble origins, had improvised social identities complementary or oblique to those of their noble patrons. The point can be made more sharply. The Roman idea of a literary career originated in the city of Rome, and would remain forever attached to it. '[A] cette litterature qui etait Rome meme, il fallait Rome.'47 But Rome under the late Empire was no longer the preeminent centre of literary judgment, patronage, and resort that it had been in the time of Cicero and Virgil.48 With the devolution of imperial power to the new Tetrarchic capitals (in

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 65

the West, Milan, and Trier) at the end of the third century and the foundation of Constantinople in the early fourth, its importance dwindled further. Members of the old Roman senatorial elite might still vaunt themselves as arbiters of style and guardians of tradition, whether in defence of 'paganism' (Symmachus and his kind) or in pursuit of new ideals of spiritual aristocracy (the patrons of Jerome). In reality, they nourished few conspicuous literary talents. Augustine came to Rome to teach rhetoric and was bilked by his pupils (Conf. 5.12). Ammianus Marcellinus came there to write a history in the manner of Tacitus but may have been sent packing when food stocks ran low.49 Local aristocracies beyond Rome maintained teachers of grammar and rhetoric, who now and again would oblige with verses or a speech on a civic or family occasion. In general, ambition followed the emperor, but only in unusual circumstances - in Claudian's case, the regency of the barbarian general Stilicho - could the court itself provide a literary livelihood. Late Roman society offered routes to advancement through military service and civil administration. Outside those well-trodden paths, the options for freelancing were extremely limited. The main public arena for literary performance, the panegyrical oration in honour of an emperor or his representative, was open as a rule only to professional rhetoricians and members of the governing class. Elsewhere, literary activity was a private affair of chiefly aristocratic selfconfirmation, without significant career import. The rise in social prestige of the Christian church between the reigns of Constantine (306-37) and Theodosius the Great (379-95) did little to alter this situation. In general, the individuals who now applied their literary-rhetorical expertise to the service of the church and the praise of God either became members of the clergy, submitting to the gradations of another prescribed career, or did so as pious laypersons, remaining within the confines of an essentially amateur literary activity. There were exceptions, however, and those of the Theodosian age have traditionally been assigned an exemplary and formative role. We have concentrated here on the cases of Augustine and Jerome as putative founders of new, Christian kinds of literary career. Both men can be seen responding to the challenges of their religion in ways that reflect a prior conditioning in the career structures of the late Empire, yet at the same time depart significantly from the 'professional' norms of the age. Augustine, the rhetorician and amateur philosopher turned bishop and tireless writer for the faith, makes spiritual progress-in-writing a part of his public and pastoral persona. As the self-creating reader of the Con-

66 Mark Vessey fessions becomes the self-revising author of the Retractationes, the Latin world acquires an entirely new teleology of literary production and collaborative reception, one in which the writer's activity in all contexts and genres strains constantly toward a perfection of knowledge (of the self in and for God) and of expression (praise) that will only if ever be fully realized and shared in a place beyond time and narrative. This Augustinian cursus, we have suggested, would prove too high pitched for rapid or general assimilation by other Christian men of letters. Jerome's way was different. Never convincingly embarked on a career either civil or clerical, and thus in an important sense an 'amateur' all his life, he adapts the emergent ideology of an anti-civic and ecclesiastically wayward asceticism to a dream of literary renown inspired by his Roman readings in Latin literary history and encouraged by the encounter with more recent memorials of Greek Christian learning (Origen, Eusebius). The result is a practice of the Christian literary oeuvre that is at once monastic in its social exclusivity, scriptural in its objective reference, and static in its monumentality. Jerome, we concluded, is the model of the Christian career-author without career-idea. Strict method would require that we measure the impact of these Augustinian and Hieronymian undertakings - and of the contemporary examples of Ambrose (c. 339-97), Paulinus, Rufinus (c. 345^111) and Prudentius, among others - on the ideas of literary profession, oeuvre, and authorship entertained by succeeding generations of Latin Christian writers. Such studies may be desirable, but cannot be pursued in the space available here. Instead, we have enlarged the historical scope of this essay by fixing on symbolic terms for the transition from a classical to a Christian literary system. For Leo Braudy, those terms are provided by the shift from roll to codex as primary medium of literary transmission; we have focused on the related shift from late classical representations of the 'professional' poet roll-in-hand to medieval images of the evangelist as scribe. Even in the absence of any currently applicable model of literary or poetic career of the kind outlined in the texts and Life of Virgil, the figure of the classical poet - and of Virgil in particular - retained considerable potency in the fourth- and fifth-century Latin West, serving as a common point of reference for reactionaries and radicals in the cultural contests and realignments of the period.50 The displacement of such a figure by the divine scribe of early medieval iconography may therefore be taken as an important indicator of changing conceptions of literary work and the writer's function.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 67 What kinds of literary career, or ideas of literary career, are possible in a culture that has the writing evangelist for icon? And what is the historical relation between the new image of writing as manual activity, albeit divinely inspired, and the stock portrait of the late antique 'man of the Muses/ who rarely if ever appears thus mechanically encumbered? As we shall see, the answers to those questions are bound up with the later history of the respectively cursive and monumental styles adopted by those trail-blazing 'scribes for the kingdom of God' (cf. Matt. 13.52), Augustine and Jerome. Part Two: The Spirit of the Letter Ezra among the Evangelists In the late summer of 716, the elderly abbot of Bede's monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow, Ceolfrith, left Northumbria for Rome, where he planned to end his days. As a gift for the pope, he took with him a magnificent pandect of the Vulgate, written and illuminated by his monks. Ceolfrith died on the journey through France but his presentation volume was carried on to Italy and eventually came to rest at the monastery of Monte Amiato in the Central Appenines, where its dedicatory inscription was cunningly altered to make it look like a product of local craftsmen. Scholars now agree that the Codex Amiatinus is a work of purely Northumbrian manufacture, modelled on an Italian pandect brought back from Rome by the same Ceolfrith in 679/80.51 The exemplar was produced in the monastery known as Vivarium, founded at Squillace (Calabria) in the mid-sixth century by Cassiodorus (485/90-c. 580), former minister of the Gothic king Theoderic. The proofs of provenance are of several kinds. The most striking is a fullpage illustration in the Codex Amiatinus which, on a likely reconstruction of the first quire, originally appeared opposite Ceolfrith's verses of dedication to the pope.52 It shows a man in three-quarters profile, nimbed, seated on a cushioned bench, his feet on a stool, and with a large open codex in his lap, in which he is writing with a pen. Opposite him there is a table with an ink-bowl on it. On the floor nearby lies another, smaller book, also open, and a scattering of scribal utensils. Behind the seated figure, against the wall of the interior space in which he is framed, stands a large bookcase drawn in faulty perspective, its doors open to reveal nine codices laid flat on five shelves. The codices contain the books of the Bible, according to a division labelled in gold

68 Mark Vessey on their spines, which are turned towards the viewer, beginning in the top left-hand corner with the Octateuch and ending on the bottom shelf with Acts and Revelation. This nine-volume division corresponds closely, if not exactly, with one specified in Cassiodorus's Institutions for a 'collected edition' of pre-Hieronymian texts of the Latin Bible. In the same work, Cassiodorus describes a single-volume copy or pandect of a Latin Bible, apparently containing Jerome's hexaplaric (Septuagintbased) revision of the Old Testament, which he calls a 'larger volume in a very clear script' (codice grandiore littera clariore conscripto), to distinguish it from a pandect of the Vulgate written in a smaller hand.53 On the assumption that the formal exemplar for the Amiatinus was Cassiodorus's codex grandior, it is a reasonable inference that the picture of the scribe, along with other illustrations in the volume, was imitated from a Vivarian original. Without straining the evidence, we may then go a step further and see the books in this picture as representing the core biblical library of Cassiodorus's monastery: nine-volume 'reference-edition' of the Old Latin text in the cupboard, portable copy of the Vulgate on the floor, larger pandect of Jerome's hexaplaric recension undergoing correction or annotation. In that case, who is the man with the pen in his hand? As the Codex Amiatinus presents him, he cannot be Cassiodorus. Despite the Graeco-Roman cut of his attire, the writer in this picture must be a Jewish high priest. Headgear, jewelled breastplate, and girdle make him one of the line of Aaron, according to Exodus 28 and the descriptions of Josephus. So far, so strange. Nowhere else in Jewish or Christian art do Jewish high priests appear as writers. And this one has been placed in front of a cupboard containing the books of the Old and New Testaments. A caption above the picture, in contemporary rustic capitals, compounds the modern viewer's difficulties. It runs: Codicibus sacris hostili clade perustis Esdra d[e]o fervens hoc reparavit opus. The holy books having been consumed by the fire of war, Ezra, drunk with God, restored this work. The reference is to an apocryphal vision of Esdras/Ezra in which the Lord addresses the prophet as the second Moses, and the prophet replies:

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 69 [L]ex tua incensa est, propter quod nemo scit quae a te facta sunt vel quae incipient operae. Si enim inveni gratiam coram te, inmitte in me spiritum sanctum, et scribam omne quod factum est in saeculo ab initio, quae erant in lege tua scripta, ut possint homines invenire semitam, et qui voluerint vivere in novissimis vivant. (4 Ezra 14.21-2, Vulgate) For thy law is burnt, therefore no man knoweth the things that are done of thee, or the works that shall begin. But if I have found grace before thee, send the Holy Ghost into me, and I shall write all that hath been done in the world since the beginning, which were written in thy law, that men may find thy path, and that they which live in the latter days may live. (KJV) In the canonical 1 and 2 Ezra (Esdras B' in the Septuagint) Ezra is called a priest (sacerdos) and scribe (scriba). In the pre-Vulgate version of the apocryphal 3 Ezra (Esdras A'), which would have been part of the codex grandior, he is several times called pontifex, translating the Greek archiereos, 'high priest.' This was apparently hint enough for the person or persons responsible for decking out the writing figure in the Codex Amiatinus.54 The fit between biblical prototype and visual image nevertheless remains somewhat loose. In 4 Ezra 14.38^41, the prophet is indeed inspired, or rather 'infused': And the next day, behold, a voice called me, saying, Esdras, open thy mouth, and drink that I give thee to drink. Then opened I my mouth, and, behold, he reached me a full cup, which was full as it were with water, but the colour of it was like fire. And I took it, and drank: and when I had drunk of it, my heart uttered understanding, and wisdom grew in my breast, for my spirit strengthened my memory. And my mouth was opened, and shut no more. Here is the source of the captionist's holy writer, 'drunk with God/ But the apocryphal Ezra, unlike his Northumbrian counterpart, wrote nothing with his own hand; instead, he dictated the word of God to five other men over a period of forty days and nights (cf. Exodus 34.27-9), until they had restored the law in nine hundred and four books. Without the caption, we should be hard put to recognize the autographic writer in the Amiatinus as Ezra. Puzzlement over the scribal figure in Ceolfrith's pandect has only

70 Mark Vessey lately begun to yield to the detective work of scholars. The following hypothesis, recently proposed by Paul Meyvaert, appears to offer the most elegant explanation. (1) The models for the preliminary illustrations in the Codex Amiatinus did indeed lie in a Vivarian codex grandior which had been at Wearmouth-Jarrow since 680. (2) They included an illustration of a scribe surrounded by the main works of biblical scholarship described in Cassiodorus's Institutions. (3) The monks of Wearmouth-Jarrow did not know that their model pandect was a product of Vivarium, only that it was old and came from Rome. (4) Neither did they have access to the Institutions. As a result, (5) the writing figure in their exemplar was a mystery to them, requiring interpretation. (6) Probably at Bede's suggestion, they interpreted it as Ezra and reproduced it accordingly.55 Bede seems to have been almost unique among Christian writers of the early centuries in taking a serious interest in the figure of Ezra, prophet, scribe, and priest - or, as he thought at one time, high priest.56 To recognize the figure of Ezra as a creature of Bede's biblical imagination is not, however, to answer every challenge posed by this image in the Codex Amiatinus. In solving one enigma, scholarship has created another. Beneath the scribal figure in the Bible which Ceolfrith carried towards Rome in 716, still visible if we strip off the nimbus and highpriestly paraphernalia, there must (on the present hypothesis) be an image from the Vivarian codex grandior that he had carried thence three and a half decades earlier. Whose portrait would that be? The natural conjecture - that it is, or rather was, a likeness of Cassiodorus, patron of Vivarium and director of its scriptorium - has been and still is resisted by some scholars. Cassiodorus, it is said, would never have presumed to place a portrait of himself at the beginning of the Bible, as if he were its 'author.' Weak in itself (how can we know what Cassiodorus thought fitting?) the argument conceals a stronger one. As an 'author'-portrait, this putatively Vivarian image would, in our present state of knowledge, have no artistic precedent. As we have seen, late classical book art never presents the author in the act of writing, and the only extant portrait of an early Christian author from the West before or close to this date (the Lateran Augustine) reproduces the type of an ancient man of letters who reads but does not write with his own hand. The problem is not that artistic models for the 'divine scribe' were unavailable to Cassiodorus; it is as good as certain that he was familiar with evangelist-portraits in more than one medium.57 The difficulty arises from the appearance of such a portrait in this particular biblical-bibliographical

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 71 context. The figure of an evangelist may occur before his own gospel, or as one of a group at the beginning of the Gospels (as also in the Codex Amiatinus); it is clearly out of place at the beginning of a pandect of both Old and New Testaments. So if the scribe in the codex grandior cannot be an evangelist except in form and cannot be Cassiodorus 'the author' except as an art-historical novelty of questionable taste, what is he doing there? And if he never was there, how did Bede and his brothers furnish the room in which we find their Ezra? The shortest way of eluding this dilemma is to reject Meyvaert's reasoning and reassert the presence of the Ezra figure as such in the Vivarian codex grandior, possibly as a discreet surrogate for Cassiodorus himself. By resorting to it, however, we remove the rare conceit of a scribal, highpriestly and (as type of Christ) bi-testamental Ezra from the head of Bede, in which Meyvaert shows it to be fully developed, and impute it to Cassiodorus, who evinces no particular interest in this biblical character. A problem remains. Yet it may not be insoluble. To see the master of Vivarium as both scribe and 'author' in the iconography of the codex grandior requires an adjustment to our senses of historical and theological propriety, and to our conception of authorship. It will now be argued that Cassiodorus's presentation of his own life and writings encourages us to make it. Cassiodorian Orthographies Cassiodorus left two accounts of his literary oeuvre. The earliest, extant only in an abridgment by a later hand, lists his accomplishments down to c. 538, when he was close to fifty years old: Cassiodorus Senator was a man of great learning, and distinguished by his many honours. While still a young man, when he was legal adviser to his father, the Patrician and Praetorian Prefect Cassiodorus, and delivered a most eloquent speech in praise of Theoderic king of the Goths, he was appointed Quaestor by him, also Patrician and Ordinary Consul, and, at a later date, Master of the Offices and [Praetorian Prefect. He submitted] formulae for official documents, which he arranged in twelve books, and entitled Variae. At the command of king Theoderic, he wrote a history of the Goths, setting out their origin, habitations, and character in twelve books.58 This notice is as clear a proof as any that can be produced of the

72 Mark Vessey essentially instrumental role of literary performance in the cursus honorum of the late Roman Empire. To be complete, it should also have mentioned an annalistic history in honour of the consulship of prince Eutharic in 519, and further speeches in praise of Gothic royalty like the one that first brought the speaker into favour. With the record of official posts held, these literary and rhetorical acts of state - panegyrics, Chronicle, Gothic History, Variae - were impressive evidence of three decades of public service. The document from which our notice derives may, in fact, have been meant to provide just such testimony, at a critical juncture in its subject's career. In the aftermath of the assassination in 535 of Queen Amalasuintha, daughter and de facto successor of Theoderic, an army of the eastern emperor under Belisarius began the reconquest of Italy. In 540 Byzantine forces entered Ravenna, seat of imperial government in the West since the fifth century, and put an end to the Romano-Gothic regime. As that regime's most prominent spokesman, Cassiodorus may then have been sent under guard to Constantinople; he is known to have been there by 550. As early as 538, when he completed his term as Praetorian Prefect and published the Variae, he can be seen adapting to the new political climate.59 Whatever the political future of the Goths in Italy, Cassiodorus had to look out for himself. This necessity may explain the composition, around the same time, of an epistolary treatise addressed to another senior Roman functionary, containing an account of services rendered to the state and higher learning by Cassiodorus and others, now dead, with whom he wished to be associated. That treatise would have been the source for the text known as the Ordo generis Cassiodororum, 'Order of the House of the Cassiodori/ from which the above notice is taken.60 Many years later, at the age of ninety-two, the former royal minister drafted another kind of literary testament. Of the events of his life in the interval we are poorly informed. Toward the end of 554 the emperor Justinian issued his Pragmatic Sanction, restoring peace in Italy under Byzantine rule and allowing exiles to recover their property. Then, if not before, Cassiodorus would have been able to go home to the family estate at Squillace on the Adriatic coast of Bruttium. On his return from Constantinople, if no earlier, this coastal retreat became the site of a religious community, called the 'Vivarian' monastery after its fish-pools.61 Henceforth the chief amenity of the place would be its library, to whose provision the ex-Prefect devoted the rest of his long life. His last written words can be read in the preface and conclusion to a digest of orthographic rules extracted from various authors. On finishing this compi-

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 73 lation, he drew up a synopsis of his entire literary work (totius operis nostri). He recalls that after (1) the commentary on the Psalter [i.e. Explanation of the Psalms] on which by the Lord's favour I expended my first labour in the time of my conversion; and after (2) the Institutions on how to understand divine and human texts, in two books of (I think) ample size, wherein you will find more utility than elegance; after (3) the Explanation of the Epistle to the Romans, from which I removed the perversities of the Pelagian heresy, urging others to do the same for the remainder of the commentary [on the Pauline Epistles]; after (4) the collection which by the Lord's favour I made of the Arts of Donatus with their commentaries, a book of etymologies, and another book by Sacerdos on figures of speech and thought, so that the simpler brethren, being instructed, might be able to make sense of texts of this kind without confusion; after (5) the book of headings collected from Scripture, which I called the Reminder, because it allows those who have no appetite for long readings quickly to review the contents; after (6) the Summaries of the Apostolic Epistles, Acts, and Revelation, in which those texts are expounded as briefly as possible; finally, in my ninety-third year and with the Lord's help, I have come (7) to the excerpting of my beloved orthographers, and if I have succeeded in gathering their flowers - of those, that is, that I undertook to abridge - into a single work, then, unless I am mistaken, the corrector and scribe will no longer suffer confusion.62 This catalogue is almost but not quite continuous with the one preserved by the earlier Order. The publication of the last work mentioned there, the Variae, seems to have coincided (c. 538) with the initial impulse towards the first listed here, the Explanation of the Psalms, which in its present state represents the final result of at least two recensions, possibly separated by a number of years. The next work listed, the Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, has been called the 'rule' of the Vivarian community but may in its original form have been conceived for another, more courtly context; it too was revised more than once.63 The expurgation of a commentary on the Pauline Epistles attributed to Pelagius was completed by Cassiodorus's disciples. The fourth item, mentioned as a codex de grammatica at Inst. 2.1.3, was one of

74 Mark Vessey several works of compilation carried out or set in train by Cassiodorus, like the De orthographia. Virtually conjoint as these two book lists are, they are none the less perfectly exclusive of each other. Simply juxtaposed, they could be taken to represent two distinct literary lives, linked only by the name of an author, Cassiodorus. Considering the hazards of authorial attribution in manuscript culture, we may find it remarkable that later tradition never in fact gave birth to two Cassiodoruses, each of whom would have lived to a ripe age in a different half of the sixth century. But for the writer's precision in stating his age, and the trail of autobiographical references he leaves elsewhere, it might well have done so. Medieval readers of Cassiodorus's works were ready enough to sharpen the division between his literary personalities. Bede, who probably knew only his Explanation of the Psalms, speaks of him as 'formerly a senator, suddenly [!] a doctor of the church,' and is echoed by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, who calls him 'a convert from paganism, senator turned monk, orator turned doctor of the church.'64 There can be no doubt that Cassiodorus himself is largely responsible for these binaries. It is hard to believe that he did not retain copies of his Orations, Chronicle, Gothic History, and Variae in his personal library at Squillace. Yet none of them is reckoned among the seven works finally taken to constitute his opus totum. The desire to make up a mystic number, which he suggests will render the Order's list more memorable, hardly accounts for their exclusion. Cassiodorus provides our clearest case from late antiquity of a bibliographic ego split between the dictates of a traditional career in imperial service on the one hand and those of a Christian literary profession or oeuvre on the other. Although he was born into and brought up in a Christian society and served only Christian rulers, Cassiodorus's official curriculum vitae to 538 betrays no religious affiliation. Nor does any idea of specifically Christian literary production obtrude on the notices on himself and others provided by the Order, even though (it has been suggested) their present form may owe something to the model of Jerome's Famous Men.65 Apart from his association with barbarian rulers, there was nothing there that would not have delighted the eye of that reputed leader of the pagan reaction of the later fourth century, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, with whose family Cassiodorus proudly claimed a connection. When and how was this traditional patrician self-image supplanted? Without pretending to penetrate Cassiodorus's religious psychology, we may at least tentatively plot the emergence of his sense of a Christian literary identity.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 75 Cassiodorus speaks of his Explanation of the Psalms as the first work he composed 'in the time of his conversion.' Late antique and early medieval notions of Christian conversion, especially those articulated in ascetic milieux, placed as much stress on the continuous pursuit of a lifestyle of religious devotion as they did on the event or decision which inaugurated it. Thus, to posit a beginning for Cassiodorus's work on the Psalms in the late 530s, as the evidence requires, is not necessarily to suppose, pace Bede, that he experienced any sudden change of heart at that time.66 Indeed it is likely that his sense of a distinctively Christian order of literary activity preceded by some years the 'period of his conversion' - that is to say, of his life as a dedicated Christian - as he was later to define it. One reason for thinking so is provided by the prologue to the Institutions, which refers to an abandoned project to set up a public school of Christian learning in Rome in the time of Pope Agapit (535-6).67 Others can be found in a work On the Soul which exactly marks the scission of the lists of the Order and Orthography, and whose absence from the latter provides a useful diagnostic for Cassiodorus's ideas about his own literary activity. In the general preface to the Variae, Cassiodorus stages a dialogue between himself and the admiring friends who urge him to publish his official correspondence. He is too busy, he says. They insist. At length he yields. He will gather the material in twelve books and entitle them Variae, since, 'having various persons (personas varias) to instruct, I have had to adopt more styles than one/68 This diversity of utterance is claimed as an example of fidelity to the rhetorical principle of adapting one's speech to the listener. The same theme recurs, with an interesting reversal of perspective, in a separate preface to Books 11 and 12. The earlier books comprise documents issued by Cassiodorus on behalf of the monarch. Now he will add two more to represent his own tenure of the prefecture (533-8), 'so that I who through ten books have put words in the mouth of royalty shall not remain unknown in my own person (ex persona propria).'69 In a first draft, he then bemoans his many burdens and lack of leisure for the 'constant reading' that alone fosters true eloquence. At some point, probably in the course of the year 538 and before final publication of the Variae, he returned to the text and inserted the following sentence: 'But after I had brought this work of ours to its desired close in twelve books, my friends compelled me to expound the substance and virtues of the soul, so that we should be seen to speak of that thing by means of which we have spoken so much else.' Later, in the Explanation of the Psalms, he would refer to his work On the Soul as 'contained in the thirteenth book of the Variae.'70 The same link

76 Mark Vessey with twelve preceding books is made in the opening sentence of the treatise itself. The progression in these texts from speaking in many styles on behalf of others (Var. 1-10), to speaking for one's official self (Var. 11-12), to speaking about the faculty by means of which one speaks and knows oneself (An. 1-16), to finally speaking to God in a spirit of self-abnegation (An. 17-18) recalls Augustine's Confessions, another work in thirteen books by a man who spoke at an imperial court before he spoke publicly to his maker. The thirteen-book Variae draws to a close with a prayer to Christ, spoken by the author on behalf of himself and those whom he now hopes to have as his companions, 'most wise men, flourishing in [their] intelligence.' True wisdom comes of knowing Christ, through whose lavish gift we know our own souls.71 The language of illumination at this point is Augustinian, the prayer thick with reminiscences of the Confessions. At the end of the treatise Cassiodorus asserts a character that is simultaneously his own and not: Let these statements suffice, not for the greatness of the subjects themselves, but for our small capacity, since we have set forth more than was asked of us, and the nourishing lights of true learning have taught such things briefly and with care. For they have been able to speak with assurance on these matters who, purified by divine gift, earned by their commendable lifestyle the right to explain themselves. That is his last word. More even than its circumlocutions and contrived syntax, the tenor of this epilogue reveals the former Quaestor, Master of the Offices, and Praetorian Prefect. Early readers of the work would know that Cassiodorus was used to making public utterances with the authority of the monarch. Now he defers to the authors of more reliably truthful texts than his can be, even on the subject of his soul, the very part of him by virtue of which he knows and speaks. A major source for the dialogue On the Soul is Augustine's De cjuantitate animae (On the Nature of the Soul), written at Rome in 388, two years after its author's conversion. Various textual parallels and borrowings have been noted, but the most important are at the outset. The interlocutors in the earlier work are Augustine and his friend Evodius: E.: Since I see you have ample leisure, I would ask you to answer my questions on certain matters that are, I think, of timely and proper concern to me. Often in the past, when I have asked you many things, you have

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 77 seen fit to put me off with some Greek saying or other which forbids us to seek after things above us; yet I do not think that we ourselves are above ourselves. Therefore, when I ask about the soul, I do not deserve to be told, 'What is above us does not concern us/ but instead perhaps to hear what we ourselves are. A.: Briefly list the things you would like to be told concerning the soul. E.: I shall, for long meditation has made them familiar to me. I would like to know where the soul comes from, what its nature is, of what substance it is, why it should have been given to a body, and what becomes of it both when it enters the body and again when it departs from it. [A. then proceeds to a division of the first question.]72 In the first section of Cassiodorus's dialogue, Augustine's friend becomes a unison of friendly voices, the Socratic dictum is expanded with commonplaces, and six questions turn into twelve. Whatever actual events or conversations may have prompted the author of the Variae to embark on a thirteenth book, its textual occasion was Augustine's treatise. If he knew both the Confessions and Retractationes by this date, as is likely, Cassiodorus would have been able to situate the De quantitate animae in the longer narrative of Augustine's literary-oratorical conversion. The influence of Augustine on the shape of literary oeuvre presented by the list in the Orthography is no less apparent. Not only was the Retractationes the obvious model for a bibliography of that kind; the placement of the Explanation of the Psalms, a work that draws heavily on Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, recalls the importance of the Psalm in the period of Augustine's withdrawal from public life at Cassiciacum (Con/. 9.4). Yet for all the evidence that this former statesman was scripting his early Christian 'career' after Augustine's, their spiritual and literary trajectories are quite different. Instead of the drama of the Confessions, Cassiodorus's life records convey the sense of a personal development 'no more theatrical or melodramatic than the course of a gentle river to the sea.'73 And whereas Augustine's writings, down to and beyond the (unfinished) Retractationes, are visibly the work of a man on a quest that would have no term this side of eternity, the ninety-two-year-old master of Vivarium contrives to present the stages of his literary production ('after... after ... after') as a comfortable reversion to the company of his 'beloved orthographers/ Then, having put the last work in place ('finally'), he sits back to contemplate the mystical perfection of a world of books in which scribes would henceforth write without 'risk of confu-

78 Mark Vessey sion.' Freely as the scribe's hand might run, the author's literary career style is no close approximation of Augustinian cursive. The inference that Cassiodorus's final sense of his own activity as a Christian writer was based more on considerations of 'oeuvre' than of 'career' is supported by the exclusion of the dialogue On the Soul from the list in the Orthography, the grounds for which seem to have been at least partly codicological. The dialogue, we saw, forms Book 13 of the Variae. Anomalous as it may now appear in such a bibliographic context, that is how its author numbered it. And when it came to counting books or parts of books, Cassiodorus calculated carefully. Perhaps because of his long experience in the royal chancellery, he had a fine instinct for the material aspects of document handling. As James W. Halporn has shown, his vocabulary of the book is especially revealing.74 The Latin word for a spine-hinged book, codex, occurs in his writings in three ordinary senses. Thus it may stand for (1) a material entity, the book as bound object, (2) a formal entity corresponding to our 'literary work' or 'text,' or (3) a division within a literary work, sometimes corresponding to our 'chapter,' regularly liber in Latin. More unusually, it can also on occasion mean (4) a collection of related works that are not necessarily, indeed are probably not, to be found within the covers of a single material book. These variant senses are held together by the idea of the book as a unity. Some such idea was presumably common to all who read, wrote, and handled books in the ancient world. It seems, however, to have grown stronger in late antiquity among those whose books took the form of the potentially more capacious, extensible yet containing codex, and who had been persuaded of the mysterious unity of that multiplicity of books, the Christian Scripture(s). There are signs that the unifying potential of the codex was being exploited in new ways in Cassiodorus's time. His own practice, from the Variae forward, is highly deliberate.75 Developing this line of thought, we can propose a second, complementary principle for the Orthography's omission of On the Soul. If the term is allowed a more Christian and canonical inflection than usual, that principle may be called bibliological. On inspection, the contents of Cassiodorus's testamentary book list turn out to be dictated by the exigencies of biblical interpretation. More precisely, they are the practical reflex of an intent to ensure the literal legibility and spiritual intelligibility of the Bible. The whole edifice of commentaries, directions for literary study, collections and abridgments of handbooks of the liberal arts, and readers's aids to understanding the sense and sequence of

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 79 New Testament books is designed with that end in sight. The rationale and full apparatus of this 'biblical' literary enterprise are provided by the Institutions of Divine and Human Learning, the work on which Cassiodorus's modern fame largely depends and one for which he is as renowned among library scientists and book historians as among students of Christian late antiquity. If the larger influence of the Vivarian book collection on medieval Christian culture remains hard to assess, we do know that the Institutions served in many cases as a model and guide for the stocking of monastic libraries, alongside Jerome's De viris illustribus and its later supplements.76 Recommending Jerome's catalogue at Inst. 1.17.2, Cassiodorus speaks of the latter's fifth-century continuator, Gennadius of Marseilles, as having written 'de scriptoribus divinae legis/ (on the writers on [literally 'of'] the divine law) that is, on those who (in Jerome's terms) had written 'de scripturis sanctis.' Although Gennadius's practical criteria for inclusion of works by ecclesiastici scriptores are as broad as Jerome's, he follows his predecessor in making a clear distinction between biblically oriented Christian literary culture (divina litteratura) and its newly imagined pagan alternative (saecularis litteratura). Cassiodorus's use of the categories of divinae and saeculares (or humanae) litterae in the title of the Institutions and elsewhere follows in this tradition. Building on suggestions in Augustine's De doctrina Christiana, he justifies making larger provision for Christian study of the so-called secular disciplines than Jerome's exclusionary rhetoric would seem to promise; so far as they are true, those disciplines are divine and to be found in the Bible. At the same time, he is if anything more consequential than Jerome in his subordination of Christian literary activity to exegesis of the Divine Law. Thus, while Book 1 of the Institutions includes references to Christian writing in a wide variety of genres and Book 2 ranges across the liberal arts, the work retains from first to last its declared character as an introduction to the study of Scripture. The author of the Institutions and the Explanation of the Psalms knows only one universe of 'letters,' with the Bible as its single sun. While his own early dialogue On the Soul belonged to that universe, it would not fit neatly in the microcosmic version of it that he presents in the preface to the Orthography. Vestigially biographical as the final ordering of the opus Cassiodori may be, it is more strictly bibliological (with a capital B). To summarize: from the point of view of a history of literary careers, there are indeed two Cassiodoruses. The first, Cassiodorus the senator, had a career whose stages can be dated precisely but which, notwith-

80 Mark Vessey standing the excellence of his performance, was 'literary' only in the instrumental way characteristic of the aristocratic cursus of the late Empire. The second, Cassiodorus the Christian educator, left a personal literary oeuvre whose components are difficult to date except by decades, consist substantially of editions and adaptations of other writers' works, and form an integral part of a much larger (if no less personally directed) enterprise or opus involving numerous collaborators and focused ultimately on the text of the Bible. Needless to say, these two literary personalities are not as distinct as their holder succeeded in making them appear. We know that the senator and the Christian educator were already conferring by the mid-530s, and recent studies have begun to show how much the latter shared with the former.77 Here we have noted the continuing deference to auctoritas and the concern for efficient handling of written documents, whether of the empire or the faith. These mutations of the late imperial bureaucrat and man of letters into Christian literary administrator already imply a rich context for the production of a book like the Vivarian codex grandior of the Bible. They fall short, however, of an argument for seeing an image of Cassiodorus himself behind the Ezra figure of the Codex Amiatinus. Unlike Bede, Cassiodorus shows no predilection for Ezra as a scribe after his own heart. How then did he represent the processes of divine inspiration and inscription? Two passages from his Explanation of the Psalms will help us to capture the spirit in which he approached the letter of the biblical text, and so place him in the longer gallery of professing Christian writers. Authorship and Autograph: The Prophet as Scribe To judge from the manuscript evidence, Cassiodorus's commentary on the Psalter was, of all his works, the one most widely read during the Middle Ages. It is preceded, after a general prologue, by a series of topical essays intended to help the reader appreciate what follows.78 The first is entitled 'On Prophecy' and opens with these definitions: Prophecy is the divine breath (aspiratio divina) which proclaims with unshakable truth the outcome of events through the deeds or words of certain persons. As one writer has well said on this, 'Prophecy is the sweet utterance which combines the honeycombs of heavenly teaching with the sweet honey of divine eloquence/ So too David himself will remark in

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 81 Psalm 118: 'How sweet are thy words to my palate, more than honey and honeycomb to my mouth!' (Ps. 118[119].103). The gifts of this grace were proffered in many ways... Clearly David was filled with heavenly inspiration ... As the first book of Kings says of him: 'And the spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward' (1 Sam.[= 1 Kings in the Septuagint] 16.13). The Lord himself too says in the gospel: 'If David in the spirit calls him Lord, how do you say he is his son?' (Matt. 22.45). By these words we realize that the psalms were clearly expressions of prophecy through the holy spirit.79 After a digression on the comings and goings of the spirit in biblical prophets apart from David, the essay closes with a brief but eloquent statement on the role of prophecy in the church after Christ's advent: Prophecy is an outstandingly splendid and truthful form of utterance (magnificum nimis et veriloquium dicendi genus) composed not by man's will but poured forth by divine inspiration (non humana voluntate composition, sed divina inspiratione profusum). As the apostle Peter says: Tor prophecy came not by the will of man at any time, but the holy men of God spoke, inspired by the holy Ghost' (2 Peter 1.21). The apostle Paul likewise says: 'He that prophesieth speaketh to men unto edification and exhortation and comfort/ and a little later: 'He that prophesieth edifieth the church' (1 Cor. 14.3-4). Clearly, the prophet builds up the church when through the function of his foretelling he makes wholly clear matters exceedingly vital which were unknown. Those who have been granted the ability to understand well and to interpret the divine scriptures are obviously not excluded from the gift of prophecy. As Paul says in his First Corinthian: 'The spirit of prophecy is subject to the prophets' (1 Cor. 14.32).80 The assimilation of prophecy to biblical interpretation was traditional in patristic exegesis of 1 Corinthians 14. In this case, however, the extension of the prophetic charisma to teachers in post-Apostolic times receives a novel impulse from the imagery used in the prologue to describe the author's first encounter with the Psalms, which he represents as occurring at Ravenna at a time when he had laid aside his official duties (c. 538). Having tasted the honey of this book of Scripture, he recalls, he wished to 'drink in sweet draughts of the words of salvation/ but was prevented from doing so by the difficulty of certain biblical expressions. He therefore turned for help to the work of Augustine, a 'father' of exceptional fluency and generosity, whose discourse

82 Mark Vessey he successively compares to a banquet, to streams of pure water, to an ocean welling from the psalmist's spring, and to a celestial light illuminating the church. It is this superabundance of a 'wholly catholic, wholly orthodox' teacher, evoked in the same language of gustation and profusion later used to describe biblical prophecy, that he has determined to bring within the compass of a single book, uno codice.81 Without claiming prophetic gifts for either Augustine or himself, Cassiodorus thus allusively places both of them within a prophetic dispensation. The imagery of paradisal sweetness and surfeit is sustained for several more paragraphs, until finally he announces his seventeen preliminary essays, conceived as so many aperitifs to ensure that when certain topics come up later 'the draught of this precious nectar may be drunk with the sweetest pleasure.'82 On the one hand, celestial abundance not his own, promising sober intoxication; on the other, compendious containment, skilfully achieved. These are the parameters of the Cassiodorian Psalter-project, summarizable as a reductio prophetiae ad codicem or bringing of prophecy to book. In the explanation of Psalm 44, we find the prophet playing his part to perfection. Having feasted on the divine Word, he feeds the faithful with his own inspired discourse: Ps. 44[45].2: Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum; dico ego opera mea regi. Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis. My heart has belched forth a good word: I speak my works to the king. My tongue is the pen of a scribe that writeth swiftly.83 Cassiodorus comments: Since the prophet knew that his understanding was pervaded by the brightness of God's gift (divini muneris claritate perfusam), he was impe by the greatness of his very joy to utter prior praise of his future words, and this not through presumptuous zeal but because he was moved by a feeling for the truth (motus instinctu veritatis). The exegesis owes nothing at this point to Augustine's sermon on the same verses, in which the prophet is taken to speak for God the Father. The explanation of the psalmist's 'works' likewise appears to be the commentator's own:

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 83 'Works' means the prophet's little composition (opusculum prophetae), his offering of the fine texture of this psalm through his voice's ministry (ministerio suae vocis), his making the divine words resound by the organ of his tongue as if he were penning them. Opusculum in later Latin usually refers to a 'literary work/ when it does not refer to a product of mechanical labour. Cassiodorus anticipates the scribal metaphor of the second half of the verse by emphasizing the formal construction of the psalm (contextionem). This 'work' of the mind inspired by God is assimilated to the handiwork of a scribe, in order that it may be distinguished more clearly from ordinary human utterance: [The psalmist] was eager to speak to the king his proclamation which he had composed about his marvellous renown. But so that none would think that he was saying anything of his own volition (ex propria voluntate), he compared his tongue to a scribe's pen; it will faithfully express the words of the Holy Spirit as a pen depicts on paper the motion of our thought. He added: 'That writeth swiftly.' We ought to interpret this scribe rather as a stenographer (notarium) who speedily understands words, and more speedily transcribes what he has heard. We must realize that the virtue of prophecy is revealed here. It does not order its thought painfully in a human way, but reveals the commands of the Godhead without any labour.84 The power of prophecy is presented as doubly analogous to the skill of the trained stenographer. Prophet and writer alike act under an impulsion not their own, and both dispense with the customary labour of discourse /inscription. While the prophet does not suffer in the comparison, the prestige of the stenographer is raised. In fact, the notarius had considerable dignity of his own. Shorthand writers played an essential role in the civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracies of the later Roman Empire.85 Beginning in the fourth century, the corps of stenographers (schola notariorum) formed a distinct career-stream within the civil service. Cassidorus's own grandfather held the title of tribunus et notarius under Valentinian III. Although he is unlikely to have spent much time taking dictation, he would have been responsible for the preparation and archiving of official documents, just as his grandson would continue to be in the various offices he held, from consiliarius to

84 Mark Vessey quaestor. The author of the Variae was accustomed to having shorthand-writers on his staff; it is possible that he had one or more in attendance during the period of retreat that saw him embark on the Explanation of the Psalms. How much of this local and socio-historical context was present to him as he imagined the psalmist on the point of delivering his panegyric or opusculum to the king, we can only conjecture. There is, in any case, a more pressing literary context for the scene. Augustine, who relied heavily on stenographers in his work as a writer, preacher, and controversialist, and who recommended the ars notaria as a worthwhile occupation for Christians,86 was adamant that the psalmist's ready scribe had no significant relation to any human handworker. As noted, he took the speaker of this psalm to be God the Father, and the arts of the human scribe were too slow to serve as models for the Word of God. 'God's "quickly/" Augustine insists, 'is quicker than anything,' far swifter than any human passage from written letter to letter.87 The cue for Cassiodorus's thinking on this passage was not given by Augustine, but by Jerome. In his Letter 65, Jerome had offered an extended exegesis of Psalm 44. Cassiodorus mentions it at the end of his explanation and recommends it as a fuller treatment than his own.88 Apparently it was his primary source. His idea of spiritual belching here derives from Jerome.89 And it is Jerome, in a typically gratuitous but engaging aside, who defines the prophet's works as literary art: In both Hebrew and Latin it is idiomatic to say opuscula to mean literary works (syntagmatibus) and writings (scriptis).90 Hence, he who is about sing praises to the Lord dedicates to him his song and little work and, in place of the Muses of the pagans, invokes him at the outset whom he intends to praise (6). Jerome then offers a miniature disquisition on the art of prophecy, now reconceived as a kind of scribal evangelism: 'My tongue is the pen of a scribe that writeth swiftly/ which we have translated [in Jerome's version according to the Hebrew] as 'my tongue is the pen of a swift scribe.' It is the final part of the prologue, to be joined with what precedes it: 'My heart has belched forth a good saying in praise of God and I have dedicated especially to him my little works (opuscula), in which I shall prophesy of him.' Therefore I should also prepare my tongue as if it were a stylus or a pen, so that by means of it the Holy Spirit

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 85 may write in the hearts of those who hear me with their ears. For my part is to provide a tongue as an instrument (organum), and his [the Spirit's] is to give utterance as if through that instrument to the things that are his. A stylus writes on wax, a pen on papyrus or parchment or what material it may be, whatsoever is fit to be written. But my tongue, after the likeness of a swift scribe, whom we may take to be a stenographer (notarium), will, as if by a kind of shorthand, engrave on the fleshly tablets of the heart an abridged and contracted statement of the gospel. For if the Law was written with God's finger by the hand of a mediator, so that what was destroyed was glorified (Exod. 34), how much more shall the gospel, which is to endure, be written through my tongue by the Holy Spirit? (7) It is a striking turn of thought, in a writer who is more forthcoming on the mechanical arts of the letter and the book than any other late antique authority, and whose observations on stenography are frequent enough to merit specialized studies.91 Especially notable is the authorial T - the stenographic ego - that intrudes on the prophet's domain as soon as his song is redefined as an opusculum. Like other late antique literati of social standing, Jerome would have dictated his letters and other works, usually to a trained stenographer. Thus it cannot in any literal sense be his hand that reaches out in the likeness of Moses' to inscribe the Gospel. Yet for all the talk of tongues and ears, the vision of the Spirit's 'work' that emerges from this exegesis of Psalm 44 is a profoundly chirographic, grammatocentric one. The Spirit moves, like the Muses of the pagan poets. The written letter remains. And so, as Cassiodorus came at last to his beloved orthographers, we come to his most famous work, in which he gave directions for a collaborative enterprise of divine and secular 'learning,' 'literature/ and 'letters/ all possible translations of litterae in the title of his Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum. Among the arts codified by secular teachers, those having to do with the material presentation of texts - the Bible in first place, but also the works of the Fathers as expounders of it - are of special concern. Announced as an 'order of reading' (1 pref. 2, 5), Book 1 of the Institutions is at the same time another work of orthography. Already in a coda to the preface Cassiodorus explains his general policy on punctuation, including the line division of certain biblical books according to units of sense (per cola et commata). As in the Orthography, issues of punctuation and correct spelling are treated together.92 Texts that have not been divided by short lines, he says, have been

86 Mark Vessey entrusted to certain scribes for rereading and, where necessary, correction (emendatio). The word used for these scribes is notarii, which has created a problem for modern interpreters. Although Cassiodorus knows or employs several kinds of notae or graphic signs other than those of the alphabet in its ordinary use,93 the only kind that seems normally to have qualified its practitioner as a notarius at this date is shorthand.94 Why set a stenographer to correcting a biblical text? These notarii, writes Cassiodorus, 'even if they cannot preserve every last detail of orthography, will nevertheless, I think, make good speed towards thoroughly emending the ancient codices. For they possess the science of their notae, which, it is known, are largely related to this skill [i.e., orthography] and inculcate it.'95 (He then refers the reader to his own Orthography.} Taken in their obvious sense, these lines permit a simple inference: trained stenographers were good at correcting the vagaries of older biblical texts so that they conformed to 'standard' spelling and morphology.96 Some of the readiest writers of late antiquity had found a new vocation. Towards the end of Book 1, the author steps back for a moment to contemplate the larger domestic scene. He surveys the fish-pools which gave the monastery its name and the baths so welcoming to visitors. For those who are suited to it, a local hermitage provides an opportunity for solitary living: to find out whether he is, a monk should read the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian of Marseilles (c. 360c. 430). Then, as if pointing out a third way apart from or overarching the communal and the eremitic, Cassiodorus inserts a monologue which could not have been spoken by any of the Desert Fathers known to Cassian: For my part, however, I must confess that whatever may be accomplished among you by physical labour, I am, perhaps not unjustly, most pleased by the work of the scribes (antiquarii), as long as they write accurately. For they give saving instruction to their own minds by repeated reading of the Holy Scriptures and, by writing, disseminate the Lord's teachings far and wide. How blessed a purpose and how praiseworthy a care it is, to preach to people with the hand, to set tongues free with the fingers, to make human beings a silent gift of their salvation, and to combat the devil's unlawful wiles with pen and ink! Satan indeed receives as many wounds as the scribe writes down words of the Lord. Hence, remaining in one place, he travels to different parts of the world through the dissemination of his work; his labour is read in holy places; people learn how they may

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 87 turn from their wicked desires and serve the Lord with a pure mind; apart from his work, he works on. Surely he will receive a return on so many good deeds, provided he is known to have done such things out of right zeal and not from desire of gain. A human being multiplies heavenly words and, as it were by allegory (if this may be said without impiety), three fingers write what is uttered by the power of the Holy Trinity. O glorious spectacle for those who gaze on it aright! (O spectaculum bene considerantibus gloriosum!) Heavenly words are written with a running reed, so that the devil's own cunning may be extinguished by the instrument with which he pierced the Lord's head in his passion. It may be added to the praise of these writers that they appear in a way to imitate the Lord's deed, who, it is figuratively said, wrote his Law with the operation of his all-powerful finger. Many indeed are the things which might be related of so distinguished an art, but it is enough to say that they are called scribes (librarii), because they serve the balance (libra) and justice of the Lord. If we forgive the feeble etymology of its final flourish, this is a creditable prototype for the genre that would culminate in the age of Gutenberg with Johannes Trithemius's De laude scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes). The words translated here as 'scribe/ antiquarius and libmrius, usually denote the writer of a final, fair copy of a text, as opposed to the notarius responsible for its earlier drafts. In Vivarian practice, these two functions may not always have been so clearly distinct.97 In the present passage Cassiodorus envisages the most perfect finished product of his monastic scriptorium. (We may compare the idealizing principle that has scribe-evangelists in manuscript illuminations writing in bound codices, rather than on loose sheets.) Despite this sophistication, his perfect scribe is still a lineal descendant of Jerome's prophetic notarius, writing with inspired fingers in the hearts of men and women both far and near. His reputation, however, has been considerably enhanced. His pen is now a relic of Christ's crown of thorns and so a fit weapon for doing battle with the devil. His fingers number off the Trinity. Most arrestingly, whereas Jerome was content to present a second Moses, mediating the divine inscription of a new law (Exod. 34), Cassiodorus fashions his writer in the image of God (Exod. 31.18). 'O glorious spectacle for those who gaze on it aright!' A seated scribe, pen gripped between thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, correcting the spelling of an ancient codex with the accuracy of a notarius and the elegance of a calligrapher. Was this the sight that met

88 Mark Vessey the eyes of Bede and his brothers of Wearmouth-Jarrow when they opened their old Roman pandect of the Bible? We may be fairly confident that it was, and that what they saw was an artisan of the divine letter, depicted more or less as he is envisaged in the Institutions, and in an appropriate setting. Was the subject Cassiodorus himself? Even now we may hesitate to say. At the beginning of his paean to scribes, Cassiodorus explicitly states that it is the work of others (vos) that he finds pleasing, and the context guarantees that 'you' there refers to the monks of Vivarium. He was the patron and teacher of monks, but apparently not one of their number. For a clear illustration of his own 'scribal' activity we should perhaps look instead to the preface of the Institutions, where he speaks of painstakingly collating the biblical text of the novem codices against other manuscripts 'as an old man/ with the help of friends who read for him.98 Who were these friends? The language recalls the courtly circles of the Variae and On the Soul but the writer's advanced age indicates Squillace. Should we imagine a coterie of laymen, apart from the monastic community? The practice of collating and correcting one copy of a literary work against another, sometimes with the help of a reader, is attested by a number of subscriptions from late antique copies of classical authors, several of them from Roman milieu that Cassiodorus probably frequented during his 'secular' career. The self-professed editors are known, in more than one case, to have been men of senatorial rank, and they subscribed their names with evident satisfaction." The recent researches of Fabio Troncarelli on manuscripts from Vivarium shed new light on the matter. Having identified the hand of Cassiodorus himself in corrections to five codices, Troncarelli is able to show that several other correctors shared a similar graphic style to his, one marked by a certain freedom in the choice of letter-forms (e.g., between 'chancellery' and 'book' hands), by the persistence of a form of uncial script otherwise datable to the earlier sixth century, and by the use of notae iuris or legal abbreviations. These characteristics distinguish the hands of the correctors from those of the main copyists of the texts, which are more uniform and more 'modern' in their uncial. From such evidence Troncarelli infers that the personnel of Vivarium originally included a number of persons who had kept company with Cassiodorus at Rome or Ravenna, 'functionaries and bureaucrats of good education' like the founder himself.100 We may imagine these individuals as forming the supervisory elite of the bibliographical enterprise, for as long as they lived. (Was their function as correctors later

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 89 taken over by the notarii referred to in the Institutions?) Some of them may also have collaborated with Cassiodorus on projects of compilation and translation. As authors, redactors, and hands-on correctors of biblical and other manuscripts, they would have constituted a special cadre or informal officium within the Vivarian establishment. At this distance, they appear to be the best match for the 'friends' who helped edit the novem codices, even if their names finally escape us. For the only one of Troncarelli's scribe-correctors to disclose himself on the page is... Cassiodorus. Twice in the extant manuscripts a shorthand notation appears next to the title of a work, which can be transliterated: Cas. (per)legi(t), '(I) Casfsiodorus] read [this].'101 Could not the scribal portrait in the codex grandior be taken for a visual equivalent of this covert editorial signature, announcing - if only to those who knew how to read its code - that '(I) Cassiodorus, restored the work'?102 On that view, the image would stand iconographically between the type of the solitary evangelist-scribe, which contextually it cannot be, and that of the late antique man of the Muses, who often appears in the company of friends but almost never writing in a codex. In the end, the difference between seeing the lost scribe of the codex grandior as Cassiodorus in propria persona and seeing him as an exemplar of the writing monk so vividly imaged in the Institutions may not be great, now or in the seventh century. As we have seen, the personal literary oeuvre inventoried in the Orthography is already collaborative, and any extension of it beyond the writer's ninety-third year was bound to be monastic. Its value, moreover, lay in its relation to a higherorder codex, opus, or biblical collection, one exceeding any individual authorship. If we cannot say for certain that in painting Ezra, scribe and prophet, into their new pandect, the English monks obscured a portrait of Cassiodorus, we can be fairly sure that they caught the spirit of his life's work as a Christian writer. Cassiodorus's learning, states Armando Petrucci, 'was so entirely immersed in the ancient tradition of rhetoric that it did not admit any foreign intrusions at the level of instruments, techniques, or instruction.' Backward-looking in its concern with the diffusion of 'traditional' literary culture, the program of the Institutions failed to register the major shift in later antique Christian thought from an instrumental to a symbolic view of writing and books - as represented, for example, by the works of Gregory the Great. The master of orthography was a man of the past, not the future: The work of Cassiodorus was dispersed,

90 Mark Vessey "Vivarium" completely disappeared, and the Institutiones [in contrast to the Rule of Saint Benedict] called forth no echoes in early medieval spirituality.'103 This strong conviction of the untimeliness of the Cassiodorian project, which is shared by a number of modern scholars, may yet prove misplaced. To consider only one aspect of the problem: if Meyvaert's arguments are sound, Cassiodorus's conception of the prophetic scribe, with all that it implies regarding 'instruments, techniques [and] instruction,' resonated loudly with Bede (673-735), whose own literary works would help form several generations of insularcontinental monks and missionaries. The Englishman's use of the image of Ezra demonstrates that, even when they were partly effaced, the lines of a 'Cassiodorian' orthography could still be picked up by later readers versed in the same biblical and patristic texts. Traditional as he was, and meant to be, the Roman civil servant not-so-suddenly turned servant of God is also a figure of transition. Most obviously from our point of view, he inhabits the still largely uncharted space in Western literary, intellectual, and social history between a late classical idea of the poet as one inspired by the Muses to compose a text that another's hand would inscribe, and an early medieval Christian idea of the scribe as one inspired by the Holy Spirit to set his or her hand to producing or perfecting a text that was, more or less literally, already written. This shift from the mental to the mechanical in the Western figuration of authorship may be taken to correspond to the 'democratization' of literary culture claimed by Braudy, after Brown and others, as one of the principal effects of the Christianization of the Roman Empire.104 It is worth insisting once more on its historical interest. Despite the assurance of our modern genealogies, the substitution of the 'divine scribe' of medieval Christanity for the ancient 'man of the Muses' was far from preordained. No mere conflation of one ideal of sanctity with another, it represents a signal disruption of a late Roman 'order of books' that reserved no place of honour for the writer-asscribe. Although the Alexandrian ideal of the poet as fastidious drafter and corrector of his own texts - the Horatian limae labor - was still current in late antiquity (e.g., in the Life of Virgil and topoi of mutual emendatio], the visual and plastic representations of intellectual activity favoured by the late Roman elite scrupulously kept stylus and pen out of their subjects' hands.105 With few exceptions, most of them involving the authentication of documents or the promulgation of laws, writing sua manu was regarded in such milieux as a subaltern activity. When the dictating poet Ausonius ascribed a divine gift to the shorthand-writer

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 91 (presumably a slave) who was able to capture his thoughts in wax before he himself gave voice to them, he was consciously inverting a social hierarchy.106 Other, similarly playful or tactical uses of such inversions could be cited, and similarly explained. The more general and lasting mise en valeur of writing-as-manual-act that took place between the late fourth and late sixth centuries in the West is a phenomenon requiring fuller study.107 If some of its contributory impulses - Jewish and Christian doctrines of Scripture, monastic regimes of work and obedience, late imperial law and bureaucracy - are plain enough, their articulation and impact on late antique literary culture are harder to uncover. Here is where Cassiodorus plays a role, in modern historiography as in the culture of his time. The documents of the long, double life of this royal minister and Christian interpreter provide us with rare opportunities to observe the disappearance of a certain kind of late imperial author and the emergence of the Christian scribe as primary exponent of an 'alternate empire' of the book. Braudy's description of the Bible as the 'common text' of a new Christian practice of writing accords well with the collective and finally monastic character of the activities envisaged in Cassiodorus's Institutions and Orthography. We should be careful, however, not to take too absolutely his assertion that Christian dissemination of the Bible created a literary system in which 'authors and authority were both invisible.' The invisibility of God this side of the eschaton might be an article of faith, but the writer's creed was open to more than one interpretation. In theory, and to some degree in practice, Christian scribality did entail the disappearance of human authors after the apostles and evangelists. It would be hard to find clearer instances of the hazards of personal fame under such a dispensation than those offered by the vestigial presence of the name and person of Cassiodorus in Vivarian codices (two or three strokes of the pen in shorthand, an ambiguous 'author'-portrait) and the anonymity of his assistants. Had we to guess what would become of 'authors' in the Christian culture of the West after 600 from this evidence alone, it would seem safe to predict their future invisibility. But of course it would be a mistake. In the event, the models of literary activity supplied by the works of Augustine, Jerome, and other 'Fathers' copied at Squillace and elsewhere in the West ensured that there would always be new scriptores ecclesiastic: to insert by name into the catalogue of Christian 'Famous Men,' no matter how many of their fellow labourers might go modestly or accidentally uncommemorated. While the rise of the Christian scribe can be con-

92 Mark Vessey strued as a sign of far-reaching alterations to the Western 'authorfunction/ it did not portend any early medieval 'death of the author.' Far from it. It is time to return to our main theme and conclude. Christian literati of the late Roman Empire, we have seen, inherited no strong idea of literary 'career.' Instead, they improvised forms, ideals, and narratives of literary production which variously answered their experience of the professional structures of the time and their personal understanding of Christianity. Of the diverse 'styles' of life-and-work that thereby came to be represented in Latin writing by the end of the first quarter of the fifth century, those associated with the names of Augustine and Jerome may be thought to have exerted a particular pressure on later generations. Without trying to discern the exact balance of these influences on Cassiodorus's self-presentation as a Christian writer, we have suggested that its overall tendency is toward a vision of biblicalliterary oeuvre whose closest affinities are with the ascetic, textualist, monumentalizing enterprise of Jerome, now reconceived in a collaborative mode. Was this to be Jerome's legacy to the early medieval West, or a significant part of it? Is it a likeness of the monk of Bethlehem, at two removes, that is concealed beneath the high-priestly figure in the Codex Amiatinus? To lend some colour to these hypotheses and make an end to this essay, we shall briefly extend the inquiry opened by Meyvaert into the relations of Bede and Cassiodorus. Colophon: The Death of Bede Before committing himself to Christ at the close of the Ecclesiastical History, Bede inserted a biobibliographical notice.108 From his entry at age seven into the monastery of St Peter and St Paul at WearmouthJarrow until the present year 731, he recalls: I have applied myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures (omnem meditandis scripturis operam dedi); and, amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write... From the time I became a priest [at the age of thirty] until the fifty-ninth year of my life I have made it my business, for my own benefit and that of my brothers, to make brief extracts from the works of the venerable fathers on the holy Scriptures, or to add notes of my own to clarify their sense and interpretation.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 93 He then gives a list of his writings: The beginning of Genesis (in principium Genesis) up to the birth of Isaac [and many other works on the Old Testament, especially on the historical and prophetic books] On the Gospel of Mark [and works on most of the other New Testament books, including Revelation] Also a book of letters to various people ... Also of the histories of the saints ... A history of the abbots of the monastery ... The history of the church of our island and race ... Amartyrology ... A book of hymns ... A book of epigrams ... Two books, one on the nature of things and the other on chronology ... A book about orthography, arranged according to the order of the alphabet. A book on the art of metre, and to this is added another small book on figures of speech or tropes, that is, concerning the figures and modes of speech with which the holy Scriptures are ordained. Finally, he offers up his prayer: And I pray you, merciful Jesus, that as you have granted me sweet draughts from the words of your science (donasti verba scientiae tuae dulciter haurire), so will you grant of your goodness that I may come in time to you, the fount of all wisdom, and stand before your face for ever. As Augustine had found, it is not easy to leave a complete list of one's works while writing to the end of one's days. Bede would live another four years after completing the History, time enough for further literary labours, including a revision of his Commentary on Acts in which he 'supplemented and corrected' what he had previously set down and discussed discrepancies between the Greek and Latin texts (Retr. praef.). So far as he was able at the time, however, he made a full literary confession in the last chapter of the History. And he would not have had much to add or alter later. The life's work that appears there is an image of the one attributed earlier in the History (4.24) to the inspired poet

94 Mark Vessey Caedmon, former cowherd of Whitby, who sang the story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation in English verse - which is to say that the life's work of Caedmon (otherwise unknown) is an image of Bede's.109 Although he wrote much that was not strictly de scripturis sanctis, the biblical canon and series sacrae historiae define Bede's scholarly oeuvre as closely as they do the Anglo-Saxon poet's. He presents himself as a lifelong student and expositor of the sacred text, and the circuit of his bibliography closes with a book on its poetic and verbal arts. The homology of the two men's literary oeuvres is not only formal. Bede and Caedmon belong to similarly structured interpretative communities.110 Where Caedmon relies on the brothers in his monastery to feed him the matter of his song, Bede excerpts the works of the Fathers while keeping the rule of reading, meditation, and song proper to his. It is not easy to die in the act of writing and leave one's work complete, but Bede's pupil Cuthbert saw to it that his master enjoyed that grace. In his account, Bede passed his last days as he had spent his whole life, in reading, singing, and writing. The songs were in both Latin and English. So was the writing: During those days there were two pieces of work worthy of record, besides the lessons (lectiones) which he gave us every day and his chanting of the Psalter, which he desired to finish: the gospel of St. John, which he was turning into our mother tongue to the great profit of the Church, [?] from the beginning as far as the words 'But what are they among so many?' (John 6.9) [?], and a selection from Bishop Isidore's book On the Wonders of Nature.111 According to Cuthbert, Bede seemed to know when his time would come. When told that one chapter was outstanding 'of that book [he] was dictating,' the old man instructed the boy who acted as his scribe to prepare his pen and write it down fast. A little later the boy piped up: There is still one sentence, dear master, that we have not written down.' And [Bede] said: 'Write it.' After a little the boy said: 'There! Now it is written.' And he replied: 'Good! It is finished; you have spoken the truth.' [Bede then asked to be helped to the place where he was used to sitting and praying.] And so upon the floor of his cell, singing 'Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit' and the rest, he breathed his last. And well may we believe without hesitation [says Cuthbert] that, inasmuch as he had laboured here always in the praise of God, so his soul was carried by angels to the joys of Heaven which he longed for.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 95 The written word on which Bede makes his end is Christ's at John 19.30, consummatum est. Christ died ut consummaretur scriptura, "that the scripture might be fulfilled' (John 19.28). Bede dies on fulfilling his task of writing: modo descripta est, 'Now it has been written down [or written out].' Although Cuthbert does not name the text, his reference to a chapter and the emphasis on prescribed extent seem to point to the Gospel of John rather than selections from Isidore. It is puzzling that Bede would translate only as far as John 6.9, and make his final pause at the beginning of the feeding of the five thousand, unless of course he expired before completing the work cut out for him - a possibility that Cuthbert was clearly unwilling to admit. Had Bede translated the whole of this biblical book, as good practice would seem to demand, his amanuensis would not then have lifted his pen from the page until after setting down, in English of his time, the following words (John 21.25): And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen. Apt colophon, had it ever been written, for the historian-exegete who was Bede. And for the scribe. If Bede usually dictated to more junior monks, he made no scruple of acting as his own amanuensis when occasion demanded.112 Since, as he says, much of his literary work consisted in the excerpting of earlier Christian authors, the difference between 'scribal' and 'authorial' writing would in practice often be minimal, while theory tended to reduce it further. Even when not copying in the literal sense, he was still following a trace, fulfilling a scripture whose order and extent were known from the outset. The tendency of (auto)biobibliographical passages like those just quoted is picked up by a fourteenth-century breviary, which describes Bede as one who 'like a learned scribe (velut scriba doctus) wrote many excellent volumes on almost the whole of the Old and New Testaments.'113 The 'almost' of this tribute, like the suspicion of missed chapters in Cuthbert's, gives the measure of an ambition. Caedmon, sober at the feast, sings the Bible through; Ezra, 'drunk with God,' restores the whole ad litteram; Bede, drinking as deeply of divine science as he can, devotes his life and work in the monastery to making up the same plenitude. The ideal of Christian literary oeuvre monumentalized by Jerome and socialized by Cassiodorus (partly along

96 Mark Vessey Augustinian lines) manifests itself at Wearmouth-Jarrow in texts and images which vibrantly assert the analogy of three wholes: the life of the author in monastic community, the total literary work, the divine revelation in scripture. Of the three, it is the third which dictates the shape assigned to the other two. '[Bede's] admirers in modern times,' writes one, 'would no doubt prefer that, instead of inserting a systematic list at the end of his Ecclesiastical History, [he] had left us a list of his works in chronological order.'114 Augustine supplied such a list, and with it a potential model of individual Christian literary career. Bede, however, reflects the more immediately decisive turn in late antique literary theory and practice, which was towards a new vision of shared scriptural work.

Notes Translations are my own unless otherwise credited. 1 Braudy 150-89 at 169. Roll to codex: Roberts and Skeat; Gamble 49-66 (New Testament writings); Reynolds and Wilson 34-6 (classical authors); Pacht 12-31 (illuminated MSS). 2 See esp. Farrell above. 3 The ductus as a term of art in modern palaeography: Mallon 21-2 ('C'est 1'ordre de succession dans lequel le scribe a execute les traits [d'une lettre], et le sens dans lequel il fait chacun d'eux'). 4 Nellen; Kaster (33-5 on the professio litterarum); Averil Cameron 673-9 ('Literary Education as a Path to Advancement'). Political functions of rhetoric in the late Empire: MacCormack, Art and Ceremony; Brown, Power and Persuasion 35-47. Panegyrical orations of third- and fourth-century Gallic teachers of rhetoric (Panegyrici Latini): Nixon and Rodgers. 5 The situation in parts of the Eastern empire (e.g., at Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople) seems to have been more favourable to 'professional' poets, as shown by Alan Cameron, 'Wandering Poets.' He concedes, however, that '[t]he fact that so many of these [Egyptian] poets were scholars and frequently practised as professional schoolmasters is of no little importance for a proper appreciation of their careers ... [I]t is likely that a large number of [them] reckoned to earn their daily bread by their teaching, and looked to their poetic skills as a useful though irregular means of supplementing their income' (496). 6 Marrou, MOUSIKOS ANER; Zanker, chap. 6.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 97 7 Familiar letters, ed. Callu; social context: Matthews. The letters of Symmachus as we have them were published after his death in a collection finalized by his son. Official correspondence, ed. and trans. Barrow. Speeches, ed. Pabst. 8 Ausonius, Mosella 476: 'ibis in ora hominum.' Cf. Ennius (ed. Vahlen) V 17: 'volito vivus per ora virum,' already imitated by Virgil, Georgics 3.9. 9 Poems, ed. Green; see also Schmidt. Career: Sivan. 10 O'Donnell, 'Augustine: His Time and Lives' 18-19. 11 Braudy 161,171. 12 Vessey, 'Opus Imperfectum.' 13 Braudy 168. 14 Jerome, Ep. 22.30. Ideological context: Hagendahl, Von Tertullian zu Cassiodor. Echoes: Antin; Rice, chap. 4. 15 Trout 68^89. 16 The poetical programs of Paulinus and Prudentius: Fontaine 149-94. 17 Jerome's moyens de parvenir, social and material: Rebenich. 18 Alan Cameron, 'Wandering Poets'; Claudian 1-29. 19 Even so, it is worth noting that of the three 'public' genres that Cameron finds chiefly practised by Claudian and his fellow Egyptian poets - encomium/invective, epithalamion, and epic - the first bulks large in Jerome's correspondence, while the second is adapted for the praise of consecrated virginity, conceived as spiritual marriage to Christ (e.g., Ep. 22 to Eustochium). 20 Jerome, Chron. a. 317, 324, 327,336, 353, 354 (grammarian Donatus, rhetorician Marius Victorinus), 355. 21 Exceptions closer to Jerome's own time are Juvencus and Porfyrius (Chron. a. 329), Christian Latin poets who dedicated their verses to the emperor Constantine. 22 Blum; Fuhrmann. 23 Schadewalt; Quinn 1-4. 24 The phrase is Loewenstein's, applied to Ben Jonson, and usefully extended by Kerby-Fulton to manuscript culture. 25 Jerome, Life of Paul (trans. Harvey) 360. 26 Jerome, Ep. 67.2 (= Augustine, Ep. 40.2); 112.3. 27 FoucaultlSl. 28 Braudy 176. 29 Markus 181-97; Brown, 'Asceticism' 615-21. 30 See now Brown, 'The Holy Man,' and Howard-Johnston and Haywood. 31 Brown, World of late antiquity 32, cited by Braudy 176 (emphasis added). The modern historiographical context: Vessey, 'Demise' 395^411.

98 Mark Vessey 32 Brown, Augustine 259. 33 Chartier 25-59 ('Figures of the Author') at 52, citing Saenger (emphasis added). 34 Saenger 388, with references to images of each type (emphasis added). A complementary corpus of female scribes/writers from the same period: Smith. 35 Nordenfalk 169-70 and pi. XLVI. Cf. Gregory, Mor. praef. 2 on the inspiration of biblical writers, imagined as both taking and giving dictation; Minnis 37. 36 Debray. 37 Friend [Part I] 141-6; Weitzmann, Ancient Book Illumination 116-27 and 'Book Illustration of the Fourth Century.' 38 Weitzmann, 'Book Illustration of the Fourth Century' 116-17, after Bethe 84-98. A second- or third-century mosaic from Hadrumetum (Sousse, Tunisia) shows Virgil seated, open roll in hand, between Clio and Melpomene. 39 As assumed by Friend [Part I] 146, and accepted by Weitzmann, Illustrations in Roll and Codex 104. 40 Weitzmann, 'Book Illustration of the Fourth Century,' esp. 109-16. 41 Friend [Part I] 143nl, a point eloquently restated by Loerke 378; cf. Nordenfalk 206. Pace Weitzmann, Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination 65, Dioscurides probably does not have a pen in his hand in the sixth-century miniature which shows him at work on his herbal, attended by a personification of Epinoia ('Power of Thought'). I owe this observation to Alice Christ. 42 See, e.g., the ivory diptych from Monza (c. 400), showing a poet who 'listens with rapt attention to the chords of his kithara-playing Muse. His inspiration comes not from the writings strewn carelessly on the ground, but from the Muse and her song': Zanker 328, referring to the illustration in Schefold 185. 43 Loerke. 44 Weitzmann, 'Book Illustration of the Fourth Century,' hypothetically reconstructs 'a very early type of evangelist [portrait] from the period when the transition was made from an ancient poet or philosopher into an evangelist, who is not yet concerned with writing down his Gospel' (115). He suggests that much of the characteristic decor of the later type of illustration may have derived from monumental art of the (post-) Constantinian age. Rosenbaum, 84, traces 'the posture of the Evangelist who dips his pen into the ink' to a classical prototype represented by a portrait of Constantius II in the Calendar of 354; cf. Weitzmann, 'Book Illustration of the Fourth Century' 109-20.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 99 45 Hunger and Wessel 486-505; Weitzmann, "The Ivories of the So-Called Grado Chair' (Matthew taking dictation from Christ; Syrian, seventh century). 46 Loerke379. 47 Bardon 2.310. 48 Auerbach 237-58; Gualandri. 49 Ammianus Marcellinus 14.6.19, probably during the Urban Prefecture of Symmachus (384); that Ammianus himself was one of the foreigners expelled on this occasion is only an inference. 50 MacCormack, Shadows of Poetry, chap. 2. 51 For this and what follows: Bruce-Mitford, 'Decoration and Miniatures/ 'Art of the Codex Amiatinus'; Halporn, Tandectes' 296-9; Merten; Marsden, Text of the Old Testament 107-39; esp. Meyvaert, 'Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus.' 52 For an accurate line-drawing and clear colour-reproduction of this image, see now Marsden, 'Job in His Place,' fig. 1 and pi. 6. 53 Cassiodorus, Inst. 1.1-9,1.11.3 (novem codices), 1.14.2 (codex grandior), 1.12.3 (pandectes minutiore manu conscriptus); Marsden, Text of the Old Testament 129-39. 54 Meyvaert, 'Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus' 875. 55 Postulates 3-6 are Meyvaert's, formulated partly in response to Corsano, who argues that the monks of Wearmouth-Jarrow confected the Ezraimage from their own reading of Cassiodorus's Institutions and that no such 'portrait' appeared in the codex grandior. But there is no convincing proof that Bede and his fellows had access to the Institutions. 56 Meyvaert, 'Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus' 873-6,881-2. 57 There is a fine series of writing evangelists among the mosaics of the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, which would have been under construction during the later years of Cassiodorus's residence there; the figure of Matthew bears a more than passing resemblance to the 'Ezra' of the Codex Amiatinus. For a curious speculation on the original model for scenes of evangelists in a mountainous setting, as at San Vitale, see the abstract of a paper by A.M. Friend in American Journal of Archaeology 30 (1926): 88-9, pointing to a hypothetical frontispiece in Jerome's revised edition of the New Testament (Rome, 384)! 58 Barnish, Ordo generis Cassiodororum, in Cassiodorus: The Variae xxxvi, adopting an emendation proposed by Theodor Mommsen. Latin text with commentary in O'Donnell, Cassiodorus 259-66. 59 Barnish, Cassiodorus: The Variae xv. Cf. Gillett, for whom '[t]he Variae is a monument to its author and his peers rather than their masters, an extension of the cultivation of eloquence as part of public administration' (50).

100 Mark Vessey 60 The other notices in the Ordo refer to Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, consul of 485 and author of a lost Roman history, and his son-in-law, the philosopher Boethius, both of whom had been executed by Theoderic on charges of treason in 523-4. Momigliano, 'Cassiodoro' 499, places the composition of the original work at Constantinople c. 550, but admits that 'the present state of the text... does not allow any certainty about its date' ('Cassiodorus and Italian Culture' 214-15 and n54). The Ordo is transmitted by one family of manuscripts of Cassiodorus's Institutions and was presumably redacted at Vivarium. It is enough for the present argument that the depiction of the political and literary career given in the notice on Cassiodorus be substantially his own. 61 Cassiodorus, Inst. 1.29. 62 Cassiodorus, Orth. praef. 144. 63 Troncarelli 12-38. 64 Bede, In Ezr. 2, line 283; John of Salisbury, Hist. pont. praef. 2. 65 Barnish, Cassiodorus: The Variae xxxv; cf. Milazzo. 66 O'Donnell, Cassiodorus, chap. 4: 'Conversion.' 67 Cassiodorus, Inst. praef. 1, contrasting the cult of saeculares litterae and mundani auctores with the neglect of Holy Scripture. 68 Cassiodorus, Var. (1-10), praef. 15, trans, adapted from Barnish. 69 Cassiodorus, Var. 11, praef. 6. 70 Cassiodorus, Exp. Ps. 145.2, lines 31-2. This arrangement is respected by several classes of manuscripts of the Variae. 71 Cassiodorus, An. 17, lines 26-33. 72 Augustine, Quant. 1.1. 73 O'Donnell, Cassiodorus 115. 74 Halporn, 'Cassiodorus's Use of the Term Codex'; Witty. 75 After other scholars, Petrucci 15-16 notes Cassiodorus's frequent use of the expression in uno corpore to refer to the gathering of texts in one material 'body' (see the index to Mynors's edition of the Institutions, s.v. corpus). He is also the first Latin writer regularly to use the Greek term pandectes for a complete Bible in one codex. Meyvaert, 'Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus/ points out that the bibliographic application of corpus 'shows someone very familiar with soma and somation to designate a codex' (867). This vocabulary may reflect Cassiodorus's experience of Greek book-culture during his time in Constantinople. 76 McKitterick 200-10. 77 Barnish, 'Work of Cassiodorus' and 'Sacred Texts.' 78 The Explanation of the Psalms as a work designed from the outset 'to be read in private and in silence': Halporn, 'Methods of Reference' 73.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 101 79 Cassiodorus Exp. Ps. praef. 1, lines 1-25, trans. Walsh 1.27 (the initial quotation is of Origen, as translated by Rufinus). Following in a long tradition of 'prosopological' Psalter exegesis, Cassiodorus understands the psalmist to speak prophetically either in his own person (ex persona propria) or in the person of Christ: Schlieben 25, 29-3. On this view, the rhetorics of the Psalms and his Variae are comparable. 80 Cassiodorus, Exp. Ps. praef. 1, lines 63-75, trans. Walsh 1.28. 81 Cassiodorus, Exp. Ps. praef., lines 1-39, trans. Walsh 1.23. 82 Cassiodorus, Exp. Ps. praef., lines 124-8, trans. Walsh 1.26. 83 'Scribe' here replaces the 'scrivener' of the Douai version of the Psalms adopted by Walsh. 84 This and the preceding quotations are from Exp. Ps. 44.2, trans, adapted from Walsh 1.440-1. The rendering of the final phrase as 'without any labour' follows a conjecture of Cassiodorus's seventeenth-century editor Jean Caret, who read sine labore for the sine livore ('without rancour') of most of the MSS, on the hint of Paris, Bibl. nat. 12.239 which has sine libore [sic]. 85 See Teitler and, for an imposing visual image of this activity, the front wing of the ivory diptych of Rufus Probianus, vicar of the City of Rome in c. 400, shown seated on a tribunal, with shorthand writers standing on either side of him, their writing-tablets open and styluses poised: Gabelmann, table 38. The reverse of the diptych has Probianus writing - or indicating? - his own name with a pen in a scroll unfurled across his knees. On the possible influence of this type of scene (derived from imperial portraiture of the earlier fourth century) on the frontal portrait of the writing evangelist: Alfoldi-Rosenbaum 115-18. 86 Hagendahl, 'Bedeutung' 33-5; Augustine, Doctr. chr. 2.26.40. 87 Augustine, Enarr. 44.(3).6, lines 18-28. 88 Cassiodorus, Exp. Ps. 44.18, lines 486-90. 89 Jerome, Ep. 65.5. 90 Thesaurus Linguae Latinae 9.2, s.v. opusculum, defining the primary sense of the word as 'the work of a writer or orator/ glosses this use in Jerome as fere de ipsis scriptis, 'virtually of written texts themselves' and that of Cassiodorus in Exp. Ps. 44 as 'perhaps referring to the action or labour of writing.' For the sense of opuscula as products of mechanical labour the one late antique example given is Jerome, Ep. 53.6.2, an unflattering comparison between the excesses of contemporary biblical exegetes and the trained work of artisans. 91 Wikenhauser; Arns 51-62; Hagendahl, 'Bedeutung' 29-33. 92 Cassiodorus, Inst. 1, praef. 9. Cf. Orth. praef. 145-6, a parenthetic discus-

102 Mark Vessey sion of punctuation before he moves on to the main subject of the work, echoed at Inst. 1.12. See Zetzel 204-5; Parkes 17. 93 See, e.g., Inst. 1.26, with Halporn, 'Methods of Reference' on marginal notae in the Exp. Ps. 94 I disagree with Jones 72 n!7, who takes the reference to be to critical signs like the asterisk or obelus and says that notae here 'clearly cannot mean shorthand/ even while citing Isidore, Etym. 1.20-2, which states that those who are trained in shorthand 'are now properly called notarii.' Because Isidore was copying Augustine, Doctr. chr. 2.26.40, his 'now' may be anachronistic. But it remains to be shown that notarius in sixthcentury Latin could mean a textual critic. For a different view from mine, see Teitler 204-6. 95 Cassiodorus, Inst. 1, praef. 9. 96 This is not so strange. In his ordinary function, the notarius would be required to turn his 'notes' into a transcript suitable for correction by the person who had dictated the text and then for fair copying, usually by another scribe trained in calligraphy but sometimes by the same writer; his ability to write accurately in cursive longhand or book-hand was thus as important as his skill in shorthand. Cf. Petitmengin and Flusin 252-3. 97 Cassiodorus, Inst. 1.15.15 urges 'those who presume to emend' - in this case, patristic texts - to 'make the superadded letters so beautiful that they may be thought to have been written by calligraphers (ab antiquariis).' The notarii of Vivarium were expected to write correct spellings neatly and elegantly above or beside the line. Note also Orth. praef. 144, lines 17-18, where Cassiodorus addresses his manual to the 'corrector and scribe' (emendator atque scriptor). 98 Cassiodorus, Inst. praef. 8: quos ego cunctos novem codices auctoritatis divinae, ut senex potui, sub collatione priscorum codicum amicis ante me legentibus sedula lectione transivi. Meyvaert, 'Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus' 872 already cites this passage in connection with the image of the scribe in the codex grandior. Other 'friends' are mentioned by name at Inst 1.9.5 (Bellator, Epiphanius, Mutianus); cf. 1.17.1. For the novem codices, see n53 above. 99 Zetzel 209-31; Reynolds and Wilson 39-43; Marrou, 'Autour de la bibliotheque' 157-65. Some of these late antique correctors specify that they emended the text with their own hand (manu mea). On the collation of Christian texts in this period, see Petitmengin, who notes that the formula T have collated [this text]' frequently appears in shorthand notation (371). 100 Troncarelli 65, 79-81.

Figures of Writing in Western Late Antiquity 103 101 Troncarelli 49-50 and table 24. 102 Subscriptions were often reproduced when the text was recopied. However, even if the name of Cassiodorus appeared in the codex grandior, either in shorthand or in a set of liminary verses similar to the dedicatory distich of the Variae (a possibility suggested to me by Sam Barnish), the producers of the Amiatinus would have had no reason to retain it, having chosen a different Latin version of the Bible for their pandect. 103 Petrucci 32, 35. 104 Brown, World of Late Antiquity 29, with Vessey, 'Demise' 403. 105 Above, nn41-2,85. Cf. Marrou, MOUSIKOS ANER 148: 'Les scenes d'ecriture sont peu nombreuses et pour la plupart difficiles a interpreter ou sans rapport avec 1'objet de notre etude.' 106 Ausonius, 'De notario in scribendo velocissimo' (ed. Green 12-13). 107 Marrou, History of Education in Antiquity 313: 'Was I mistaken when at the beginning of this history I suggested that the old education was to develop into a culture dominated by scribes?' 108 Bede, Hist. eccl. 5.24, trans. Colgrave and Mynors. 109 Frantzen 138: Caedmon's 'is a story whose author uses a character as a counterpart.' Crepin 182 notes the resemblance of the 'later career[s]' of Bede and Caedmon, and speaks of their respective bodies of work in Latin and Old English as 'homogeneous.' 110 Lerer42-8. 111 Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae, trans. Colgrave and Mynors 583. The Latin reads in part: In istis autem diebus duo opuscula multum memoria digna ...facere studuit, id est [?] a capite evangelii sancti lohannis usque ad eum locum in quo dicitur 'Bed haec quid inter tantos?' [?] in nostrum linguam ad utilitatem ecclesiae del convertit. 112 E.g., In Luc. prol., line 96: ipse mihi dictator simul notarius et librarius, i.e., Bede was his own dictator, note-taker, and fair copyist (here, of excerpts from commentaries by Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great). It is likely that the technical sense of notarius as 'shorthand-writer' had by now been lost, along with the art itself. 113 Pfaff 229. The image of the 'learned scribe' from Matt. 13.52 is glossed by Bede, In Sam. prol., lines 11534, with reference to his own activity as a biblical interpreter. 114 Meyvaert, '"In the Footsteps of the Fathers'" 267.1 wish to thank Paul Meyvaert and Sam Barnish for discussing with me the questions raised in the second part of this essay, and for their many helpful suggestions and corrections. For the first part I am similarly indebted to Neil McLynn.

THREE

Medieval Literary Career Robert R. Edwards

For medieval writers, literary careers are shaped by practice rather than program. The most influential career program from antiquity is preserved in the medieval manuscripts that prefaced the opening of the Aeneid with four lines tracing Virgil's literary progression through pastoral, georgic, and epic: Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono, gratum opus agricolis; at nunc horrentia Martis.

(Virgil 1.240)1

I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, then, leaving the woodland, constrained the neighbouring fields to serve the husbandmen, however grasping - a work welcome to farmers: but now of Mars's bristling. The same three genres reappear in John of Garland's Wheel of Virgil as an aid to remembering the proper relation of style to subject matter and social degree.2 In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante transposes the genres to their respective topics when he enumerates the great themes (magnalia) of poetry in the vernacular - ardour in love (lyric), control of the will (didactic lyric), and prowess in arms (epic).3 Aside from these applications, however, the Virgilian program proves a limited model for medieval writers. It has no discernible influence on poets composing in oral and folk culture, while in high literary culture a career would more

Medieval Literary Careers 105 likely be plotted as a movement through genres than a hierarchical progression from lower to higher forms.4 The medieval idea of a literary career, to the extent it is theorized in prefaces and epilogues, is dynamic rather than teleological.5 Ecclesiastical and courtly writers frequently undertake their projects either because of patrons or in the hope of securing patronage; patronage carries with it not only the promise of advancement and reward but also an enabling fiction of authorship - a work is called into being by the wishes of an ecclesiastical or seignorial lord.6 At the same time, writing in various genres without a sense of hierarchy or progression can be a form of literary apprenticeship. Chretien de Troyes translated portions of Ovid before turning to chivalric romances. In the Vita Nuova, Dante frames his early love lyrics in a narrative structure that shows them simultaneously in retrospect and anticipation of a new and novel work dedicated to Beatrice (not necessarily the Commedia).7 At the end of the Middle Ages, Francois Villon moves through various lyric forms and a provisional work (Le Lais) before finding full expression of his poetic vision in his Testament.8 In the Epilogue to her Fables, Marie de France strikingly connects the elements of a medieval literary career. Her collection is written with a patron in mind - Tur amur le cunte Willame' (Epilogue 9). William has, as Marie reports in her Prologue, commissioned ('cil me sumunt' [Prologue 30]) and charged her ('me ad requise' [Prologue 33]) to stage a repetition of Aesop's service to his master, the fictitious Emperor Romulus, by writing a book of instructive tales. Just as Aesop has become the name of the book he wrote ('Esope apel'um cest livre' [Epilogue 13]), so presumably will Marie be textualized. In carrying out her charge, Marie is concerned, as she is throughout her Lais, with memory. She ends the Fables by naming herself as its author: 'Me numerai pur remembrance: Marie ai num, si sui de France' (I'll give my name, for memory: / I am from France, my name's Marie) (Epilogue 3-4). She thereby protects 'mun labur' (Epilogue 6) from competing clerks and herself from oblivion: 'il fet que fol ki sei ublie' (It's folly to become forgot) (Epilogue 8). Finally, Marie locates her work in a literary succession. Aesop (she mistakenly believes) has translated the book from Greek to Latin. King Alfred then translated it to English, and now she has put it into French to the best of her abilities: 'jeo 1'ai rimee en franceis, / Si cum jeo poi plus proprement' (And I have rhymed it now in French / As well as I was competent) (Epilogue 18-19). Of the elements in Marie's Epilogue, the last one - succession - holds

106 Robert R. Edwards the richest possibilities for illuminating what medieval writers understood when they contemplated a literary career founded on practice rather than program. Writers have careers to the extent and in the way that they position themselves with respect to literary tradition. Patrons may initiate a work and the work may secure memory for its author or (more likely) its topic, but a writer becomes fully part of literary culture when he creates a place, as Marie insists, within a textual genealogy. This is particularly crucial in the case of vernacular writers, who must locate themselves and their work in relation to classical auctores and classical literary models (hence Dante's ambitious claims, in Latin, for the primacy of the vernacular). Literary succession can be adaptive or contested - or both, as Chaucer shows in his early dream narratives and in Troilus and Criseyde. In this essay, I want to focus on a particular sequence of texts in which poets write themselves into literary culture by reconceiving the work of their predecessors. The poets I shall examine take as their topic the story of Thebes, the emblematic tale of internecine rivalry. Statius, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and John Lydgate all follow a 'Theban track' within their literary careers. They thereby align complex authorial rivalry and intertextual poetics with a narrative topic that radically questions the heroic culture celebrated in epic. To plot a career by practice, by moving among genres means participating in a poetic system while redefining its settled arrangements. The mechanism that allows these writers to engage the epic and other genres while finding a place in literary culture is invention. In the poetic theory derived from Cicero's De inventione (1.7.9) and the pseudoCiceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium (1.2.3), invention is a conceptual and aesthetic act: it prepares for writing by imagining an abstract plan of composition. Douglas Kelly has entitled this plan of composition "The Future Poem.' It is a work paradoxically realized and deferred - a complete imaginative act without a verbal embodiment.9 James J. Murphy transposes the conceit into scholastic terminology that both clarifies and blunts the force of the paradox. For him, invention's Future Poem is 'the Potential not yet Act... the uncreated awaiting creation, that which can be but is not yet' (360). For poets on the Theban track, invention deals specifically with materia exsecuta or materia pertractata - subjects of literary discourse already put into verse by an earlier writer. It depends on a critical reading of a literary source, an engagement with an anterior text for what it actually says and for what remains potentially to be said. Geoffrey of Vinsauf admonishes such writers, 'ne sequamur vestigia verborum' (Let us not follow in the footsteps of the words), and advises them to be silent where the source

Medieval Literary Careers 107 text speaks and to speak where it is silent (Faral 360). Seen this way, invention is a form of intertextuality by which poetic creation proceeds from hermeneutics. As a result, the politics of influence works on the side of borrowing.10 Though belated, the later poet has the power to reconstruct his authorial and textual source. I

The author who stands as the authorizing source for Latin and vernacular poets writing about Thebes is Virgil. Virgil is the poet who signifies civilization and legitimates the vast project of establishing empire, national destiny, and heroic identity (Martindale). A career that includes epic within its trajectory cannot but engage the Aeneid. Virgil's authority is, in this sense, inseparable from the narrative fiction of the Aeneid. Dante shows how this encounter produces a fascinating compound of reverence and resistance. Much of our current interest lies in reading the contradictions of Virgil's poem or in exploring the counterepic or antiepic position claimed by Ovid. Statius's Thebaid positions itself by rejecting Virgilian epic and offering a dark vision of classical culture both in itself and in its legacy to medieval writers. Boccaccio, as we shall see, enlists courtly culture in the service of containing the tragic history that Statius's poem sets loose, while Chaucer undoes Boccaccio's work of cultural and poetic containment by emphasizing the contradictions within courtly culture itself. Lydgate's Siege of Thebes commits itself to the project of maintaining chivalric culture without endorsing Boccaccio's mythic recuperation or Chaucer's deconstruction. The Thebaid, as classical and medieval commentators remarked, shows extensive parallels with the Aeneid in characters, themes, incidents, and phrasing.11 In a sense, Statius invents the story of internecine warfare between Oedipus's sons Eteocles and Polynices within the ethics and ideology of Virgil's poem. Equally important, the Thebaid ends with gestures of ostensible deference to the Aeneid. While recognizing the patronage and popular audience his poem has won on its own merits, Statius ambiguously subordinates his work to Virgil's: nee tu divinam Aeneida tempta, sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora. mox, tibi si quis adhuc praetendit nubila livor, occidet, et meriti post me referentur honores. (Thebaid 12.816-19)

108 Robert R. Edwards nor rival the divine Aeneid, but follow afar and ever venerate its footsteps. Soon, if any envy as yet o'erclouds thee, it shall pass away, and, after I am gone, thy well-won honours shall be duly paid. Eschewing open rivalry, Statius wagers on time as the medium of both fame and vindication. He denies outright envy only to introduce poetic competition; and in the image of his poem's reverently trailing behind the Aeneid ('longe sequere')/ we glimpse the revisionary poet stalking his source, marking its steps, and measuring the distances still unfilled between them. Moreover, Statius has done just this by his rich allusions to Virgil in a story that does the poet of civilization no honour but calls into question everything the Aeneid would have us believe about heroic enterprise and imperial culture. A detailed rehearsal of Statius's subversion of Virgil is beyond the scope of this essay and the space alloted me, but it might be useful to touch on several facets of the Thebaid that simultaneously rewrite Virgil and prove important to medieval poets in their rewritings of Statius. The opening of Virgil's poem enlists Fate as the motivating force behind Aeneas's displacement from Troy to Italy, and Fate gives an overall direction and linearity to the narrative, even through such apparent detours as the episode with Dido in Carthage. Statius, by contrast, wonders aloud where he might possibly begin: 'unde iubetis / ire, deae?' (Whence, O goddesses, do ye bid me begin?) (1.3-^4). His story is structured by repetition, an obsessive restaging of conflict that finds its most powerful emblem in the fraternal warfare between the sons of Oedipus, who agree to share the throne of Thebes in alternate years but fall into bitter rivalry when Eteocles refuses to step down. Aeneas's wanderings and suffering have a prize - Rome, a Trojan-Italian lineage unfolding in time, empire following on from the republican consolidation of civic-military virtues. Theban strife has only the will to power and the irony of fighting for a city scarcely worth having. Statius makes the bleakness of his story inescapable from the beginning: 'sed nuda potestas / armavit fratres, pugna est de paupere regno' ('twas for naked power the brethren armed, a starveling realm was their cause of battle) (1.150-1). The late classical commentator Lactantius Placidus remarks that Eteocles and Polynices in fact wage civil war, producing an unfit kingdom ('non esse idoneum regnum') because of the hatred they call forth (1: 23). When the brothers fall at each other's hand in a battle conducted 'sine more, sine arte' (without skill or fashion) (11.524), Fortune installs Creon on the throne and immediately transforms him

Medieval Literary Careers 109 from a grieving father to a tyrant like Eteocles. As William Dominik has argued, the Thebaid is about supernatural power, monarchal power, and the abuse of power (157). The Aeneid presents a metaphysical and moral universe in which the gods operate under the constraints of destiny while working in synchrony with mankind. Juno and Venus may be antagonists acting through their human proxies, but Jupiter can finally intervene to settle their competing claims.12 Juno's anger and Dido's pain can be expressed in the same phrase: 'sub pectore volnus' (1.36; 4.67, 689). The equivalent phrase in Statius - 'sub pectore motus' (1.125) - describes the Fury Tisiphone's descent on Thebes to rouse the brothers to the madness that is their heritage. In its semantic range, 'motus' signifies impulse and agitation within individuals, and it means turbulence and rebellion in the political sphere. Passion in the Thebaid devolves to rage without limits and so with no objectives outside itself - a form of psychological and moral solipsism - while eros recedes to power alone. Statius gives perfect expression to this compaction in the signature phrase 'regendi / saevus amor' (1.127-8). The body politic of Thebes is maintained through tyranny, and as the Argive army advances to install Polynices on the throne, the Thebans reluctantly come to their city's defence. Meanwhile, the gods abet the turmoil, back their favourites, yet eventually find themselves pushed aside by the Furies. At the battle between Eteocles and Polynices, a 'duel unspeakable' (par infandum) (11.125), Jupiter is powerless to assert his authority; he orders the Olympian gods to avert their eyes and for the act to be hidden from him. This fracture of divine governance has its parallel in the wholesale collapse of heroism. If Virgil can assert the character of 'pious' Aeneas and invest him with wisdom and courage (sapientia etfortitudo), none of these attributes is available in significant measure in Statius's poem (Curtius 167-79). Oedipus summons the gods of the underworld and especially Tisiphone to avenge him against his sons by severing the bonds of kinship between them ('generis consortia' [1.84]). Eteocles is a figure of rage and deceit, Polynices a compound of anger, grievance, and wavering courage. The Argive heroes who march against Thebes represent horrifying excess or pathetic deficit. Tydeus dies gnawing the skull of the man who killed him; Dante would render this image of uncontrolled fury still more famous in his encounter with Ugolino, who speaks and weeps at the same time (Inferno 33.9). Jupiter must strike down Capaneus when he goes too far in battle and challenges the

110 Robert R. Edwards gods (he is unrepentant still when Dante encounters him on the burning sand of Inferno 16). Hippomedon loses himself in the fury of struggle, while Parthenopaeus is not up to the business of war. When Amphiarus's wife betrays his hiding place to the Argives, she dooms him to his final, exhilarating ride through the cracked earth into the underworld. As heroism devolves to brutishness on the battlefield, the social order of the heroic also unravels. The order of battle dissolves into melee and slaughter, with leaders indistinguishable from common soldiers. The most successful foray is Thiodamas's night-time slaughter of the Thebans, which recalls the horror of Ulysses and Diomede's ambush in the Iliad. Statius seems to enforce a measure of containment on his poem with the final episode in which Theseus accedes to the pleas of the Argive women to overthrow Creon and allow fit burial of the dead. The women arrive at the temple of Clemency in Athens at the moment of Theseus's triumphal return from war against the Amazons. Evadne's speech moves Theseus to righteous anger ('iusta mox concitus ira' [12.589]), and his exhortation to his troops appeals to both natural and positive law ('terrarum leges et mundi foedera' [12.642]). When Theseus kills Creon and is received as a guest ('hospes' [12.784]) in Thebes, Statius is surely working toward poetic closure.13 In the traditional reading of the poem, his intervention sets things right on the moral, political, and cosmic planes. David Vessey argues this point forcefully: "The Thebaid ends with the triumph of virtue over sin ... The Thebaid is an epic not of sin but of redemption, a chronicle not of evil but of triumphant good' (316).14 But whether Statius's story has escaped Thebes's recursive history of violence and internal strife is hardly clear. John Kevin Newman argues that Statius rejects the possibility of heroism altogether (234-43). Dominik contends, 'there lurk beneath the surface some fairly disturbing implications concerning the extremely violent manner in which Theseus restores moral order to Thebes' (157).15 Frederick M. Ahl sees Theseus as a figure who brings a simple solution to a problem whose complexity he does not understand (2897). The conflict in Thebes is, in fact, not resolved; like Tisiphone's fury (11.92-4), it has reached a point of momentary exhaustion. Hippolyta, Theseus's Amazon queen, has remained in Athens because she is pregnant (12.635-8), presumably with Hippolytus, the son whom Theseus will kill at a later stage, in a belated repetition of Oedipus's fury against his sons. Statius's final scene in the Thebaid is a vast funeral for heroes and commoners alike, at which

Medieval Literary Careers 111 Evadne leaps on the pyre and the women weep for husbands and sons. The icon of tragic futility is the beautiful corpse of Parthenopaeus, who is the penultimate image of Statius's narrative and, as Winthrop Wetherbee suggests, a symbol of Statius's ambivalence toward heroic enterprise and his own role as an epic poet with a counter-Virgilian literary career (161-4). II

What possibilities for both poetic invention and literary succession do Chaucer and Boccaccio find in the silences and empty spaces of Statius's tale of anger and violence spilling over the boundaries that traditionally define heroic identity, family, the city, and the powers of the gods and Fate? The opening of Boccaccio's Teseida shows one aspect of invention, while supposedly aligning his poem with an 'antichissima storia' not translated heretofore from Greek to Latin. Books 1 and 2 of the Teseida are devoted respectively to Teseo's conquest of the Amazons and his battle against Creonte. In his own commentary on the text, Boccaccio explains that he must defer the main action of his poem in order to explain how his principal characters - Emilia, Arcita, and Palemone - enter the story. Emilia is Hippolyta's sister, and she comes to Athens among the trophies that accompany Theseus in his triumphal entry after conquering the Amazons. Arcita and Palemone are the Theban nobles who fall into Teseo's hands after his battle with Creonte. Piero Boitani has argued that the inclusion of these books reflects Boccaccio's intention of writing a learned poem and his fascination with exotic fantasy (12). Seen under the rubrics of invention and succession, however, the apparent digressions are serious explorations of literary tradition that position Boccaccio as an author. The book devoted to the Amazons probes significantly into the kinds of excess and transgression that Statius portrays. The Amazons murder their husbands and abandon sexual for heroic identity. Ipolita exhorts them, 'neU'arme sempre esercitate poi, / cacciando ogni atto feminil da voi' (1.25.7-8). Their objective, as she repeatedly insists, is Hberta (1.27.8, 1.35.3, 5, 1.88.1), by which she means the authority of women to rule themselves.16 The book devoted to Creonte not only amplifies the theme of just war but discovers a different understanding of heroic culture. Statius shows Creon as a tyrant who succeeds Eteocles and recreates his faults. Boccaccio limits Creonte's fault specifically to his refusal to allow burial of the dead, a nuovo torto beyond the act of killing kings. In all

112 Robert R. Edwards other respects, Creonte is a heroic parallel to Teseo. Boccaccio describes him as 'uomo nobilissimo e possente' in his gloss to Book 2 and explicitly marks his similarities to Teseo on the battlefield (2.58.1-2). In both the Amazons and Creonte, then, Boccaccio discovers a more immediately politicized heroic world than Statius allows. In his poem, heroism migrates uneasily over the divides of gender and ambiguous moral authority. A second and larger aspect of Boccaccio's invention is his continuation well past Statius's point of enforced closure. The Teseida is not a vernacular sequel to the Thebaid but an amplification that seeks to resolve the themes and action of Statius's poem. Its abstract plan of composition grows out of a careful reading of the source text and a transposition of the Thebaid into the framework of medieval aristocratic culture, which traced its origins to antiquity. Boccaccio's main action begins where Statius leaves off, with the Theban dynasty shattered and the city razed. Arcita and Palemone represent, on one hand, the prospect of repairing the genealogical break occasioned by the deaths of Oedipus's sons and, on the other, the threat of renewed fraternal rivalry. Both possibilities remain open in Boccaccio's poem (and in Chaucer's and Lydgate's). Arcita, for example, laments over Thebes, left barren now of defenders after Etiocle and Polinice are dead (4.1317). When Palemone seeks combat with him, he recites the tragic history of Thebes and its internecine conflicts (5.55-9), and Boccaccio's gloss on the passage underscores his point about repeated family strife.17 A distinctive feature of Boccaccio's authorial invention is the recovery of desire. At a thematic level, Boccaccio reformulates Statius's emphasis on the will to power by giving will an object outside itself. Statius's 'regendi / saevus amor' is transformed to erotic desire, a topic far more readily accommodated in vernacular epic and romance than in Virgil or Statius. Reimagining this topic allows Boccaccio, in turn, to plot a narrative resolution to Theban history within his own literary career. Rivalry over power is displaced into erotic competition for Emilia and into mediated desire. Among recent commentators on the poem, David Anderson has pointed out that Boccaccio 'developed his narrative, scene by scene, in open imitation of the main action of Statius's Thebaid' (50). As Anderson sees it, the Teseida is an 'allusive narrative' in which parts of Statius's poem may be located differently. So, for example, the funeral games in Book 6 of the Thebaid, which both echo Virgil and foreshadow the battle before Thebes, serve as a general model for the last half of Boccaccio's poem. Equally important, the stylized and

Medieval Literary Careers 113 symbolic violence of the tournament produces a result that civil war does not. Mars and Venus negotiate a resolution to the conflicting promises they have made to their respective supplicants before the tournament. Arcita's triumph and death allow Teseo to achieve his original aim of a political marriage for Emilia while restoring Cadmus's lineage to Thebes and bringing it under Athenian sway. In conceiving a resolution for Statius, Boccaccio is guided by career motives as well as the formal techniques of poetic invention. Since the Renaissance, readers of the Teseida have recognized that Boccaccio's poem seeks to fill a lacuna in the program Dante envisioned for vernacular literature. The three great topics enumerated in De vulgari eloquentia (2.2.7-8) are those 'to be treated [pertractanda] in the loftiest style.' Dante's verb form pertractanda indicates immediately that these topics are drawn from material already put into literary discourse materia pertractata. He goes on to say that love and virtue have been treated by vernacular poets but that no one has taken up the topic of arms: 'Arma vero nullum latium adhuc invenio poetasse' (As for arms, I find that no Italian has yet treated them in poetry) (2.2.8). Boccaccio's Teseida fills the gap in Dante's program and confers on its author the final position in a triumvirate with Cino da Pistoia and Dante himself as exponents of a vernacular poetic tradition. Indeed, by taking both arms and love as its topics it claims something of a preeminent position. At the start of the poem (1.3), Boccaccio invokes Mars, Venus, and Cupid; at the end (12.84.6-8), he says he has written a vernacular epic, and the title given it by the fictional Fiammetta reflects its fusion of erotic and martial topics - Teseida delle nozze d'Emilia. Most scholarship sees in these dual topics a combination of vernacular romance with classical epic. I would argue, further, that Boccaccio's poem realizes all three topics in Dante's program - love, virtue, and arms. In particular, the Teseida subordinates love and arms to virtue through the figure of Teseo. Teseo recognizes himself as a lover in Book 1, and his valour is apparent in the battles he fights against the Amazons and Creonte. Equally important, he exercises discrimination and judgment - the direction of the will that Dante uses to thematize virtue. Confronting the Amazons, for example, he holds out the choices of force or negotiation - 'per forza o per patti' (1.91.7). After his victory, he allows them a sphere of political influence, a measure of the liberta that originally moved them to murder and rebellion against their husbands, for the Amazons are to be ruled by laws overseen by Ipolita (1.124). When Arcita and Palemone first appear before him, he does not rise to

114 Robert R. Edwards the bait of their arrogance and disdain but governs himself so as to govern them. In these examples, Teseo enacts the ideals of sapientia et fortitudo and of the self-regulating imperial Roman subject.18 Finally, Teseo allows a way to reclaim the Virgilian ideal of pietas from the wreckage of Theban fury and excess. As he kills Creonte, Teseo affirms that he will not deny him proper burial (2.47). Boccaccio's gloss (2.10) describes him as 'famosissimo vendicatore d'ogni ingiuria/ The Argive women enlist his support by appealing to his sense of what is proper and customary; their plea is 'sie pietoso' (2.33.2), and this term is echoed throughout the poem. Boccaccio's portrayal of Teseo is connected to a still larger career strategy of invention and succession, which I believe Chaucer recognized, appreciated, and challenged. Boccaccio represents classical antiquity through the medieval aristocratic culture that claimed its origins in the pagan past - more specifically, in the literary imagination of the pagan past. It has been argued that the Teseida reflects an authentic archaeological interest in recreating the cultural practices of antiquity (McGregor); alternatively, one might contend that the poem is an exercise in the pseudo-antique, a later-day copy trying to pass self-reflexively as a classical poem. Yet it is the medieval conventions that predominate. Teseo is a warrior and a lover who must avoid the sexual otium that threatens the Arthurian heroes who continually balance the claims of arms and love. His directio voluntatis gives a purpose to the wanderings of romance heroes in what Dante called the 'Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime' (the most lovely romances of King Arthur) (De vulgari eloquentia 1.10.2). Teseo's troops are glossed by Boccaccio as cavalieri.19 Ipolita is described as the donna angelicata of the Dolce Stilnuovo, while the subsequent portraiture of Emilia echoes both the first love vision of Dante's Vita Nuova and medieval misogyny. When Teseo condemns Arcita and Palemone to imprisonment, he holds them within aristocratic culture; when he frees them and restores their properties, he makes them his vassals. If Statius recognizes that Thebans and Argives are one people, Boccaccio insists that they all belong to a single chivalric culture whose conventions regulate will, passion, and appetite. Ill

In his two Theban poems, Chaucer cancels out Boccaccio's medieval overwriting of Statius and seeks to rearrange a genealogy of literary

Medieval Literary Careers 115 careers. Both the Knight's Tale and Anelida and Arcite, in the most authoritative manuscripts, cite the passage from Statius in which Theseus triumphantly returns to Athens to applause from the people, with Hippolyta and Emily beside him in his chariot (12.519-21): lamque domos patrias Scythicae post aspera gentis / proelia laurigero subeuntem Thesea curru / laetifici plausus missusque ad sidera vulgi [clamour]' (And now Theseus, drawing nigh his native land in laurelled car after fierce battling with the Scythian folk, is heralded by glad applause and the heaven-flung shout of the populace). This is, however, the only portion of Statius that Chaucer engages directly. Though he nowhere acknowledges Boccaccio, Chaucer's invention works through and against the Teseida. Anelida and Arcite begins with an elaborate invocation borrowed from Boccaccio, and Chaucer seemingly repeats Boccaccio's aim of telling an 'antichissima storia' in '[t]his olde storie' (10). But unlike the Teseida's strange matter ('materia pellegrina'), hidden away from Latin writers in untranslated Greek originals, Chaucer's narrator finds his story already written in Latin, first in 'Stace, and after him Corynne' (21). This overturning of Boccaccio's authorizing textual fiction prepares for a still more radical invention. Chaucer introduces the civic spectacle of Theseus's Athenian triumph in order to contrast Fortune's bounty with the treachery and turmoil of Thebes. Anelida is usually characterized as a French love-complaint in the style of Machaut set inside an epic framework borrowed from Boccaccio. The best recent criticism of the poem, Lee Patterson's chapter in Chaucer and the Subject of History, emphasizes its rich intertextuality and its corresponding problem of defining a clear point of origin within recursive history (47-83). What Chaucer does strikingly in this experimental, fragmentary poem is to superimpose the political on the erotic. In this way, he calls into question both Boccaccio's recovery of desire as the antidote to power in Thebes and courtly values as the regulating mechanism over the aristocratic will. Chaucer's invention of Boccaccio is most apparent when the frame story of Anelida turns from Theseus to the poem's actual topic: 'founde I wol in shortly for to bringe / The slye wey of that I gan to write, / Of quene Anelida and fals Arcite' (47-9).20 Arcite here bears no resemblance at all to the hero of the Teseida or his successor in the Knight's Tale. He is a prototype of the deceptive lovers, like Jason and Aeneas, who consume 'gentil wemen' (1370) in the Legend of Good Women; implicitly, he is the counterpart of Theseus who plays a double role in that later poem, as the betrayer of Ariadne and the father of Demophon,

116 Robert R. Edwards who betrays Phyllis. Arcite himself is 'double in love and no thing pleyn, / And subtil in that craft over any wyght, / And with his kunnyng wan this lady bryght' (87-9). His mastery of craft does not translate to self-mastery, Teseo's virtue and the fundamental requirement of the Ovidian lover who services his appetite by art without losing control. Arcite is alternately tyrannical toward Anelida and servile to his new lady whose 'daunger made him bothe bowe and bende, / And as her liste, made him turne or wende' (186-7). Anelida's abjection and her complaint against Arcite's betrayal of her 'trouthe' are the focus of the poem. Chaucer locates the betrayal of love and fidelity ('trouthe') not just against the background of Theseus's triumph but directly in the context of Creon's Thebes. His poem occupies the compositional space between the deaths of Eteocles and Polynices and Theseus's ostensibly just war to restore law and custom or, as Boccaccio puts it, 'ingiuria vendicare' (to avenge injury) (2.14.8). Creon surveys a political scene in which 'blood roial was broght a-doun' (65) and uses his 'tyrannye' (66), a term imported directly from Boccaccio, to effect a totalizing political control over aristocratic life: he 'dyde the gentils of that regioun / To ben his frendes and wonnen in the toun' (67-8), much as Teseo coopts Arcita and Palemone. The treachery that Arcite carries out, his 'slye wey' and 'newfanglenesse' (141), takes place, in other words, in the city whose political formation is no different from the centralizing authority of Teseo's Athens. Chaucer does not reject Boccaccio's claim that Creon differs from Teseo in only one fault. Rather, he casts profound doubt on Boccaccio's conviction that the aristocratic culture common to Athens, Thebes, and Amazonian Scythia is a remedy to internal conflict. This scepticism carries forward to the Knight's Tale. We cannot date the poem precisely or establish its exact relation to Anelida, but it is clearly part of a literary project encompassing the House of Fame, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Legend of Good Women, undertaken in the 1380s to explore the imaginative world of classical antiquity; it represents not the 'Italian phase' traditionally ascribed to Chaucer's tripartite career but a turn from the French lyrico-narrative dits of earlier court poetry toward a new literary idiom.21 Since Thomas Tyrwhitt's announcement, in his late eighteenthcentury edition of the Canterbury Tales, that the Teseida served as Chaucer's source, scholars have been able to trace the pattern and details of Chaucer's revision. I will not rehearse the information gathered by W.W. Skeat or the editors of the Six-Text Edition and analysed

Medieval Literary Careers 117 astutely in this century by Elizabeth Salter and Piero Boitani, but the overall scheme, the conceptual plan that informs his execution, seems clear enough. Chaucer enforces a much greater degree of structural balance between episodes and characters. He tries to rearrange the philosophical confusions of the Teseida into a more coherent Boethian perspective. He suppresses the apotheosis of Arcita and his dismissal of the world, and introduces Saturn as the melancholic agent who resolves the competing claims of Mars and Venus by the murderous intervention he practises so well (1.2456-69). The plan of invention that we can derive from Chaucer's changes to Boccaccio bears directly on the portrayal of Theseus. The Knight's Tale imbues Theseus with a complex but ambiguous moral authority. Robert W. Harming points out that Teseo is 'the active principle throughout the poem' in Boccaccio (528). Chaucer recasts him so that the controlling figure of aristocratic culture bears the contradictions that the culture itself reveals. The qualities of valour and wisdom carry over from the Teseida, as does Teseo's desire for fame. But when Chaucer restages the spectacle of Theseus's triumph at the start of the Knight's Tale, he revises both Boccaccio and himself. Theseus spreads the banner of Mars and beside it a pennon with the image of the Minotaur. This image tropes the dual invocations to war and love at the beginning of the Teseida and makes explicit the threat of erotic betrayal suggested by Anelida in its oblique references to Theseus and Ariadne. Theseus returns to his erotic history when he discovers Palamon and Arcite battling over Emily in the grove and pardons them because 'I knowe of loves peyne' (1.1815) as Love's servant, ostensibly with Ipolita, who represents the threat of sexual indolence in the Teseida, and remotely with Ariadne.22 His recognition of Love's overwhelming power absolves him even as he forgives their 'trespaas' (1.1818,1825) against his law and majesty. As Palemon and Arcite become Theseus's 'freendes' (1.1824), they follow the path toward political control that Creon imposes on the 'gentils' of Thebes in Anelida. The qualifications Chaucer introduces into Theseus point to a larger strategy of invention - namely, a rejection of Boccaccio's effort to realign the will to power with erotic desire and to regulate desire through the practices of aristocratic culture. In the Teseida, the rivalry between Arcita and Palemone develops slowly and requires Tisiphone to set it in motion (5.13). In the Knight's Tale, the split occurs as soon as each lover catches sight of Emily in the garden. The rationale Arcite provides when Palamon claims priority over him rejects the synthesis of natural

118 Robert R. Edwards and positive law that underwrites Theseus's just war in Statius and Boccaccio. Arcite separates the two moral strands that permit an ostensible end of recursive Theban history: 'And therfore positif lawe and swich decree / Is broken al day for love in ech degree' (1.1167-8). Boccaccio later introduces a scene in which 'buona pace e 1'amista antica' (6.6) are reestablished in anticipation of the tourney. In Chaucer, the break endures beneath the subsequent rituals of civility. Arcite gives expression to a Statian rivalry that threatens not only the political order but also its foundational values of 'trouthe' and 'felaweship': 'And therfore, at the kynges court, my brother, / Ech man for hymself, ther is noon oother' (1.1181-2). Chaucer's ambivalence over Boccaccio's recovery of desire gives us a proper context for interpreting the tournament, Theseus's speech of consolation, and the forced, though satisfying, marriage that end the Knight's Tale. Ritual battle settles the love question so that internecine war does not erupt in the political sphere. Though Emily is the object of desire, the final referent and beneficiary is chivalric culture. The knights who vie for inclusion in the 'game' (1.2108) Theseus devises do so for love of chivalry and hope of fame. Theseus sets his rules to avoid 'destruccioun / To gentil blood' (1.2538-9), a decision applauded by the 'peple' (1.2561-4). Saturn's intervention does not thwart his intentions so much as further them, for Theseus seeks to forestall the genealogical break that ends the Thebaid and the unforeseen accident that produces wholesale political catastrophe, as in the Morte Arthure. In the end, love is made to realize the political aim of Athens, which is to 'have fully of Thebans obeisaunce' (1.2974). Palamon's passionate, though not fierce, love ends in delegated rule, such as the regendered Amazons enjoyed under Ipolita. IV

Boccaccio and Chaucer follow the Theban track in their literary careers by inventing Statius in opposite ways. Boccaccio fills the silences at the ending of the Thebaid by restoring, through medieval aristocratic conventions, the kind of heroic ideological program that Statius had rejected in Virgil. Chaucer reconceives Boccaccio by making his tale more Statian - that is, by injecting into his affirmation of pietas and heroic virtue an awareness of their contradictions and costs. Lydgate's Siege of Thebes undertakes a quite different project. Rather than extend chivalric culture to the myth of Thebes, it focuses on the application and exem-

Medieval Literary Careers 119 plary meaning of the story in order to illustrate how chivalric culture can be maintained and its forms of moral and political authority legitimized. To achieve this focus and write a poem that hovers at a certain distance from its immediate topic, Lydgate must displace both Statius and Chaucer without banishing them. More precisely, he must encounter them in terms that he defines. The reasons for this strategy stem from the poem's place within Lydgate's literary career, which is shaped significantly by aristocratic and civic patrons. His Troy Book, begun in 1412 on commission for the Prince of Wales and completed for Henry V in 1420, provides a mythic origin for medieval chivalric culture and thus carries out the ideological work that Boccaccio undertakes in the Teseida and Chaucer interrogates in the Knight's Tale. The Siege of Thebes does not name a patron, but its topical references to the Treaty of Troyes propagandize for English interests in general and its resolution to narrative questions of genealogy and governance underwrite Lancastrian political ambitions in particular.23 Derek Pearsall speculates that the Siege shares with Troy Book a thematic interest in peace that may explain why Lydgate composed the poem in the absence of a patron (156).24 With Troy Book, the Siege is what Lois Ebin describes as a 'public poem,' in which 'Lydgate first explicitly directs his skills as poet-craftsman to the concerns of the state' (39). Writing himself into the Canterbury Tales, which have won Chaucer the originary reputation '[o]f wel seyinge first in oure language' (47), Lydgate offers what purports to be the first tale on the return journey to London from Canterbury. Geographical references to Boughton under Blean (1047; cf. Canterbury Tales VIII.556) and Deptford (4523; cf. Canterbury Tales 1.3906) gesture toward the fictional frame of the Canterbury pilgrimage, but Lydgate's summary of the Knight's Tale makes it clear that Chaucer's poem exists for him as a written, scribal text (Siege 4531-2).25 Just as Troy Book completes (and tacitly corrects) Troilus and Criseyde by telling the background story, so the Siege of Thebes complements (and masters) the Knight's Tale by presenting a version of what precedes it. Lydgate's invention of the Theban story marks a sharp departure from the Thebaid. In the Prologue to Troy Book (225-46), Lydgate cites Statius and rehearses details from his poem in a way that fully demonstrates his knowledge of what the Thebaid contained. In the Siege of Thebes, he mentions 'Stace of Thebes' once (1272), but his actual source 'myn autour' as he says repeatedly - is a version of the Roman de Edipus, a prose redaction of the Roman de Thebes. Lydgate supplements this

120 Robert R. Edwards source with Boccaccio's Genealogiae deorum gentilium (but not the Teseida) and the Bible; he also makes single references to Martianus Capella and Seneca. His source gives a three-part narrative. The narrative begins with the story of Oedipus, moves to the breakdown of fraternal bonds between Eteocles and Polynices and the unlikely friendship of Polynices and Tydeus in the middle part, and ends with the Argive attack on Thebes and Theseus's defeat of Creon in the aftermath of the fall of the city. In re-plotting Statius's poem, the Siege draws on a tradition that transforms and omits important elements. For example, Oedipus is dead before the rivalry between his sons breaks out and so cannot make the horrific entrance that Statius gives him late in the Thebaid (11.580-5). In fact, Lydgate silences Oedipus, citing Seneca as a textual source for information about the period between Oedipus's death and the sons' mutual disaffection. Hypsipyle's story, which plays a decisive role for Boccaccio's treatment of feminine liberta, is suppressed and reduced to another textual reference (3154). Maeon, unnamed in Lydgate, kills himself in despair rather than heroic defiance of Eteocles. The extravagant, memorable deaths of the Argive heroes likewise diminish or disappear. Amphiorax, who rides his chariot through the gaping earth into the underworld, simply falls to hell, justly punished for his idolatry; Tydeus's gnawing of his slayer's head is excised with a reference to Boccaccio (Genealogiae 9.21), who supplies the details, and with Lydgate's coy assertion 'I can non other telle' (4239). Capaneus, who challenges the gods and remains a compelling figure for Dante, survives the combat. When Statius enters Lydgate's poem, it is as an alternative and evidently inferior authority on the final dismantling of Troy (4541-51). Lydgate invents Chaucer in much the same way as he does Statius. In the Prologue to the Siege, Chaucer is an unnamed, allusive figure Tloure of Poetes thorghout al breteyne' (40). Lydgate, we should note, describes him in precisely the terms he had earlier fashioned in Troy Book: Chaucer is the figure who reconciles the beguiling lies of poetic fiction with historical truth and who redeems rhetoric from deception. Then, in a striking conflation of himself, his work, and his master, Lydgate praises Chaucer for 'keping in substaunce / The sentence hool with-oute variance, / Voyding the chaf sothly for to seyn' (53-5). Separating the wheat from the chaff alludes, of course, to the ending of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale (VII.3443). Preserving the substance of truth within language is the office Lydgate envisions for himself: at the end of Troy Book, he expresses the hope that his readers will 'fynde trewe / t>e story pleyn, chefly in substaunce' (5.3542-3). 'My mayster

Medieval Literary Careers 121 Chaucer' (4501) is not actually named until Lydgate rehearses the opening of the Knight's Tale at the end of his poem. Throughout the Siege of Thebes, Lydgate similarly reads Chaucer's work to his own purposes. As A.C. Spearing points out, he uses characteristic features of Chaucerian style - diction, syntax, and rhetorical figures - generally in poetic imitation but at times in a specific echo of scenes (72-83). Oedipus kills Laius not on the road but by breaking into a tournament that Laius has established in imitation of Theseus's tournament in the Knight's Tale. Polynices and Tydeus duel outside Adrastus's castle 'with-oute iuge' (1366-82) in a pointed reference to Palamon and Arcite's duel in the wood (1.1712). Tydeus's return after slaying the fifty Thebans sent by Eteocles to ambush him detours into romance as he finds a lady to heal his wounds before he continues on to Argos and his wife. Adrastus's speech of consolation after the death of Lygurgus's infant son echoes the consolatory speeches by Egeus and Theseus in the Knight's Tale. Theseus is true to the letter of the Knight's Tale in defeating the Thebans and razing their city (1.985-93), but in the Siege he goes further, slaying the people 'for al her crying loude' (4557). He acts, in other words, as the violent enforcer whom Chaucer holds in exquisite tension with the rational agent of deliberation and judgment. The narrative that Lydgate creates by displacing Statius and Chaucer accentuates the themes that underlie his project of maintaining chivalric culture. As in Troy Book, Fate and Fortune alternate with human choice, but here the stress falls on the meaning rather than the hidden yet determinate shape of history. Repetition, the paradox that stands at the very beginning of Statius's poem, operates at various levels. The rivalry of Eteocles and Polynices is generated by a pride (1069) they share with Oedipus (468-74). Their initial agreement to alternate kingship yearly is both an icon of repetition and a formalization of rivalry with no prospect of resolution: within the cycles of Fortune's rise and fall, one party must expose himself as well to the aventure of exile and romance wandering. Tydeus is ambushed where Oedipus earlier encountered the Sphinx. After the battle of Argives and Thebans, Creon becomes lord of a city as 'bar and destitut' (4372) as the 'regioun / ... destitut of a gouernour' (756-7) and the 'towne desolat and bare' (873) that Oedipus takes over. After Theseus destroys Thebes, the Argive women return to their homeland 'ful trest and desolat' (4627), and Lydgate draws the general conclusion that war 'makej? londys bare and desolat' (4692).26 The repetition that most seriously threatens the order of chivalric

122 Robert R. Edwards culture in the Siege is a sequence of breaks in genealogy. Laius and Jocasta are childless at the beginning of the poem, and he fears being "defrauded of his bone' (353). After his rescue as an infant, Oedipus is adopted by King Polyboun because '[s]one hadde he noon by lyne to succede' (464). Adrastus has no heir, and he sees his daughters' marriages with Polynices and Tydeus as means to transfer his possessions equitably to his successors. The grief Lygurgus feels at the death of his son is both the pathos of losing a child and the stark prospect of having no heir. Ipsiphyle, the unwitting instrument of his sorrow, summarizes his predicament: 'His sone is ded and his heir also' (3242). The remedy Lydgate holds out to these breaks in genealogy and political stability is 'alliaunce' - the possibility of creating bonds that supersede the fractures in kinship and inheritance through mutual pledges of fidelity. Though Eteocles and Polynices betray the ties of broJDerhede (1070-1), Tydeus and Polynices are joined Vnder a knotte bounde of brotherede' (1452). Adrastus's marriage strategy is to '[t]o make a knotte as be allyaunce' (1590). The nobles in Thebes ally themselves with monarchy first by trying to negotiate the alternating reigns of Eteocles and Polynices and then by forestalling rebellion by the kinsmen of the Theban knights killed in the abortive ambush of Tydeus (2522-49). The volatility of alliance as a political strategy shows, however, in the recruitment of Theban defectors '[y]meued only of trouth and of resoun' (2640) when Adrastus gathers his force, the continuing Variance' (3621) within the city under Eteocles' rule, and later the election of Creon: 'he hadde no title by discent / But by fre choys made in parlement' (4389-90). In the historical and textual space that the Siege shares with Troy Book in their quotations from the Treaty of Troyes, alliance holds out the prospect of resolving a protracted conflict over succession while identifying the reason for collapse when those prospects ultimately fail.27 Genealogy and alliance have an obvious resonance for the Lancastrian interests that Lydgate advances, just as they bear on his literary career. In Troy Book and The Siege of Thebes, he tries to regulate these mechanisms of political control by abstract virtues and exemplary figures. Legitimacy hinges, in theory, on precept rather than practicality. The dominant reading of the Siege is that Lydgate imbues it with a moral purpose, hence with a meaning safely beyond historical contingency and poetic ambivalence. Robert Ayers argues that the poem's moral idea endows it with a unity of action, character, and tone.28 The most prominent virtues Lydgate extols are truth and prudence. In a

Medieval Literary Careers 123 long excursus, Lydgate maintains, 'abouen alle thyng / Trouthe shulde longe to a kyng' (1721-2). In his valiant defence of himself against overwhelming odds, Tydeus offers an example of truth to nobles (223653), and the failure of truth, says Lydgate at the end of the second part of the poem, is 'f>e firste grounde and roote of this ruyne' (2549), by which he means the destruction of Thebes. Nonetheless, it is characters like Oedipus and Eteocles, the antitype of the faithful prince, who drive events in the poem. Prudence, the other major virtue illustrated in the Siege, operates in Oedipus's solution to the Sphinx's riddle, Adrastus's marriage strategy, and his advice to send someone in place of Polynices to enforce the claim to alternating kingship with Eteocles. It is, as Lydgate expounds in one of his additions (2933-97), a virtue of age and wisdom over untried youth. But as in Troy Book, prudence in the Theban story fails to outflank mutability and disaster (Lydgate, Troy Book: Selections 4-6). Laius acts prudently by trying to forestall parricide by exposing his child, and Oedipus's marriage to Jocasta looks to be a prudent step of civic governance (766-70). Amphiorax is 'ful prudent and right wyce' (2796), but his foresight neither protects him from the Greeks' anger when he discloses his dire prophecy of their ruin nor saves him from his own death. As James Simpson argues, 'Lydgate promotes the virtue of prudence only to underline the unpropitious historical circumstances that must constrain its confidence' (20).29 Just as truth and prudence fail to establish a reliable model of judgment and action, the exemplary figures of the Siege reveal their inability to transcend mutability and chaos. Amphion, the mythic founder of the city, is 'debonayre' (248), and his measured behaviour toward his citizens gains him 'inward loue which that wol not twynne' (280). Ayers sees him as 'the type of the ideal king' (472). He is the Lancastrian model of a prince legitimated by mutual love for and from the commons, as against the Ricardian figure of princely disdain. Amphion builds Thebes 'be his elloquence / Mor than of Pride or of violence' (287-8), but his originary power is challenged by an alternate tradition in Boccaccio and Ovid, which sees Cadmus as the founder of Thebes (293-315) and symbol of its internecine strife. Rivalry over the Theban throne extends beyond Oedipus to its very foundation as a civil and political institution. Adrastus, Ayers's 'pattern of the practically good king' (472), is a model both in his practical wisdom and his generosity (2688-736), which enlists political allegiance among his people. His authority, as Lydgate emphasizes, is moral and consensual. One of the

124 Robert R. Edwards unstated structural ironies of the Siege is that both Adrastus and Creon hold their offices 'of fre eleccioun' (1202,4390). In Statius, Adrastus, like Jupiter, is unable to turn aside the impious crime (nefas) of brothers fighting one another (11A22-46) and abandons everything. In the Siege, he performs a final act, at once compassionate and impotent, of conveying the grieving Argive women to Theseus to seek redress for Creon's prohibition against burying the dead. He then returns home to Argos, bereft of his liegemen and his life shortened by melancholy and sorrow (4608-19). The lesson Lydgate extracts from the Theban story finally works against his project in writing the poem. War, he acknowledges, leads only to 'los fynal vnto outher syde' (4644) and the destruction of social order in its unpredictable levelling of high and low estate. Though he invokes the Augustinian social ethic of love that John Gower extolled a generation earlier in the Prologue to his Confessio amantis and echoes Chaucer's appeal to divine love at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, the price of closure in his poem is the abandonment of heroic enterprise and worldly accommodation. The destruction they unleash undoes their best intentions: Tt may nat be by mannys myght restreyned' (4657). If the narrative of Troy Book ultimately belies the chivalric institutions it is designed to memorialize and legitimate, the exemplary meaning of the Siege of Thebes cancels out the project of regulating chivalric culture. For Lydgate as for his predecessors, the Theban track brings the poet's literary career into significant relation with tradition, but it leads to a conceptual and thematic impasse. V

Medieval writers in high literary culture present a dynamic rather than teleological sense of a poetic career. If genres and topics marked progressive stages of a determined cursus in antiquity, they map a field of expressive possibilities in medieval vernacular culture. Medieval poetic careers are defined through a poetics of invention in the rewriting of authoritative sources and the exploitation of their silences. The projects medieval writers undertake are more fluid than the traditional trajectory from lower to higher genres. Boccaccio's experiments in synthesizing classical topics and medieval forms in his formative period at Naples variously play out in later phases of his career. The frame tale and exemplary stories of his 'Questioni d'amore' from the Filocolo anticipate similar features in the Decameron, while stories of antiquity

Medieval Literary Careers 125 emerge in a different key in his lives of illustrious men and women. Chaucer offers two largely similar retrospects on his kinds of writing one at mid-career in the Legend of Good Women and the other at the conclusion of the Canterbury Tales, and these differ most significantly not in his categories of writing but in the courtly or religious values he attaches to them. Lydgate positions himself overtly within a project of invention, supplementing Chaucer's stories and taking over the authorial role he creates for Chaucer. What the Theban track reveals about poetic practice are the larger stakes involved in a literary career. Authorship and poetic inauguration do not arise independently; the movement among genres and topics is not an exclusively aesthetic itinerary. To rewrite one's poetic forebears is to engage the moral, political, and cultural dimensions of their work. For Statius, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate, this means to situate invention ambivalently in relation to the authoritative narratives of empire and chivalry. The road to Thebes carries ambitious writers and the conflicts that animate their own moments in culture and history.

Notes 1 The late-classical manuscripts of the Aeneid (fifth-sixth centuries) which provide the earliest textual witnesses do not include these verses. The lines appear in a separate textual tradition preserved in medieval manuscripts dating from the ninth century (codex Bernensis 172). Suetonius's Life of Vergil (42), now lost but extracted by Donatus and thence reproduced by Servius, reports the story that Virgil's literary executors expunged these lines, and Priscian quotes the first line frequently in his Institutio grammatica (12.11,17.16,17.145,17.165,17.187,17.204,18.4); other authorities cite ' Arma virumque' as the opening of Virgil's poem. For an overview of the scholarship, see Conington 2: 2-3; and Camps 121-3. Another theory, as Camps mentions, proposes that the lines were attached to a portrait of the poet in an early deluxe edition of the poem and subsequently were read as part of the original text. The distich that Virgil composed for his tomb at Naples also sets out a progress through genres: 'cecini pascua, rura, duces' (Servius 2: 3). It is worth noting that in the tradition of Virgil's biography, which underwrites the progressive career model, the endpoint is not the composition of epic but retirement to a life of philosophy. All translations of Virgil come from the Loeb edition. 2 John of Garland 39-41; Faral 86-9. Faral points out that the medieval

126 Robert R. Edwards

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

adaptation of style to social rank modifies the classical correlation between style and the gravity of subject matter. Coolidge explores the oblique approaches of lesser genres to great topics in Virgil and the capacity of those genres to forecast in miniature a poet's ambitions in the higher forms. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia 2.2.7-8: 'Quare hec tria, salus videlicet, venus et virtus, apparent esse ilia magnalia que sint maxime pertractanda, hoc est ea que maxime sunt ad ista, ut armorum probitas, amoris accensio et directio voluntatis' (So these three things, well-being, love, and virtue, appear to be those most important subjects that are to be treated in the loftiest style; or at least this is true of the themes most closely associated with them, prowess in arms, ardour in love, and control of one's own will). Dane argues that the three Virgilian genres correspond respectively to Books 1 (epic), 2 (didactic), and 3 (pastoral) of the House of Fame. The difficulty of this argument lies in explaining how Book 3 can be equated with pastoral. Neuse 610 suggests that the medieval schema of the contemplative, sensual, and active lives might be a counterpart to the three poetic genres. Coolidge 10 notes that the Virgilian progression depends on an internal dynamism: 'Small things not only provide relief from great concerns; they also contain the promise of great things to come.' Theodorakopoulos demonstrates how in the Virgilian canon the teleological impulse moves forward while echoes reach backwards; final lines of the Aeneid return to endings of the first and last Eclogues. I am grateful to Alice Sheppard for sharing her work in progress on AngloSaxon and early Middle English historiography, which identifies the selfauthorizing gestures of a vernacular writer like Lasamon, as against Wace and Latin chroniclers. For the influence of Augustine's Confessions on the temporal structure of the Vita Nuova, see Mazzaro. Dante's intention 'to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman' (Vita Nuova 42) is not a forecast of his writing the Commedia; see Harrison 130-4. Mazzotta 7 points out, moreover, that Dante's career plan and his plan of future composition are interrupted in the 1290s by his turn to philosophy, the ostensible endpoint of the Virgilian cursus. I am grateful to Norris Lacy for his advice about the literary careers of medieval French authors. On invention, see two key articles by Kelly, 'The Scope of the Treatment of Composition' and 'Theory of Composition' and, more recently, his summative The Arts of Poetry and Prose.

Medieval Literary Careers 127 10 For discussion of the shift from questions of influence to those of hermeneutics and reading, see Clayton and Rothstein 3-36; and Worton and Still 1-44.1 am grateful to Patrick Cheney for sharing his suggestions about key issues in intertextuality with me. 11 Virgilian analogues and verbal parallels are noted throughout Lactantius Placidus. The anonymous twelfth-century commentary (Super Thebaiden commentariolum) written in imitation of Fulgentius's Vergiliana continentia describes Statius as an imitator of Virgil: 'qui Virgilianae Eneidis fidus imitator Tebaiden scribere adgressus est' (Lactantius Placidus 1: 698). 12 When Chaucer retells the story in the House of Fame he makes Venus the agent of eros and history who finally persuades Jupiter to her design: 'Jupiter took of hym cure / At the prayer of Venus' (464-5). 13 Hospes is the term used when Dido receives Aeneas under her protection, and it is made an ironic term of reproach by Ovid's Dido in Heroides 7.146. On the political resonance of hospitium, see Monti 30-6. 14 See, among recent critics, Echinard-Garin 31-46; and Hardie, who argues, for example, that Statius holds out a model for breaking out of recursive history in the priestly succession from Amphiarus to Thiodamas (111-13). 15 Dominik's argument recreates those used by Chaucerians who challenge the role of Theseus as the moral centre of the Knight's Tale; see below. 16 The suppression of Amazonian liberta stands in a complex relation to the text's own history. Boccaccio may have begun the Teseida under the influence of the court of Robert of Anjou in Naples, but he finished it after returning in 1341 to Florence, which made libertas (the rights of free citizens and especially its merchant classes) the centre of its political philosophy. 17 Gloss to 5.57.1: 'Vuole qui mostrare Arcita che tutti li suoi predecessori, discesi di Cadmo, facitore e re prime di Tebe, abbiano fata mala morte, e cosi convenire fare a loro due che rimasi n'erano, cioe a Palemone e a se' (2: 400). 18 For discussion of these topics, see Curtius 167-79; and Brown. 19 Statius, by contrast, is keenly aware of social distinctions even as he describes their collapse in brutish warfare; see Thebaid 7.616-17; 12.798. 20 Strohm, Social Chaucer 115-18 argues that Anelida divides along the temporal axis of the narrative and the extratemporal axis of the complaint. 21 In the F Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, usually dated somewhere around 1386, Queen Alceste lists 'al the love of Palamon and Arcite / Of Thebes, thogh the storye ys knowen lyte' (420-1) among works composed to serve Love. 22 Teseo falls in love with Ipolita, the object of his military conquest in Teseida

128 Robert R. Edwards 1.129-31. In Heroides 10, Ariadne makes the empty bed she shared with Theseus the symbol of their erotic otium. 23 Meale 93 suggests that Alice Chaucer, the poet's granddaughter, may have commissioned British Library, Arundel 119, our best early text of the Siege of Thebes, after she became Countess of Suffolk. See Strohm, England's Empty Throne 186-93 on Lydgate's complex roles as Lancastrian propagandist and Chaucerian disciple. Recent interpretations of Lydgate's role as a propagandist build on earlier discussions of him as an unofficial court poet in Pearsall 166-7; and Schirmer 116-19. 24 Pearsall 158-9 notes that the Siege of Thebes appears with Troy Book in manuscripts destined for noble patrons: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.5.2; London, British Library, MS Royal 18.D.ii; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 230. 25 The reference to Deptford confuses the Knight's Tale with the Reeve's Prologue (I. 3906) and constitutes just one of several errors and misidentifications of Chaucer's work. Bowers 40 proposes that Lydgate did not care about the inconsistencies; Pearsall 153 takes them as evidence of Lydgate's 'extraordinary confidence' in himself after the completion of Troy Book. 26 The image is drawn from the opening lines of Jeremiah's Lamentations ('Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo'), which Chaucer echoes in Troilus's visit to Criseyde's empty palace ('O paleys desolat' [5.540]); see Edwards, 'Desolate Palace.' 27 Troy Book 5.3435-8 and the Siege of Thebes 4698-703 echo the language of the Treaty of Troyes: 'Item, ut Concordia, Pax, et Tranquillitas inter praedicta Franciae and Angliae Regna perpetuo futuris temporibus observentur ...' (Lydgate, Siege 1:8). 28 Schelp 222-35 offers further detailed analysis of the moral themes of the poem; for a more sceptical view, see Edwards, 'Lydgate's Troy Book.' 29 For a similarly revisionist approach to the poem, see Allen.

FOUR

Authority and Influence - Vocati

Anxiety: The Sense of a Literar in the Sentimental Novel and Ce James F. Burke

An attempt to discuss what sense of literary career might have existed among writers in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance is complicated enormously by the fact that we cannot be certain that the concept of the individual which pertained was analogous to our present understanding. Descartes's famous dictum cogito ergo sum implies that Western civilization in the early Renaissance had begun to move away from the understanding of human cognizance which had prevailed for a thousand years and had started to evolve toward new modes of interpreting experience. The personality of this unique self would be seen as lodged within a body which to a large degree was considered not only the locus of individuality but also the origin of it. Knowing for the modern world is a phenomenon based in the solid reality of a selfcontained, empowered being and such knowing affirms reality. The subject has become a reified personality, a centred, controlling entity, who is able to categorize and rationalize the world around, coordinate and subordinate information from a central vantage point, which is unique to him or her. The modern human is understood as an empowered being who commands at will his or her surroundings from a focused perspective. It is not an easy matter to chart the development of this modern concept of the person, as scholars such as Gregory Bredbeck have pointed out (145). Some argue that the poetry of the individual troubadour should be taken as no more than a reflection of a great common poetic voice, langue as opposed to parole, while others maintain that a sense of modern selfhood begins to develop as early as the twelfth century and is apparent in the writings of the Occitan poets (see Stone

130 James F. Burke and Spence for contrasting views). Some critics feel that even Renaissance 'self-fashioning' is a process that repeats to a large degree the paradigms for fixing personality which were established in the early Middle Ages (see the studies of Greenblatt). We understand that in the medieval period there existed what might be termed a 'culture of authority.' In such a culture the most important thing for an artist to do was to attempt to imitate, while bettering if possible, what had gone before. The original meaning of the word inventio had little relation to our modern concept of 'inventiveness.' In terms of writing, to invent meant to find, to come upon and recognize existing material which had basic value of some variety. This material, possibly hackneyed or poorly delineated in its original form, could be re-presented in some new fashion, and this new form would enhance the basic significance inhering within. But even the modes of re-presentation were never deemed original in anything like the modern sense. Material would be reshaped by employing commonplaces, topics, topoi, loci of various sorts that had to do not just with content material but also with the very methods which were used to structure what was being refashioned (Burke, 'Finding the Topics,' Structures From the Trivium 45-59). In the medieval period the human body was the basis for a rich field of symbolic associations, the most immediate of which were the religious and the political, the corpus mysticum and the corpus politicum. This human being also had a name, albeit not one as complicated and imbued with significance as what occurs in modern times. Greenblatt suggests that what linked this body to the name was the 'property' that could be associated with either body or name ('Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture' 141). By 'property' I think Greenblatt also implies any secondary, distinguishing attributes which would not be something part of and joined to the physical body itself. He further suggests that in modern culture our concept of the 'psyche' has replaced property as the middle term linking body and name. One of the ideas which Greenblatt uses in developing his arguments is based upon Leo Spitzer's observation that medieval writers seemed to have had little or no sense of 'intellectual' property. For us moderns what is created in the mind and then transposed or metamorphosed into other media is 'real' property in the same sense as any of the other things which we possess, whether it be 'real' estate, clothing, or any other assortment of tangible goods and objects. In the Middle Ages it would appear that the performer - and I use the term in its broadest

The Sentimental Novel and Celestina 131 possible sense - did not feel that a particularly close connection existed between him and any variety of his performance that might eventually be committed to parchment or paper. Such concretized discourse did not necessarily link body to name. It did not help to establish identity and a sense of self in the same way that happened (among the nobility) with the blazon, the rich clothing, the jewels, the land, and even the genealogical precedence of the family. When the early-fourteenthcentury poet Juan Ruiz says that his poetry should circulate freely like 'pella a las duenas' (a ladies's ball) (1629d), he implies no more importance for his verses than this toy, this object of play. Such is hardly an artefact upon which to found identity, upon which to posit an articulated sense of self.1 Harold Bloom has argued that the poet (and I think that we might extend this term to include any creative writer) often suffers from an 'anxiety of influence.' The writer senses that the language, the phraseology that he or she is using to shape a new creation is often not precisely fresh and original. The writer hears within his own words the echoes of other voices, the poetic predecessors who have gone before and whose contributions to the higher modes of idiom can never be thoroughly effaced. For the new writer to flourish, for him or her to develop a 'literary career/ the predecessor must be overcome, forced into oblivion. Bloom's argument is obviously drawn from an understanding of human relationships based upon the Oedipal myth, a postulation that many have considered to be inherent in the human condition.2 But the paradigm that seems to have prevailed for medieval writers, at least in official discourse, was the opposite. Anxiety would have resulted for them from a failure to follow in the footsteps of the fathers, from an inability to find the proper material surely contained within the archives of the culture of authority. The tendency for the medieval writer, then, was to search for pre-existing material that could be refurbished and presented in new and better fashion or, at least, to claim that they had done this. Thus the likelihood that the idiom, the images, the symbols and structures that one finds in earlier works is truly original is not great. Even the most important of poets, Dante for example, makes certain to provide a guide, Virgil, from the literary culture of authority to accompany him at the beginning of his journey, one that will be inscribed in poetic form. As Patrick Cheney has shown, Spenser's idea of the literary career' even as late as the sixteenth century is based upon the classical Virgilian scheme of the progression from the pasto-

132 James R Burke ral, bucolic mode to that of the epic. And we are beginning to understand that even the evolution of the individual subject in the late medieval period was often associated with models drawn from authority. Jerry Root has argued convincingly that the outline and subject matter found in the confessional tracts that were produced after obligatory confession was introduced by the church had a decided impact upon the evolving sense of selfhood. In the sixteenth century it is clear, however, that something different was beginning to occur not only in regard to a new sense of self but also in the realms of literary creation. Spenser may have based his model of the 'literary career' upon an established image, but as Seth Lerer has indicated, by this period there is beginning to develop a culture of 'laureate' poetics in which the autonomous and self-conscious figure of the poet, even when he is using traditional themes, will begin to loom larger and larger (5). What is true for England is also true for Spain. Writing there in the sixteenth century is escaping from those medieval practices and concepts that tended to blur the distinctions between author, scribe, compiler, and commentator and from the confines of tradition, which suggested to the writer that he or she should hope to do no more than vary and improve upon those forms inherited from tradition. What I hope to do in this essay is to investigate at least in part what may have led to the development of such new practices in the preceding century in Spain. What evidence is there of an emerging sense of literary individuality, of the personal 'literary career' among the large number of writers whose names we know? Proceeding in this manner, the critic must bear in mind Timothy Reiss's observation that there was never a violent rupture between medieval, Renaissance, and later culture. Those profound changes which were occurring proceeded from and grew out of firm and established continuities (41). Spain produces a vast quantity of poetry in the fifteenth-century surely more than any other area in Western Europe. Julian Weiss suggests that a definite sense of self-consciousness does pervade this poetry (1,2). But Weiss senses that a key factor for these poets, as they constructed a poetic world for themselves, was a correct frame of reference, a thorough and complete knowledge of the auctores (128). Are these poets breaking free from the medieval obligation to follow the fathers, and if so to what degree? This poetry of the candoneros is richly glossed, and there are surely clues which might help us to understand what sense of 'literary career' was emerging. As Weiss points out, the

The Sentimental Novel and Celestina 133 glosses certainly merit attention (123), but because of their number a comprehensive study of them would prove to be a daunting task. Medieval Spanish imaginative prose, the best example of which is the early fourteenth-century Libra del Cavallero Qfar, seems to be as oriented toward authority as is its poetic counterpart. The author of the work is not named, and the prologue demonstrates the same variety of medieval nonchalance toward proprietarial rights that was obvious in Ruiz's Libra de buen amor: Tero esta obra es fecha so hemjenda de aquellos que la quisieren hemendar, e ^iertament deuen lo fazer aquellos que quisieren o lo sopieren hemendar sy quiera, porque dize la escriptura que sotilmente la cosa fecha emjenda, mas de loar es el que primeramente la fallo' (But this work has been done with the idea that those who wish to emend it, may do so. And certainly those who wish to do so or who understand how to do so, must attempt such if they wish. This is because writing (tradition?) says that the work that is carefully bettered is more worthy of praise than the person who first found it) (2). In the fifteenth century, works are produced which seem to foreshadow modern historiographic or biographical writing. But as R.B. Tate pointed out a number of years ago, the medievalist familiar with the period preceding the fifteenth century senses that this prose is directly connected to the gnomic and exemplary literature that characterized this earlier era (300). What appears to be biography in the fifteenth century is not only repetitively exemplary but often no more than a structure that provides for the accumulation and amassing of epigrammatic sententiae (300). Another group of prose writings which develops in the fifteenth century does offer a much more fertile field for seeking the possible origins of the literary career. Scholars and critics have debated for years whether the so-called novela sentimental (the sentimental novel or romance) can be considered a genre.3 But in regard to late medieval classificatory systems that viewed content in written works as designating a coherent genus, I think we should have no difficulty in seeing the 'sentimental novels' in terms of relationship. In my view, if a problematic love situation is the dominant theme in such a prose work, and if the protagonist appears to suffer stress because of this situation, the definition as 'sentimental' can certainly be taken as valid. The first of this genre is Juan Rodriguez del Padron's Siervo libre de amor (The Slave Free of Love), which appeared in 1440. The work would seem to be autobiographical and to relate an unhappy love affair. Within

134 James F. Burke the frame of the general story is set another sentimental novelette, the Estoria de dos amadores (The Story of Two Lovers), in which themes of unreciprocated love are placed within a context of violence. Books of this sort continued to be written for over a century - the last was Juan de Segura's Processo de cartas de amores (Process Having to do with Love Letters) in 1548 - and the question of literary career among the later writers is of course relevant. But my interest in this essay relates to those works of this type which preceded Fernando de Rojas's great prose masterpiece La Celestina, printed in its first version in 1499. Scholars normally also include within the grouping Rodriguez del Padron's translation and elucidation of Ovid's Heroides, which he called the Bursario. One work of Dom Pedro, Constable of Portugal (1429-66), the Sdtira de lafelice e infelice vida (A Discussion of Happy and Unhappy Life), surely merits inclusion, as does the Triste deleytapon (Sad Delectation), which, although in Castilian, was composed by a Catalan known only by his initials. Two late fifteenth-century writers produced the most important of the sentimental novels. Diego de San Pedro wrote the Tractado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda (Treatise Concerning the Loves of A. and L), which is the story of a deeply unhappy lover found living in a wilderness. The Cdrcel de amor (Prison of Love) begins with another unfortunate lover held within a metaphorical prison of love and moves quickly to a description of the principal protagonist who finds the prisoner there and then decides to attempt to help him. Juan de Flores also wrote two sentimental romances, Grisel y Mirabella and Grimalte y Gradissa, both printed around 1495, although they could have been composed earlier. The former is the story of two lovers guilty of sexual transgression, and the work describes the horrible events that follow the discovery of their actions. In the second novel, an experiment based upon Boccaccio's Fiametta, an attempt is made to give a happy ending to the story of the lovers who appear here as Fiometa and Panfilo. The sentimental romances and Celestina all deal with experiences relating to love and the severe problems and anxieties that the protagonists of these works seem to suffer. For the present-day reader it is practically impossible not to view the mental perplexities of the characters in terms of modern psychological theories and explanations. And in truth the use of the word psychological in regard to these works is unavoidable since we really have no other expression that is applicable to the ongoing mental processes of the human being, particularly when such an individual is under stress. But we must always remain aware of

The Sentimental Novel and Celestina 135 the great differences that separate the late medieval concept of the functions of the mind from modern ideas on the subject. In Western Europe at this time, thought processes were understood to result from an interrelation between the functions of a higher soul divinely bestowed and an 'intellect' located in the head. Information reached the mind, which was generally divided into five parts, from the surrounding world through the five senses in the form of species. These species were a kind of emanation that originated in the object of origin and then multiplied out across space to the organ of reception. Thus the objects of the outer world could be understood as penetrating into the intellect. These secondary 'inward wits' were also affected by various 'spirits' that arose in the physical functions of the real body of the individual.4 A word frequently used in these works is 'auctor' (author) and a debate has existed among hispanists interested in the group as to whether the use of this term can be taken as implying that the writer of the sentimental romances was assuming for himself the position of auctor in the sense of creator and originator, a stance usually avoided by medievals, as evidenced in the quotation from the beginning of the Libro del Cavallero Zifar.5 Barbara Weissberger in the late 1970s proposed that a rubric such as 'fabla el auctor' (the author speaks) employed as a marker in a sentimental text would imply a note of radical subjectivity that had previously been lacking. But Keith Whinnom in a 1982 study strongly questioned whether the composers of the sentimental novels or any other writers of treatises during the fifteenth century could have been claiming auctoritas for him or herself in anything like the modern sense. John Dagenais (1985-6) continued the debate, doubting that the use of the word 'tratado' (treatise) by these individuals could mean that they were seeking to construct a ground of authority for themselves by implying that they were providing an accessus ad auctorem in the classical tradition. An important addition to this debate came in 1990 with the publication of Marina Brownlee's The Severed Word. Brownlee's point is that the extratextual sphere of referentiality that stood as backdrop for medieval writing has largely disappeared by the time of the fifteenth-century sentimental novel. Her way of demonstrating this thesis is to contrast the manner in which the Alphonsine writers in the thirteenth century presented their adaptations of Ovid's Heroides with what occurs in Juan Rodriguez del Padron's version, which he called the Bursario. The collaborators of Alfonso X, the Wise, viewed Ovid's text as ethically

136 James F. Burke exemplary, as reflecting in the sublunary sphere the timeless values of the beyond. For Brownlee, there is an 'undeniable discursive disparity' (19) between this variety of writing and the novela sentimental because in the latter the word has been severed from its metaphysical referent. 'Whereas the ambiguity of the sign had been articulated in fourteenthcentury Spain (most notably by the Libro de buen amor), it is the fifteenth-century novela sentimental that fully grasps the existentially and novelistically dire consequences of this ambiguity' (19).6 For Brownlee, the authors of the sentimental romances are increasingly concerned by their inability to control their environment through language, and this awareness will lead to the development of novelistic discourse (212). If Brownlee is correct in thinking that the fifteenth-century writers who composed the sentimental novels are more and more aware that their language is free, that it is no longer linked to a controlling sphere of referentiality beyond the realm of human expression, what can this mean in regard to each of the writers personally? If the individual writer is no longer so compelled to pretend that he or she is furthering and bettering what has been handed down by tradition, echoing the voices of authority, does this author begin to rapidly develop a new and real sense of self importance that in effect would allow him to develop an increasing awareness of a personal 'literary career'? Because the quantity of introductory material in the novelas sentimentales is not great, not nearly so extensive as what occurs in the poetry collections, the cancioneros, it is possible to peruse this material in order to see if there is any indication of an emerging sense of 'literary career.' An examination of the prefatory topics in the novelas suggests that those images, examples, and metaphors that are used to illustrate the role of the writer in regard to these texts are largely conventional. They present the author as what might be termed the 'scribe of tradition' - the one who hopes to better and improve but in no way to pass beyond what has been bequeathed by those who have gone before. In the dedicatory passage at the beginning of Siervo libre de amor, directed to Gonc.alo de Medina, the author makes the typical attribution to authority: 'non confiando del mi simple ingenio, seguire el estilo, a ti agradable, de los antigos Omero, Publio Maro' (having little confidence in my simple understanding, I'll follow the style, so agreeable to you, of the ancients, Homer, Publius Marro) (83). The author then continues with the names of another eighteen figures from antiquity and even the Middle Ages - he mentions Dante. The author of the Triste deleytapon tells us in the customary medieval manner that he is

The Sentimental Novel and Celestina 137 simply rewriting a previously existing work: 'Venido a conocimiento mio, ahunque por via indirecta, un auto de amores... quise pora siempre en scrito parec,iessen' (There came to my attention indirectly a treatise concerning love ... I wanted these matters to be available always in writing) (1). Juan de Flores informs the reader where he has secured his material for Grimalte y Gradissa: 'La invencion del qual es sobre la Fiometa' (The content material of this work is derived from the Fiametta) (Matulka 374). At the beginning of Grisel y Mirabella there is no reference to sources but we do find another medieval topos, a variety of the so-called modesty topic frequently used by writers to diminish a sense of primary authorial responsibility. Flores does not wish to attract too much attention to himself 'porque non mas de vos fuessen publicos mis defectos' (so that my defects don't become too widely known) (333)7 The same motif, one that will come to have enormous importance in Celestina, is employed by Diego de San Pedro in the introductory material of Arnalte y Lucenda: 'mi nombre no se declare, que si la publicacion del quiero callar, es porque mas quiero ver reir de mi obra encubriendome, que no della y de mi publicandome' (I don't want my name known and if I hope to keep it unknown, it's because I would prefer to see people mocking my work not knowing who I am, rather than to be able to make fun of both the work and of me) (88). In the Cdrcel de amor Diego de San Pedro presents another much-used commonplace from the tradition of what one might term non-authorial responsibility. He has been directed to compose the work that follows: 'Pues me puse en ella mas por necesidad de obedescer que con voluntad de escribir ... Assi que por conplir su man[damie]nto pense hazerla' (I set to work more because of the necessity of obeying than through a desire to write ... Thus to obey your command I decided to craft this work) (80). There follows that most typical of medieval denials of authorial right: 'vuestra merced ... la emienda como discrete' (your worship as an intelligent man should emend and correct it) (80). The authors of these works, even if they do feel some greater sense of authorial right, continue to use in their introductory material the typical medieval modes of denial or diminuation of primary responsibility. Lisa Voigt has analysed the structure of Cdrcel de amor and has demonstated that the very creative process at work in this late sentimental novel is still one that is largely medieval and traditional. Voigt takes as her point of departure John Dagenais's concept of lecturatura, which he develops in his study The Ethics of Reading. Dagenais is basically describing in a new way the medieval idea of the writerly enter-

138 James F. Burke prise. What exists in concrete form, on wax, parchment, or on paper, is read by a number of readers and each of these has a different reaction to what is read. What is in reality a new version of the inscribed text is now formulated in the mind of each of these new readers. In the medieval period it was believed that it was the duty of such readers to 'participate' in the text by developing it and, if possible by bettering it. At least some of these readers would proceed to reinscribe the resulting mental text and the process would continue.8 Voigt sees the 'auctor' in Cdrcel de amor as one placed 'en una posicion de lector mas active' (in the position of the most active reader) (128). This author can serve as the person who not only is the bearer of the letters that the two lovers Leriano and Laureola send to one another, but one who is also able to function as the interpreter of them. Voigt does make one very interesting observation that, whether she intended it or not, manages to describe a process - one that, although always inherent in the medieval concept of lecturatura, seems to be coming to the fore, almost unselfconsciously, in the late sentimental novel. Besides being an active interpreter and rewriter of the material, 'El Auctor llega a ser un lector que desea participar en la historia y ejercer su influencia sobre el desencadenamineto de los eventos' (The author becomes a reader who wishes to participate in the story and to exert his influence over the evolution of its events) (129). The definite clues that might affirm to the modern reader that such a desire to exercise influence, to assume responsibility for what occurs in the text, are lacking. But my sense is that Voigt is correct in inferring that the author of the Cdrcel de amor does seem to experience a desire to wield influence upon the evolution of the text. Such a desire might well produce what is in essence a kind of anxiety, not yet a resentment of what had gone before, but one resulting from the realization that the auctor is exceeding the bounds of what had been for the medieval writer proper. The evolution of a sense of personal literary career in these pre-modern works emerges as the author continues to be concerned about abandoning the obligations of tradition and the adherence to procedures cultivated and handed down over the centuries. If clues that signal this preoccupation are nonexistent or sparse in the late sentimental novels, they do appear, I think, in Fernando de Rojas's masterpiece, now almost always referred to as Celestina, a piece that develops so well the elements of the sentimental tradition. In this work we see more fully evolved many of the basic themes and ideas only alluded to in passing in this genre. The first extant edition of Celestina in 1499 is divided into sixteen acts.

The Sentimental Novel and Celestina 139 In a 1500 version five additional acts are present, as well as important introductory material. It is this material that interests us in regard to what concept of literary career the author, Fernando de Rojas, might have had. The first section present in the 1500 version is a supposed letter from the author to a friend explaining the importance of the work. At the beginning of the letter the author underlines the theme of absence from the homeland and what such an absence produces. 'Suelen los que de sus tierras absentes se fallan considerar de que cosa aquel lugar donde parten mayor inopia o falta padezca' (Those who find themselves away from their native lands usually ponder concerning what that place which they have left most lacks) (69).9 Rojas suggests to his friend, perhaps also his patron, that one thing missing in 'nuestra comun patria' (our mutual fatherland) (69) is precisely the kind of work that follows, one that warns enamoured youth about the dangers of love. Following the basic traditions of the medieval writerly process, the author says that he has come upon a textual model that he has rewritten, refurbished, and extended. He portrays this exemplar in terms of 'armas defensivas' (weapons for defense) that the youth of his nation could use in their struggles with love. But immediately after declaring his verbal filial devotion to the well-being of his fatherland, the author moves to reject what was for the Middle Ages the archetypal patria, expressed first in classical terms and then later as the model for the emerging Renaissance. This text is of Spanish provenance and does not come from Italy, the land of the great cultural forbears, Virgil, Ovid, and Dante: '[armas] no fabricadas en las grandes herrerias de Milan, mas en los claros ingenios de doctos varones castellanos formadas' ([arms] not forged in the great ironworks of Milan but in the sharp minds of wise men from Castile) (69). Thus from the very beginning of Celestina the author seems to be toying with the most basic precepts of tradition, admitting and accepting the importance of the ancient and medieval legacy while almost simultaneously questioning its continuing relevance. The author also states that whoever it was who composed this work decided to conceal his name. The reason is the same as the one seen in earlier works: the writer hopes to avoid the criticism and notice that would necessarily have accompanied any direct personal declaration of responsibility. The present rewriter can thus not be blamed for doing the same: 'No me culpeys si en el fin baxo que le pongo, no espresare el mio' (You won't blame me if for the same inelegant reason that I ascribe to him, I don't reveal my own name). There is certainly no sense of a desire for a literary career here.10

140 James F. Burke Immediately after this letter comes a long series of verses in which Rojas continues to justify this authorial anonymity by implying a possible lack on his part of intellectual and writerly skills - the medieval modesty topos. 'El silencio escuda y suele encobrir / la[s] falta[s] de ingenio y torpeza de lenguas' (Silence shields and usually covers up a lack of intelligence and a torpid tongue) (71). But this long poem is an acrostic with the first letter of each verse revealing who the author of Celestina is, Fernando de Rojas. The author is involved in an elaborate game of concealing and revealing - of espousing the medieval concept of utterance in terms of langue rather than parole, while simultaneously proclaiming a very personal identity. The next line is 'blason que es contrario, publica sus menguas' (An armorial bearing which does the contrary, proclaims the failings of the author) (71). The word 'contrary' in effect expresses perfectly the two senses at play here - the themes of revelation and concealment, open and closed, ideas which are logical contraries. Immediately after this comes an exemplum, which implies even better the dilemma of the late medieval author. This is the story of an ant that decides to use its wings to fly. Rejoicing in this new but dangerous winged adventure, 'jactose con alas de su perdicion' (boasting about the wings which will be its undoing) (71), the poor creature is caught and devoured by ravenous birds. Cheney has discussed the ancient Orphic idea of the literary career which presented the poet as winged or as exercising the powers of some creature with wings, a great bird, a bee, a cicada a butterfly (10). The Middle Ages would doubtless have interpreted this tradition as meaning that the writer was receiving divine inspiration and thus all the more capable of enhancing and bettering what was being handed down. In Celestina, behind the image of this hapless ant, there must also hover the legend of Icarus. In stanza 8 of the poem the writer compares the text that he has encountered, and that he will refurbish, to the work of the great architect Daedalus: 'No hizo Dedalo cierto a mi ver / alguna mas prima entretalladura' (Daedalus certainly in my opinion did not construct such a first-rate structure [literally carving or bas-relief]) (74). Daedalus was, of course, the father of Icarus and it was he who fashioned the wings of wax and feathers that facilitated the escape from Crete. He also warned his son about the dangers of the sun, an admonition that the boy ignored with disastrous results. The failure of Icarus to heed the injunctions of his father would doubtless have been interpreted in the Middle Ages as a prime illustration of someone who

The Sentimental Novel and Celestina 141 rebelled against or tried to move beyond the precepts of tradition, a refusal to devote the proper filial piety toward the structures of paternal authority inherited from the past. During the late Renaissance and immediately afterwards, Icarus, along with Prometheus, became a symbol of the intellectual drive to discovery. Theologians in particular would condemn attempts to 'fly too high/ to attempt to obtain knowledge and powers that traditionally had been viewed as unaccessible to human beings (see Ginzburg). Jonathan Goldberg sees Anthony Van Dyck's painting Daedalus and Icarus (c. 1620) as exemplifying an awareness of the master artist, personified as Daedalus, who represents that tradition that produces the artist in subsequent generations. 'Placing himself in this family matrix, the artist alludes to his dependency upon his forebears, qualifies his self-assertion with subscription to higher powers' (107). Thus over a hundred years after Celestina appeared artists still were preoccupied with an acceptance and acknowledgment of the vast importance of what had gone before. Self-assertion was still seen as qualified and the artist as fully accepting of the lines of authority and pre-existing structure. But can we take the example of Rojas's overly ambitious ant as implying that he, as artist and creator, was apprehensive, anxious, in regard to an emerging sense that he was really an independent author, that he was doing more than simply bettering and refining the remnants of tradition, that he was placing himself as a writer on the path to a literary career? In the next section of Celestina, the prologue in prose, I think that there is evidence, again drawn from traditional descriptive imagery, that makes such a likelihood very strong indeed. The major theme of this prologue, one inspired by the writings of Petrarch, is that of conflict and struggle. The opening words taken from Heraclitus make this clear: Todas las cosas ser criadas a manera de contienda o batalla' (Everything is created and functions in terms of struggle or battle) (77). From this point on the author continues with a series of examples, ones drawn from the inherited lore of ancient and medieval culture, that illustrate and prove that this point is indeed true. One of these illustrations is particularly interesting in regard to the question of the development of notions of the writerly craft. 'La bivora, reptilia o serpiente enconada, al tiempo del concebir, por la boca de la hembra metida la cabe^a del macho y ella con el gran dulcpr aprietale tanto que le mata, y quedando prenada, el primer hijo rompe las yjares de la madre, por do todos salen y ella muerta queda; el quasi como

142 James F. Burke vengador de la paterna muerte' (The viper, a poisonous reptile or serpent, at the moment of conception, has the head of the male inserted in the mouth of the female. And she because of the great sweetness exerts such pressure upon him that she kills him. The result is that she finds herself pregnant and the first offspring breaks the tissues of the mother and all the remaining young serpents come forth. The mother then dies and this first young serpent which came forth exacts, as it were, revenge for the death of the father) (78-9). Alexander Leupin discusses the use of this image in the Middle Ages and describes it as an allegory which implies the origins of fiction (151-2).111 suspect that Leupin is correct not only in regard to the rise of fiction but also that his insight is useful in explaining the emergence of the individual author with his or her own literary career at the moment of the Renaissance. Certainly this image has great relevance for the plot of Celestina. The young knight Calisto loses all interest in the duties and requirements of his aristocratic station. The object of his desire, Melibea, while from a family of humble origins that has achieved success through the efforts of the father Pleberio, is equally unconcerned with those structures that support society and is aware at the end of the work that her actions and those of her lover have caused great harm to fall upon the common weal. She makes this clear in her final, long declamation to her father from the tower before she jumps: 'Yo cobri de luto y xergas en este dia quasi la mayor parte de la cibdadana cavalleria; yo dexe [hoyl muchos sirvientes descubiertos de senor; yo quite muchas raciones y limosnas a pobres y envergoncantes' (I covered with mourning cloth today almost all the nobility of this city; I left today many servants without a master; I deprived many poor and unfortunate people of food and alms) (333). What has happened is that under the spell and ministrations of Mother Celestina a negative maternal influence envelops all the characters in the work. The problem that bothers the young prostitute Areusa in Acts 7 and 8, the 'mal de la madre' (the evil of the mother), which was known in English as 'the wandering womb/ stands metaphorically in effect for the situation throughout most of the work.12 That Calisto has rejected positive paternal structures in an Oedipal fashion becomes clear in Act 14 when in his beautiful soliloquy he declaims against those positive precepts of law and order that would forbid his illicit love for Melibea. The paternal paradigm is personified in that official who might right the situation and make the young knight responsible for his actions. 'O cruel juez ... Yo pensava que pudiera con tu favor matar

The Sentimental Novel and Celestina 143 mil hombres sin miedo de castigo' (Oh cruel judge ... I thought that I could because of your influence kill a thousand men without fear of punishment) (289). The exemplum of the serpents illustrated for the Middle Ages and premodern period that there existed a kind of fluctuation, even conflict, between what might be termed paternal and maternal moments of importance and sway. Periodically the maternal principle must overcome, even destroy on occasion, the perhaps ossified sphere of the paternal if rebirth is to occur. The female serpent kills the male in order to conceive and bring forth the next generation. The birth of the young results in her death, seen as vengeance for the father, and doubtless implies a reassertion of lines of authority and structure that the earlier eras thought of as paternal. In Celestina the influence of the old bawd creates a completely negative maternal ambiance which is never countered by either positive maternal or paternal examples. But all the major characters do die in unfortunate circumstances, and one might thus assume that the various forms of negative behaviour are seen as punished. The last prose element in the work is Pleberio's long lament, which certainly presents him as the failed father: 'Del mundo me quexo porque en si me crio' (I complain of the world because it created me in it) (343). The last words of this planctus, 'in hac lacrimarum valle' (in this vale of tears), are from the Salve Regina. As Peter Dunn has pointed out, this Marian antiphon is sung at compline as all the lights are extinguished in the church. Compline is the last Office of the day and it takes place only a few hours before the beginning of the next day's round. Those who heard the Salve Regina at compline would know that the great archetypal paradigm of paternal order and structure, the Divine Office of the church, would soon begin again (see also my discussion in the last chapter of Vision, the Gaze). Rojas in the expanded version of Celestina was proclaiming the message of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He would have understood completely the traditional concept of the author as refiner, corrector, and transmitter of the important themes and precepts handed down from generation to generation, the voice of langue. And yet he must have sensed that he was doing something different, or he must have realized that what tradition predicated in reality was not what occurred with an author. But that phrase 'O cruel juez' must have resounded in his mind. Were he to assert himself absolutely as individual, were he openly to declare a personal sense of literary career, he

144 James F. Burke might imagine that the forces of usage and customs, viewed as paternal, could rise and destroy him. A true birth of fiction and the artistic career could have for him, as for the mother serpent, very dire consequences indeed. Thus what we have here at the real outset of modern Hispanic prose fiction, soon to flower in the great Golden Age figure of Cervantes, can only be viewed as an 'anxiety of influence' in a mode opposite to that described by Harold Bloom. Rojas does not completely resent the fact that he is forced to use traditional language, images, and themes - ones inherited from the fathers. Rather he is anxious about asserting his independence, his personal, individual manner of dealing with this material - in effect, his authorial ownership and control of it.

Notes 1 Juan Ruiz was such a common name in early fourteenth-century Spain that it might have been no more than the equivalent of 'John Doe' today. The second part of the appellation applied to the poet 'Arc.ipreste de Hita/ is also suspicious in that etymologically 'Hita/ which does exist as a geographical locale, could also be derived from Latin 'ficta.' The manuscript might be denying true identification in much the same way that Cervantes negates place at the beginning of Don Quixote 'En un lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme' (In a place of La Mancha the name of which I don't wish to recall) (35). 2 Racklin has questioned whether castration, the basic theme of Freudian ideas of gender differentiation, really has relevance for those symbols in the plays of Shakespeare which appear to suggest the concept (83). She points out that gender ideology before the Renaissance was not based upon the then marginal discourses of biological science but in those of history and theology (69). What records we have coming down to us from earlier periods are, of course, always portrayed within or near the modes of these privileged discourses. Thus it is practically impossible for us to know whether writers in the pre-modern period ever thought in terms approaching the modern understanding, particularly as articulated by Freud, of such ideas as 'castration' or the 'Oedipus complex.' 3 See Deyermond for general information on the novela sentimental as well as Celestina. 4 The term 'inward wits' was commonly employed by writers in English in the pre-modern period and was used by Ruth Harvey as the principal title

The Sentimental Novel and Celestina 145 of her study. For a fuller discussion of ideas and theories relating to the manner in which the mental processes functioned in the pre-modern period see my chapter "The Sensory Fields - Ancient and Modern' in my study on Celestina entitled Vision, the Gaze. 5 See Minnis for medieval views on authorship and authority. 6 See de Looze's study for a demonstration of how strong this questioning had in fact become during the fourteenth century. 7 See my study Vision, the Gaze in which I argue that this topos was used by medieval writers to imply a much wider range of meaning. 8 For us moderns it has been difficult to understand this process in terms other than those which have to do with the written artefact. Carruthers in her studies has helped us to understand that medievals were doubtless often able to effect this process orally and also within themselves in memory. Since for medievals the object of culture was ultimately the salvation of the individual soul, a person who did no more than improve a text in his or her mind for personal benefit was accomplishing from the medieval perspective a great deal indeed. 9 Since we learn further along that the author was a student at the University of Salamanca, we can probably assume that he is referring here to his 'patria chica' (the small homeland), the region of Spain from which he came, Puebla de Montalban on the banks of the River Tagus. 10 In my study Vision, the Gaze, I relate this reluctance to be identified to the medieval worry about the destructive powers of envy. This is a theme which I take to be of great importance throughout Celestina. 11 See also my comments on this image in regard to Rojas's use of the legend of Pyramus and Thisbe in my 1996 study. 12 See my 1993 study.

FIVE

Versions of a Career: Petra

His Renaissance Comm William ]. Kennedy

Few writers have recorded more about themselves and their careers than did Francesco Petrarch (1304-74), and in the two centuries that followed his death none received more critical notice and commentary. Such diverse texts as his Latin epic Africa and pastoral Bucolicum carmen, his prose 'Coronation Oration' and 'Letter to Posterity/ and above all his Epistolae Familiares (Letters on Familiar Matters) and Epistolae Seniles (Letters in Old Age) inscribe different accounts of his lifework at its different stages. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentators on his Italian Rime sparse in turn understand these accounts from yet different perspectives. The poet's programmatic statements in the Africa, Bucolicum carmen, the 'Coronation Oration/ and the 'Letter to Posterity' project an idealized course conformable generally with the Virgilian rota. His more fungible statements in the Familiares and Seniles project a less self-assured, often conflicted, and even contradictory awareness of his own practice. In addition to the pattern of Virgil's career, the experience of St Augustine's conversion and Dante's exile figure in Petrarch's self-representation and they sharpen his awareness of the compromises that he needed to make in order to do his work. In recounting these tensions, later commentators would articulate new paradigms to emplot Petrarch's trajectory, versions of a career that was itself beset by conflicting versions of its own distinctiveness. 'I am convinced that a man must seek after the glory that he may reasonably hope for in this life while he still lives/ writes Petrarch near the end of his confessional Secretum meum.1 Keen to pursue literary fame, he counters Augustinus, his fictive St Augustine, who has berated his willingness 'to spend the best part of your life in doing what

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 147 looks good to others and in flattering them' (136).2 Petrarch accepts his fate because 'the proper order is that mortal men should first think about mortal things, and eternal things should follow transitory things' (137). This combination of worldliness and spirituality rather differently inflects his De sua ignorantia some two decades later. Here Petrarch responds to all that is provisional and unstable in his life, and he lets this awareness shape its contours: 'Do you see how I am hurrying toward the end and never reach it? There are so many things that interfere with the course of my speech and obstruct it... How ambiguous are all matters, how great and entangled is the confusion of words.'3 The confidence of the Secretum yields to the diffidence of De sua ignorantia and an oscillation between these poles shapes the profile of Petrarch's career for later commentators. This oscillation emerges across the arc of Petrarch's collected letters. Here the author represents his career as a progressive journey toward self-understanding on paths by no means direct or obvious but oblique and only half-perceived.4 Its open-ended narrative mirrors changing times and social circumstances, permitting only contingent insights. For example, the last letter of the Seniles, composed probably in 1373 and designated as a 'Letter to Posterity/ omits nearly all dates and circumstantial details and offers no more than a general sketch of the poet's early development. It ends abruptly with his return to Vaucluse in 1351 and so minimizes his subsequent pursuit of patronage from the Venetian senate and such northern Italian lords as Galeazzo Visconti, Francesco da Carrara, and Pandolfo Malatesta.5 Nor does it mention the writer's administrative, ambassadorial, or professional roles in the Avignon papacy and European politics, including his efforts to restore the papacy to Rome and his support for Cola di Rienzo's efforts to revive the Roman Republic.6 Without naming Laura, it reports only that its author 'struggled in adolescence with the most intense but constant and honorable love, and would have struggled with it even longer, had not a premature but expedient death extinguished the flame that was already cooling.'7 The letter's interpretive logic cannot allow it to function in any determinate way. Petrarch avers at the outset a profound awareness that readers will assess this account from the horizon of their own understandings: 'Men's opinions will vary. For almost everyone speaks as his pleasure, not the truth, impels' (2.672). He repeats this claim when he notes his delight in reading and writing about antiquity, 'seeming always to graft myself in my mind onto other ages' (2.674). No

148 William J. Kennedy single model of history prevails. Every event is unique and unfathomable. For this reason, historical writing stirs Petrarch's competitive imagination to recover buried insights, forgotten understandings about the past from older texts. With regard to the appropriation of his own career pattern by later readers and writers, one size cannot fit all. Each will have a different trajectory even if it is misinterpreted by others.8 Petrarch's effort 'to graft myself in my mind onto other ages' in fact generates the unique trajectory of his career, his early formulation of a philological humanism, and his poetic practices in both Latin and Italian. The impetus comes from recognizing the vast cultural differences between antiquity and later times, and above all the temporality of language that blurs meanings until it no longer registers the precise formulations of earlier generations.9 Petrarch's familiar letters to writers from the past - especially to Cicero (Fam. 24.3 and 4), Horace (Fa 24.10), and Virgil (Fam. 24.11) - express his chagrin at only half-comprehending the remnants of their texts. A similar distress affects his composition in the stylized Tuscan vernacular of Dante and the stilnuovo that accompanied his family's exile from Florence to southern France and northern Italy. Clashing with this sense of an individual, unrepeatable migratory passage in the 'Letter to Posterity' is the outline of a narrative that nonetheless replicates other models. The letter tells of a life in which 'adolescence misled me, youth swept me away, but old age set me right, and taught me by experience ... that adolescence and pleasure are vain' (2.672). This shadowing of repentance evokes St Augustine's Confessions, which in turn evokes the wanderings of Virgil's Aeneas as a refugee from an old order in quest of a new home.10 Rewriting the twin voyages of St Augustine and Aeneas to Italy, Petrarch recounts his own first visit to Rome as motivated by 'my ardor and curiosity to see many things ... which I had ardently longed to see since childhood' (2.675) and by a 'nausea and hate' for Avignon, now identified as 'that second urban Carthage [Avignon]' (2.676) where St Augustine misspent his youth and Aeneas encountered Dido. His return to Rome in quest of the poetic laurel conferred by King Robert of Naples retraces Aeneas's itinerary from Cumae, incurring the kind of jealousy and hostility that Turnus held for Aeneas: 'The crown earned me nothing in the way of knowledge, but very much in the way of envy' (2.677). Like St Augustine, however, he professes humility in pursuit of his vocation. Spurred by his coronation in 1341 and 'with such ardor, in a relatively short time, that I myself am now amazed' (2.678), he composes long parts of

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 149 his Latin epic on the Punic Wars. But just as Virgil wished to destroy his unrevised Aeneid, so Petrarch expresses dissatisfaction with his Africa, a poem sketched in broad design that would remain unfinished in detail. With a slight of hand that wrenches the letter's implied chronology, Petrarch mentions his 'sylvan work' (2.675), the Bucolicum carmen, a dozen pastoral poems composed in imitation of Virgil's Eclogues, though written at a later period (1346-52) after he had abandoned his Africa (drafted mostly in 1338-42). It is as though the errant figures of St Augustine and Aeneas have bled into the example of Virgil, the poet whose three-stage career might impart order to Petrarch's life.11 Petrarch's trajectory from epic to eclogues reverses that of the Roman poet, but by inserting his reference to the Bucolicum carmen early in his letter, Petrarch makes it seem that he too has moved from pastoral to epic. The Bucolicum carmen relays yet another version of Petrarch's career. Composed at a time that overlaps with his mid-life crisis recounted in the Secretum, its eclogues lay bare Petrarch's worldly ambition with alternate measures of Augustinian scruple and Virgilian irony. The condition of his spiritual life dominates the first eclogue, a dialogue between Petrarch and his brother Gherardo (Monicus 'single-eyed' or 'monk'), on preferring the challenges of a literary career to the vapid lacrimas (tears) and raucus 'unmusical groanings' (1.74) of the monastic life.12 Foremost among these challenges and, as we shall see, a concern that would continue to weigh heavily upon his later years, is the quest for patronage. Virgil found his way to Augustus through Macenas, but Petrarch finds his route to fame through a series of benefactors beginning with Argus, a figure for King Robert of Naples in Eclogue 3. Despite Robert's favour, Petrarch feels daunted by the magnitude of his task: 'Sector vestigia dure, / Heu michi! sparsa ferre; fugit ilia, meosque dolores / Nescit' (I am seeking, alas, some traces of a cruel / Quarry that ever eludes me and nothing knows of my travails) (3.97-9). In Eclogue 8 he imagines the responses of a former advocate, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, whose support he no longer accepts: 'Men iuvenem pavisse domi et finxisse docendo, / Ut doctum nova selva senem, novus hospes haberet?' (Have I then nourished this youth in my house and given him lessons / That in his learned age he might seek a new country and patron?) (8.112-13). The betrayal refers to Petrarch's endorsement in 1347 of Cola di Rienzo's republican project against the ruling nobility of Rome that included the Colonna family.13 In the poet's eyes the cost to his affective life appears worth the price. In eclogue 10

150 William J. Kennedy his persona cultivates his laurel tree at the expense of all temporal concerns, including those of securing sound sponsorship: 'Aut ibi iam senior nova carmina cantem?' (At my age to whom shall I venture to offer / New songs?) (10.385-6).14 Far from depleting his energies, the condition of living in a permanent state of suspended ambivalence ignites his imagination and provides him with matter for reflection. It is typical of Petrarch's reflection that his anxieties in the pastoral mode follow rather than precede his triumphalism in the epic mode. Earlier in Africa Ennius, the ancient Latin poet and historical contemporary of Scipio Africanus, appears as a friend of the hero and forecaster of his deeds.15 A Petrarchan melancholy shadows his question, 'Sed quid tamen omnia prosunt? / Iam sua mors libris aderit; mortalia namque / Esse decet quecumque labor mortalis inani / Eddit ingenio' (Yet still, what serves it all? Books too soon die, for what with futile art a mortal makes / is also mortal) (2.454-7, Bergin trans. 2.589-91).16 The poem's final section opens with Ennius's prophecy about the poet's role in the work of history and culture. As poets cover the truth of history with a veil of fiction, an integumentum that beguiles the reader's eye, their insights must not be confused with mere fantasizing: 'Qui fingit quodcumque refert, non ille poete / Nomine censendus' (One who invents what he relates should not / be honored by the title of a poet) (9.103-5, Bergin trans. 9.140-2). The work of poetry requires toil and study and a measure of divinely conferred talent. These ideas derive in part from Lactantius's De divinibus institutionibus (noted in Festa, ed. 695) and Cicero's Pro archia, the latter an oration on the poet's officium (office, duty) that Petrarch had discovered in a manuscript at Liege in 1333 after it endured centuries of neglect. They also dominate Petrarch's early career statement in the 'Coronation Oration' commemorating his receipt of the laurel at the Palace of the Roman Senate in 1341. This text emphasizes the difficulties of a literary career and the genuine enthusiasm for it that true poets must sustain. Here Petrarch glosses Virgil's 'me ... dulcis raptat amor' (a sweet longing ravishes me) (Georgics 3.291-2) by observing that the phrase 'suggests the ardent eagerness of a studious mind' (1242).17 In addition to 'a certain inner and divinely given energy' (1242) to complete the task, poets need the good fortune of patronage and a receptive cultural environment in which to pursue their calling.18 Next Petrarch glosses (out of its Virgilian context) 'vincit amor patriae' (love of the fatherland has conquered [him]) (Aeneid 6.823) in order to validate the poet's social usefulness as a guide for others (1245).19 He quotes Lactantius's

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 151 endorsement of truth as the object of a poet's expressive skill - To make up all that one writes is to be a fool and a liar rather than a poet' (1246) for which it helps if a poet 'can find pleasure in a certain playfulness' (1246). With this description Petrarch disclaims a merely personal application: 'Let this suffice as a statement not so much about myself as about the poetic profession' (1246). Emphasizing his 'moment of initiation or breakthrough/ Petrarch's formula serves as an inspirational stimulus on the odd days and as a job-seeking resume on the even.20 Attentive readers will notice that my exposition has followed a reverse chronological order from the 'Letter to Posterity' in Petrarch's old age to the pastoral eclogues of his middle years and the Latin epic and 'Coronation Oration' of his early maturity. Petrarch's real-life experience proved messier, however, as the author understood when in the late 1340s he set out to collect and edit his correspondence in a project that grew to twenty-four books of Familiares, eighteen books of Seniles, and five books of Epistolae sine nominee (Letters without Name), the last concerned with the Avignon papacy and Cola di Rienzo. Inspired by his discovery of Cicero's long-lost letters to Atticus at Verona in 1345, he embarked on his project, no doubt aware that it would compromise formulaic statements about his career in his other works. Cicero's letters had revealed petty, manipulative, unpleasant dimensions of character that shocked Petrarch.21 Here, opposed to an idealized version of Cicero's career, one finds an account of factionalism and rivalry, futile desires and abandoned goals, mistaken beliefs and irrational decisions, all of which shaped his actual career as anything but programmatic. 'Why did you choose to become involved in so many quarrels and utterly useless feuds,' Petrarch asks Cicero in Fam. 24.3, adding ruefully that 'you revealed to your followers the path where you yourself stumbled most wretchedly.'22 Deep learning and an eloquent style prove all too detachable from the person of the one who pursues them. 'It was your life that I censored, not your intellect and your tongue,' Petrarch asserts in Fam. 24.4 (3.319/1252). Petrarch's letters will reveal similar fissures in his own character and faultlines in his own career. Introducing his letters in Fam. 1.1, Petrarch frankly admits that their arguments contradict one another, not always in a positive or progressive fashion: 'My style [sermo] was strong and sober in the early years ... With the passage of time it became weaker and more humble and seems to lack strength of character [virilibus]' (1.12/248). In Fam. 8.3 (dated from Parma, 13 May 1349) Vaucluse becomes the specific site of his vernacular compositions about Laura, where 'no help against the

152 William J. Kennedy raging fire in so solitary a place made me burn even more hopelessly' (1.399/565). Though here Petrarch belittles his Rime sparse as a distraction from the important work of his Latin literary career, he admits that they have allured a wide audience among 'those who are affected by the same disease' of passionate ardour (1.399/565). Some, including Bishop Giacomo Colonna, charged early on that he invented Laura as a poetic fiction to entertain an indiscriminate readership. In Fam. 2.9, dated 21 December 1336 and addressed to Colonna, Petrarch vehemently denies the charge: 'Believe me no one can pretend at great length without great toil, and to toil for nothing so that others consider you mad is the greatest of madnesses' (1.102/329).23 The response is curious because Petrarch nowhere refutes Colonna with hard evidence but rather balances Laura against his explicitly fictive representation of St Augustine as the beacon of his career in the Secretum: 'Against this fictitious [simulatam] Laura as you call it, that other fiction [simulatus] of mine, Augustine, will perhaps be of help' (1.102/329). Curiously too Petrarch declines in this letter to scorn the vernacular audience of his Rime sparse that he elsewhere discredits so readily.24 For once Laura and the Italian poems come to figure as important aspirations in his literary career. With respect to this audience Petrarch insists that he has not tried to teach a lesson or elevate the imagination. To Giacomo Colonna in 1342 Petrarch despairs of being able to change, educate, or influence any of his readers; the most he expects is a kind of self-therapy, 'to unburden myself of ideas and to console my mind with writing' (Fam. 6.4:1.314/ 502). In a series of letters dated 1352 and grouped on the topic of his varied readership Petrarch iterates these convictions about his Latin writing. He professes a humility in his style that does not require 'fastidious minds or delicate ears' (Fam. 13.5: 2.191/778).25 Instead, 'I wish to be understood by those possessing intelligence, and even by these through a mental effort and application that is cheerful and not grudging' (2.191/778). Petrarch does not entirely disdain popular verse for casual entertainment, but he does distinguish it from genuine poetry, 'a divine gift granted to few' (Fam. 13.6: 2.193/781). Yet he laments that 'never was there a time or a place when in my opinion so little was understood about it' (2.193/781) and he cites Horace Satires 1.4.40-1, 'you will not grant that to weave a verse is enough' (2.197/ 785). The context of these letters is Petrarch's refusal to defend Cola di Rienzo on the grounds of his poetic talent.26 Cola is one of those versifiers who 'taste Pierian honey on their lips' but cannot like true

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 153 poets 'digest it, ... [or] dream about it' (Fam. 13.7: 790/2.201). The difference between versifiers and true poets applies to readers as well: 'Poetry is very sweet to the taste but is capable of being grasped by very few minds' (790/2.201). These concerns merge in a letter to Boccaccio in 1359 where Petrarch barely conceals his dismay about following in Dante's footsteps.27 Refusing to mention Dante's name, he concurs with Boccaccio's praise of their forerunner whose reputation has been 'buffeted and wearied by the windy applause of the multitude' (Fam. 21.15: 3.202/1128). He confesses that he does not own a copy of Dante's work, but only because T did fear that, were I to immerse myself in his, or any other's, writings, ... I could scarcely escape becoming an unwilling or unconscious imitator' (3.204/1130). He insists that similarities in their poems result from 'pure chance or similarity of mind' because he has aimed to craft his own style 'without anyone's aid' (3.204/1131). He adds that he abandoned his vernacular poetry when it found a wide readership because T feared for my writings what I saw happening to the writings of others, and especially of this poet' (3.205/1132). It is really Dante's vernacular audience that he dislikes and will avoid by devoting his career to Latin composition. Off the leash but still wearing a collar, he declares Italian poetry a 'mere sport, a pastime [solatium], a mental exercise [ingenii rudimentum]/ whereas Dante regarded it 'if not his only occupation, surely his principal one' (3.205/1132).28 Despite these disclaimers Petrarch continued to reorder, revise, and augment his vernacular poems throughout the last decades of his life. In 1356 he cultivated the friendship of Pandolfo Mala testa, a military commander from Pesaro with a respect for learning, who had fought for Florence and Milan. To Pandolfo he writes warm letters of advice about remarriage (Fam. 22.1), his illnesses (Sen. 13.9), and the death of Pandolfo's second wife (Sen. 13.10). In January 1372 he sends Pandolfo a manuscript of his Italian poetry with thanks for a kindness that 'never ceases nor slows down' (Sen. 13.11: 2.499). In Pandolfo he has found a generous reader and benefactor, if not exactly a patron for his Rime sparse. He apologizes for his 'vernacular trifles,' the 'rambling madness' of his Italian poetry, the Variety' of its contents, and 'the crudeness of the style,' attributing the latter to his youthfulness at the time of its composition (2.499). Pandolfo has requested a transcription of these poems and Petrarch cannot refuse since 'they have all circulated among the multitude, and are being read more willingly than what I later wrote seriously for sounder minds' (2.500).29

154 William J. Kennedy To Boccaccio, however, Petrarch argues that 'scarcely anyone is a fair judge of his own work' (Sen. 5.2:1.157) and he goes on to suggest in an ankle-biting way that he and Dante excel over the former in critical esteem: 'Do you bear it so ill to be thus outdone by one or two men, especially fellow citizens?' (1.160). When Boccaccio points out that Petrarch has compromised his career by spending so much time in the service of princes and prelates, the poet responds, 'I would never approve any conditions that would distract me even for a short while from my freedom and from my studies. Therefore, when everyone sought the palace, I either sought the forest or rested in my room among my books' (Sen. 17.2: 2.650). His remonstration implies that Boccaccio has touched upon a raw nerve in his commitment to a career. It specifically implies that Petrarch still entertains a delicate conscience about his move in 1353 from Avignon and southern France to Milan and northern Italy at the expense of forsaking his idealized image of Rome and perhaps even of his and Boccaccio's ancestral Florence.30 The motivation was palpable. Archbishop Giovanni Visconti, the Ghibelline lord of Milan, aggressor in northern Italy, and on all counts Petrarch's ideological antithesis, had offered him attractive accommodations in Lombardy. Petrarch needed only to close his eyes to their political differences.31 Familiares 17.10 records Petrarch's scruples upon accepting Giovanni Visconti's offer. Dated 1 January 1354, some six months after his arrival in Milan, and addressed to Giovanni Aghinolfi, the highly respected chancellor of the Gonzaga at Mantua whose moral integrity might exemplify how Petrarch should conduct his life in the company of despots, the letter recalls the objections of several friends. It does not mention the Visconti rulers by name, but it evokes Petrarch's hesitancy about them by opposing his love for rural solitude to his new involvement in urban affairs. It cites 'a transalpine friend' (doubtless Ludwig van Kempen, his 'Socrates') who, though entrammeled in 'Babylon's subterfuges' at Avignon, has censured him for preferring the 'clamor [negotia]' of Milan to the quiet of Vaucluse (3.31/950). Petrarch reveals his divided conscience as he quotes from the Roman mime Laberius, a critic of Julius Caesar, in attributing to Giovanni Visconti 'the power over me of an absolute command and the force of imperial majesty' (3.31/950). More problematically he recalls precedents in St Paul and St Augustine. The conflict, as St Paul states it, is that T do not the good that I wish to do, but rather the evil that I do not wish to do' (3.31/950, Romans

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 155 7:19). The result for Petrarch is an 'internal warfare of spirit' all the more relevant for taking place in Milan, the site of St Augustine's conversion only a few paces from the poet's house near Sant Ambrogio (3.32/951). It is a 'destructive sluggishness and perplexity of mind' that enslaves Petrarch's will in 'the bonds of a terrible habit' (3.34/953), his pursuit of literary fame. On the one hand he aims at poetic excellence based upon the honesty, truth, and integrity of his writing. On the other he hopes for earthly glory even if he must compromise his writerly ideals to achieve it. His indenture to the Visconti seals this compromise. In exchange for their munificence he barters his rhetorical talents and political convictions. To acknowledge his agitation Petrarch quotes extensively from St Augustine's account of his conversion in Confessions 8.8-9, but he omits what immediately follows: T thought it best to retire quietly from the market where I sold the services of my tongue' (Con/. 9.2).32 St Augustine's renunciation of worldly involvement is precisely the opposite of Petrarch's compliance with it in Milan. Aghinolfi has urged the poet to safeguard his freedom: 'You so kindly urge me to flee and, upon regaining my liberty [libertatem] ... not to forsake the foundations of a better life' (3.30/949). Doubtless the freedom that Petrarch summons is the moral libertas of a Christian proclaimed by Paul in Romans 6:15, but he also implies the writer's professional freedom to devote himself to his literary career, and he implies as well the political freedom that writers compromise when they attach themselves to despotic patrons. Libertas resonates with the ideals of the ancient Roman Republic embodied for Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and their contemporaries in an earlier Florentine Republic and challenged by the aggressive designs of a reconstituted Empire in league with northern lords such as the Visconti and Petrarch's later benefactors, the Carrara of Padua.33 Petrarch evokes three ancient Roman writers who expressed complex attitudes toward emergent political tyranny in their own time. To introduce Giovanni Visconti he cites Laberius's subversive description of Julius Caesar's honeyed rhetoric (3.31/950). He also cites Horace's Epistle 1.11.28-9 to depict the strength of a sound will amid adversity (3.32/951). Finally he paraphrases Suetonius, the trenchant observer of Roman emperors who noted that Vespasian found himself oppressed by his own indebtedness to ambitious masters. This last analogy launches Petrarch's ironic peroration: 'Even in fetters, if fortune condemns me to them, I continue thinking of liberty, and amid the cities I continue thinking of the country' (3.35 / 955). Having settled in Viscontian Milan for what would be a longer

156 William J. Kennedy period of continuous residence than he ever spent anywhere else, Petrarch had already made his decision. The support of wealthy patrons seemed worth the compromise. The stresses and strains of these contradictory impulses came to define Petrarch's career for later generations in Italy and throughout Europe. They charted his need for solitude, his attitude toward a varied readership, his preference for Latin over the vernacular, his competition with other writers, and above all his response to the moral question of patronage. Few before him had interrogated the process of benefaction so intensely. Virgil harboured ambivalence about the emotional cost of Rome's imperial achievement, but he expressed it with intuitive irony and regretful melancholy.34 St Augustine made good his conversion by refusing to sell his rhetorical talents afterwards, but he implicated no single patron or circle of patrons in his decision. Some troubadour poets conveyed regret about their patrons' stinginess or vulgarity but not about their questionable ideologies.35 Dante learned to accept the salty bread of benefactors after his exile.36 But Petrarch disclosed a troubled sensibility about accepting certain kinds of patronage throughout his career, and his disclosure affected poets in his wake. Among writers and commentators in later, more secular times, Petrarch's interest in an Augustinian career path would fade, but his attraction to the Virgilian pattern took hold in various ways. There emerges, then, from Petrarch's many accounts of his practice no single programmatic version of his career but rather several, and they in turn generate and regenerate different versions of a poetic career in succeeding centuries. The primary vehicle of transmission is fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on the Rime sparse in early printed editions of the text. Certainly Petrarch's taunt to Boccaccio about the relative weight of their reputations in regard to Dante's came to fulfilment with the canonization of Petrarch as the supreme model for vernacular poetry in the later Renaissance. In the decades before Bembo authorized the Rime sparse and Decameron as the premier stylistic models for Italian poetry and prose in his Prose della volgar lingua (published 1525), Petrarch's and Boccaccio's prestige had begun to rise steadily over Dante's.37 With the publication of Petrarch's collected Latin works in 1496 at Basel and in 1501 at Venice, and again in the complete Latin and Italian works in 1554 and 1581 at Basel, the Familiares and Seniles received fresh attention, providing ample biographical information about the writer's career.38 In the competitive climate of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century bookselling, rivalry prompted

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 157 editors to include new materials in interpretive paratexts designed to attract a specific clientele in expanding markets. Various approaches in commentaries on Petrarch's Italian works subsequently reflect social and cultural differences among prospective buyers, based upon their educational backgrounds, regional biases, religious convictions, political attachments, and cultural sophistication.39 Some biographical prefaces simply amplify Petrarch's recital of his career in the 'Letter to Posterity.' Antonio da Tempo, the earliest commentator on the Rime sparse, offers an expanded paraphrase of that letter to accompany his glosses on individual poems, composed probably in the 1420s and printed in 1477. Antonio's preface emphasizes Petrarch's sympathies with northern Italian Ghibellinism and the Imperial faction during his eight years of service to the Visconti at Milan, 'la quale citta molto suole collaudare, dicendo nelle sue epistole in niuna avere trovato migliore abitazione' (a city that he used to praise greatly, saying in his letters that nowhere had he found a better home) (Aiiiiv). Antonio distorts his pro-Visconti account by omitting Petrarch's even more effulgent praise of Parma, Padova, and Venice. Nor does he privilege Petrarch's love for Laura over his dedication to patrons when he translates part of Fam. 2.9 about Giacomo Colonna's denial of her existence: 'Dio volesse che fusse simulazione e non furore' (Would to God that she were a fiction and not a madness!) (Avr). Ultimately Antonio reaffirms Laura's historical existence by noting Petrarch's inscriptions about her in his edition of Virgil, but he relegates the poet's amatory concerns in the vernacular to only a small part of his literary and especially political preoccupations. Petrarch's most innovative biographer was Alessandro Vellutello, whose annotated Le volgari opere del Petrarcha (1525) proved to be the most frequently reprinted and widely circulated edition of the sixteenth century. Vellutello reconceived Petrarch's career by reading his Rime sparse in the light of his Latin compositions and especially in the light of his letters. Vellutello insists that earlier biographers - chiefly Leonardo Bruni, Antonio da Tempo, Bernardo Ilicinio who wrote commentary on the Trionfi, and Hieronimo Squarzafico who wrote an introduction for the volume of Latin works published by Andrea Torresani at Venice in 1500 - erred because they followed Petrarch's 'Letter to Posterity' too slavishly: 'Ma noi, che ne le altre sue opere, e ne le istorie del suo tempo habbiamo di lui molte altre cose investigate, volendoli piu distintamente scrivere, vi giungeremo quelle, che giudicheremo degne da non esser taciute' (But I who have investigated many other

158 William J. Kennedy details about him from his other writings and from the histories of his time, will include here those that we deem worthy of being rescued from silence) (AA7V).40 This approach compels Vellutello to write a biography of Laura as well, since the intersection of her life with Petrarch's had such momentous consequences for his Italian poetry. After surveying parish records in Cabrieres, Vellutello concludes that the beloved was an unmarried daughter of an impoverished nobleman named Henri Chiabau, 'e la cagione perch'ella non fusse maritata fu forse per 1'impossibilita del padre e '1 non volersi oltre a la sua nobilita abbassare' (and the reason why she had not married was perhaps her father's stubbornness and his unwillingness to compromise the family's noble title) (BB2V). The conclusion places the Rime sparse squarely in the centre of Petrarch's literary career, validating Bembo's proclamation of these poems as models for vernacular style. So convinced is Vellutello that he has uncovered an authentic sense of this poetry that he reorganizes the songs and sonnets into a new sequence conforming with the outline of his biographical research.41 In this version of Petrarch's career, the writer's greatest achievement was his Italian verse, and the trajectory of his life's work proclaims its dominance. Subsequent biographers strop their razors upon Petrarch's letters either to affirm or refute Vellutello's account. Although Vellutello claims that he has read everything the poet had written, he in fact cites few passages from the letters or other Latin works to support his claims. Fausto da Longiano and Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, whose editions were published in the early 1530s, repair this defect with copious citation. Fausto wrote his commentary in the late 1520s at Modena where Lutheranism was attracting attention. His annotations endorse religious heterodoxy by portraying Petrarch as an avid reader of scripture and St Augustine and as a strong critic of the Avignon papacy. Fausto's preface refers a dozen times each to the Familiares and the Seniles and twice to the Epistolae sine nomine, and in it Petrarch emerges as a protoProtestant hero who 'rifutollo ... [E] hebbe nemico ... il collegio de Cardinali' (refused [the pope] and was hostile to the College of Cardinals) (aiiv). Gesualdo, a member of Minturno's poetic academy at Naples, wrote a much longer, obsessively detailed commentary that focuses on the poet's rhetorical expressiveness but minimizes his political and religious controversies. His preface alone refers sixty-one times to the Familiares, ninety-six times to the Seniles, and eight times to the Epistolae sine nomine. Fausto's and Gesualdo's preferences for the Seniles over the

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 159 Familiares indicate their willingness to accept Petrarch's retrospective view of his career in old age as authoritative. The ways in which they interpret these letters nonetheless differ considerably. Fausto quells doubts about Laura's existence by citing Petrarch's response: 'Se fu fittione o pur vero questo suo amore, vedilo alle ix del II a lacomo Colonna' (Whether this love of his was fictional or true, see Fam. 2.9, addressed to Giacomo Colonna) (aiir). Accepting Petrarch's word that she was indeed a living person, the commentator reasons that she could not have been so impoverished as Vellutello had described her, but must rather have been a wealthy noblewoman from Avignon's aristocracy: 'Laura primieramente fu ricca e di nobilissima ed antichissima famiglia' (Above all, Laura was wealthy and from a most noble and ancient family) (aiiiir). According to Fausto, Petrarch travelled in the highest circles of nobility and even royalty since his letters give abundant evidence of close personal contacts with King Robert of Naples (Fam. 4.4), the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV at Prague (Sen. 1.5), Pope Urban V (Sen. 13.14), Pope Gregory XI (Sen.15.2), and King John II of France (Sen.18.2). They also suggest that Petrarch ghostwrote a great deal of poetry and prose on commission from courtiers: 'Molti ne scrisse a requisizioni d'altri (ep. II del V delle Sen al Boccaccio' (He wrote many of them requisitioned by others [see Sen. 5.2, addressed to Boccaccio]) (aiiiv). Such personal and professional associations come at a price because they inflame calumny and envy among Petrarch's rivals. Fausto accordingly represents Petrarch's career as the confessional narrative of an ambitious man in the precincts of power, beset by occasional scruples about enjoying the luxe of public recognition. Gesualdo pursues the opposite approach. In his account, Petrarch so values his career as a serious writer that he detaches himself from the rich and famous who vie to purchase his talent. The commentator finds that Petrarch projects a Socratic irony onto his dealings with others, 'dimostrando sovente ignorare e coprendo maestrevolmente gli effetti suoi, & intendendo altro che non sonavano le parole' (often showing ignorance while masterfully veiling his emotions as well as intentionally using words in a sense different from what they seem to mean) (bvv).42 Instead of cultivating wealthy patrons, Petrarch lives apart from them and seeks the company of learned peers in what becomes the prototype of a literary academy: 'Ma si come per 1'amor de la libertate volentieri da signori s'allontanava, cosi lieto viveva co' gli amici' (But just as he willingly distanced himself from these lords because of his

160 William J. Kennedy love for freedom, so he lived happily with his friends) (bviv). Petrarch's writerly interests impel him to travel far and wide, whether to meet other scholars and writers or to experience the world's variety firsthand: 'Hebbe egli ancho in costume d'andare pellegrinando per un suo naturale amore di veder molto' (He was also wont to travel a great deal because of his natural inclination to see so much) (bviiv). In Gesualdo's estimation Petrarch's devotion to his work furnishes a template for the modern literary academician and professional. A similar emphasis on literary professionalism marks the commentaries of Bernardino Danielle and Ludovico Castelvetro, both written in the 1540s and symptomatic of an increasing autonomy among the arts heralded by post-1530 revaluations of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics. Danielle's Sonetti, canzoni, e triomphi di messer Francesco Petmrcha, published in 1541 and expanded in 1549, includes in its later edition a biographical preface that foregrounds Petrarch's aversion to court life and his search for the company of like-minded intellectuals and literary devotees: Tu non solamente desideroso de gli uomini dotti, virtuosi e buoni, ma grandissimo osservatore di quelli; quanto ... vedasi ne le sue epistole' (He was not only desirous of the company of learned, talented, and upstanding men but was also a keen observer of them; as can be seen in his letters) (*iir).43 According to Daniello, Petrarch presents his Italian poetry as a memorial to Laura whose unobtainability impelled him to write his songs and sonnets and whose early death turned his writing into a stylistic exercise that transcends amatory experience. Castelvetro (1505-71) sharpens the focus on Petrarch's Italian poetry in his Le rime del Petrarca, published posthumously at Basel in 1582. Castelvetro wrote no biographical preface for his edition of Petrarch, and his commentary on Aristotle's Poetics (1570) explains why. Here he argues that the narrative of a poetic text bears no relationship to the life of its author. Poetry aims to please and delight, not to teach or instruct, and poets achieve this goal through invention and fabrication: 'Poetry was invented for the sole purpose of providing pleasure and recreation' (1.9: 19).44 It is a craft that requires poets to fix their attention on techniques of rhetorical construction rather than untrammelled selfexpression. Castelvetro admires Petrarch for borrowing freely from and improving upon the work of his predecessors, even at the risk of exposing himself to charges of plagiarism: 'Petrarch succeeded in making his love poems as beautiful as they are by fixing his mind on almost anything but himself and his life, so much so that... he is sometimes to be condemned as a thief (2.2: 40). He has absorbed the conventions of

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators 161 the Roman elegists, the troubadours, the stilnovisti, and especially Dante, whose representations of Francesca, Pier della Vigne, Brunetto Latini, and Ugolino echo throughout the Rime sparse. Petrarch fashioned a career by emulating the sheer artistry of his predecessors. His career follows no single pattern but, eclectic and cumulative, it strikes out in new directions. Citing Fam. 1.7 with its commendation of poets who deploy 'matter previously invented by others or figures of speech already used by them/ Castelvetro lauds Petrarch as a poet of 'imitation and practice' (2.3: 41). The sources for these emplotments of Petrarch's career in the late Renaissance, then, range from Petrarch's own idealized profiles of his activity in the 'Letter to Posterity,' Bucolicum carmen, Africa, and the 'Coronation Oration,' to the conflicting and contestatory challenges that puncture these idealizations in his various letters. Especially in his Familiares and Seniles Petrarch questions conventional platitudes about writing and scholarship as he avers the hesitancies and inconsistencies of his own practice, the stops and starts and unpredictable turns that verbal expression takes amid social, political, and economic circumstances beyond his control. To the extent that Petrarch's letters provide the kernels, they re-circulate inside a great microwaved bag that gets bigger and bigger in the sixteenth century. The profiles start with an emphasis on his public role as a respected advisor to popes and rulers by Antonio da Tempo, as a public figure who happened to be a poetic innovator in Italian verse by Alessandro Vellutello, and as a courtier with an eye on both personal gain and its moral consequences by Fausto da Longiano. Somewhat later, in presenting the Rime sparse, commentators acknowledge Petrarch's career as a literary professional, whether as an exceptional proto-academician (Giovan Andrea Gesualdo), as a fully mobilized scholar-poet (Bernardino Daniello), or as workmanlike master of style and technique (Ludovico Castelvetro). Channelled and processed through early modern commentaries on his Italian poetry, Petrarch's career came to mean so much to so many.

Notes 1 Petrarch's 'Secretum,' trans. Carozza and Shey 137. 2 For Petrarch's role as a writer in a community of readers who regard themselves as Augustinian and his consequently artificial differentiation from Augustinus, see Quillen 148-81.

162 William J. Kennedy 3 On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, trans. Nachod, 122-5. For a reminder of the features of late scholasticism in this text, see Rummel, 29-35. 4 For the epistolary form as an ideal stage for such ethical inquiry, see Struever 7-56. 5 It does, however, mention his relations with the Colonna family, Azzo da Correggio, and Giacomo da Carrara. The best treatment of Petrarch's pursuit of patronage for his vernacular poetry is Santagata 158-295. For Petrarch's lifelong relations with his various patrons, see Wilkins, Life of Petrarch. 6 For a comprehensive sketch of this background, see Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch 46-58,128-52. 7 Quotations from the Seniles are from Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, trans. Bernardo, Levin, and Bernardo 2:673. 8 For a survey of career patterns in fourteenth-century Italy contrasting Petrarch's quest for patronage with Dante's independence and Boccaccio's entrepreneurial spirit, see Larner, Culture and Society in Italy, 1290-1420 201-32. 9 For Petrarch's humanist sensibility, see Greene, The Light in Troy 81-146, and The Vulnerable Text 18-45. For its exilic character, see Giamatti 12-32. For Petrarch's attraction to a variety of classical models, see McLaughlin 22^8. 10 SeeShanzer. 11 For the preeminence of the three-part Virgilian career pattern in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods, though challenged by broken Ovidian and linear Augustinian models, see Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight 56-62; for the Ovidian, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession 31-48. 12 Quotations are from Petrarch, Bucolicum carmen, ed. and trans. Bergin. For Petrarch's humanism and monastic spirituality, see Mazzotta, 147-66. 13 For Petrarch's relations with Cola, see Mazzotta 102-28; Wojciehowski 52-78; and Cosenza. 14 See Gensini. For Poliziano's later reversal of Petrarch's values in the interest of securing firm patronage, see Godman 64-79. 15 For the epideictic power of Petrarch's panegyric in Africa, see Murphy 90-126. 16 Quotations from Petrarch, L'Africa, ed. Festa. Translations by Bergin, Petrarch's Africa. Augustinus repeats these verses in the Secretum, trans. Carozza and Shey 139. 17 Quotations are from Wilkins, 'Petrarch's Coronation Oration.' For the Oration as a career prospectus, see Wilkins, The Coronation of Petrarch.' For a reading of the 'Coronation Oration' in theological terms that link the poet's role to that of an Apollonine Jesus Christ, see Boyle 11-43.

Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators

163

18 For the profession of a humanist as registered in the 'Coronation Oration/ see Biow chap. 2. 19 The context in Virgil's poem refers to Junius Brutus's uncompromising decision upon the founding of the Roman Republic to execute his sons for treason to the state, a judgment that prompts profound ambivalence about Roman ideology. 20 See Lipking ix, as discussed in Patrick Cheney's Introduction above. 21 See Hutchinson 169-71 for a series of shifting structures in the letters to Atticus. 22 Quotations refer to the translation by Bernardo, here in 3.317; Latin text is from Familiarum Rerum Libri, ed. Rossi and Bosco, 2:1251. Subsequent citations refer first to Bernardo's translation, then the Latin text. 23 For 'La leggenda di Laura," see Carrara 79-111; for Laura as a figure of creativity, see Bernardo; for Laura as a figure of philosophy (Laureta = La verita), see Potters 115-32; for disparagement of Laura's historicity in the grip of an overstated thesis about Petrarch's solitude and narcissism, see Braden 15-22; for the beloved's historicity in later sonnet sequences, see Kuin 141-9. 24 For the growth of a vernacular public with social, political, economic, and scientific needs for a vernacular humanism, see Auerbach 237-338. 25 For Petrarch's humilis style, see Auerbach 317-38; the prioritizing of cultivation over erudition in the Petrarchan mold is later articulated in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier 1.44 and Montaigne's 'Of Education/ Essays 1.25 as the mark of an emerging aristocratic refinement. 26 Petrarch here reverses the argument of Cicero's Pro Archia that exculpates Archias on the grounds of his poetic interests. 27 See Bernardo, 'Petrarch's Attitude toward Dante'; Trovato; Orelli 124-62; Capovilla 103-201; and Branca 193-222. 28 For Petrarch's linguistic preferences in the context of the Trecento vernacular, see Migliorini 134-54; Pei 138-60; Devoto, 122^17; and Pulgram 40220. 29 Santagata 281-95. 30 Petrarch's feelings toward Florence ranged from cool to antipathetic; he entered the city only twice, each time for a few days flanking a visit to Rome in 1350; see Familiares 11.1 and 11.5. For Petrarch's indifference to the city's Guelph ideals, see Pacca 179-86. 31 For the Viscontian court as a paradigm for the modern absolutist state and its implications for patronage and the formation of a Petrarchan Academy, see Wallace 40-62 and 262-94. For the Viscontian signoria, see Fossati and Ceresatto 483-636. For the signoria in Petrarch's time, see Mainoni. 32 Quoted from St Augustine, Confessions, trans. Pine-Coffin 182. For

164 William J. Kennedy

33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44

Petrarch's reading of Augustine's hermeneutics in terms of the prodigal son parable, see Robbins 49-70. For Petrarch's adaptation of St Augustine's doctrine offigura with a reassertion of the poet's own voice, see Freinkel chap. 2. For the climate of this patronage, see Kohl 103-204. For Petrarch's access to solitude in Padua, Milan, Parma, and Venice, see De Vendittis 81-104. See Greene, The Natural Tears of Epic.' Ovid suffered exile for expressing his ambivalence more directly, while Horace managed unobtrusively to accommodate his career to the goals of the regime. For Augustan patronage, see Gold, Literary Patronage in Greece and Rome 111-72, and Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome, especially 3-27 and 87-102. For an argument that Augustus did not intrude upon his poets' imperial thematic but that the latter invented one because of opportunities and interest, see White 95-109. Bernart de Ventadorn, for example, complains, 'Ja mais no serai chantaire / ni de 1'escola N'Eblo, / que mos chantars no val gaire' (I shall be a singer no more, nor of the school of Lord Ebles, for my song does not avail me) (Bergin and Hill eds. 1.56). For troubadour patronage, see Kay 132-70; and Patterson. Paradiso 17.58-99. Kennedy 82-113. For the buying and owning of printed books in sixteenthcentury Italy, see Richardson 107-22. For an inventory, see Fowler 1-69. See Trovato 143-63. See Vellutello. For Squarzafico, see Allenspach and Frasso. Translation is my own. The definitive early printed edition of Petrarch's Cose volgari was published by Aldus Manutius in 1501 in an edition supervised by Pietro Bembo, based upon Petrarch's final exemplar begun by his secretary in 1366 and completed in the poet's own hand the year of his death. The sequence of poems in this edition established an order that had been variable in fifteenth-century manuscripts and incunabula. See Belloni, 108-18. Translation is my own. See Gesualdo. Translation is my own. Danielle's Vita di Petrarca appears for the first time in this second edition of his commentary; there is no vita in the first 1541 edition. Translation is my own. Castelvetro, On the Art of Poetry, trans. Bongiorno. Translation is my own.

Six

Judging a Literary Antonio de Guevara (14807Kathleen Bollard de Broce

Antonio de Guevara's literary career follows neither a Virgilian nor an Ovidian model, but does suggest an alternative paradigm for the early modern period. While Guevara draws on classical rhetoricians for methodologies, his genre patterning differs significantly from that of a classical or medieval cursus in that he wrote neither epic, pastoral, nor love poetry; nevertheless, his heroic biographies, manuals for courtiers, devotional works, and collections of letters, together with his prologues, suggest both an engagement of literature with contemporary political and religious culture and a keen understanding of an author's ability to craft his literary legacy.1 Like Virgil, Guevara wrote for an emperor at a critical moment in imperial history, but Guevara drew his authority to address Charles V not from an established literary career, but from his various professional roles as preacher in the royal chapel, official chronicler, commissioner for the Inquisitor General, courtier, and bishop, positions gained through his mastery of the political, religious, and literary rhetoric that together shaped his career. His life bespeaks that of many Italian humanists in its public dimension; it fits neither Richard Helgerson's nor Lawrence Lipking's models precisely because his writing was so closely tied to his non-literary careers, as reflected in his choice of genres and topics. Lipking's comment that 'the life of the poet is achieved at the cost of many other possible lives; it fixes the poet in place like a worm in amber' (184) raises important questions regarding the literary careers of non-poets like Guevara. Given the intersection of literary, historical, and political discourses in sixteenth-century Spain, and the conflation of genres that often resulted, the very 'literariness' of the work of an author like

166 Kathleen Bollard de Broce Guevara may be problematic. What is more, if an author's ideologically bound literary vision is brought to praxis in parallel careers, the integrity of the literary career as such may be compromised in the eyes of critics. Whereas New Historians widen the field of literary analysis by including non-literary texts, they do so largely to illuminate the literary texts that constitute their primary focus. An analysis of Guevara's implicitly and explicitly expressed views of his life's writing cannot resolve the 'literariness' of that work, but career criticism does foreground its complexity. In fact, his distinctively ornate style and frequently fictionalized historical exempla, which captivated the reading public, led to negative aesthetic and moral judgments by Spain's intellectual elite.2 Thus, while his public career and extraordinarily popular literary works demonstrate the influence available to those with the ability to manipulate the discourses of politics and religion in early sixteenth-century Spain, his condemnation by contemporary humanists and later scholars illustrates Marina Brownlee's discussion of the 'fragile status of the authorial subject' in Golden Age Spain (x). As Brownlee argues, 'one of the most striking features of Golden Age Spain is its obsession with questions of authority, and one of the most characteristic features of Golden Age Spanish literature is its propensity for continuation...' Many of the issues she identifies as problematic for 'this phenomenon of repeated continuation ... canonicity, ideology, history and literary models, textuality and intertextuality, the status of the authorial subject, and his or her authoritative discourse(s)' (xi), overlap with topics Richard Helgerson cites as central to career criticism, including authorship and subjectivity, imitation and intertextuality, history and nationhood, and politics and religion, all of which are critical to a study of Guevara's work (xi). Among these issues affecting continuation and authority, imitation and intertextuality have been especially troubling for critics studying Guevara, as they were for Guevara's contemporaries, largely because of the fictionalizations and false attributions that characterize his pseudohistorical and religious works. The fact that his chronicle survives only as incorporated by his successors suggests that the liberties he took with the purported subtexts for his more literary works undercut his authority as a historian.3 Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens's analysis of the role of counterfeit in the production of literary authority is revealing for Guevara's case. They note that 'traditional scholarship relied upon the recuperability of the Author through the recognition of

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 167 his intentions, as partially revealed by the prior identification of his Sources/ Given that so many of Guevara's sources were either invented or misidentified, especially in the heroic biographies, his career illustrates Brownlee and Stephens's observation that 'the verdict of counterfeit was tantamount to verifying the lack of an authenticating presence within the work.' They explain, 'Once the Author's irrelevance had been proclaimed, the work was effectively orphaned, excluded from the Canon or register of authenticated names. Having no single originating "referent," the work became illegible, deprived of all reference outside the realm of words' (3). But if Guevara's works were illegible for the scholarly elite at Charles's court, that was not the case for most courtiers or for the reading public in general. For them, the didactic import of Guevara's exempla, expressed through the genius with which he manipulated 'the realm of words,' offered sufficient authority. The appearance of classical authority provided by his constant reference to real and invented historians and philosophers, together with the extraliterary religious and political authority he had acquired through family connections and his skill as an orator made the works not only legible, but authoritative for many readers.4 Scholars could exclude Guevara from the canon, but he remained an 'authenticating presence within the work.' Guevara's religious career had advanced significantly long before his first work was published, thanks to the rhetorical skills that had no doubt been sharpened during the years in which he preached and held administrative positions in various Franciscan monasteries.5 Those skills were demonstrated also in the comunero revolt, in the resolution of which he claimed to have played a significant role;6 his speech before the rebels at Villabragima (1520) typifies the parallelism and antithesis that would characterize the rhetorical style of his later literary works.7 In fact, Guevara's style is so distinctive that critics have been able to show that he probably authored at least three of Charles V's surviving speeches, a fact that testifies to the emperor's recognition of his rhetorical skill (Castro xix). His role in the rebellion of the comunidades, his growing reputation as an orator, and the influence some of his relatives enjoyed at court probably accounted for his having been named a preacher in the royal chapel in 1521.8 He began performing his duties in 1523, in the court where he had lived from the age of twelve until he entered the Franciscan order in 1505. His influence continued to grow, and in 1525 his combined religious and political careers advanced significantly when he

168 Kathleen Bollard de Broce was chosen as part of a commission that debated whether undue force had been used in the conversion of the Muslims of Valencia after the war of the germanias.9 The commission decided that the conversions were valid, and since the moriscos, as converts, fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, four commissioners, including Guevara, known for his considerable rhetorical skill in the pulpit, were sent to bring them back into the church's fold. As J.R. Jones notes, Charles wrote a letter praising Guevara's work, and when he ordered that the rest of the Muslims in Valencia be converted, Guevara was placed in charge of the effort.10 In 1526 he was one of five examiners sent to investigate complaints about the treatment of moriscos in Granada, and was later named to a council of theologians who drafted strict new regulations for them.11 Thus, by the time he was appointed Official Chronicler at the end of 1526, his activities had established his authority as a consultant on morisco affairs,12 and his sermons had established his fame as an orator. His first literary work, the Libra dureo de Marco Aurelio or Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, published in three pirated editions in 1528, then edited and published by him as the Relax de principes (Dial of Princes) in 1529, is a fictionalized heroic biography that launched Guevara's literary career not only in Spain, but throughout Europe. As Simon Vosters has shown, by 1593 there had been at least 130 editions and translations of the unauthorized edition, and 102 of the revised work, making Guevara one of the most successful Spanish authors of the sixteenth century (37).13 In his article on Renaissance peritextes, Philippe Desan notes a shift in the early modern period from the prologue dedicated to a patron to the preface dedicated to a wider public, and suggests that it was due to the book's role as merchandise.14 The fact that Guevara seems to address both the emperor in the prologue and a wider public in the 'Argument' supposes that he was well aware that the work's diffusion might extend beyond the court, and also suggests that he understood the different benefits and authority that might accrue from multiple audiences for his work. The reception of that work illustrates not only the problematic shifting of authority with respect to audience that occurred in the period, but also the changing politics of patronage noted by Desan. Few authors were supported entirely by patrons in sixteenth-century Spain; in the absence of family wealth, most had careers, literary and non-literary, which they pursued with varying degrees of success. Guevara's career was extraordinary not because it involved so many professions, or even because those professions were so inextricably linked, but because the professional persona he created

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 169 for himself was viewed so differently by humanist scholars and the literate public. Those differences may explain the lengths to which Guevara goes in creating and authorizing his authorial and public persona as one. In the prologue to the Libro dureo, Guevara claims to have discovered a Greek text and translated it first into Latin, and then into Spanish. In fact, he could not read Greek, and he invents most of the biography that he presents to Charles V as an exemplary model resting on classical authority.15 Guevara establishes his authority to address the emperor directly by noting that he speaks 'en fee de sac.erdote' (in the faith of a priest) and by including himself as one of the writers who will publish Charles's fame for posterity (8-9). He also emphasizes the selflessness of his effort in almost military terms, noting 'quantos sudores en el enojoso verano, quantos frios en el encogido invierno, cuanta abstinencia aviendo de comer, quanto trasnochar aviendo de dormir, quanto cuidado aviendo de descansar' (how much heat in the vexatious summer, how many chills in the fearful winter, how much fasting when I should have eaten, how many nights sitting up when I should have slept, how many cares when I should have rested) the work has cost him. But he hopes that la doctrina de este libro tanto provecho haga en vuestra vida quanto dano me ha causado en la salud corporal de mi persona' (the doctrine in this book may bring as much benefit to your life as it has cost me in the physical health of my person) (12). He has chosen the seventeenth emperor for his exemplary biography because 'los que desean ser princ.ipes buenos rniren a otros que fueron muy buenos' (those who want to be good princes look to those who were very good) (11), and Marcus Aurelius was both the wisest of the emperors and a friend to wise men (10). The advice that a prince surround himself with competent advisors had long been part of the furstenspiegal tradition, and in reminding Charles of the importance of good counsel, Guevara positions himself as one able to offer it. In the 'Argument' he 'quotes' Marcus Aurelius's comment to a friend that he was made emperor not because of the blood of his ancestors, or the goodwill of men of the present, but rather because he was 'amigo de sabios y enemigo de nesc.ios' (a friend of wise men and an enemy of fools) (18). In Fictions of Advice, Judith Ferster notes that for their authors the advice manuals 'provided a rich repository of principles and stories that could be shaped into an instrument for pursuing their own interests, sometimes promoting themselves, sometimes criticizing their nil-

170 Kathleen Bollard de Broce ers' (176). In the Marco Aurelio, Guevara does both, promoting his abilities as counsellor in his prologue, and distancing himself from the occasionally harsh criticism implicit in the work by presenting his fictionalization as a translation. Still, his explanation of the translator's role is calculated to bring him praise: No estamos obligados los interpretes dar por medida las palabras: abasta dar por peso las sentences. Como los histori6grafos de quien sacava eran muchos, y la historia que sacava no mas de una, no quiero negar que quite algunas cosas insipidas y menos utiles, y entrexeri otras muy suaves y provechosas. Tengo pensamiento que todo hombre sabio despues que hubiere leido este libro no dira yo ser el autor principal de la obra, ni tampoco sentenciaria que me excluya del todo Delia, porque tantas y tan maduras sentences no se hallan en el tiempo presente, ni tal ni tan alto estilo no le alcanzaron los del tiempo pasado. (20) We interpreters are not obliged to measure words: it is enough to weigh wisdom. Since the historians from whom I translated were many, and the history I translated only one, I do not want to deny that I took out some insipid and less useful things and wove in others that were delicate and advantageous. I believe that no wise man, after reading this book, will say that I am its principal author, nor exclude me entirely from it, because so many and such judicious pieces of wisdom are not found in the present time; nor was such a high style achieved by those in the past. Thus, Guevara has it both ways; he takes credit for the work's eloquence and wisdom while effectively shielding himself from negative reaction to its criticism. Despite his recourse to the rhetorical humilitas with which he ends his prologue, asking that his slight ability and eloquence not cause the emperor to disdain 'tan exc,ellente obra' (such an excellent work), his last request of Charles is that he give 'a la presente obra gravedad y a mi, su interprete, autoridad' (to the present work gravity and to me, its interpreter, authority) (12). His numerous classical exempla suggest that even though he seems never to have completed a university degree,16 he was attempting to don the authority of a humanist scholar at a time when the Polyglot Bible had recently been completed at the University of Alcala, and Erasmus's works were enjoying an enormous popularity throughout Spain.17 Nevertheless, Guevara's tendency to invent or wrongly attribute speeches and situations, together with his condemnation of

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 171 Erasmus's works at the Council of Valladolid in 1527, seem to have effectively excluded him from the elite discourse community of Spanish Erasmians that included such figures as Alfonso de Valdes, Latin secretary to the emperor, Alfonso de Virues, Juan de Valdes, and Juan Luis Vives.18 As Bataillon points out, despite Guevara's international fame after the Libra dureo was published, Vives and Juan de Valdes never deign to mention him in their extant writings, and Alfonso de Valdes even jokes about him in a letter to Juan Dantisco, in which he states that 'Noster Suarez te toties salvere vult quot mendacia sunt in Marco Aurelio' (Our Suarez sends as many greetings to you as there are lies in the Marcus Aurelius).19 In his chapter 'Guevara and the Humanists,' Grey analyses similarities between Guevara's and Alfonso de Valdes's works to suggest Guevara in fact shared many of the humanist's Erasmian attitudes (Guevara 27-32), and Stelio Cro argues that Guevara's Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, like one of Valdes's dialogues, is an example of Erasmian utopianism (123). In his analysis of Guevara's influence on Cervantes, Angelo J. Di Salvo points out Guevara's pacifism, which paralleled that of Spanish Erasmians (50); the fact that Guevara borrowed passages from Francisco de Osuna's Abecedarios in his Monte Calvario, and that sections of his Oratorio were condemned by the Inquisition, supports an Illuminist or Erasmian reading of at least part of his work,20 but the influence of Illuminist ideas in the early sixteenth century was pervasive; even if Guevara did share some of the Erasmian humanists' ideas, it does not appear that he was ever granted their respect. In discussing Juan de Valdes's attitudes, Bataillon goes so far as to suggest, Todemos estar seguros de que el estilo del Obispo de Mondonedo le era tan insoportable como las mentiras de su Marco Aurelio' (We can be sure that the Bishop of Mondonedo's style was as insupportable to him as the lies of his Marcus Aurelius} (696).21 Despite the Erasmians' disdain, and even after other scholars published the work's falsifications, its popularity continued unabated, and Guevara could adopt the authority the work's fame brought him as a writer.22 Still, the prologue to the Relax de prmcipes reveals that Guevara did react to the criticism the Marco Aurelio produced. He complains that los auctores tenemos el trabajo de componer y traduzir, y otros para si usurpan la autoridad de nos sentenciar' (we authors have the work of composing and translating, and others usurp for themselves the authority to judge us) (44). His claims that he translated the biography from Greek into Latin, and then into Spanish, have been modified to

172 Kathleen Bollard de Broce state that he translated it 'del griego con favor de mis amigos, de latin en romance con mis sudores propios' (from Greek with the help of my friends, from Latin to romance with my own efforts) (45); his assertion that all his life he had spent the greater part of his time reading suggests a defence of his limited education.23 Likewise, the description of his role as translator quoted above has been modified significantly to tone down his praises of his own efforts,24 and he has added a 'General Prologue' to the 'Prologue' and 'Argument' of the earlier work, in which he states, 'Muchas vezes acontece que pierden mucha auctoridad los libros, no porque ellos no son muy buenos, sino porque los auctores fueron presumptuosos y vanos; porque, a mi parecer, no es otra cosa loar uno mucho su escriptura, sino dar a todos licencia que digan mal del y della' (It often happens that books lose much authority, not because they are not very good, but rather because their authors were presumptuous and vain; because, it seems to me, praising oneself a great deal in one's writing does nothing but give everyone license to speak badly of him and of it) (17). He does, however, continue to emphasize the importance of his role, when he notes Salust's comment that those who write about famous deeds deserve as much glory as those who perform them. He asks, '^Que fuera del Magno Alexandra si no escriviera del Quinto Curcio? ... iQue fuera de los doze Cesares si Suetonio Tranquilo no hiziera el libro De Cesaribus?' (What of Alexander the Great if Quintus Curtius [Rufus] had not written of him? ... What of the twelve Caesars if Suetonius had not written the book De Cesaribus?) (53-4). His comparison of his role with that of classical historians asserts his authority to recount not only the deeds of Marcus Aurelius, but also, as Official Chronicler, those of Charles himself. Issues of history and nationhood or empire permeate Guevara's literary works, as in the most famous episode in the Marcus Aurelius and Relox, known as the 'Villano del Danubio' (Rustic of the Danube), which is one of the most widely read anti-imperial statements published in sixteenth-century Spain. The biography serves as a frame narrative for the story the emperor tells to a group of scholars and orators who have been discussing how Rome has changed for the worse. He tells them that during the first year of his consulate, a poor farmer from the shores of the Danube came to ask for justice. He provides a detailed description of the man's physiognomy and dress that he says suggested to him 'algun animal en figura de hombre' (some animal in the shape of a man) (Marcus Aurelius 123). The contrast

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 173 between the man's physical appearance and his eloquence is emphasized in the comments of those who hear the speech, in which the man explains that 'el nombre de romanos y las crueldades de tyrannos iunctmente en un dia llegaron a nuestros pueblos' (the name of the Romans and the cruelty of tyrants arrived the same day in our towns) (127). The speech, believed to have been written between 1518 and 1524, has been analysed extensively with respect to the contemporary debate on the treatment of indigenous Americans by Spanish colonizers,25 but its importance in terms of Guevara's developing literary career has received less attention. In his study of the episode, Stephen Gilman argues that 'castigation, the highest art of the prophet and sermonizer, became [Guevara] in that it filled his more or less empty rhetoric with commitment to justice' (177). Nevertheless, that castigation was problematic, and Guevara distances himself from the villano's scathing attack through the work's narrative structure. Since the criticism is part of a speech recalled by the emperor himself, included in the biography Guevara translates, he presents the ideas at three removes from himself. As Gilman notes, 'What the prologue material [in the Marco Aurelio con el Relax de Principes] amounts to is a tacit assumption by Guevara of the mantle of "auctoritas" belonging to the still legendary Marcus Aurelius' (174); by speaking in Marcus Aurelius's voice, Guevara not only authorizes his fictionalization, but also shields himself from negative responses to its criticism. This tension between the need for moral authority for public address and Guevara's desire for recognition of his artistic success surfaces again in Una decada de Cesares, or Lives of Ten Emperors (1539).26 By the time it appeared, Guevara's literary reputation was well established, as was his religious and political authority. During the years since the publication of the Libro dureo, Guevara had been named bishop of Guadix (1528), directed a field hospital as part of Charles's military expedition to Tunis (1535), travelled extensively, and been named bishop of Mondonedo (1537). Neither of his bishoprics provided an especially good income, and both removed him from the court atmosphere. As Castro Diaz notes, the period from 1526 to 1529 witnessed Guevara's 'epoca dorada' or golden age at court in his ascent up the career ladder as royal preacher, consultant to the Inquisition, official chronicler, and after 1528, famous author. Thus, when he was named bishop of Guadix, probably because of his family's influence and his expertise in morisco affairs, 'it seems that he did not receive the designation with much enthusiasm,' either because he had hoped to be appointed to one of the

174 Kathleen Bollard de Broce more lucrative bishoprics available at the time, or because the position 'required him to abandon the court, for which he felt such attraction, and to establish himself in a distant and poor diocese/27 In short, it was not the reward he had hoped for, and although the bishopric at Mondonedo was more prestigious and provided a somewhat better income, he had to borrow money to pay the costs of assuming it, and it, too, was far removed from the court. The positions may represent a recognition of Guevara's service to the church and the emperor, but they may also reveal a desire to distance him from the imperial court, which at that point was at the apex of its enthusiasm for Erasmus, and would soon attempt, unsuccessfully, to lure him to Spain. Guevara's 'counterfeit' biography of Marcus Aurelius was an embarrassment to scholarly humanists, who were no doubt relieved at his appointment to Guadix. In the Decada Guevara continues to assert his authority to address the emperor on political and moral issues. He again claims the authority of numerous Greek and Latin sources (73), and again compares his role to that of classical historians, noting that 'a immitacion de Plutarcho y de Suetonio Tranquilo he querido traduzir, copilar y corregir las vidas de diez principes romanos, dignas por cierto de saber y muy sabrosas de leer' (in imitation of Plutarch and Suetonius I have wanted to translate, copy, and correct the lives of ten Roman princes, worthy, certainly, of being known, and very enjoyable to read) (69). Not only does he assert his authority as historian, but also as moralist and artist, when he states that he has 'corrected' the biographies he presents and made them 'very enjoyable' to read. He notes that after the eleven years he spent composing the Marcus Aurelius, he had decided not to write another book, 'mayormente en aquel estilo' (especially in that style), because 'facil cosa es escribir libros, y muy difficil el contentar a los lectores' (it is an easy thing to write books, but very difficult to content readers). But in stating that 'el delicado juyzio quiere estilo gracioso, eloquencia suave, sentencia profunda y doctrina sana' (the delicate judgment wants witty style, smooth eloquence, profound wisdom, and healthy doctrine), he suggests that he is capable of satisfying it (71). He further emphasizes the abilities that underlie his authority when he claims that in writing the biographies he has had to 'aclarar lo obscuro, concordar lo diverse, ordenar lo sin orden, adobar lo insipido, desechar la superfluo, elegir lo bueno, y ponerlo todo en estilo' (clarify the obscure, reconcile the diverse, order the disordered, season the insipid, discard the superfluous, choose the good, and put all in style) (73).

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 175 Most telling for his political and religious self-authorization is his statement that the work has been very arduous for him because he had so little time to devote to it. He writes, 'despues que cumplia con los officios de mi yglesia y leya en la Sacra Escriptura y aim escrevia en la imperial chronica, no me quedava mas tiempo del que hurtava del negociar y ahorrava del dormir' (after I fulfilled the offices of my church and read from sacred scripture and even wrote in the imperial chronicle, the only time that was left to me was that which I stole from business and saved from sleep) (73). The passage illustrates Guevara's reworking of the classical trope of ars longa, vita brevi to suggest that his political and religious duties, rather than his literary efforts, are arduous. The passage emphasizes not only his moral authority as bishop and his political authority as chronicler, but also his dedication as advisor to Charles V. In the prologue he emphasizes the work's value to the emperor as a function of its exemplarity, noting, Todo lo que arriba hemos dicho por escripto, queremos agora, serenissimo principe, mostraros por exemplo; que segun dezia Eschines el philosopho, las palabras bien dichas despiertan los juyzios, mas los grandes exemplos persuaden los corac,ones' (All that we have above written, we want now, most serene prince, to show you through example; because according to the philosopher Eschines, well said words awaken reason, but great examples persuade hearts) (67). The lack of historical authenticity in those examples was ultimately irrelevant to Guevara's didactic intent. As both John Lyons and Timothy Hampton have pointed out in their studies of medieval and Renaissance exemplarity, the example's force lay in its power to move its reader to action.28 Guevara also published four other works in 1539: Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, Aviso de privados 6 despertador de cortesanos, Arte de marear, and the first volume of the Epistolas familiares, titles J.R. Jones has translated as A Dispraise of the Life of a Courtier, The Favored Courtier, The Art of Navigation, and the Familiar Letters, all of which have a far more personal tone than the historical biographies, and rely to a greater extent on Guevara's personal experience for their authority. The Menosprecio, a didactic work on the dangers of the court, and its companion, the Aviso de privados, a book of practical advice on the model of Castiglione's // cortegiano, both rely on Guevara's religious position, but more extensively on his experience as a courtier to establish the authority with which he addresses those to whom he dedicates the works, as well as the wider public. The works' more personal tone can be seen in the introduction to the Menosprecio, dedicated to the king of Portugal,

176 Kathleen Bollard de Broce when Guevara says that he wishes he knew as well how to remedy his own actions as he does how to tell others what they should do (8). He adds that 'si entre los cortesanos soy el menor, entre los pecadores soy el mayor' (if among courtiers I am the least, among sinners I am the greatest) (9), and for the first time includes part of his autobiography, telling of his early years in the court and of the eighteen years he later served there as preacher and chronicler to the emperor. He explains that he has included the account so that his reader will know that todo lo que dixere en este vuestro libro este vuestro siervo no lo ha sonado ni aun preguntado, sino que lo vio con sus ojos, passeo con sus pies, toco con sus manos y aun lloro en su coracpn; por manera que le han de creer como a hombre que vio lo que escrive y experimento lo que dize. (11) all that is said in this your book your servant has neither dreamed nor even asked about, but rather he saw it with his eyes, walked it with his feet, touched it with his hands and even cried for it in his heart; such that he must be believed as a man who saw what he writes and experienced what he says. His reliance on personal experience in the Aviso de privados is similar. He refers to himself often in both the prologue and the body of the work, in nearly every case in an attempt to bolster his assertions of the accuracy of his observations and the usefulness of his advice. Early in the manual he writes: Yo estuve en colegios estudiando y estuve en la religion orando, y estuve en la corte predicando y agora estoy en mi obispado doctrinado, y de todos estos cuatro estados digo y afirmo que no hay estado mas estrecho que es ser en la corte cortesano. (53) I was in schools studying and I was in the religious life praying, and I was in the court preaching and now I am in my bishopric teaching, and of all these four states I say and affirm that there is no state more difficult than that of being a courtier in the court. He often illustrates a piece of advice with an anecdote allegedly recounting his own experience. He begins sentences with 'Siendo yo cortesano ../ (While I was a courtier ...) (76), 'En mi presencia vi...' (In my presence I saw ...) (157) 'jOh, cuantos he yo conocido ...!' (Oh, how

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 177 many have I known ...) (182), and constantly includes phrases such as 'diria yo' (I would say) (150), 'seria yo de parecer' (I would be of the opinion that) (151,168), 'les hago saber' (I let you know) (156), 'para mf (in my opinion) (160), and 'yo confieso' (I confess) (166), that emphasize his presence in the text. Often his statements underline his role as an eyewitness to the events he relates: 'No lo digo porque lo lei, sino porque lo vi, ni lo digo por ciencia, sino por experiencia' (I don't say it because I read it, but rather because I saw it, nor do I say it as something studied, but rather as something learned by experience) (57). In the Menosprecio he also attempts to both flatter the king and authorize his own role as advisor through comparisons of their relationship to those of classical rulers and writers. He cites Alexander and Homer, Marcus Aurelius and Livy as precedents for their relationship, claiming that the king will for him be another Demetrius, and he for the king another Hermogenes.29 The latest of the works published in 1539 was the Arte de marear, an extremely practical advice manual for those travelling by sea. Like his other works, it is full of allusions to fictitious classical sources, but it demonstrates a readability and wit also evident in the Epistolasfamiliare the second volume of which was published in 1541. The exaggerations of the extent of his travels parallels the retouching of his biography in the Epistolas, which together form a careful rewriting of Guevara's life. The fact that the Epistolas were published without a dedication underlines the sense that he is memorializing his actions for a public beyond the court. The final stage of Guevara's literary and religious careers includes three works focused on religious themes and, as Marquez Villanueva notes, 'These works win out even over his others in falsifications, plagiarism, and apocryphal erudition.'30 In 1542 Guevara published his Oratorio de religiosos y ejercicio de virtuosos, a title J.R. Jones has translated as the Monks' Chapel. He writes in the first person, as in his manuals for courtiers, but in this case rests his authority on biblical, patristic, and hagiographic rather than classical sources. He addresses his reader directly, and offers practical advice to monks in the same way he offered practical advice to courtiers in the Aviso de privado. In chapter 21 he explains 'de como es muy gran peligro tratar con los hombres parleros y maliciosos (how it is very dangerous to deal with talkative and malicious men), and in chapter 31 'que el religioso no debe ser en su comer y vestir extremado, sino seguir la vida comiin del convento' (that the monk should not be extreme in his food or dress, but rather

178 Kathleen Bollard de Broce follow the common life of the convent). He interweaves comments on table manners and travel with chapters on prayer, obedience, abstinence, the monastic vocation, and other topics, translating and elaborating on biblical passages or incidents from saints' lives relevant to the monks. His invention of quotations and incidents, and in one case an entire letter (chapter 27), parallels that of his secular works. In J.R. Jones's discussion of Fr. Fidele de Ros's scathing critique of the Oratorio, he notes that one of the most interesting facts that comes to light upon examination of Ros's lists of Guevara's self plagiarism is that 'in a number of the self-borrowings, Guevara copies himself verbatim and then attributes the passage to some famous pagan or Christian writer' (Antonio 141). As Jones notes, 'most of the other attributions ... are virtually impossible to verify,' although Ros specifically accuses Guevara of 'fabricating [quotations] from St. Augustine or St. Jerome out of whole cloth' (Ros 356, as quoted by Jones 142). The same criticism holds true for the Monte Calvario. The first part was published by Guevara in 1545; the second part, incomplete at his death, was completed and published anonymously in 1549. Both include a series of meditations probably meant to be used much like Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, although they could also be used as readings in chapels or refectories. And although the book has, as J.R. Jones tactfully states, 'aged less gracefully than any of the bishop's works' (Antonio 145), it does round out a literary career that had moved from an attempt to influence imperial policy through exemplary heroic biography, to cynical, and in many ways disillusioned, ruminations and advice on life at court, and then to collections of letters that offered, most likely, a revisionist view of his public career. The final works, however ridiculous some of their suggestions for interpreting scripture,31 suggest Guevara's attempt to crown his religious and literary careers. Antonio Castro Diaz, like Augustin Redondo, suggests that as a younger son, Guevara was pushed to enter the Franciscan order 'not so much by religious sentiment as by the necessity of finding a way out' when faced with his family's loss of favour at court.32 Redondo's comment that 'one understands very well that thirty-two years later [in the Epistolas familiares], he presented this entry into the monastery in a manner more flattering for him' underlines both the revisionist nature of Guevara's letters and his consciousness of shaping a record of his religious career.33 The Oratorio and Monte Calvario might have authenticated his vocation, but responses by his contemporaries are scarce, and twentieth-

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 179 century evaluations have been damning. Marquez Villanueva, especially, questions the authenticity of the religious emotion the works profess, and claims that despite the number of historians who, through 'perezosa rutina' (lazy routine) characterized Guevara as a mystic, his works lack even a superficial understanding of contemplative experience (22). The critic suggests that even in his last works Guevara was never a moralist, and that since he had to write sermons to 'entertain and captivate by any means possible the attention of a congregation of courtiers as dull as they were superficial/ his solution was to turn the sermons into literature.34 Marquez Villanueva's remarks illustrate the negative response typical of the many critics who have attacked Guevara's work, based on perceived falsifications of religious experience and fictionalization of sources. In fact, the exemplary nature of the heroic biographies Guevara dedicated to Charles V, together with the fact that he 'made literary' his sermons in order to gain the attention of an ambivalent congregation, would suggest a religious and political telos. Maravall calls him 'un moralista politico' (a political moralist) who heralded the beginning of baroque moralizing history (184). And while Guevara does not refer to his literary career in the epitaph J. Gibbs believes he wrote for himself, his oratorical skill and wisdom figure prominently in the epitaph that was written for him.35 His writings reveal a keen understanding of his audience, and whether or not he wanted to write the Habsburg Empire, he was certainly trying to influence its direction through his rewriting of classical antiquity and biblical and patristic sources as example. He fashioned a literary career that rested, originally, on the strength of his political and religious authority, and later on that authority and the popularity of the works themselves. Guevara's cynical treatment of life at court after he had been granted the bishopric that forced him to leave it, followed by the publication of his letters, which recast his political and religious roles, suggest a flattering rewriting of his life in the context of his literary career. Despite the numerous subtexts that inform Guevara's work, the essay style he develops is unique in its combination of classical and sermonic rhetoric in the political and religious texts that shape his career. Career criticism foregrounds the literariness that is sometimes overshadowed by the works' overt didacticism, allowing a reading of Guevara's work not as the overly rhetorical effort of a failed humanist or minor bishop, but as the narrative accompaniment to an early modern life in dialogue with the most pressing political and religious issues

180 Kathleen Bollard de Broce of his time. And while the downturn of Guevara's religious and political careers toward the end of his life may, ironically, have been due in part to the popularity of writings many intellectuals of his day considered neither literary nor scholarly, those texts nevertheless influenced the development of Spanish prose, most notably that of Cervantes. However his various careers are judged, Guevara's case demonstrates that career criticism can begin to mediate the literary and political aspects of a culture in the analysis of a single author's work.

Notes 1 For discussion of a poem possibly written by Guevara, see J.R. Jones, 'A Note on Antonio de Guevara/ 2 Those negative judgments of Guevara's work as empty rhetorical exercises, full of fictionalizations and false attributions, continued through the first half of the twentieth century, until critics like J.R. Jones, Ernest Grey, and Augustin Redondo re-examined his works in a more positive light. Redondo, whose definitive Antonio de Guevara et I'Espagne de son temps resolves many of the complaints about Guevara's 'falsifications,' draws attention to his significance as a writer, courtier, inquisitor, and bishop, constructing a far more favourable view of his public career and writings than had critics like Rosa Lida de Malkiel and Francisco Marquez Villanueva. 3 For a summary of and response to arguments that Guevara never wrote any of the Chronicle, see Redondo, Antonio de Guevara 308-49. Like J.R. Jones ('Antonio de Guevara's Lost Chronicle'), Redondo analyses segments of later chronicles probably taken from Guevara's writings to show that 'il apparait que Guevara a travaille serieusement a la chronique imperiale' (349). Jones argues that the incorporated material is 'sufficient to prove that Guevara did write his oft-mentioned chronicle/ and adds that although that knowledge 'does not enhance his reputation as a historian or alter his important place in the development of European literature ... its discovery at least corrects the mistaken idea that, in this instance, he was dishonest' (50). 4 On Guevara's readers, see R.O. Jones xviii-xxi. 5 J.R. Jones notes that Guevara was 'guardian of the monasteries of Arevalo, Avila, and Soria ... custos of the province of La Conception and definitor of the order, by election, in 1520' (Antonio de Guevara 15). 6 On Guevara's much debated participation in resolving the comunero revolt, see J.R. Jones Antonio de Guevara 16; Castro Diaz 53; and Redondo 115-47.

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 181 7 In the version he published in the first volume of the Epistolas familiares (1539), he writes: 'Yo, senores, dire lo que siento y dire lo que me es mandado, para que oido lo uno y visto lo otro, sepals lo que me habeis de responder y os determiners en lo que habeis de hacer' (I, gentlemen, will say what I feel and I will say what I have been commanded to, so that having heard the one and seen the other, you will know what you must respond to me and determine what you must do) (1: 325). 8 As Redondo has shown, Guevara's family had lost its favoured position in the court by supporting Phillip the Handsome, Charles V's father, against Ferdinand VII after the death of Isabella, and could expect some reward from Charles V for their continued loyalty. On the political alliances that led to the family's fall from favour, a fall most critics have interpreted as Guevara's motivation for entering the Franciscan order, see Redondo Antonio de Guevara 86-91. Castro, for example, writes, 'At the age of twenty-five, motivated more by worldly resentment than mystic rapture, [Guevara] joined the order of Saint Francis' (vii). 9 The conflict pitted the nobles, who depended on the labour and taxes of the Muslims, against the common people, who envied the Muslims' prosperity and accused them of collusion with the Turkish pirates who had been attacking the coast (J.R. Jones, Antonio de Guevara 16). Kamen suggests that the rebels baptized the Muslims, and thus freed them from the obligation of paying special taxes to the nobles, because they believed it was the best way to undermine the power of the nobility in the countryside (216). For a succinct analysis of the situation of mudejares and moriscos from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth century, see Kamen's chapter 'The End of Morisco Spain' (214-29). 10 His role in the conversion has been debated, but appears to have been significant. For an analysis, see J.R. Jones, Antonio de Guevara 17; and Redondo 217-89. 11 The examiners decided that the moriscos' complaints were unjustified, and that widespread apostasy had to be remedied. The harsh regulations the council drafted were ignored, however, when the moriscos offered the emperor 80,000 ducats (J.R. Jones, Antonio de Guevera 18-19). 12 This authority may have been especially valuable, given the evidence suggesting converse blood on his mother's side (Redondo 53-8). 13 Guevara explains how the Marcus Aurelius came to be published without his permission in the 'Argumento' that precedes the Relax de principes (5780). J.R. Jones points out that Rene Costes has suggested that Guevara in fact authorized the three supposedly pirated editions (Antonio de Guevara 153nl4), although later critics have disputed that claim. 14 'Nous voudrions ici montrer que cette rupture entre le prologue medieval

182 Kathleen Bollard de Broce et la preface de la Renaissance ne releve pas uniquement d'une explication technologique (1'invention de rimprimerie et de la typographic), comme on 1'a trop souvent avance, mais possede aussi un origine socioeconomique-certes liee a I'apparition du livre en tant que marchandise' (Desan 103). 15 On Guevara's use of exemplarity, see Bollard de Broce, 'The Rhetoric of Exemplaritiy in two Spanish Sixteenth-Century Specula principis.' 16 Castro Diaz notes that Guevara 'no fue doctor ni licenciado y, probablemente, tampoco alcanzo el grade de bachiller' (50). R.O. Jones writes that 'Guevara's reading was, though disorderly, evidently not contemptible, but he cannot be accounted a particularly erudite man: his learning cannot be shown to extend beyond the ordinary range of classical, medieval Latin and ecclesiastical texts which had been the schoolroom fare of any educated man of his day' (Antonio de Guevara x). 17 For a thorough study of the diffusion of Erasmian texts in Spain, see Bataillon 279-315. He quotes a letter from the Spanish translator of the Enchiridion to Erasmus in which he writes: 'En la corte del Emperador, en las ciudades, en las iglesias, en los conventos, aun en las posadas y caminos, todo el mundo tiene el Enchiridion de Erasmo en espanol' (In the Emperor's court, in the cities, in the churches, in the convents, even in the inns and on the roads, everyone has Erasmus's Enchiridon in Spanish) (280). The original letter, in Latin, has been lost. 18 As Guevara's vote against Erasmus on four points is one of the most damning non-literary aspects of his biography for most critics, assessments of Guevara's role at the Council vary according to critics' positive or negative attitudes toward the man, based largely on aesthetic and 'moral' evaluations of his literary works. 19 Alfonsi Valdesii litteras XL ineditas. Ed. Eduardus Boehmer. In Homenaje a Menendez y Pelayo. Vol. 1 Madrid: Libreria General de Victoriano Suarez, 1899,1:385-412, as quoted by Bataillon, 620. 20 Two sections of the Oratorio were denounced to the Inquisition for Illuminist or Lutheran tendencies, and were expurgated. For an analysis of the specific passages, see Redondo 'Le Menosprecio de corte' 194n7. 21 Bataillon appears to conflate the two brothers, Alfonso and Juan de Valdes, in this section. He goes on to contrast 'la superabundancia guevaresca' (Guevarian superabundance) with 'la sobriedad erasmiana' (Erasmian sobriety) (697), and quotes a 1553 critique of Guevara's work in which the author suggests that Guevara's style had fallen into the ridiculous, although it could have been transformed into 'true elegance' had he held back on the rhetorical flourishes and filled it with more substance. The

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 183

22

23

24

25

26

early critic also claims that Guevara's 'corrupt style' and lack of accuracy were inherited from the chivalric novels. The intellectual elite of Charles's court, ironically, shared many of Guevara's political and religious beliefs, but would not countenance his inventions and inaccuracies, perhaps because of the scorn with which their own classical learning was treated by Italians like Castiglione, who served as papal nuncio at the imperial court at the time the Marco Aurelio began to circulate. See, for example, Ricapito's analysis of Castiglione's disparaging treatment of Alfonso de Valdes after the appearance of the latter's Didlogo de las cosas acaecidas en Roma (1527). Guevara's best documented critic was Pedro de Rhua, who in 1540 sent him a series of letters criticizing the Epistolas familiares and Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea. Nevertheless, humanists had begun pointing out Guevara's errors as soon as the Libra dureo appeared. For a study of problems with Guevara's erudition, see Redondo, Antonio de Guevara 544-72. For a study of Rhua's arguments, see Redondo 554-65; and Grey, 'Pedro de Rhua's Critique.' 'Desde que naci hasta agora, assi en el mundo de do fui como en la religion a do me acogi, todo lo mas de mis anos he ocupado en leer y estudiar libros divinos y humanos, aunque confiesso mi flaqueza de no aver leydo tanto quanto pudiera, ni he estudiado tanto quanto deviera' (45). 'Como los historiadores y doctores de que me aprovechava eran muchos y la doctrina que escrivia no mas de una, no quiero negar que quitava algunas cosas inutiles y insipidas, y entretexia otras muy suaves y provechosas, por manera que es menester muy delicado juyzio para hacer que lo que en una lengua era escoria, en la otra parezca oro' (59). Wiltrout. See also Gilman, especially 177-84; and Castro, who notes that the episode 'circulated among the courtiers as an independent fragment of the Vida de Marco Aurelio before being printed' (xv). He calls 'the grandiloquence of the anti-imperialistic pages of "El Villano del Danubio'" a 'response to the greatness of the Empire of Charles the Fifth,' because 'assuming importance was for Guevara a compensation for lacking importance' (vii). For a discussion of Guevara's ideas with respect to Charles's imperial policy, see Menendez Pidal. Perhaps because of the desire for authority that surfaces in Guevara's works, critics have analysed everything from his illegitimacy to the sincerity of his religious calling to discover his motivations. For an excellent analysis of the sometimes amusing debate, see J.R. Jones, Antonio de Guevara 151-2 n4.

184 Kathleen Bollard de Broce 27 Tarece que el franciscano no recibio la noticia de su designation con demasiado entusiasmo, probablemente porque, existiendo en aquel momento varios obispados vacantes, esperase la concesion de algun otro con mejor dotation economica que el de Guadix, o quiza porque el nombramiento le obligaba a abandonar la corte, por la que tanto apego sentia, y a establecerse en una diocesis alejada y pobre' (62). See also Redondo, Antonio de Guevara, chapters 7 ('L'acces a la dignite episcopale: L'eveque de Guadix') and 8 ('Le celebre eveque de Mondonedo'). 28 Lyons argues that 'the authority of the past becomes the raw material for the corrective genius of the writer in his quest to influence the future conduct of the reader or audience.' Thus, 'examples, when they are not frankly fictional, must be corrected in order to fit ideological models' (14). Hampton argues that 'the evocation of the exemplary ancient in a Renaissance text is distinct from other rhetorical gestures of citation and allegation in that the exemplar makes a claim on the reader's action in the world' (13). 29 I have been unable to identify either Demetrius or Hermogenes, but it may be that Guevara invents them, or at least their friendship, as he presents their relationship as a model for the relationship he hopes for with the king: 'Jamas se vieron ni se conoscieron ... mas junto con esto Hermogenes offrescio muchos libros al rey Demetrio y Demetrio hizo muchas mercedes al filosofo Hermogenes; de manera que les hizo tan grandes amigos la pluma como a otros haze la patria' (They never saw each other or met... but in spite of that Hermogenes offered many books to King Demetrius and Demetrius did many favours for the philosopher Hermogenes; so the pen made them as great friends as the homeland makes others) (13-14). 30 'Estas obras religiosas vencen, incluso, a las otras en materia de falsificaciones, plagios y erudition apocrifa' (18). 31 RJ. Jones, Antonio de Guevara 145, cites some of the most ridiculous passages, but also writes that the work's rhetoric is 'masterly,' and that 'some of the passages are as exalted and dramatic as any contemporary sermon' he is familiar with (146). 32 'Con las puertas cerradas para hacer carrera en la corte y desenganado por los reveses de fortuna, el joven Guevara, empujado no tanto por un sentimiento religioso cuanto por la necesidad de buscar una salida, entro en el convento' (Castro Diaz 51). See also Redondo, who states that Guevara 'n'ait pris la bure pousse autant par le sentiment religieux que par la necessite de choisir une voie differente' (94). 33 'On comprend fort bien que trente-deux ans plus tard, il ait presente cette entree au couvent d'une maniere plus flatteuse pour lui' (94).

Judging a Literary Career: Antonio de Guevara 185 34 According to Marquez Villanueva, Guevara needed to 'entretener y cautivar por cualquier medio la atencion de un auditorio de cortesanos igualmente aridos y superficiales/ and his solution lay in discovering 'terrene literariamente virgen donde experimenta con la mayor inteligencia' (24). 35 Guevara's tomb contained two epitaphs. Gibbs believes he wrote the following: 'Carolo V Hispaniarum Rege imperante, Illustris D. D. Prater Antonius. Patria Alavensis. Genere Guevara. Religione S. Francisci. Habitu hujus conventus. Profesione Theologus. Officio praedicator, Et chronista Caesaris. Dignitate Episcopus Mindoniense fecit. Anno Dom. 1542. Posui finem curis. Spes et fortuna valete' (56). The other epitaph reads (55): En sacer antistes, clarissimus orbe Guevara, Artibus insignis, religione pius. Inclytus orator, coelestis preco sophiae, Caesaris interpres hystoricusque fuit. Stemmata qui tegit sacco saccumque tiara Ornavit, niveo marmore nunc tegitur. Obiit anno MDXLV

SEVEN

Arms versus Letters: The Poetics o the Career of the Poet in Early Mod Anne J. Cruz

As a classical literary topos that enters the Renaissance through the normative writings on courtly behaviour, the vaunted linkage of arms and letters, known earlier as sapientia et fortitude, nevertheless displays considerable instability. In his magisterial European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Ernst Curtius attributes its significance to the increasing differentiation both of disciplines and of social ranks - an issue, he avers, that raised the question of which studies were most appropriate for the ideal type of ruling class. Curtius's study of the transition from classical to vernacular literatures, evincing as it does his vast humanist erudition and familiarity with disparate literary traditions, has profoundly influenced our readings of medieval and Renaissance texts. One of its legacies for Spanish culture, however, has been to maintain the theme's two categories - arms as a military career, and letters, understood as both the study of the humanities and literary activity as intrinsically united and of equal value during this period. Curtius states unequivocally that '[njowhere else has the combination of the life of the Muses and the life of the warrior ever been so brilliantly realized as in Spain's period of florescence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.' Setting the tone for future critical studies, he continues, '[i]t is the glory of the Spanish Empire that there the ideal of armas y letras is most highly esteemed' (178). While the topos certainly accounted for the paths various social groups would take to achieve fame and wealth, the merit given the two professions differed considerably across time and among social ranks. My own contribution to the diverse aspects of literary careers studied in this volume centres on the changes in the perception of both arms

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 187 and letters as possible dual professions in the two centuries known as Spain's Golden Age, and how those changes were themselves inscribed in - and as - literature. From the early sixteenth century, when Spain's premier Renaissance poet, Garcilaso de la Vega, encouraged his friend, Juan Boscan, to undertake the the translation of Castiglione's Cortegiano, to the seventeenth century, whose paradigmatically Baroque icon, Don Quixote, vainly invokes medieval beliefs, the relationship between arms and letters assumed various and varying perspectives. Moving first from a directly oppositional stance to a comparatist correlation wherein one category's worth was subsumed by the other, the affiliation between the two again reached a level of alienation that, however, served to poeticize the process of an author's career. In the Middle Ages, the division between arms and letters was predicated on class standing; roundly rejecting scholarship, the nobility elected military endeavors to achieve recognition. Although there were exceptions, such as the Marques de Santillana and Jorge Manrique, known for their expertise in both arms and letters, by the early Renaissance most nobles subsidized humanists among their retinue: Lucio Marineo Siculo and Pietro Martire d'Anghera are examples of humanists who owed their careers in Spain to their aristocratic patrons (Perez, Carlos V149). By the seventeenth century, with authors for the first time assuming a professional social role at court in Madrid, the topos's conflictive aspect had, for all practical purposes, disappeared. Don Quixote's mad desire to recreate an archaic social system wherein the profession of arms again resumes command, demonstrates how disconnected the categories had indeed become. In his famous deliberation on which is the more worthwhile, the goal of arms to attain peace or the objective of letters to 'poner en su punto la justicia distributiva' (ensure that every man receives exactly the same justice) (1.37:466), Don Quixote carefully weighs the career advantages of arms against those of letters.1 He compares their opposing characteristics to conclude that, while both are important, it is through arms that republics defend themselves (1.38: 469). One of the text's most discerning editors, Luis Murillo, warns that the argument does not centre on an exalted discussion of literature versus knighthood but on the difference between letrados, or humanist scholars such as lawyers, and lowly soldiers. However, the Don's choice of arms over letters reveals his longing for the mythical Golden Age, when military glory depended entirely on individual chivalric valour. According to the arguments he proffers, it is the soldier who wins the palm of victory for risking his

188 Anne J. Cruz life, even when, in this 'iron age/ it might be taken by a stray bullet spat out by a harquebus, the diabolical invention that had recently and gratuitously wounded Cervantes.2 The irony subtending Don Quixote's lengthy discourse on arms and letters is that, by addressing the matter in logical terms, he confirms once again his lucidity and rationality. Indeed, his sober reasoning recalls Machiavelli's thoughts on the need for a good military to enforce good laws.3 Until the moment, that is, when the Don breaks into a fanatical defence of chivalry, thereby reaffirming his madness: Pero haga el cielo lo que fuere servido; que tanto sere mas estimado, si salgo con lo que pretendo, cuanto a mayores peligros me he puesto que se pusieron los caballeros andantes de los pasados siglos. (1.38:471) But Heaven's will must be done; and I will be thought even better of, if I can achieve what I seek to, since I will have confronted far more serious perils than any of the knights errant of ancient times. Rather than join the rush to plead a position at court, then, Don Quixote dusts off his armour to sally forth from La Mancha in search of adventure. Yet, while the bellicose Don can be expected to privilege arms over letters, what is revelatory about this discourse is that it is immediately followed by the Captive's Tale, a fictional soldier's autobiography whose exploits closely mimic those of Cervantes when taken prisoner in Algiers. The truthfulness of the narrative is explicitly evoked by the narrator: 'oiran un discurso verdadero a quien podria ser que no llegasen los mentirosos que con curioso y pensado artificio suelen componerse' (you will hear a true tale that may well be superior to those lying narratives framed by strange and laboured tricks and artifices) (1.38:72). Although the tale purports to recount the military travails of Captain Ruy Perez de Viedma at La Goleta, it soon metamorphoses into a haunting, bicultural love story. On a metafictional level, therefore, the captain's account inverts Don Quixote's argument. Arms take a back seat to letters once the captain begins to narrate his adventures; moreover, they become doubly inscribed in the mind of the narrator as he recollects the events: [Pjorque de todos los puntos sustanciales que en este suceso me acontecieron, ninguno se me ha ido de la memoria, ni aun se me ira en tanto que tuviere vida. (1.40:490)

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 189 (F)or nothing significant that happened to me throughout this entire business has ever left my memory, nor ever will, so long as I live. By his telling it, the captain's story of combat, capture, and escape will also be reformulated and engraved in the collective memory precisely by means of the literary device of autobiographical narrative. Unlike heroic genres, however, Cervantes' new fictional form does not rely solely or mainly on an impersonal or anonymous recounting of war; rather, it encapsulates descriptions of battle within the larger frame of emotive experience.4 According to Murillo, the Captive's Tale 'entrana el arte novelesco de Cervantes, en que se reconcilian lo maravilloso y lo verosimil, tanto en el asunto como en el estilo, y teniendo como fin el despertar la admiracion del lector' (comprises Cervantes' novelistic art, that of uniting the marvelous and the verisimilar, both in content and in style, with the purpose of inspiring awe in the reader) (I.42:514n2). Although Murillo is right to note the aesthetic combination of realism and wonder in this interpolated tale, its function, I contend, goes beyond its literary exemplarity. In undergirding the captain's wartime experiences, the rhetoric of admiratio invites the reader to participate vicariously in the events. But the strategy does not merely promote the tale's historicity; it actually defines it. In its modern rendition of the topos, Cervantes' novel problematizes the relationship of arms and letters by the recitation of arms through letters. It is through letters - specifically, in this case, through fictionalized narrative - that military historiography is configured as personal experience. Its tensions are thus created between the narrative's universalization and its particularization.5 The narrator of this episode is himself a fictitious character whose escape from the North African war zone is orchestrated by a muted cultural 'other,' his Moorish beloved, Zoraida. Renaissance poets had earlier utilized the lyric to articulate the thematic tensions between love and war, thereby repudiating the epic, whose most significant scenes, Thomas Greene tells us, take place not between two people, but between the hero and his mortality (15). By incorporating the war experience within a love story, this new narrative not only inverts the epic mode, it displaces both the lyric and the epic's function. As a genre concerned with the literary narration of war, epic poetry has traditionally celebrated the formation of empire and the heroicization of warriors. The genre followed a complex, bifurcated path in Spain, emulating but also diverging from classical and Italian models.6 Greene

190 Anne J. Cruz has alluded to this tension as a mimetic concern of the Renaissance epic in general, since in failing to replicate the Virgilian spirit, it likely failed to produce a proper epic, departing from the classics even as it thought to imitate them (4 and 7)7 He notes that in France, the decline of the heroic epic 'betray[ed] the growing gap between courtier-poet and soldier' at the same time that the growth of a middle-class public spurred interest in a 'bastard form of Biblical epic' (364). Availing themselves of recent historical events as well as religious themes, Spanish epics proliferated during the early modern period. Three of the most famous were praised in the book-burning episode of Don Quixote: Alonso de Ercilla's Araucana, Juan Rufo's Austriada, and Cristobal de Virues's Montserrate, all of which were saved from the flames that consumed the pernicious novels of chivalry. Despite the Araucana's popularity during the Renaissance, the diplomat and letrado Diego de Saavedra Fajardo objected that its author, given his career as a soldier, lacked the erudition expected of poets (111-12). Although few of these epics held to classical rules of composition, Frank Pierce points out that Ercilla is the first to call attention to autobiographical elements in his poem, echoing Garcilaso in the line, 'now the pen in my hand, now the sword' (269). Ercilla's autobiographical stance when relating his participation in the wars against the Araucanos personalizes even those actions in which he never took part. The sense, for the reader, of sharing in the adventures expands and converts the author's particularized experience into a broader poetics of war. The epic's ending, wherein the poet inscribes what Elizabeth Davis has aptly termed 'a pained expression of exhaustion, apparent resignation and failure' (56), attempts to claim the honours owed him for having served his monarch, fully expecting to be disillusioned: 'But even if the determination of my star / has thus left me cast aside and downhearted, / in the end you will see that / have run / the difficult race on a straight path' (Mas ya que de mi estrella la porfia / me tenga asi arrojado y abatido, / veran al fin que por derecha via / la carrera dificil he corrido) (Ercilla 37-72; quoted in Davis 56; my emphasis). He ends his address to Philip II by bitterly conceding that his poetic talent will bring him no rewards either, as it does little justice to the king. Like Ariosto before him - and Don Quixote's Arab historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, after him - Ercilla submits that 'maybe a different poet might sing it better' (1.52:355): 'So I bring this to an end, since / another talent, another voice / and accent, can better sing the innumerable / sum of your deeds and high thoughts' (Asi doy punto en esto pues conviene / para

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 191 la grande innumerable suma / de vuestros hechos y altos pensamientos / otro ingenio, otra voz y otros acentos) (Ercilla 37-73; quoted in Davis 57). Having managed to compose a profoundly moving epic despite his literary limitations, the soldier Ercilla is poised precariously at the moment when the balance between arms and letters seems finally about to stabilize. While the topos of sapientia et fortitude in classical literature had stressed that both qualities should inhere harmoniously in one individual, by the Middle Ages the theme's deployment served to question this union. Since, according to historian Jose Antonio Maravall, medieval and Renaissance Spain reserved its highest accolades for the military, Ercilla's epic is remembered more for its graphic depictions of cultural contest than for its generic innovations. Almost a century later, Don Quixote would similarly conceive of procuring social reform by knightly feats of courage, rather than through wisdom or the administration of justice (Maravall, 'The Humanism of Arms' 92). Maravall nonetheless recognizes what he calls the 'humanism' of arms, making a case for the correspondence between the two: 'The very possibility of comparing arms and letters ... indicates that for humanism they possessed a basic homogeneity, for only similar things can be compared' (98). But although both methods allow for the achievement of virtue, Don Quixote impatiently aspires to literary fame through someone else's recounting of his chivalrous deeds. It is up to another, whether historian or storyteller, to narrate and applaud his exploits, a literary task that will then, he believes, grant him the military fame he so richly deserves. In contrast, the captain challenges the opposition between arms and letters by his very narration of the events, that is, in recalling and recounting his own military experiences. By the seventeenth century, the conflict between arms and letters, as envisioned in Don Quixote's archaic mindset, no longer held any ideological currency. Changes in military technology had destroyed whatever potential remained for the categories' continued parallelism, as the development of artillery replaced individual courage in battle. A curious example of such alterations in warfare - and of the increasing significance of letters over arms - appeared in the later decades of the sixteenth century. The Spanish captain, Jeronimo de Carranza, became famous, not for wielding the sword, but for having written a treatise on sword fighting.8 No longer interested in making war, the nobility were derided on occasion by authors who viewed their inaction as inimical to their social role.

192 Anne J. Cruz Cristobal Suarez de Figueroa's El passagero presses the question: '^Quien sigue ahora la milicia? ^Quien se emplea en honrosos sudores? ^Quien solicita la inmortalidad de su nombre?' (Who now wishes to join the army? Who is deployed in honourable tasks? Who seeks to make his name immortal?) (quoted in Perez, Carlos V150). The military hero, in the persona of a knight-errant, not only becomes a remnant of a previous age, but a figure of ridicule. Don Quixote's social counterpart, the Knight of the Green Coat, is, like the Don, portrayed as an outmoded hidalgo whose favourite pastime of hunting small game had by then supplanted the more consequential activity of arms. The country squire, whom Francisco Marquez Villanueva has ironically characterized as prudente, urges his literary-minded son to focus on the materially rewarding career of law instead of on poetry. The episode marks the new distinctions within the humanities, with letters referring to a university degree. It makes no mention of the young man's taking up arms, an opportunity seized by Don Quixote to embark on another of his mad diatribes in praise of chivalry. Another recently minted narrative genre, the picaresque novel, had further belittled the role of the historical hidalgo. In the Lazarillo's satirical depiction of the boy's penurious third master, the unemployed squire reflects the growing disengagement of the nobility from the military. In light of the hidalgo class's ineffectiveness, the comment by Quevedo's picaro, Pablos, that he required little schooling in his efforts to become a knight, proves tautological: 'Escribi a mi casa, que yo no habia menester mas ir a la escuela, porque, aunque no sabia bien escribir, para mi intento de ser caballero lo que se requeria era escribir mal' (I wrote home stating that I no longer needed to stay in school, since, although I couldn't write very well, what I needed in order to be a knight was to write poorly) (El buscon 89). By mouthing his author's conservative conviction that hierarchical order should be maintained at all cost, Pablos's statement serves to highlight the unproductive career of knighthood as it reveals the increasing permeability of social class. As we have seen, vigorous opposition between arms and letters had indeed been the case in the fifteenth century, when the two categories, in Maravall's estimation, contributed to the formation of Spanish humanism. Peter Russell asserts that it was not until the early sixteenth century that the aristocratic prejudice so long held against education finally diminished in Spain, in part owing to the popularity and influence of Castiglione's Cortegiano, which emphasized both arms and letters as part of the successful courtier's curriculum. Russell attributes

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 193 the antagonism between the two practices to the rigid social divisions then in force. Each estate adhered to its particular function and role: just as the warrior knight did not dedicate his time to learning, the man of letters did not wage war. This antagonism was intensified by the importance given the nobility's role during the contentious Middle Ages: the continuing civil wars and the battles of the Reconquest necessitated the military contributions of the aristocracy, thus privileging its social rank. This in turn caused the profession of letters to be scorned and despised, a reaction that Americo Castro cites, besides the fact that it was the converses, or Jews forcibly converted to Christianity, who traditionally took up letters (quoted in Russell 222). For all these reasons, therefore, Spanish nobles resisted cultivating letters even as late as the close of the fifteenth century. The humanist and educator Pietro Martire d'Anghera complained bitterly to a friend that the young nobles enrolled in his school at the Isabelline court detested studying the humanities, as they believed them an impediment to their future military career (quoted in Russell 238n22). In that he practised both arms and letters, the Renaissance poet and member of Charles V's guard Garcilaso de la Vega is the first to have been credited for successfully balancing the two professions. His Neapolitan companion, Luigi Tansillo, writes in a sonnet that the 'spirito gentil' has 'la spada al fianco ognor, la penna en manno' (the sword always at his side, the pen in hand), while one of his early editors, Tamayo de Vargas, comments that in Garcilaso we find 'en quien solo se a llegado a concordar la antigua dissension entre las armas y las letras, por averlas el ennoblezido con igualdad' (the only one who has remedied the ancient discord between arms and letters, because he has ennobled each equally) (quoted in Lumsden-Kouvel 337). Numerous modern critics have maintained the same opinion: calling him the 'Emperor's poet,' Antonio Prieto dwells on Charles's tears upon hearing of Garcilaso's untimely death.9 Ignacio Navarrete is the most recent critic to accept this view, finding the 'perfect balance' of Eclogue Ill's famous line, 'now the sword, now the pen,' emblematic of the successful combination of the two offices (117). For Russell, it is Garcilaso's interest in the translation of the Courtier that assures his belief in the combination of arms and letters (235). Garcilaso was not the only writer to whom critics attached the title of 'soldier-poet/ since this archetype continued to be mythologized through the Spanish Renaissance. To mention just two examples, Francisco de Aldana and Francisco de Figueroa both were praised as much for their military valour as for their poetry.10

194 Anne J. Cruz Nevertheless, a glance at their biographies, along with a close reading of their poetry, confirms that none of these writers ever attained the equilibrium repeatedly attributed to them. Maravall has astutely pointed out Garcilaso's disinclination toward war, an attitude in stark contrast to the emperor's interests ('Garcilaso').11 If Charles and Isabella favoured the poet by making him a court favourite and marrying him to Elena de Zuniga, a wealthy lady-in-waiting to Charles's sister, Leonor of Portugal, they also exacted a heavy tribute (Keniston 65-6). As I have stated elsewhere, the conflicts that ensued while he was in the service of the emperor reveal that Garcilaso was constantly pulled in opposite directions (Cruz, 'Garcilaso's Self-Fashioning'). Despite Garcilaso's pleas, the emperor was slow to forgive his brother, Pedro Laso, for his rebellious participation in the comunero revolt of 1521. The poet was sent as diplomat and spy to the French border; upon his return from exile on the Danube, he was again dispatched from the emperor's side to Naples, where he entreated his friends and even his patron, Pedro de Toledo, Duke of Alba and Viceroy of Naples, to lobby in his favour. A letter from a friend explicitly describes the poet as 'exceedingly eager to be employed in Your Majesty's service... I again beg you to make use of him, he is so desirous of this that I assure you that he will render very good account in everything that you ask of him.'12 Garcilaso was also expected to reciprocate in kind. In a letter extolling his literary gifts, the renowned humanist Pietro Bembo also mentions how highly the Italian Benedictine Honorato Fascistel thinks of the poet: 'ea mini de tuis plurimis maximisque uirtutibus' (He spoke to me of your most ample and great virtues).13 He goes on, however, to request Garcilaso's support in pleading for the return of the Fascistelli family possessions: 'Quare te magno pere rogo ut rem suscipias fratresque illos, atque familiam in pristinum fortunae statum tua cura procurationesque restituas' (I sincerely wish to ask you, so that you may undertake this, and restore those brothers and also the family by your care and by your management into the former state of fortune) (305). In her edition of the letter, Luisa Lopez Grigera points out its essentially supplicatory nature, written shortly after the Tunisian victory, when Garcilaso's military successes had appeased the emperor (295). As courtier, Garcilaso not only needed to remain in the emperor's grace, he was also placed in the difficult role of interceding for others. Perhaps owing to his negative experiences, he anticipates in his own life the actions we have seen taken by Cervantes' fictional Knight of the Green Coat. In his testament, the poet stipulates that his illegitimate

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 195 first-born son, Lorenzo, should be educated in a good university, where he may learn humanities and then study either canon law or jurisprudence.14 As with Cervantes' prudent knight, he makes no mention that his son should, like himself, obtain a military position.15 Compelled to maintain good relations with the emperor, Garcilaso continued to play a leading role in imperial warfare, despite the increasing demoralization detected in his poems. The difference between the poet's efforts to placate imperial authority and his nostalgia for a peaceable existence such as that enjoyed by his mentor, Boscan, is most noticeable in Elegia II. Addressed to Boscan, the epistolary poem begins by granting the different motivations pressing the victors of the recent Tunisian expedition. In the first two lines below, which respond implicitly to the losses inflicted by war, the poet strikes a loftier pose than the soldiers who are only after booty. The poem distinguishes him from a mercenary; once the poet clarifies his behaviour, he returns to the purpose of the elegy: I maintain the middle road, for I never felt the need to pursue possessions; holding myself higher than the others; nor do I follow the narrow path of those who I know for sure switch to the other side by dark of night. My Lord, I cleave always to the right road, where you know that I, Garcilaso head and have always headed; and thus, midst this thick forest, I sustain my difference, not without difficulty, but by no means do I abandon the muses, rather, I shuttle between them and my work, And with them I sweetly pass the time. The hours are thus deceived; thus we spend but one of these resting from life's hard tasks and sad lament.

(Elegia II16-21, 25-36)16

The oscillation between the muses and the business of war denotes the tensions he experiences when, as in his famous lapidary phrase, he

196 Anne J. Cruz takes up 'now the pen, now the sword.' But the poem registers the imbalance between the two categories: a mere hour is allotted to literary creativity dedicated to love, while he finds himself surrounded, as he laments in Elegia I, by 'an excess of wars, of dangers, and exile/17 By separating him from his beloved while he risks his life, war doubly punishes the poet. He complains - precisely through his poetry - that war keeps him from dedicating himself to the lyrical lamentations of his beloved's absence. The elegy ends by evoking the mythical miscast couple of Mars and Venus to assert that the poet will not die in battle, but from the suffering caused by his beloved's imagined infidelity: Practising, to my sorrow, your [Mars's] profession, I am by intervals diminished so that only death will be my final reward; and my hard luck did not allow it [death] to overtake me fighting, pierced by sharp and powerful steel, so that instead I would be shattered by seeing my sweet, beloved fruit in another's grasp, her cruel possessor laughing at me.

(Elegia II 100-8)18

The irony is that the 'sharp and powerful steel' that would destroy Garcilaso in battle, may, if shot by Cupid, also annihilate him in love. He is consumed either way, through arms or through the pain caused by love. The poem's last line, 'and thus, between contraries, I die/ clearly evinces the poet's inability to resolve both the literary and the real-life tensions created by his allegiance to one or the other category. Most recently, Jose Maria Rodriguez Garcia has argued that, by expressly embracing the lyric over the epic, Garcilaso questions 'a key concept of Renaissance notions of providential history, that of translatio imperil' (152). In Sonnet XXXIII, the poet writes to Boscan from La Goleta, the fort guarding Tunis, where, fighting with the imperial armies in 1535, he had been wounded. Despairing of war, Garcilaso shifts his position from that of imperial victor to that of the vanquished 'other,' Dido. According to Rodriguez Garcia, 'the poetic voice begins by echoing the ideology of imperial Rome, and ends by paying homage to Dido's feelings and words when she kills herself in an orgy of ashes,

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 197 tears, and blood' (154). Rodriguez Garcia's brilliant exegesis proves beyond doubt that Garcilaso captures war's violence in his poetry in order to critique it. Moreover, by functioning as 'successively the subject and the object of a historical process,' he portends his own destruction and, in the process, destroys the epic impulse in favour of the elegiac and the lyric (159-60; 163). What becomes clear, as we read the sonnet together with Garcilaso's other poems, is that the poet chooses always the side of the vanquished and the vulnerable. This is not to say that he disavows the importance of historical narration altogether; rather, he anticipates its quixotic turn. Surely convinced that war is celebrated as much by chronicles as in epics, Garcilaso gave his friend, the chronicler Juan Gines de Sepulveda, Luis de Avila's Comentario de las guerras de Tunez; most likely, he related to him his own experiences in battle, which Sepulveda incorporated in his Cronica de Carlos V (Keniston 140; Losada 72).19 Garcilaso's Latin ode to Sepulveda, who had recently written an exhortation to Charles in defence of the wars against the Turks (Ad Carolum V. Ut belum suscipiat in Turkas), clearly indicates that he respected the historian's ability to both justify these wars on religious grounds and chronicle imperial feats: Since the Muse granted the power to tense the bow of religion and of savage war to the breaking point when its bent ends meet To you only, learned Sepulveda; so it befits you to narrate the history of an Africa trembling under an intrepid and pious king who, mounted on his famous pied stallion moves rapidly through the tight ranks outrunning the wind, vehemently brandishing the lethal lance in his hand.20 As in Sonnet XXXIII, however, where the poet turns from the triumphant stance of the Romans to that of defeated Carthage, Garcilaso slips, in this ode, from the heroic depiction of the emperor to one whose animal simile imparts on Charles V the characteristics of a predatory lion against a peaceful enemy. Further, the ode directs the reader's vision away from the emperor's stalking grounds to the elevated site

198 Anne J. Cruz where the abandoned wives of the enemy soldiers watch in vain for a sign of their departed lovers: While he [Charles] impetuously charges the timorous with constant turning, like the fierce lion stalks the peaceful beasts through Massyllian or Numidian forests, the wives, accustomed to scanning the countryside's wide fields from their high towers sigh with a trembling breast recently deprived of their lovers, 'Oh, young men,' they cried, 'avoid the arms of Caesar, their unequal strength And their unholy encounters! When his sacrificed mother gave his name to posterity while they struggled to pull the weak child from her womb, from that moment, the Caesarean race springs, from that moment, it relishes a new killing: Do you think that he who crossed death's threshold And stepped fiercely into life, would not, from that moment, have engendered a passion and thirst for hot blood?'21 Garcilaso's ode bifurcates boldly in two different and opposite directions: from the proud perspective of military troops led across the plains by imperial valour, the poem moves surprisingly to the besieged position of the enemy's wives, their observant position in the towers reminiscent of the ill-fated Dido. The pathetic portrait of the Tunisian women coalesces with the sacrificial role of Caesar's mother, whose death ensured the Caesarean dynasty, her spilled blood robbing her of her own life to nurture and fortify her frail son. The young women's presage of their lovers' demise by the emperor's force of arms inverts and negates the image of Charles's bloody birthright, as their death will prevent any future life from issuing forth. Again, Garcilaso identifies, as he does in Sonnet XXXIII, not with military conquest, but with the vulnerability of the conquered women. This identification, however, is carried through by the poem's echoing the vanishing voices of the vanquished. Unlike Cervantes' 'Captive's Tale/ whose speech act relies on the silence of the cultural 'other/ Garcilaso empowers the conquered with self-knowledge, if only for the duration of the enonce. In this

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 199 deconstruction of lyric subjectivity - which reiterates and presages his own self-destruction - Garcilaso ends by destroying the unquestioned coupling of arms and letters. Despite the obvious divergence of the two categories in Garcilaso's poetry, the mythical figure of the soldier-poet was never explicitly challenged until 1570, when the Sevillian poet Fernando de Herrera annotated and published Garcilaso's poems. Navarrete has perceptively noted how Herrera wishes to replace the ideal of the poet as courtier since, for him, Garcilaso's reputation as warrior and as poet held little authenticity: The Spanish, occupied exclusively by arts until they had finished restoring their kingdom to the Christian religion, unable amid that struggle and the clash of iron to heed the quiet and solace of these studies, remained for the most part far from [poetry's] regard, (quoted in Navarrete 139; his translation) Since the soldier could not function in the role of poet, Herrera believed that writers were required to immortalize their exploits: What Spain needs are men dedicated entirely to letters: the scholar poet is not inferior to the man of arms, but instead his fitting successor, the only one capable of completing the ascendency of Spain. Indeed, only he will be able to complete the task that was merely begun by the great warriors of the past, (quoted in Navarrete 149; his translation) Herrera seems to be pressing for the development of letters as a profession, a focus that also allows for a writer to attempt a career at court. That the epic could offer a means of social entry is evinced by Lope de Vega's ready use of the genre to lobby for the position of court chronicler. Elizabeth Wright shows just how Lope's epic, the Dragontea, usurps the function of the historical relation: 'Epic in particular linked the poet to empire. Literary allusions built into the the heroic poem called up mythic resonances that placed the poet in the centre of society' (44). Wright demonstrates that the poem's timely subject matter - the raids of the English pirate, Francis Drake, on Spain's colonies and its galleons at sea - serves a double purpose: it permits Lope to assume a position of royal servant while cloaking himself in the guise of an epic poet. Yet Lope's choice of epic narrative over historical rendition nonetheless signals the genre's uneasy commodification. Wright tells us that

200 Anne J. Cruz the poem's unlikely hero, who aspired to a government post in the New World, most probably paid Lope to transform his reticent behaviour into heroic action, thereby eclipsing his competitor (40-1). Acutely aware that Lope himself desired his position, the court chronicler, Antonio de Herrera, censored the Dragontea's lack of historical veracity as much to protect his post as to clarify its mission: Y la principal causa que debio de mover para criarse el ofizio de Coronista maior de las Indias... devio de ser para q[ue] escribiendo la historia dellas, fuese con mucha puntualidad, conforme a los papeles y relacjones ciertas que se an recogido y tuviesen de las Indias. Y asi conviene que para evitar los inconvinientes referidos y relaciones encontradas, como se ha visto, que V. Md. ordene al Cons[ej]o de Castilla que no de licencia para que se pueda imprimir ningun libro en que se trate de cosas de In[dia]s, sin que primero se vea en el Consejo dellas. (Antonio de Herrera 1) And the main reason for the establishment of the office of major chronicler of the Indies was so their history would be written with precision, according to the documents and historical accounts collected and obtained from the Indies. And thus, in order to avoid the difficulties mentioned and any conflicting accounts such as have already occurred, Your Majesty should order the Council of Castile to withhold approval to print any book dealing with the Indies until the Council (of Indies) has first examined it. If the epic's idealizing function contrasts with historical truth, so, too, does its lending itself to a political agenda: Wright shows how the epic's heroic tenor converts into legalistic discourse (41). The anxieties created by the genre's political and economic commodification, therefore, closely resemble those caused by the rupture of arms and letters. The opposition between these categories meant the development of a rivalry, not solely between individuals, but among social groups for positions of power. It is not coincidental that also at this time, numerous literary academies whose function it was to prepare writers for the court bureaucracy proliferated in Madrid and other centres of influence. Participation in these academies offered the lesser nobility and those of lower social rank opportunities to compete for positions, even as it resulted in an abundance of mediocre poetry (Cruz, 'Art of the State'). Regardless of the quality of poetry produced by the academies, however, the courtier-poet, like his avatar, the soldier-poet, had already become an obsolete figure.

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 201 As we have seen, this move was presaged by the tensions first evinced in Garcilaso's poetics. The battle of Tunis in particular furnished the event whereby the poet laments his participation in war, sublimating, as Rodriguez Garcia so well puts it, 'the historical epic into an introverted lyric' (164). Yet if, according to Rodriguez Garcia, for Garcilaso, the African battleground's ancient locus, Carthage, stands for poetry and for the repression of the epic impulse (163), for Cervantes, Tunis stands equally for the novel, and for its repression of the epic. For this is the same city and fort that was lost to the Turks in a battle in which Cervantes took part and which, in Don Quixote, is harshly commented on by the captain: Pero a muchos les parecio, y asi me parecio a mi, que fue particular gracias y merced que el cielo hizo a Espana en permitir que se asolase aquella oh'cina y capa de maldades, y aquella gomia o esponja y polilla de la infinidad de dineros que alii sin provecho se gastaban, sin servir de otra cosa que de conservar la memoria de haberla ganado la felicisima del invictisimo Carlos Quinto, como si fuera menester para hacerla eterna, como lo es y sera, que aquellas piedras la sustentaran. (1.39:480-1) Yet many people thought, and myself among them, that Heaven showed Spain a very special grace and favor, permitting the destruction of that criminals' workshop and refuge, that sponge and guzzler, that wastebasket of so much money, all thrown away to no purpose, except that it was supposed to help preserve the blessed memory of its capture by the invincible Charles the Fifth - as if his memory required those stones to keep it eternal, as it surely will be. Worried that Spain's insistence on fortifying and guarding La Goleta resulted in heavy expenditures, the captain dismisses the idea that the fort's loss symbolizes any corresponding loss of fame for the emperor. For the captain, no real stones need remain for its remembrance, as Charles's capture of Tunis had been immortalized by chronicle and epic alike. Despite his participation in the battle, however, Garcilaso refused to glorify imperial conquest, identifying instead with the vanquished lover. In a similarly anti-epic move, the captain rejects formulating any kind of grand testimony to the historical event, preferring to inscribe his ordeals of war by situating them in the delimiting context of his emotive experiences. As the Renaissance epic entered its later phase, it

202 Anne J. Cruz could no longer effect a bridge between Christian belief and, in Greene's terms, the 'supernatural furniture' with which the classical epic was construed (412). The move to a less solemn and sublime scale in poetry was accompanied by the several changes that occurred in the practice of arms and letters. Following what has been called the professionalization of war, the hidalgos continued to join the army without pay during Philip II's reign to gain experience and make a name for themselves, in hopes of obtaining a military post (Fernandez Conti 418). At the same time, the government bureaucracy was increasingly formed by letrados, known for their administrative efficiency and technical expertise. As the century wore on, they began to enjoy the privileges of the nobles, and by its end, many letrados had been knighted into the prestigious military orders, which had long abandoned their initial defensive purpose (Perez, Carlos V154). If letters seemed to have won over arms, Perez asserts that the nobility, realizing its loss of power, reclaimed the universities, a move that resulted in the fusion of the two categories (Perez, Carlos V154). For Maravall, however, the aristocracy had abandoned its military function, leaving only the trace of their ideology in the continuing popularity of the novels of chivalry (Maravall, Poder 205). He cites a document lamenting not just the lack of experienced military leaders at the time: 'faltales la experiencia de las cosas de la guerra que tanto importa para el fin que se pretende' (in war matters, they lack the experience so necessary to reach the desired outcome), but also what this lack will mean for the future: 'la falta que agora hay de personas muy calificadas para gobernar exercitos sera cada dia mayor' (the present lack of wellqualified men to lead armies will increase considerably day by day) (Maravall, Poder 208). As the the military hero cedes his role, so the epic genre becomes commodified, yet not explicitly nor even entirely. In an ironic imitation of his soldier-narrator, whose response to the opposition of arms and letters is to convert both his war and his amatory experiences into narrative, the soldier Cervantes establishes his career and gains fame, not for his military exploits or for reconfiguring them in heroic epic verse, but by creating a new kind of literary form. Recalling the early Georg Lukacs, Greene places the birth of the novel at the moment when the epic no longer commanded control of or inspired awe in the universe; when authors turned instead to 'explore the interest of the individual and interior consciousness' (17). The epic's sense of destiny and cyclical history is supplanted by the novel's randomness and prosaic linearity. In the end, it is not merely that arms have been replaced by

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 203 letters, as Don Quixote may have feared, but that letters themselves, as represented by distinct literary genres, have shifted and deviated as much from the lyrical poeticization of war as from its historicizing narrative. By encapsulating historical circumstances and by universalizing particularized experience, the new fictional genre known as the novel abrogates - from Don Quixote on - the heroic nature of the poetics of war by, at the same time, restructuring the relationship between arms and letters within the concept of a Spanish literary career.

Notes 1 For citations of Don Quixote, I have used the Murillo edition. English citations are from the Burton Raffel translation. Unless otherwise noted, all other translations are my own. 2 Don Quixote here follows Ariosto's thoughts on modern artillery in his Orlando Furioso, an epic that also harks back to medieval customs: 'Oh, horrendous and criminal invention! How could you find a place in men's hearts? You alone have destroyed military glory: because of you, the career of arms is without honour; because of you, valour and virtue have been so reduced that the evil man is often preferred and chosen over the good; because of you, audacity and courage are no longer an advantage in battle' (Come trovasti, o scelerata e brutta / invenz'ion, mai loco in uman core? / Per te la militar gloria e distrutta, / per te il mestier de 1'arme e senza onore; / per te e il valore e la virtu ridutta, / che spesso par del buono il rio migliore: / non piu la gagliardia, non piu 1'ardire / perte puo in campo al paragon venire) (Canto XI.26; 302). 3 'The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms; and ... you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow' (Machiavelli 77). 4 In what is perhaps the best study of the Renaissance epic genre, Greene clarifies that the poet may be 'the amphibian, the mediator, the messenger, the guide ... [b]ut he is not the actor' (25). 5 'Letters' refers both to secular literature (letras humanas) and to learning, thus the term letrado to designate university-trained lawyers. See Maravall 'Humanism'; and Perez 'L'Humanisme.' 6 Pierce has written the classic book-length study on the Spanish epic; see also Davis; and Nicolopulos. I have not been able to see Lara Garrido. 7 Greene cites Curtius that arms and letters in the Renaissance continued the

204 Anne J. Cruz ancient topos of sapientia et fortitude, stating that 'the finest Christian epics of the sixteenth century ... eschewed Biblical subjects in preference for those of interest to an educated professional soldier' (364). Yet he admits that, in France, '[e]pic poetry was divided ... between tired perpetuations of the quasi-military epic ... and ... the bourgeois Biblical epic' (364). 8 The term 'to be a Carranza/ meaning an expert swordsman, was coined from people's taking Carranza's writing on how to fight for his actual ability with the sword. The confusion offers another example of the supplanting of arms by letters, in this case, Carranza's book, Libra que trata de la Philosophia de las armas y de su destreza (1569). See Chauchadis. 9 Prieto states that Charles V 'ya pronto llorara a su poeta porque supo en Garcilaso de la amistad y el valor' (will soon weep over his poet, as he found in him both friendship and valor) (15). 10 Aldana was killed at the Battle of Alcazarquivir (Rivers, Francisco de Aldana). Figueroa was a soldier in Italy and the Netherlands according to Gonzalez Palencia. However, see Maurer. 11 Fernando Checa Cremades quotes Sansovino, who lists among Charles's favourite books Castiglione's Courtier, Machiavelli's Discorsi, and Polybius's Histories, and then goes on to state that the emperor 'si diletto molte piu dell'armi... sempre stimo piu che ogni altro huomo del mondo le cose di guerra. E la pratico nella materia dell'artigliari' (quoted in Checa Cremades 14-15). 12 The letter, from Antonio de Leiva to the emperor, states 'El dicho Garcilaso tiene extremado desseo de emplearse en el servicio de V.M.... Torno a suplicar V.M. se sirva offrecerse en que del, pues tiene tal desseo que salgo fiador que dara muybuena cuenta de si en toda cosa que sele encargare' (Archive General de Simumes, Estado, leg. 1179, fol. 58,25 August 1534 [quoted in Gallego Morell, Documentos 160]). 13 Bembo's letter has been published by Lopez Grigera. 14 Vaquero Serrano has recently documented the identity of Garcilaso's illegitimate son. Thanks to her assiduous research, we now know that this child, whose full name was Lorenzo Suarez de Figueroa, was the product of Garcilaso's early relations with Guiomar Carrillo, a member of the noble Toledan family of Ribadeneira (Vaquero Serrano 95ff). 15 'Don Lorengo, mi hijo, sea sustentado en alguna buena universidad y aprenda ciencias de humanidad hasta q[ue] sepa bien en esta facultad, y despues, si tuviere inclinacio[n] a ser clerigo, estudie canones, y si no, dese a las leyes, y sienpre sea sustentado hasta q[ue] tenga alguna cosa de suyo' (Garcilaso de la Vega, Testamento [quoted in Rivers, Garcilaso 209]). 16 'Yo enderego, senor, en fin mi passo / por donde vos sabeys que su pro-

The Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain 205 cesso / siempre a llevado y lleva Garcilasso; / y assi, en mitad d'aqueste monte espesso, / de las diversidades me sostengo, / no sin dificultad, mas no por esso / dexo las musas, antes torno y vengo / dellas al negociar, y variando, / con ellas dulcemente me entretengo. / Assi se van las oras enganando; / assi del duro afan y grave pena / estamos algiin ora descansando' (Garcilaso 245-6). 17 '^A quien ya de nosotros el ecesso / de guerras, de peligros y destierro / no toca y no a cansado el gran processo?' (Who among us has not experienced and been exhausted by the great process of wars, dangers, and exile?) (Renaissance and Baroque Spanish Poetry 82-4). 18 'Exercitando por mi mal tu officio, / soy reduzido a terminos que muerte / sera mi postrimero beneficio; / y esta no permitio mi dura suerte / que me sobreviniesse peleando, / de hierro traspassado agudo y fuerte' (Garcilaso 250-1). 19 As both Garcilaso and Sepulveda accompanied Charles to Bologna for his coronation, it is highly likely that the two spent time together. It was after his meeting with Garcilaso that Sepulveda was officially appointed imperial chronicler, a title he held until his death (Losada 73). Sepulveda would later write his controversial Democrates segundo, o de las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios (ca. 1544); for a view of Sepulveda as a major Renaissance humanist, see Losada; cf. Pagden. 20 'Arcum quando adeo religionis et / saevae militiae ducere longius, / ut curvata coire inter se capita haud negent, / uni musa tibi, docte Sepulveda, / concessit: pariter dicere et Africam / incumbit pavitantem / sub rege intrepido et pio, / qui insigni maculis vectus equo citos / praevertit rapidus densa per agmina / ventos, fervidus hastam / laetalem quatiens manu.' (Garcilaso 480). For a discussion of Garcilaso's Latin poetry, see Gutierrez Volta; and Lumsden-Kouvel. 21 'Pugnax perpetuo dum trepidos agit / giro, saevus uti Massylias leo / per sylvas Nomadasve / imbelles agitat feras, / suspirant timido pectore, turribus / ex altis aciem lata per aequora / campi tendere suetae, / sponsae nuper amoribus / orbatae: 'Heu, iuvenes, Caesaris', inquiunt, / Vitate imparibus viribus armaque / congressusque nefandos / Quando nomina posteris / mater caesa dedit, dum puerum student / languentem eruere e visceribus, genus / hinc east caesareum, hinc est / gaudens caeda nova: putas / saevum funereo limine qui pedem / ad vitam imposuit, non ferat indidem / ingeneretque furorem / et caedis calidae sitim?' (Garcilaso 480-2).

EIGHT

Divine Poetry as a Career The Complexities and Cons of Following David Anne Lake Prescott

No one would deny that divine poetry - poetry or verse drama based on the Bible - was admired in the Renaissance, not least in that period's waning years. True, not all poets were quite up to the task of soaring skyward with Urania, the muse of astronomy who, largely thanks to a poem, 'L'Uranie' by Guillaume Saluste, Sieur Du Bartas, mutated into a muse of such poetry often indistinguishable from the Holy Ghost him/herself.1 Although 'L'Uranie' is an accomplished poem (it or its protagonist must be the 'Muse' that Spenser praises at the end of his Ruines of Rome [1591]), most of us would not want to spend much time with a poem by Robert Roche on Susanna that Lily Campbell quotes in her study of divine poetry. Its sentiments do, however, show the influence of 'L'Uranie.' In lines that are both humble recusatio and implied challenge or boast, Roche warns the reader: Expect not heere th'invention, or the vaine, Of Lucrece rape-write: or the curious scan, Of Phillis friend; or famous faery-Swaine; Or Delias prophet, or admired man. My chicken fethered winges, no ympes enrich, Pens not full sum'd, mount not so high a pitch.2 So much for (in order of appearance) William Shakespeare, Thomas Lodge, Edmund Spenser, and Samuel Daniel. Roche's chicken feathers, we are to take it, allow him only a few awkward flutters, but he also hints that in subject matter he is nevertheless following the wings of the dove and in this regard can outfly the competition.

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 207 The complexity of such competition for those who wanted to give a career its final takeoff on something more airworthy than chicken feathers is the topic of this essay. Without wishing to deny the value of studying the career paths that Patrick Cheney, most notably, has been tracking in such writers as Spenser and Marlowe, I hope to complicate the way we might see divine poetry's role. Because the subject is huge and my space limited, I will focus on the Psalms, including the difficulty of fitting them as they were read in the Renaissance into a generic scheme and the ambiguity with which Renaissance writers might present themselves to the world as divine poets. Divine poetry can be an alternative, valuable at any age, to love lyrics, courtly flattery, vulgar balladry, pagan myth, or feigned nonsense, something that might help even the young - as John Rainolds put it when preaching on Psalm 18 at Oxford in 1586 - to 'cast away profane songs of wantonnes, of lightnes, of vanity.'3 Sometimes those advocating the triumph of scripture over secular poetry name the famous names: Thomas Jackson's sermon, Davids Pastorall Poeme (1603), to take one of many examples, says that 'Doubtlesse, no man will denie but the Greeke and Latine poems of Homer, Hesiode, Pindarus, and others deserve great praise, and want not their singular use: yet for any to preferre or equall them with this Booke, were intollerable dotage and contumelie.' If Alexander kept his copy of Homer in the precious Persian casket in which the defeated Darius had kept his treasures, 'how much more highly ought we to esteeme of this Booke, whereof the holy Ghost himselfe is the Author' (sig. B5v). Authors of divine poetry were themselves given to such exhortations and claims, and only the most cynical would deny their sincerity and, at certain times and in certain places, the courage it took to sing the Lord's song in a spiritually strange land.4 Divine poetry could also, however, be less a parallel path than a new turn in a career after youthful or even mature experience with secular life. Hence the little verses I heard as a child from some irreverent adult: 'King David and King Solomon led merry, merry lives / With far too many concubines and far too many wives.' But as time went on and they 'felt old age's qualms / Then Solomon he wrote Proverbs and David he wrote Psalms.' This makes sense, even if few Renaissance readers thought that David composed his songs after he grew old: hymns, Jewish and, later, Christian equivalent of Orphic and Homeric hymnody, may crown a worldly career here, win an immortal garland later.

208 Anne Lake Prescott English poets did not have to wait for Du Bartas to see this dynamic at work in France. Joachim Du Bellay had anticipated Urania in praising biblical poetry. More than Du Bartas he imagines it as a shift, a palinode: 'I, who so often have sung a fleshly muse/ he writes in 'La lyre chrestienne' (1552), a poem bearing comparison with 'L'Uranie/ now 'elevate my voice to sound the eternal muse.' If the old Greeks and Romans sang the glory of false gods, would we not be more inhuman than they to be silent about the true God? Du Bellay's metaphors present this turn to biblical poetry spatially, as a shift in a path, a 'career' in the old Roman sense of a racetrack, and as a flight: false poets have left the 'droict sender/ the straight path, for a winding one, a 'carriere tortueuse/ drinking in a merely temporal 'favour' and the 'familiar vanity' in a crowd of courtiers. The muses now seem like chattering parrots (an intriguing remark from a writer who had written so notably on imitatio in his Defense et Illustration). May he be a swan, flying audaciously with divine help to the skies and sing God's immortal praise. Du Bellay's own major effort at divine poetry appears in the same volume as the 'La Monomachie de David et de Goliath/ one of many Renaissance poems on David the giantkiller. And his 'Hymne Chrestien/ which forswears 'vain sighs and vain songs/ toys with the notion of writing not an Odyssey or Iliad but an 'Israelide.'5 Six years later Du Bellay published his major works: two sonnet sequences on Rome and a book of secular lyrics (as well as neo-Latin love poems to 'Faustina'). A poetic cursus can have U-turns as well as bends. One good way to forsake lesser work for divine poetry was to translate or imitate the Psalms. As George Sandys was to put it in prefatory lines to his Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David (1636): Our graver Muse from her long Dreame awakes, Peneian Groves, and Cirrha's Cave forsakes Inspir'd with zeale, she climes th'Aethereall Hills Of Solyma, where bleeding Balm distills; Where Trees of Life unfading Youth assure, And Living Waters all diseases Cure, Where the Sweet Singer, in Coelestiall Laies, Sung to his solemn Harp Jehovah's Praise. Renaissance psalmody, however, had its own context, one that affected how imitating David might feel to any writer thinking about genre and the shape of a poetic career. One important shift in biblical exegesis

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 209 had led to a tendency further to politicize the Psalms. Witness the Geneva Bible's polemical headnotes and marginalia. Thanks to commentary that built - overbuilt - on older Hebrew titles and headnotes, the psalms were read very specifically, although not chronologically, in terms of David's life as recorded in 1 and 2 Samuel.6 Not everybody ascribed all the Psalms to him, although many did think him the author in some sense of the entire Psalter. Moreover, it could be argued that as a prophet who spoke in the person of Christ he was to some extent free from what we would call spacetime as we ordinarily know it. And, said some, none of this matters since the real author is God. Because most Bibles and commentaries available to English Protestants so closely tied the Psalms to David's biography, readers could deduce the shape of his poetic career. Or they could have done so had his career had a discernible shape. David had a career, but not in the terms we often associate with Virgil, Ovid, Ronsard, or Spenser. Because David began as a shepherd boy, it is tempting to read him as a pastoral poet. For the most part, though, the Renaissance David was a royal poet whose taste in genres and topics shows no evolution: before his accession he was a courtier poet (if often in exile or on the run) and after coming to the throne a writer with many moods - elegiac, penitent, grateful, awed, anguished - but always a king, albeit a threatened, sinful, and pressured one. Unlike Ovid he was an exile early in life; unlike Ronsard he wrote only one love poem, Psalm 45, and even that was thought allegorical; unlike Spenser he began with religious poetry; and unlike Virgil he became his own Augustus. Indeed, his royal status, said some, showed the legitimacy of poetry. Hence Francis Quarles's epigram on David in Divine Fancies: Stands it with State, that Princely David, who Did weare the Crown, should play the Harper too? He playes and sings; His glory nere disdaines To dance, and to receive a Crowne for's paines: Tis no disparagement, 'tis no misprision Of State, to play before the Great Musition.

(sig M3v) David the 'sacred Psalmograph/ R. Robinson told Christopher Hatton in 1591, is the 'Patrone, of singers,' which in Elizabethan English means both patron and pattern.7 Unlike all other poets except the biblical, moreover, David's voice is

210 Anne Lake Prescott inherently multiple: human, historical, and individual, it is also the voice of Christ and, when recited or translated with the grace of God, the voice of the reader or imitator. To write divine poetry by following David is to entangle oneself in a knot of identities, voices, selves, for which we have no adequate vocabulary. What imitating him does not do, and here writing like David is profoundly different from writing like Virgil or even Ovid, is to join a famous author in a known career. There is no 'rota Davidica/ What one can do, however, is to turn from sonnets or minor pastoral to religious lyric, or - to describe the pattern a little differently - to move beyond epic, the poetry of dynastic or heroic praise, to the poetry of divine praise (following Jewish tradition, the Psalter was regularly interpreted as the 'Book of Praises'). One could, that is, fly off from the Virgilian wheel, like a stone from David's whirling sling, into some higher flight unknown even to Orpheus, Hesiod, or the Homer of the hymns. If David can indeed outdo Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and the others, then a pious poet - or an ambitious one - would be wise to venture out past pagan hymnody into divine poetry (although in terms of the history of genre, some said, religious hymns were the first poetic 'kind').8 But the instability of the Psalms' own generic status dents or tangles any smooth curve from minor kinds to inspired praise of God or even the justification of His ways to man. The Psalms, everybody agreed, have enormous variety and together make some sort of sequence (although comments to this effect are elusive). But what sorts of poetry did David write? George Wither's Preparation to the Psalter (1619) notes that the Psalms 'consist of divers kinds of Poesie; to wit, Heroicall, Tragicall, Pastorall, Satyricall, etc/9 That 'etc.' covers a lot of generic territory. In any case, there was a widespread conviction that whatever one might admire in secular poetry is there in David, and better. Indeed whatever one might find in the rest of the Bible is present, epitomized, in this single book. The Huguenot Peter Palladius's Introduction into the bookes of the prophets and apostles (1598), translated by Edward Vaughan, provides a helpful list of what the Psalms include: history, law, promises, faith, consolation, and repentance. No wonder Francis Quarles, in Divine Fancies (1632), could endow David with multiple muses (although some might object that he hardly needed them): Who ever sung so high, so rapt an lo As David prompted by heroick Clio? But when thy more divine Urania sung,

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 211 What glorious Angell had so sweet a tongue? But when Melpomene began to sing, Each word's a Rapture, or some higher thing: Sweet were thy triumphs; sweet those joyes of thine; O, but thy Teares were more then most Divine.

(sig. Z4v) The progression itself is intriguing: from epic (Clio, muse of history, here seems to be in charge of praise and heroics) to Uranian hymn, to complaint, to shouts of celebration and, finally, to lamentation - presumably the penitential Psalms. Quarles also knows that David wrote movingly on the dead, composing his own terse version of David's 'epitaph' for Jonathan (sig. I2v; see 2 Samuel 19-27, translated as prose in English Bibles). Some might sooner call David's powerful lines on Jonathan and Saul an elegy, for it has what feels like stanzas and a refrain. Nehemiah Rogers, whose Strange Vineyard in Palaestina (1623) includes a sophisticated if moralistic discussion of poetry and allegory, calls it a 'funerall Song or Epitaph' (1632 ed., sig. C4). He adds that David wrote 'Odes and Hymnes to God ... to the honour of God in various kindes of Verse.' Was David ever known as a shepherd poet? As I have said, few Renaissance exegetes imagined him writing the extant Psalms while tending his father's sheep, although presumably - in the Renaissance understanding of his career - he sang many songs now lost. As far as the Psalter is concerned, though, David was not Corydon or Colin, and pictures of him as a singer routinely show him with a crown as well as a harp. Perhaps the very notion of a Christian poet's post-Virgilian development contributed to the belief that although as a man David began as a shepherd, as a poet he wrote his surviving religious poetry later in life. Compare William Vaughan's praise of those poets who had 'Cloz[ed] their Feast with Healths from Sions Fount/ as he said of Beza's turn from risque neo-Latin epigrams to Psalmody.10 David's early life as a shepherd doubtless affected how many read his poetry and the metaphors they used. Theodore Beza's verse epistle to the 'little flock' of the faithful that prefaces an edition of the Psalms (1553) tells kings to hear a king and clerical pastors to hear the pipe of a shepherd.11 But David's early experience with husbandry provoked more political and ecclesiastical than literary commentary. The clergy had of course long been called shepherds - pastors - who serve both their parishioner sheep and the Good Shepherd, Christ. David's early

212 Anne Lake Prescott role encouraged such language in advice to those in power, metaphors carrying particular weight - and irony - when the monarch was for some reason, such as a talent for poetry or the experience of persecution or exile, plausibly compared to David.12 The relevance to rulers could be ambiguous, however. One good example of how David's pastoral experience could generate both comparison and contrast is a Lenten sermon on Psalm 77, verse 20 ('Thou diddest lead thy People like Sheepe'), that Lancelot Andrews preached before Elizabeth on 24 February 1590. Just as God 'leads' us, says Andrews, neither seducing nor forcing us, the good governor is no mere rustic shepherd - which of course is just what David had been - but rather resembles the Great Shepherd, the Prince of Shepherds. A country shepherd's job is easy: all he must do is keep his sheep 'from goring another with their homes, and one from eating up the others locke of hey,' whereas the 'great' shepherd must make sure 'that they be in good plight, that they be led in the way of truth' (XCVI Sermons, 1635 ed., sigs Bbl-Bb4). This is not to say that the genres with which Renaissance readers associated the Psalter never included the pastoral. After all, the most famous pastoral lyric in all literature is Psalm 23, 'The Lord is my shepherd.' Thomas Jackson, the canon of Canterbury whom I have quoted on David's superiority to Homer and Orpheus, understandably calls his set of seven sermons on it 'Davids Pastorall poeme or Sheepeheards Song' (1603). Jackson's understanding of David as a pastoral poet does not, though, include a sense of the divine poet's career, for he is at pains to stress that the author, who scorned to write 'vain, light, and foolish ballads' (sig. B2, a comment that like so many of its kind is as much about social class as about genre), composed this poem when he was at the peak of his kingly prosperity (sig. 16). Precisely because he was now in a position to lead his people in peace, says Jackson, he now wrote about God as a shepherd, for kings should be shepherds who can make us to lie down in the green pastures of rest, just as has Elizabeth (sig. F4V). By locating the Psalm so late in David's career Jackson precludes the sort of Virgilian path that invited Renaissance poets like Spenser or Milton. Yet Virgil is not missing from these sermons, for after praising Elizabeth he exclaims, 'O bona si sua norint Angli.' This is a version, modified for his own nation, of line 458 in Virgil's second Georgic, the one that praises the happiness of the Italian countryside and wishes its inhabitants the good fortune to know how lucky they are: 'O fortunatus nimium, sua si bona norint.' Unquestionably, other traces of Virgilian pastoral or georgic haunt other treatments of the Psalms. When Clement Marot urges the 'ladies

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 213 of France' to bring back the age of gold by singing the Psalms he may expect them to remember Ovid, but surely he also recalls the golden age of Virgil's fourth, 'Messianic/ eclogue, long read by Christians as anticipating the birth of Christ, the Good Shepherd.13 The allusion looks forward as well as back, though, for this will be a restoration, a paradise regained. To a Christian pastoralist, that is, the Virgilian rota or cursus can indeed make a circle, turning at last to a beginning that is both a recovery and the discovery in some wished-for tomorrow of pastures new, a rotation from Eden to God's great pastoral time when his sheep - if not his goats - may safely rest in his peaceable kingdom. Beginning with pastoral, a Christian poet can end, like a more coherent and reputable Falstaff, babbling of green fields. A related dynamic explains the prettiest picture I know of David as a pastoral poet: the title page of Wither's Preparation. David is hardly a solitary piper, to be sure, with only his sheep and a nymph or two, or maybe a boy or a rival, around to hear him. He makes music in the midst of a crowd of people and animals with sea animals in the distance and heavenly harmony above. The royal Psalmist, in this lovely picture that despite the absence of once fearsome animals recalls Isaiah as well as the golden age, plays on behalf of humanity, perhaps on behalf of all creation, his crown and sceptre set humbly on the ground beside him. And others (we his readers, perhaps) play too. Pastoral poets could also consider David good company simply because he had once shared their personas' line of work. In Francis Sabie's Pans pipe (1595) the shepherd Damon remembers David, although his crowd of pastoralists also includes Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and - correctly enough but a bit unexpectedly - the Trojan prince, Paris (who, it will be recalled, had spent some quality pastoral time on Mount Ida). Damon gives a quick synopsis of David's life: David sate with his heard, when as a Lyon huge And eke a Beare he slew, this little pretie swaine Kild a victorious and mightie champion, Whose words did make a king and al his host to feare And he ful many yeares raign'd over Israeli. Go to my merie Muse, sound out upon a pipe, Heardsmens antiquitie, and noble progenie.

(sig. D3) It remains relevant to the Renaissance sense of David's poetry that Damon's first mention of words comes only as the hero reaches the

214 Anne Lake Prescott battlefield and court. True, Sabie can elsewhere imagine young David making music. In his David and Bathsheba, when Nathan scolds David ('What hast thou done, O Psalmist blush for shame/ sig. F2v) he reminds the king that once 'thou wert a shepheardes boy' with russet coat and crook as he gathered nuts, played barley-break - a nice English touch - and tuned 'rude Odes upon an Oaten pipe/ Horrified, the royal penitent takes his harp and 'warbles out' an 'Ode': Psalm 51 (sig. Gl). David's poetry has evolved from ode to... ode. As Pindar might remind Anacreon, some odes are more equal than others.14 What other genres might one find in or make of the Psalms? Some poets found in the Psalter possibilities for that other genre with which a poet might start a career: the sonnet.15 What is striking in this regard is less the occasional translation of a Psalm into a sonnet (e.g., Mary Sidney Herbert's translation of Psalm 150) as hints that the entire Psalter is a coherent lyric sequence, one that contains, distributed throughout the Psalter but retrievable as a group, another sequence: the seven penitentials. As a model for later sequences the Psalter has been overshadowed by Petrarch's Rime, but that it was often read as a unified collection is clear. As religious poetry, psalmody is a fine way to move beyond epic into hymn; but as a lyric sequence the Psalter has a curious cousinship, formally, with sonnet sequences. It is not wholly astonishing that the first sonnet sequence in English, by Anne Lock (1560), comprises twenty-six sonnets based on Psalm 51.16 Nor was she alone in making David a sonneteer. In 1611 Matthew Lownes published a handsome little volume with the seven Penitential Psalms, Musica Sacra: to Sixe Voices. Composed in the Italian Tongue, by Giovanni Croce. Newly Englished. Lownes prints each sonnet, translated from the Italian of Francesco Bembo, on its own page, identifying the Psalm on which it is based, and on another page with its music. A preface says that so many have already admired the music that they should have the words too: the combination will then reach 'the intellectual Soule' and thus stir the affections. The Psalms, especially when taken as recording David's dramatic military, domestic, and political career, could also function as a sort of drama. It is not just that David, with or without Bathsheba or Absalom, was to be the subject of a number of early modern plays, as well as long poems: there are traces in the readers' response of a generic slippage from lyric to drama. A touching example is the comment of one J. (or I.) B. in his long Psalme of Mercy: or, a Meditation upon the 51. Psalme, by a true penitent (1625). After praising the Psalms in familiar terms (they are

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 215 an anatomy of the soul, good medicine, a 'sweete summe of all Scriptures/ and so forth), J.B. recounts with what seems like some awareness of Aristotle's Poetics that he had read the Psalms with delight, for there 'David his pangs and passions, are lively described, with a kinde of pitifull delight, and pleasing regret, as men behold Tragedies on a stage, and reade lamentable stories' (sig. A4; J.B. adds that he read them better after experiencing his own turmoil).17 David's poetry also has traces of the epyllion (aside from the erotic Psalm 45), for Ps. 51 records his repentance after Nathan allegorizes the king's love affair with Bathsheba in a quasi-pastoral fable of the shepherd who takes his neighbour's one ewe lamb. Nathan's confrontation is stern indeed, but many artists and poets were to see the sensuous possibilities in describing David's gaze at Bathsheba bathing and the lust that followed. Even repentance can be sensual, almost physically pleasurable, especially in a culture that relished the discourse of lamentation and tears. The Psalms are hardly a fragmented epyllion, but how they were traditionally read linked them closely to material that could be nudged into Ovidian territory.18 And into more than one Ovidian landscape, for as a penitent David reminded at least one reader, Thomas Jackson, of the Roman poet's sorrows in exile: 'If we compare Ovids elegie to the emperor Augustus [the margin cites Tristia 22] with that Psalme of David, (in number the 51.) why should wee thinke that the one was more conscious of misdemeanour towards that Monarch, or more sensibly certain of his displeasure procured by it; than the other of soule offences towards God, and his heavie hand upon him for them?'19 If the Psalms can be read as David's response to his experiences as courtier, exile, warrior, sinner, and king, they can by that same token be read as a fragmented epic.20 That the Psalms are traditionally a 'book of praises' hardly diminishes this epic potential. The Psalmist's life is the best dynastic story of all, for from the House of David issued Christ himself.21 Abraham Cowley's Davideis (1656), the epic that he himself says fits a career modeled 'after the Pattern of our Master Virgil' (even as he defends this reach for 'Sacred Fame' with arguments found in Du Bartas's 'L'Uranie' and adds some digs at Spenser), follows 1 and 2 Samuel. But, as Timothy Dykstal notes in a fine article exploring the reason for the poem's partial failures, Cowley's David is also the poet of the Psalms. The Renaissance David was, I would add, a hero with a particularly knowable interiority. Had this David sulked in his tent like Achilles or sailed away from Dido like Aeneas he would have left

216 Anne Lake Prescott poetry expressing his torment or regret. Such access to the mind of his hero did not make Cowley's poem better, but it must have added to David's attraction as a hero, especially if, as some believe, Cowley's age saw a sharpened subjectivity and sense of an inward self.22 In sum, even if not itself epic, the Psalter is one cause of epic in others. My point in making this survey of David's generic range, real or supposed (and some of the variety is merely a matter of labelling), is that although imitating the Psalms is certainly an exercise in writing 'divine poetry,' knowing just how such poetry fits a ranking of genres - aside from the very fact of its 'divinity' and hence its suitability as alternative to secular poetry or as the culmination of a career - is not easy. Also necessary to notice, for human motivation is never simple, is the mixture of secular and devout hopes that often impel a turn to biblical verse. To sing like David can be an act of religious devotion, it goes without saying, and there is much in David's career and Psalms that might, if logically pursued, discomfit those committed to social hierarchy or hereditary monarchy. Nevertheless, Renaissance divine poetry like the Psalms as then read - is written in a culture dominated by courts, universities, and the established church, none of them an egalitarian institution. A divine poet can thus assume a complicated relation to power: to political power, which can make a poet bend at the waist to his superiors, but also to power as cosmic energy, which can elevate him or her above mere magnates. David himself, said tradition, had a more than rhetorical energia, a semimagical effectiveness that might not animate trees, attract dolphins, or raise city walls, but that could, famously, lighten the murderously insane moods of Saul by harping to him.23 The 'effects' of his song involved now lost metres and musical harmonies (perhaps more a matter of mathematical proportions and intervals than of polyphony or chords) that parallel and participate in the forces and forms God himself used when making the cosmos according to number, weight, and measure.24 Indeed, says Virgilio Malvezzi in David Persecuted (1637), if we could only recover David's techniques we could use them instead of drugs when we are ill and consult musicians rather than doctors (sigs B12-C1). Such 'effects' are also suggested by John Cosyn's Musike of Six, and Five paries. Made upon the Common Tunes used in Singing of the Psalmes (1585), songs that the dedication to Walsingham says will replace less godly ones and help us 'make melodie to God in our harts.' The title-page has a familiar cast of musicians: Apollo and the defeated Marsyas, Mercury, Arion on his appreciative

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 217 dolphin, and Orpheus. True, Cosyn stoops to asking Walsingham, Tatrone of godlines/ for 'protection' (sig. A2). But the David he presents has a power no ordinary monarch, or Sir Francis for that matter, can wield. When an author writes divine poetry, then, he taps a force more available to writers than to rulers. The trouble for Renaissance poets who might flatter themselves with this thought was that some early modern monarchs, not least James I, were also poets or musicians and several others, like Francis I and Elizabeth I, could claim to have undergone sufferings analogous to David's. Such a monarch might offer a divine poet fellow feeling. But perhaps not: one problem for a court psalmist like Clement Marot, say, or even the much better positioned Sidneys was that even Davidic monarchs have a way of turning into Sauls and must be handled carefully. For the remainder of this essay I will examine three texts that show how problematic, or at least multidirectional, a move to divine poetry can be. My examples are by Marot, whose services to God and king at times coincided but at other times were so at odds that the poet nearly lost his life (even though, until nearly the end, he was still writing for the court); by Du Bartas, whose 'L'Uranie' accelerated the vogue for divine poetry; and by George Wither, who hoped to gain favour and fame by leaving satire and pretty love poetry for hymns and Psalms but who first fell prey to discouragement ant then managed to enrage the printing industry. How these three treat divine poetry does not exhaust its possibilities; they do show that leaving a secular career path could lead a poet through briars and rocks, along a highway to the palace, or to not much of anywhere. Of all courtier poet/psalmists the one with the most David-like troubles is Clement Marot, whose reputed 'Lutheranism' (some scholars call him 'evangelical') got him into periodic trouble with those who read his Psalms as further evidence of heterodoxy. I have already quoted his serious yet gallant poem to the ladies of France on restoring the golden age. Marot's ventures and adventures made him both David and Ovid. At times, when in exile, he would construct Francis as a nicer Augustus and himself as in an Italian or Genevan Tomos. At other times he would write Francis in ways that are carefully self-positioning - Marot is a David, sort of, at the court of a fellow David who would never, ever be (but is) Saul. I have elsewhere traced some of the often poignant and sometimes dramatic turns of Marot's performance as a court poet and Psalmist; here I will simply recall that translating David

218 Anne Lake Prescott was a delicate matter at a court that valued his verse but periodically succumbed to spasms of anti-'Lutheran' anxiety.25 The paradoxes of singing like David in a court culture pressured by its own religious disagreements and aware of worse schisms elsewhere show particularly well in Marot's 1541 verse epistle to the king printed with his translations of thirty Psalms.26 The letter praises David in by now familiar terms: he is our equivalent of the great inspired pagans, with God his Apollo and the Holy Ghost his Calliope. He had no need to study, for drinking the waters of grace made him a poet at once ('en ung moment'). He is a better painter than Michaelangelo and teaches us a better love than Eros. In his poetry we will not find lying fables about the likes of Aeneas or Achilles. His verses are a medicinal garden. He soars above Horace as an eagle outflies a lark. Had not his harp mollified God's wrath and cured King Saul's madness? If Orpheus had heard David's lyre, he would have hung his own on some tree ('La sienne il eust a quelque arbre pendue'), Arion would have fallen silent, and Phoebus would have broken his instrument or at least stayed to hear and yielded up laurels with a will. Very gracious. But notice the stress on competition, on overgoing. This is not just the language of replacement, of giving readers an alternative to the sin and folly of secular poetry. The Psalms outfly, outdo, break lyres, outperform. In them lie true Eros, flight, and laurels. And with them a court poet may please a fellow David. It is the unease of writing for another David with Saulish tendencies that further energizes this poem. Praising Francis as a prophet-king given to the French by the same God who gave David to the Israelites is good courtiership, but it also hints at wishing for a more reformed and Gallican, less papist, French church. Similarly, Marot's praise of the 'bons espritz rusez,' the clever souls, who had explicated the Psalms after a long night of obscurantism, could not please those conservatives whom Francis too disliked (just as he disliked out-andout Protestantism) but could not afford to ignore and who considered Erasmian humanism a generator of heresy. This work, says Marot, is so royal and Christian that it belongs to Francis ('II se dit estre tien'), a rhetorical gesture that makes the translator and his king allies against those who ignorantly opposed vernacular Psalm translation. Indeed, Francis shares much with David, having undergone adversity, promoted learning, and composed deathless writings with the same hand that wields a sceptre. Since the translator of these Psalms is thereby in some regards a David too, and since God was willing to put a shepherd on a throne and change his crook to a sceptre

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 219 (making him 'de bergier en grand roy ... / Et sa houlette en sceptre luy changea') there are hints here of an equality, on some level, between court servant and royal master. Such are the subtleties of being a David writing to another David. The courage of Marot's only seemingly abject epistle comes in his allusions to those noble hearts needing the Psalms' consolation for jail, sin, care, loss, or opprobrium ('prison, peche, soucy, / Perte ou opprobre'). Francis might have asked himself, as despite its overt flattery this poem implicitly dares him to do, how he too had wounded those hearts, including the one inside Marot, by executing those who thought themselves good Christians and by harrying others or failing to protect them against calumny and prosecution. Marot was a significant poet, if one with an irrepressible talent for irony, and the Psalms came to mean more to him as he got older. Nevertheless, his contemporaries might be startled by the degree to which some now see his career as an evolution from secular to sacred, from Cupid to Christ.27 There is something suspiciously archetypal, if moving, about making Marot see the light like St Paul, give up indecent epigrams for psalmody like Beza, or transform himself from Apollo's to the true God's priest like Donne - something that even Donne did not quite do. Marot had begun his Psalm translations as a young man, and far from angering the court had at first pleased it, if not the resolutely conservative who found vernacular translation of the Bible worrying. If one of his modern editors, C.A. Mayer, is right about the late composition of some off-colour epigrams, moreover, this brave and devout poet went on being Marot. Two Marots. It takes nothing from his bravery and depth, or from his service to Huguenot Geneva, to think that he remained both a court and an anticourt poet. David had done the same. It remains true that Marot's interest in religious poetry grew with the years. Du Bartas, though, found fame early with his divine poetry: his manifesto, 'L'Uranie,' was accompanied by an allegorical Triumph of Faith' in the style of Petrarch's Trionfi, and a minor epic on Judith's bloody way with Holofernes. Then, a few years later, came a long hexameral poem, La Sepmaine (1578), and its sequel La Seconde Sepmaine (1584 et seq.), an unfinished epic on Israelite history from Adam on. These were, mostly in Joshua Sylvester's translation, immensely popular in England. The English also knew that Du Bartas, an aristocrat, was a friend of his fellow Gascon, Henry of Navarre and, as an international VIP, had been James VI's house guest in Scotland; he and the king traded translations: Du Bartas took on Lepanto, and James did 'L'Uranie.' Passing up trifles and fictions can get a man fancy friends and invita-

220 Anne Lake Prescott tions. It can even get him a part in a play as a king's sidekick, for Du Bartas has a few lines as Navarre's friend 'Bartus' in Christopher Marlowe's Massacre at Paris. True, it may or may not be a compliment to appear in a play that seems to waver between pro-Huguenot propaganda and sceptical distaste for all sides. Eventually Sylvester's works, including his translation of 'L'Uranie/ appeared in a magnificent volume with an elegant title page, prefatory anagrams, shaped poems, liminary encomia - a royal performance staged for royalty. Poetry, and in this volume primarily divine poetry, has indeed found its place in a prince's palace. The shepherds in Spenser's October eclogue would be impressed. Some Christians - the editors of the Geneva Bible's Psalms, for example, or even Spenser - might be impressed and yet suspect that Philotime, glory-loving inhabitant of Mammon's house in Book II of The Faerie Queene, is here somewhere, mingling with the crowd of royals and swells. In the 'Aprill of mine age/ young Du Bartas says in 'L'Uranie,' he had been thirsting for literary fame.28 What genres to try? Or, to use his spatial metaphor, which path should he take up Parnassus? Tragedy in the Greek manner? Or, in yet loftier accents, an epic on the gigantomachia? French history? How about 'with fawning Pen to praise / Th'un-worthy Prince; and so, with gold & glorie / T'inrich my Fortunes, and my Fate to raise / Basely to make my Muse a Mercenarie' (these socially squeamish lines contain a reminder that Du Bartas was a nobleman whose muse could afford to work pro bono). And there is always love poetry. At this point Jove's daughter Urania arrives, lovely in her fancy headgear with its seven metals representing the seven planets. She urges him not to abuse her sisters by writing filthy and false love poetry, praising the world's Caligulas and Neros (in 1574 this must mean the Valois dynasty), writing bad religious poetry, or relying on fictions. Something of a Neoplatonist, and so offering a way to bypass tradition and imitatio, Urania announces that great poets are inspired. Witness Homer, Ovid, and that 'Shepheard, turned poet,' David. So if Du Bartas wants a 'Laurell Crown / Where's possible a richer Theam to take / Then his high praise, who makes the Heav'vns goe round / The Mountains tremble, and dark Hell to quake?' Here is that copia so necessary in rhetoric and poetics: this 'subject is a deep, broad bound-lesse Ocean, / Th'aboundant Horn of Plentifull discourse; / the Magazin of wealth for Wits quick motion; / Of divine Eloquence th'immortal source.' Yes, her sisters can 'warble well,' she says, adopting the ancient avian metaphor for poetry, and 'ravish millions with

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 221 their Madrigals/ But compared to her they are magpies to Sirens (often winged in Renaissance imagery), or geese to nightingales. With her help, Du Bartas's pen can 'soar' to heaven and he can win 'eternall bayes.' Or, as she puts it later in the poem, he should take the silver Dove of the Holy Spirit as his winged Pegasus and on that ride to the skies. So far, so clear: transcend secular genres, avoid the trashy stuff that too many modern poets write (some of whom sound like the Pleiade poets), compose biblical verse, and win eternal glory. But there are some curious aspects to Urania's advocacy. Du Bartas may be a divine poet, but what he writes is not so unambiguous, stable, or devoid of overtones that we can simply take it straight. His language, like all language, has swirls of contradiction, subtlety, ambivalence, perversity, even incoherence.29 To begin with Urania, a pagan fiction who rejects pagan fictions and clearly knows her Plato and Horace as well as her Bible, has been speaking with 'ninefold voice.' Unless this refers to all possible celestial spheres, this probably means that she speaks for her sisters as well as for herself (much as David's poetry includes all genres). But we need not take what she says as simply duplicating Du Bartas's literary theory. Whatever her compression of her siblings into a whole encyclopedia or full-scale museum, her preferences are what one would expect from the muse in charge of stars and divine poetry. A Huguenot Clio, say, might advocate writing the history of the St Bartholomew Massacre, and Melpomene might mourn that terrible night in her own tearful manner. 'L'Uranie' is a defence of Du Bartas's own generic choices, but Urania is not the only daughter of memory. Despite her vocal range, what she sees is in its way as monocular as is, say, Skelton's 'Bowge of Court,' which gives us Dread's view of politics, or Sackville's 'Induction,' which sadly shows us what Sorrow sees. To judge from his praise of such poets as Homer, Ronsard, and Sidney in his Premiere Sepmaine's 'Babylon' Du Bartas knew perfectly well that other muses, with other jobs to do, were worth hearing.30 More to the point of an essay on divine poetry as a career move, Urania's views suit a court culture better than had, say, Anne Lok's sonnet sequence, and are not unworldly. Indeed, Urania omits one powerful reason to write divine poetry: to please God. She never suggests, as Milton was to do in 'Lycidas/ that for some would-be poets fame might have to wait for the 'perfect witness of all-judging Jove.' She never suggests that one might need to choose between God and kings, although as a Huguenot Du Bartas can hardly have had any

222 Anne Lake Prescott illusions on that score. What she does stress is fame, knowledge, power, and access to the great. Divine poets sing in 'lasting Numbers' of 'Heavn's & Nature's secret works.' God's politic courtiers, they are in the know: 'Secretaries of the Heav'nly Court.' The sheer power Urania grants is also worth noting. In part this is a matter of those mysterious 'effects' produced by such musician poets as Orpheus. (Urania says her poets can 'quicken stones' as well as draw us by the ears - an allusion to the Gallic Hercules, often pictured with chains coming out of his mouth.) But as Urania describes it, this power is nearly sexual, effecting a reproduction of the poet's very identity. The divine poet affects the reader like seal printing itself on wax, impressing 'so deep his passions in his Reader's Ghost, / That oft th'Reader th'Authors form receiveth.' The same could be said, ran the medical theory of the time, of sights that affect the fetus in a woman's womb or of the male seed that is to the female 'matrix' as form is to matter. Urania's divine poet, perhaps because of his vital heat, is very male. And, like that of any male, his phallic energy is both creative and dangerous. Note the metaphors: Tor, Verse's vertue, sliding secretly / (By secret Pipes) through th'intellectuall Notions; / Of all that's pourtraid artificially [i.e., artfully] / Imprinteth there both good and evill motions.'31 That is why, says Urania with less than entire truth - a sophistry Sidney's Defense will repeat - Plato banished 'poetasters.' Divine poets will be popular ('All would admire your Rymes, and do you honour') and noticed by kings ('Majestic would make you wait upon-her / To manage Causes of the most import'). Inspiration from God, applause from the public, favour at court, and even self-cloning power over the reader. What more could a poet ask? In the 1570s Urania's sisters, magpies and geese or not, went on inspiring secular song, but it is further evidence of divine poetry's ambiguous relation to the secular world that toward the end of his life Ronsard, never one to turn a blind eye to fashion, toyed with the thought of writing biblical poetry. Whether from the piety often attendant upon knowing that the grave beckons or from a speculation that France's cultural climate was about to take a new turn, in 1586 he began a poem, never finished, telling Henry of Navarre, 'illustrious' prince of the 'race Bourbonne' and by now probable future king of France, that this poem offers no raging loves or frivolous thoughts but rather the story of Moses leading the Israelites.32 Ronsard had come to dislike Du Bartas's poetry, but he too could hear Urania. More of a genuinely Christian poet than sometimes thought, Ronsard had written some impressive philosophical poetry,

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 223 some scorching anti-Huguenot polemics, and 'Hercule Chrestienne' [1555], a long comparison between Hercules and Christ saying that it is now time to sing Christian verse to rejoice Christian ears. But over the decades Ronsard had done little or nothing with 'divine poetry' in Urania's sense. Now, contemplating his own sunset and/or Navarre's rising sun, he seems to have thought that indeed it might be time. Renaissance divine poetry was, then, both an alternative to secular literature and a means of ascent to something new when the pastoral greenery withers,Venus grows cold, or the sounds of epic battle fade. One need not even wait until old age's qualms, though, for even at the start of a poetic career divine poetry can bring laurels and favour. And yet, as David himself knew, life near kings can bring disillusion. Some who wrote divine poetry or translated the Psalms had yet another concept of divine poetry. In a culture that inevitably imagined God as a king, it was consoling to remember that in His court, the one beyond all this dying and suffering, this envy and grasping, patronage would go to the deserving, good poets would not provoke calumny, and the faithful would never be subject to what Marot once called his king's 'oeil obscur,' that darkened eye that can spell death. When an earthly career sours, one can sweeten one's thoughts by contemplating that court that puts all earthly ones in the shade. That, at least, is what George Wither thought.33 So I end this study of the ambiguities of divine poetry as a career move with his vision of a court as a divine poet might long to find it: flowing with favour, honour, recognition, and clarity. As a young poet, says James Doelman in an exceptionally useful essay, Wither had hinted at a Virgilian or Spenserian poetic career for himself. He never did manage a traditional epic, although Britain's Remembrancer (1628), a long work on the plague, has heroic as well as prophetic and denunciatory elements. By 1620 or so, however, he had written many of what one might call the starter genres: an elegy for Prince Henry dedicated to Robert Sidney with stanzas in the now depasse sonnet form; an epithalamion; satire in the no longer very fashionable 'whipper' style; epigrams that for some reason landed him in Marshalsea prison (from which he was released thanks, probably, to William Herbert); pastorals penned in jail after he was finally allowed paper and ink; and love poems, including the proto-Cavalier 'Shall I wasting in despair.' It was time for something more elevated. For a while Wither tried divine poetry, publishing his Juvenilia (1622) while working on his Psalms and hymnody as though indicating that such

224 Anne Lake Prescott frivolity was now behind him. Still to come were a lovely book of emblems, his quasi-epic poem on the plague, more religious hymns and odes, tracts, and during the Civil War, panegyrics and more tracts. With the Restoration it was back to jail, this time the Tower, but he was eventually released and Wither died a free man. Doelman persuasively sees in Wither's career an effort to reconcile the roles of laureate poet and admonitory prophet (277-8), ascribing the turn to divine poetry in part to knowledge that James I liked it. Indeed, James gave Wither a license to append his appealing Hymnes and Songs of the Church (1623) to editions of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, a notoriously dreary work that Wither's metrically varied hymnal would have in fact much enlivened. What looked to an author like royal favour, though, looked like royal interference to the infuriated Stationers, who (Wither claims in his Schollers Purgatory, 1624) succeeded in making Hymnes and Songs a commercial failure. Urania thus did give Wither a laurel leaf or two, but not many, and despite James's action on behalf of Hymnes and Songs she never made him a king's confidant. Perhaps Wither's heart was not in his efforts to approach royalty. Cordially disliking the favourites and courtiers around James, although apparently not the royal family itself, and eventually to take parliament's side in the Civil War, Wither read David in anticourt terms even as he imagined God as a monarch with a court. As I have said, to do so was common in the Renaissance, but Wither was among the most strenuous, and I suspect angriest, of those who used the Psalter as a way of courting kings here below and evoking a better political system, but not a different political system, up above.34 In 1619 Wither published his Preparation to the Psalter, without much originality but with learning and energy, explaining the literary nature and value of the Psalms, their psychological and spiritual 'effects/ the relevance of their original but now lost musical settings, and much, much more. His hopes to publish an entire translation were to be long frustrated, but in 1620 came Exercises upon the First Psalme. Both in Prose and Verse (the title-page identifies Wither being 'Of the Societie of Lincolnes Inne'). How he treats the first of the poems he calls 'these unimitable Odes' (sig. Flv) beautifully illustrates the ambiguities of Christian poetic courtiership: divine poetry should please a king who has himself translated 'L'Uranie/ but earthly courts glow with corruption as well as glory. Nor is Wither reticent on his sense of grievance: 'Discouragements and hinderances, I have had many, since I began to meddle with the Psalmes. But helps, or encouragements, I have had

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 225 none; no, not the least part of one: save the comforts, which I have found, within mine owne heart' (p. 11). His preface to and verse paraphrases of this short Psalm show his talent for merging David with Jeremiah and Juvenal. Unlike Du Bartas's Urania, Wither's own 'heavenly muse' in Exercises offers not fame or glory but refuge as well as alternatives to 'trifling newes' of kings' and plutocrats' 'Counterfeit felicities.' In this world, 'Kings, in their awfull thrones of Soveraignty; / And uncontrould prerogatives delight: / The Courtier, sooths up them in vanitie; / And thinkes it heaven, to be their Favourite' (sig. 17). Nor does Wither admire imperialism: Those Princes, that have largest kingdomes got, Are never quiet, whilst there doe remaine Some other Emperies which they have not: Nay, if they might, the next, and next obtaine Till they had all.

(sig. I7v) God's court is very different, and it is there that a divine muse can lead us. So 'Let Kings of Earth; affect an earthly Crowne. / Let Courtiers at the Court attend their Fates. / And whilst they catch the bubbles of renowne; / Let fooles; still wonder, at their happy states.' David has taught Wither's muse that she can feed us with 'Angels foode' and make us 'richer, then old Adam was.' In her realm You, shall be deere unto the saints above, And into fellowship with Angels grow. Where you shall love, and be belov'd of all; Without (the least) distrust, or Jelousie ... You shall be Favorites, to that great Prince, To whom, Earths greatest Monarks are but slaves. Such wished honours, She shall bring you to, As Kings can neither give; nor take away. We reach this court, a royal court and a court of equity like Star Chamber or the court of Mercilla in Faerie Queene V, not by 'strength' or 'policie' - so much for Machiavelli's lion and fox - but by David's path (sigs I8v-Kl). And in his paraphrase of the fifth verse ('Therefore the Ungodly shall not stand in the Judgement, nor Sinners in the Congrega-

226 Anne Lake Prescott tion of the Righteous') Wither tells us more about what we find there: true justice in a court where wealth, rank, beauty, flattery, and bribes win no favour and crowns cannot decay: In his Grand Court of Justice; he admits, No subtill Travers, no Demurs, Repeales, Delayes, Injunctions, neither any Writs Of Error, nor Excuses, nor Appeales. No bribed Favorites, hath Hee to raise, By motions at his Bar: On him, attends No Groomes, nor Kinsmen, that his Lordship swayes: No great man sends his letters to entreat, To change his sentence; nor a costly fee... And when the Righteous, are assembled there: With, Come you Blessed. And at full possesse, (According to the promise, made them here) The joyfull Crowne of endlesse happinesse. (sigs L2v-L3) Divine poetry may crown a career, but for this frustrated psalmist it takes God to turn a Virgilian wheel into a crown worth having. Notes 1 First published in 1574, it was translated in 1584 by James VI, in 1589 (into Latin) by Robert Ashley, and in 1606, by Joshua Sylvester; John Lumley owned an MS English version, made before 1609, given him by 'Sir William Herberte,' although which Herbert is unclear; see my French Poets and the English Renaissance 179. Educated Renaissance Christians must sometimes have known that the gender of God's 'spirit' is ambiguous in the Hebrew Bible. Hence at the start of Milton's Paradise Lost the Holy Spirit can both 'brood' over the waters, like a female dove, and make it pregnant, like a male. Wisdom literature, too, gendered divine sapience as feminine. This aspect of an otherwise all-male Trinity may matter for divine poetry, especially granted the popularity of Judith and Susanna as topics. 2 Campbell 125. 'Ympes' seems a noun, although 'to imp' in this context would mean to add feathers to a bird's wing, hence to make a feather/ plume/pen fly higher. On avian symbols, see the book most relevant to this essay: Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight. For another chicken, see Du

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 227

3

4

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

Bartas's comparison of the spirit of God that did 'brood upon this Gulph: with care paternall / Quickning the Parts' to 'a Henne that faine would hatch a brood' (see Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Sylvester I: 120). Milton kept the double gender but wisely changed the species. See also Malpezzi. A Sermon upon Part of the Eighteenth Psalm, sig. X4. The context is an extended comparison of Elizabeth to David, including their shared ability to restore the value of their currency. Saul is played by Mary Tudor. To write biblical poetry in ways opposed by authority was to risk exile, prison, or worse. Some Christian poets might say that even when in safety they sing in a strange land (see Ps. 137) because the fallen world in which we travel/travail is, as Augustine put it so resonantly in Confessions VII.10, 'a land of unlikeness/ of difference (even differance). These poems are all found in Inventions de I'autheur, in volume 4 of Du Bellay's Oeuvres poetiques 137-44; 119-29; 111-18. See my 'Evil Tongues at the Court of Saul,' which cites some scholarship I ignore here. In his preface to a translation of A Proceeding in the Harmonie of King David's Harpe by Victorinus Strigelius (sig. A2). Strigelius praises what rhetoricians would call David's enargia, in ways derived from the Greek fathers and by now commonplace: e.g., the portrait of Christ in Psalm 22 (the Psalm Jesus quotes on the cross) shows more efficacy than Durer or Apelles in how it sets Christ's passion 'before our eyes' (sig. Bl). For words by Campanella and Puttenham to this effect, see Hardison ch. 4.; p. 96 quotes Jerome on David 'our Simonides, Pindar, and Alcaeus, our Horace, our Catullus, and our Sirenus all in one.' Sig. G4v. Vaughan, The Church Militant sig. B2v; such poets' 'ripe Fruite,' he adds, 'Ransom'd their Froth, and greener passages.' Sig. Z4, after praising King James for translating the Psalms so well that nobody now could call them 'Geneva jigs,' Vaughan scorns old 'tales' of 'St. Georges Launce, / Of Errant Knights, or the Fairy Daunce,' a remark that must allude to Spenser's epic but demotes it generically from epic romance to monkish legend or popular fiction, sending Spenser's career into reverse - to superstition and childhood. Marot, Cinquante pseaumes 321-5. The poem, which praises Marot's Psalms (together with Beza's own they made up the Huguenot Psalter), urges other poets to give up silly love poetry, false gods, and lies. He himself will make the foamy shores of Lake Geneva resound with God's praise. There may be an echo of Psalm 137 ('By the waters of Babylon'), for Beza,

228 Anne Lake Prescott born French, was harping in an alien city - and, it is also true, helping run it. 12 Francis I, a poet and a former prisoner of Charles V, could play David (there is a nice carving of David with the face and costume of Francis in Auch cathedral), but from time to time he could seem more like Saul to Marot's David, just as the more Elizabeth (another poet and ex-prisoner) was praised by preachers as David the more the preacher might look like Nathan. And Henry VIII, reformer, musician, and poet, was all too Davidic as a lover and a slayer of those in his way. 13 'Quand viendra le siecle dore / Qu'on verra Dieu seul adore ... ?' Marot's typically gracious poem tells the ladies to sing these songs of true love, not those of a more fugitive and unstable Eros, and imagines - as had translators before him - ploughmen, craftsmen, and shepherds singing these songs as they work (this golden age does not include the first one's idleness). So 'begin, ladies, begin - hurry along the age of gold in which fickle Cupid will fly away, giving place to the true God of changeless love' (Cinquante pseaumes 93-4). 14 Bloys's Meditations upon the 42 Psalme (1632) also imagines young David harping, for 'that leasure which shepheards have, he did not abuse it to wantonnesse and folly, as they were wont for the most part to doe, but being a cunning player on the Harp, and a divine Poet (that art of poetry having its beginning from shepeardes, as the song of Moses doth testifie) who formerly led the flock of Jethro, who at that time led the people like a flocke; Hee composed most heavenly and melodius pastorals in praise of his Creator. After that being lifted up by the right [hand?] of the Almighty (who loveth a cheerefull giver) and not by his owne pride ... he kept in tune still, and did more excell the best of his nobles in gratitude and zeale than in regall dignity' (sig. E12v). Bloys does not, however, identify the extant Psalms with these early songs. 15 Renaissance poets could think the love sonnet a beginner's genre, whatever the practice of those who continued writing or revising them (Petrarch, Drayton), published a sequence of them after forty (Spenser), returned to them after a pause (Ronsard), or waited some years to see them in print (Shakespeare). Ronsard explicitly attaches the love sonnet to the Virgilian rota, writing to J. de Boyssieres in 1578 that 'Virgile, pour essay, chanta sa Bucolique, / Puis le Troyen ^nee: ainsi premierement / Boyssieres a chante son Amoureux tourment, / Et ores son Hercul' d'un long vers heroique' (Oeuvres Completes, ed. Cohen 2: 944). 16 The sequence, printed with her translation of Calvin's Sermons on ... Ezechias, is available in The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, ed.

Divine Poetry as a Career Move 229

17

18 19

20

21

22

23

24

Felch. To Felch's fine introduction I would add that the sonnet sequence form, usually used for erotic purposes, is given more relevance by the biblical context regularly assigned Psalm 51: a king's sexual licence and abuse of power. In an extraordinary, almost Donne-like conceit, J.B. imagines David's sort of penitence as a physical engraved monument: even a layman, he says, can 'record his repentance, build his tombe of black-Marble, and erect it in the Temple of Gods people; that by looking upon the Ensignes, and reading the Epitaph, others may be mooved, as in Christian affection to condole with him, and so by a kinde of reflection to mourne for themselves' (sig.A6). See the helpful introduction to Frontain and Wojcik. Jackson, The Eternall Truth of Scriptures 31. These two books of commentary upon the Apostles' Creed include lengthy discussions of the nature and value of poetry and myth in which David appears as an exemplary poet; Jackson also notes engagingly that the Israelites, after emerging from the Red Sea 'as if they had beene baptised in a sacred Helicon, presently turned Poets.' In this regard they are a helpful model for, e.g., Du Bellay's Roman sonnet sequences: although explicitly (and humbly? tauntingly? amicably?) not the epic that Du Bellay knows Ronsard is supposed to be writing but having trouble getting on with, and despite their affiliations with Petrarchan desire and Ovidian tears, they are haunted by and evoke Virgil and Lucan. Allingham thinks David makes a poor epic hero, being a mere shepherd stripling, and shows amusingly how Drayton works around the biblical facts. So, I might add, does Du Bellay's Monomachie. But David's later career, as does much Israelite history, has fine epic possibilities. Dykstal quotes Harold Bloom contrasting David's 'autonomous ego' to Achilles' 'wavering vision of himself.' Maybe, but that 'autonomous ego' (if such a thing exists at all) would be more on display to anybody who assumed that the Psalms are all or mostly by David and that they refer to his epic (mis)adventures. John Fisher's Fruytfull Saynges of David (sig. Aa2v), to take one example, cites David's power to cure Saul's 'woodnes' by playing 'nobly upon the harpe' as one of God's gifts. Protestants and Catholics alike could agree on the Psalms' 'effects/ which is one reason for Renaissance efforts to translate the Psalms into quantitative metre - thought more likely to be 'effective' than vulgar rhyme. Some hoped the effects would help reconcile religious differences. For a moving

230 Anne Lake Prescott discussion of one such effort by a (Catholic) member of the Pleiade, J.-A. de Baif, see Bermingham. As Bermingham admits, Ba'if's reader is unlikely to feel 'effets theurgiques.' 25 See my 'Musical Strains.' 26 I follow the text in Cinquante pseaumes, ed. Defaux 95-9. 27 See, for example, Defaux's introduction to Cinquante pseaumes and essays in Defaux and Simonin. 28 My quotations from Du Bartas are from Sylvester's close translation, reprinted in his Complete Works, ed. Grosart 2:3-7. 29 Du Bartas has been getting more respectful attention from French critics. On the paradoxes of writing for God see, e.g., Monferran. 30 As for David, Du Bartas says his 'touch right cunningly / Combined with his voice drawes downe sweete harmony / From th'organized heav'ns, on Harpe that still shall sound / As long as daies great star shall ore our heads go round' (William Lisle's translation sig. H2). 31 Compare the metaphors from a later stanza: 'spend your Eloquence / In singing loud those holy Heav'nly Oracles; / Pour there your Soule's pure pretious quint-essence' (my italics). 32 Cohen 2: 666. 33 For a relevant study of yet other ways in which court poetics can relate to religious poetry, see Strier. 34 To think of heaven as a court was easy from biblical through early modern times but it is not in itself inevitable. Modern popular culture (e.g., the TV hit 'Touched by an Angel') can imagine heaven less as a court than as a benign, albeit undemocratic, bureaucracy.

NINE

'Novells of his d Chaucerian and Virgilian Career Spenser's Februarie E Patrick Cheney

Among Western writers treated in this volume, Spenser has become the career critic's poet. He has proved fertile in this discourse because he is Renaissance England's first 'laureate': a writer who breaks free from the 'amateur' mould of his generation to present himself with a complex literary career important to the nation.1 In 1579, Spenser self-consciously begins his career-presentation in The Shepheardes Calender, his inaugural collection of twelve pastoral eclogues, written nominally in imitation of Virgil, who had published his Eclogues before his didactic poem, the Georgics, and then his epic, the Aeneid. In the October eclogue (lines 5560), the young shepherd Cuddie narrates what Spenser's glossator, 'E.K.,' calls 'the three severall workes of Virgile' (197). In his Dedicatory Epistle, E.K. provides the Renaissance version of the Virgilian model as a critical lens for viewing the 'new Poete' (1), who chose eclogues to 'follow ... the example of the best and most auncient Poetes... at the first to trye theyr habilities: and as young birdes, that be newly crept out of the nest, by little first to prove theyr tender wyngs, before they make a greater flyght. So flew Theocritus ... Virgile ... Mantuane ... Petrarque ... Boccace ... Marot... Sanazarus ... whose foting this Author every where followeth' (158-73). Here E.K. authorizes Spenser's inaugural poem as a pastoral of progression: England's New Poet uses pastoral to represent his maturation from the lower genre to the higher one of epic.2 In 1590, Spenser announces his mastery of the Renaissance Virgilian career in order to open The Faerie Queene: Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,

232 Patrick Cheney Am now enforst a far unfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds. (The Faerie Queene I.Pr.l) While other writers on the Continent - Petrarch, for instance, or Boccaccio and Sannazaro - had written both a pastoral and an epic, Spenser was the first national poet to risk structuring the early and middle parts of his career strictly on the two-genre Virgilian model.3 Accordingly, critics have long recognized the Calender as a Virgilian pastoral in preparation for the epic Faerie Queene.4 Most criticism addressing the Virgilian dimension of the Calender, however, concentrates on either its considerable textual apparatus (title page; prefatory poem, To His Booke'; Dedicatory Epistle and The general argument; woodcut and Argument preceding each eclogue, with gloss closing each; Envoy) or on those eclogues treating the art of poetry: the five eclogues focusing on Spenser's persona, Colin Clout (Januarye, Aprill, June, August, November, December), and the one eclogue formally reflecting on the 'state of Poet' (October 97).5 In this conversation, critics have neglected Februarie, even though during the last twenty years historical criticism has recognized this eclogue's importance as a cultural document.6 In this essay, I suggest that we might profitably enter Februarie into the current conversation, because this eclogue is the first to complicate the Calender's Virgilian matrix through the superimposition of a Chaucerian matrix. During a dialogue, two shepherds, the older Thenot and the younger Cuddie, recall Tityrus,' whom E.K. curiously identifies not as Virgil but as 'Chaucer, whose prayse for pleasaunt tales cannot dye, so long as the memorie of hys name shal live, and the name of Poetrie shal endure' (282-4). The building of Chaucer as Tityrus into the narration of the eclogues formalizes a referential matrix that is literally afoot from the Calender's first line to its last. As is well documented, To His Booke' opens with a quotation from Troilus and Criseyde: just as Chaucer directs his poem, 'Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye' (V1786), so Spenser directs his, 'Goe little Booke: thy selfe present' (1). Similarly, the Calender's Envoy returns to this very passage from Troilus: as Chaucer tells his little book to 'kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace' (V.1791-2), so Spenser tells his, 'Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus hys style, / Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde a whyle: / But followe them farre off, and their high steppes adore' (9-11)7 Inside these two verse

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 233 bookends, both E.K. in his prose portion of the Calender and the anonymously named New Poet, 'Immerito' (Unworthy One), in his poetic portion continue to inscribe the Chaucerian matrix. To open his Dedicatory Epistle, for instance, E.K. paraphrases Chaucer's wording at Troilus 1.809 ('Unknowe unkist'): 'Uncouthe unkiste, Sayde the old famous Poete Chaucer:... whom our Colin clout in his Aeglogue calleth Tityrus the God of shepheards, comparing hym to the worthines of the Roman Tityrus Virgile' (1-15). In his glosses on the eclogues, E.K. recurrently draws attention to the New Poet's imitation of his great medieval master: 'sometime of Chaucer used' (Maye 382). For his own part, Immerito refers to Chaucer as Tityrus in two other eclogues (June and December), bringing his total narrative appearances to three. The representation in June is extended and important, for it presents Tityrus/ Chaucer as a love poet important to communal health: He, whilst he lived, was the soveraigne head Of shepheards all, that bene with love ytake: Well couth he wayle hys Woes, and lightly slake The flames, which love within his heart had bredd, And tell us mery tales, to keepe us wake, The while our sheepe about us safely fedde. (June 83-8) Tityrus's love poems were communally useful because he was able to both order his own desire and to move his fellow shepherds beyond idleness to public responsibility. While critics have long discussed the presence of Chaucer in the Calender, and even his conjunction with Virgil, no one has satisfactorily pursued the implication of Spenser's most peculiar and memorable representation: his calling Chaucer Tityrus.'8 By looking at the first narrative appearance of Tityrus in the Calender, we can discover a neglected conjunction between Virgil and Chaucer that I believe contributes an important chapter to the reception history on both of them. In particular, I argue that the Februarie eclogue qualifies not merely as a cultural document but also as a 'career document'; that it is as historically important as the frequently examined October (of which it is a photographic negative); and that its historical importance lies in its use of a versified dialogue between a young and an old shepherd, together with the latter's enclosed fable for the benefit of the former, to inventory and evaluate various career models available to the English poet in

234 Patrick Cheney the late sixteenth century. These models include the Virgilian 'laureate' model, the Elizabethan 'amateur' one, and a medieval model we will come to call the Chaucerian. Unique in the reception history of both poets in the English Renaissance, Februarie explains why Spenser assigns Virgil's persona to his native master: Chaucer, too, has a literary career organized around a set of generic practices important to the nation.9 Even though Februarie is only 350 lines long, it is especially useful in the present volume because it represents the historical relation between classical, medieval, and Renaissance literary careers. Section I below recalls the eclogue's dialogic narrative and reviews criticism on it in order to establish a baseline from which to gauge the above argument. Sections II and III then provide a historical context that informs a detailed analysis of Februarie's debate and fable, respectively, while Section IV offers a template for viewing Spenser's representation of fellow Elizabethan poets. Section V concludes by addressing the significance of this argument for a fuller mapping of Spenser's European career path. I

In Spenser's second eclogue, Cuddie complains of the harsh February weather, only to be rebuked by Thenot, who accuses Cuddie of laziness. Their dialogue quickly turns into a bitter argument between youth and age: Cuddie prefers the spring, when he can use his pipe to 'caroll of Love' (61), while Thenot prefers the winter, when he can sing 'a tale of truth' (91). Since the weather favours Thenot, he tells Cuddie a tale that he learned of Tityrus' in his youth, when 'that good old man' kept his sheep 'on the hils of Kent' (93-7).10 As E.K. observes in his gloss (286-9), the tale turns out to be an Aesopian fable of the Oak and the Briar, which purports to play out the youth-age debate to Thenot's advantage. The Briar grows 'Hard by [the Oak's] side' (115) yet complains of the Oak's ugly decay, vaunting his own beauty to their 'soveraigne' (163), a Husbandman, who cuts the Oak down. Without the tall tree's protection, however, the Briar soon withers and dies. When Thenot begins to moralize the tale, Cuddie interrupts him - 'Here is a long tale, and little worth' (240) - and commands the old shepherd simply to go home: 'the day is nigh wasted' (246).n From the late sixteenth century through the late twentieth, commentators found the Februarie eclogue to be a treasure to read. In 1586, William Webbe singled out its 'Sheepeheardes homelyst talke,' while in

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 235 the eighteenth century, Francis T. Palgrave remarked that "The tale of the Oak and Briar is told with great narrative clearness and liveliness of motion. We see here already that gift of story-telling which the Faerie Queene displays.' In the nineteenth century, William Hazlitt even called the fable 'as splendid a piece of oratory as any found in the records of the eloquence of the British senate.'12 Yet E.K. was the first to arouse suspicion that the eclogue might be more than an occasion for private pleasure. In his Argument, he insists that This Aeglogue is rather morall and generall, then bent to any secrete or particular purpose. It specifically conteyneth a discourse of old age.' Throughout the twentieth century, critics were inclined to interpret E.K.'s directive as a cover for allegorical meaning. As a collectivity, however, they have remained uncertain about what to make of the eclogue. In the recent summarizing words of The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, the dialogue with its fable 'obviously does "applie" to the dangerous milieu of Elizabethan political and religious life, though exactly how is no longer clear. It may simply be a broad allegory of competition for power at court, or it may allude to a specific set of events like the displacement of the Roman church by Elizabeth's Religious Settlement. There have been several proposals but no critical consensus.'13 Lack of critical consensus, nonetheless, has not impeded enterprising attempts to break what many have considered a lost allegorical code simply waiting to be cracked. Taking the cue of the Yale Edition, we might divide the many interpretations into two camps, each the result of isolated clues coded into Spenser's carefully hedged pastoral allegory, with both camps occasionally interrelated: the religious or theological; and the social or political.14 To these two long-standing camps, we can add a third one, which has emerged only recently and in intermittent form: the generic or literary, which suggests that Spenser might be representing more than religious or social disputes by enfolding into the eclogue a dispute between different poetics.15 The criticism of all three camps has taken us a long way down the path of interpretation. We now appear to agree that the eclogue represents a generational strife between Youth and Age, and most believe that this strife has both a religious context - the Reformation debate between Protestant and Catholic doctrines in the Church of England - and a political context - the Elizabethan debate between certain political factions at Queen Elizabeth's court (such as that between Leicester and Oxford). A few recent critics identify a literary context: the

236 Patrick Cheney sixteenth-century debate between the older native tradition represented by Chaucer and the newer continental tradition represented by Wyatt and Surrey. This last camp sees the shepherds not simply as pastors or courtiers but as poets, encourages us to posit a relation between Februarie and the poetic eclogues, identifies genre as an important topic, and recognizes the eclogue's special, microcosmic significance in the Calender as a whole. One critic has even found Spenser representing the relation between Chaucer and Virgil.16 Oddly enough, despite the efforts of this camp, standard overviews of the criticism have yet to represent their viewpoint.17 While all three camps illuminate Spenser's engaging eclogue, we might be more specific about Februarie's historical context and thus the precise details of the poet's corresponding historical representation. Certainly Spenser uses the youth-age dialectic to evoke ecclesiastical, courtly, and literary debates between generations of men, but more particularly he inscribes a coded pastoral lexicon in order to sustain a comprehensive vocational debate that contains, organizes, and clarifies the other three debates: a lexicon about Renaissance ideas of a literary career, especially the two dominant models (at least for him), the Virgilian and the Chaucerian. As we shall see, the career lexicon is not so much the key unlocking the eclogue's allegorical code as virtually its topic. II

Februarie divides evenly into two parts, between the debate (1-101) and the fable (102-238), with the final eight lines supplying an intersecting conclusion (239-46). In the debate between Cuddie and Thenot, the first exchange appears to provide little evidence that both are more than shepherds from different generations with different attitudes, tastes, and beliefs, especially about the weather. Cuddie asks for 'pittie' against 'rancke Winters rage,' which has 'gryde' (pierced) his body and made his 'ragged rentes' ('young bullockes,' says E.K. [256]) 'shiver and shake' (1-5). Criticizing Cuddie's complaint, Thenot asserts a doctrine resembling Christian stoicism in its humanist form: in a cyclically organized universe, wherein 'the world wend[s]... / From good to badd, and from badde to worse..., / And then returnefs] to his former fall,' he has 'never complained ..., / Ne ever was to Fortune foeman, / But gently tooke, that ungently came. / And ever my flocke was my chiefe care' (11-23). In rather precise terms, I suggest, Thenot and Cuddie look to be a composite photograph of the generational dispute well articu-

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 237 lated by Anthony Esler: the 'older' Elizabethans from the 1540s and 50s, represented by the queen herself, such chief counsellors as Burleigh, Leicester, and Walsingham, and such poets as Thomas Sackville, Thomas Churchyard, and other authors from the Mirror for Magistrates tradition; and what Esler calls 'the generation of 1560,' those 'younger' Elizabethans represented by Ralegh, Sidney, Oxford, Dyer, Spenser, and Marlowe.18 While the eclogue does sustain a broad political divide between generations, E.K. reminds us in his gloss that the New Poet is imitating literary works; the word 'Gride/ he says, is 'an olde word much used of Lidgate, but not found (that I know of) in Chaucer' (255-6). The second exchange between Cuddie and Thenot opens up the literary nature of their difference. Cuddie's references to his 'flowring youth' and his storm-tossed 'shippe' (31-2) rely on traditional metaphors for poetry (the latter especially important to Horace, Ovid, and Petrarch, and through the latter to Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde), but neither is precise enough to arouse more than slight interest. It is Thenot's description of Cuddie (supported by E.K.'s gloss) that first intimates an unfolding literary representation: So loytring live you little heardgroomes, Keeping your beastes in the budded broomes: And when the shining sunne laugheth once, You deemen, the Spring is come attonce. Tho gynne you, fond flyes, the cold to scorne, And crowing in pypes made of greene corne, You thinken to be Lords of the yeare. (Februarie 35-41) According to Thenot, Cuddie is a small herdsman who keeps his bullocks in the shrubs as long as the sun shines, who foolishly scorns the cold like a (butter)fly requiring warm weather, and who plays his pipe made out of green corn as cacophonously as a crow sings. Such behaviour makes Cuddie think he is a lord of the year: a sovereign of the season, the governor of time. Cuddie's pipe is the first concrete image evoking his status as a poet. Here Spenser records the ancient link between the pastoral pipe and the bird that makes the avian image a central artistic representation throughout the Calender, as E.K. himself reveals in the Dedicatory Epistle by calling the New Poet a young bird writing pastoral to prove his tender

238 Patrick Cheney wings.19 Again, E.K.'s gloss confirms a literary significance, this time of great interest: 'Chaucers verse almost whole' (264). As the Yale Edition helps us see (49), E.K. means lines 1224-6 of The House of Fame: And pipes made of grene corne, As han thise lytel herde-gromes, That kepen bestis in the bromes. (House of Fame 1224-6) To this often-cited passage, we need to add Chaucer's next line, together with its larger context, which surveys three kinds of musicians resident in the House of Fame: the harpers, represented preeminently by Orpheus (1201-13); the pipers, represented by Virgil (1213-36); and the trumpeters, represented again by Virgil (1237-50). Line 1227 links the three preceding lines about the herdgroom, his beasts in the broom, and his green corn-pipe with Tityrus: "Ther saugh I than Atiteris.' Altogether, then, the passage that Spenser is virtually quoting shows Chaucer locating pastoral activity under the leadership of Tityrus as part of a larger artistic paradigm. What are we to make of this important moment of pastoral intertextuality, linking Spenser with Chaucer and Virgil?20 Within the narrative, we should not be surprised to find Thenot quoting Tityrus/ Chaucer, his self-proclaimed master, or to suspect that he does so in order to delimit Cuddie's achievement: the youth is merely a pastoral poet, unable to move on to the higher genres (a predicament, we shall see, that Cuddie himself comes to admit in October). Ironically, however, Thenot unwittingly grants Cuddie a kind of authority, at least to the reader, since suddenly we can plot him moving along a Chaucerian/ Virgilian path, albeit at its point of origin. The ambiguity raises a few questions: is Cuddie following in Tityrus's footsteps or is he not? And what about Thenot? Through this narrative, we may speculate, Spenser is presenting himself as the controller of the ambiguity. He is finding grounds in the The House of Fame for identifying Chaucer as a pastoral poet.21 Yet Spenser's quotation of the pastoral Chaucer, who is himself troping the Virgilian genre within the context of both lyric and epic poetry, encourages us to see the making of a career model. Evidently, Spenser designs his keen intertextual pastoral metadiscourse to compete with his medieval and classical masters in a domain leading to his own House of Fame. In the next exchange, Cuddie supplies important details about the

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 239 character of his art. Scorning Thenot's 'skill' (51) of envious folly, he taunts the older shepherd with a prospect at once sexual and poetic: But were thy yeares greene, as now bene myne, To other delights they would encline. Tho wouldest thou learne to caroll of Love, And hery with hymnes thy lasses glove. Tho wouldest thou pype of Phillis prayse: But Phyllis is myne for many dayes: I wonne her with a gyrdle of gelt, Embost with buegle about the belt. Such an one shepeheards woulde make full faine: Such an one would make thee younge againe. (Februarie 59-68) This representation resembles the art of the Elizabethan amateur poet, as described by Richard Helgerson in Self-Crowned Laureates: 'The Elizabethan amateurs presented themselves as poets in opposition to [humanist] ... teaching. They made a place for poetry and created an identity for the poet by systematically inverting the values of midcentury humanism. In their literary self-presentation, gravity gave way to levity, work to play, reason to passion, public accomplishment to private delight, misogynism and antiromantic prejudice to love. The very generic forms they most favoured - the love sonnet, the pastoral, the prodigal-son fiction - express the opposition between poetry and duty. But, curiously, even in their self-defining rebellion, the amateurs confirmed the values of midcentury humanism' (27-8). As Helgerson concludes, 'The laureates began in close association with the amateurs ... The two groups differed, however, in how they hoped to accomplish that service - the amateurs as churchman and statesmen, the laureates as poets ... For the laureate, poetry was itself a means of making a contribution to the order and improvement of the state' (28-9).22 Like the amateur, Cuddie is a young ('greene') poet who sings a song committed to 'delight'; such a poet fragments the twin Horatian ends of poetry so important to literary theorists like Sir Philip Sidney: delight and instruction. As with the amateur as well, Cuddie's topic is 'Love' in particular his love for the shepherdess Phyllis. While saying that the purpose of his 'hymne' is to 'prayse' Phyllis's 'glove,' Cuddie betrays the amateur's chronic misogynism by intimating his real goal: to win Phyllis with the promise of material reward, which, as the 'gyrdle of

240 Patrick Cheney gelt' indicates, is quite literally a strategy for female containment.23 Cuddie, however, does not merely contradict himself about the end of his art; he appears to confuse the form his art takes. In his poetry, Spenser uses the term 'hymn' sixteen times, and all but this instance have either a religious connotation or a connotation of height appropriate to its superior standing in the Renaissance hierarchy of genres, as his own Fowre Hymnes testify.24 In 'November, Thenot himself distinguishes between the two forms, telling Colin of his fame among his peers, 'whether thee list thy loved lasse advaunce, / Or honor Pan with hymnes of higher vaine' (7-8). Colin also understands the distinction, though rejecting both forms for the moment: 'Thenot, now nis the time of merimake. / Nor Pan to herye, nor with love to playe' (9-10). In Februarie, Cuddie betrays his ignorance by collapsing the high hymn into the lower love lyric. These preliminary details, then, like subsequent ones that we shall examine, identify Cuddie as a model of Spenser's 'fellow English poets,' who '[i]n the 1570s ... were all amateurs' (Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates 22). If Spenser presents Cuddie as a type of amateur poet writing amorous verse, we might see Thenot - in Helgerson's formulation - as the older humanist against whom the young amateur rebels. Thenot's moralizing clarifies his didactic end - a didacticism devoid of delight: 'ever my flocke was my chiefe care.' For Spenser, the word 'care' often connotes not just regard but anxiety, as allegorized in the carlish figure of Care in Book IV, canto v, of The Faerie Queene. Thus, Thenot, too, fragments the Horatian paradigm of instruction and delight. In lines 47-50, he neatly summarizes his moralizing 'skill' during his rebuke of the younger shepherd: 'Then is your careless corage accoied, / Your carefull heards with cold bene annoied. / Then paye you the price of your surquedrie, / With weeping, and wayling, and misery.' Thenot also understands both the importance of stoic resistance and the vanity of youth's sexual passion, twin markers of the older generation of humanists and humanist poets (as emphasized by Esler): Thou art a fon, of thy love to boste, / All that is lent to love, wyll be lost' (69-70). While these and other features of his discourse - his quoting of scripture, for instance (88) - identify Thenot as an older Elizabethan humanist, his apprenticeship under Tityrus and his recording of Tityrus's tale identify him more precisely as an older humanist poet, the poet from the previous generation who is also an amateur but who works in the more 'mature' didactic mode:

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 241 But shall I tel thee a tale of truth, Which I cond of Tityrus in my youth, Keeping his sheepe on the hills of Kent? (Februarie 91-3) The word 'Keeping' is ambiguous: who is keeping Tityrus's sheep? While the sense of the passage suggests Tityrus, the grammar suggests Thenot, syntactically recording the poetic succession that the telling of the tale narrativizes. While Cuddie and Thenot, then, appear to historicize a generational opposition between the two leading English career models practised in the late 1570s - the erotic amateur and the didactic amateur - they discover common ground in Tityrus, as Cuddie's subsequent comment indicates: To nought more Thenot, my mind is bent, Then to heare no veils of his devise: They bene so well thewed [mannered], and so wise, What ever that good old man bespake. (Februarie 94-7) Here Cuddie betrays a new version of his poetics. Whereas before he used his pipe to sing of love and pleasure without clear public utility, now he has 'bent' his 'mind' - trained his subjectivity - to 'heare' Tityrus's ethical art. For Cuddie, Tityrus's authority lies in his power to invent original tales - 'novells of his devise' - that form inward character. In their only moment of harmony, Thenot then complements Cuddie's praise of Tityrus by extending that good old poet's 'novells of... devise' from subjective formation to generic form: Many meete tales of youth did he make, And some of love, and some of chevalrie: But none fitter then this to applie. Now listen a while, and hearken the end. (Februarie 98-101) Thenot then tells the fable of the Oak and the Briar. The Tityrus passage remains unannotated in the main scholarly editions.25 Of the commentary that exists elsewhere, the most authoritative

242 Patrick Cheney is that of John A. Burrow in his Spenser Encyclopedia article on Chaucer: 'Thus, in Chaucer's tales or "noveils/' the wisdom of the old proves acceptable to young Cuddie, and the youthful excitement of love and war once more stirs old Thenot. Chaucer's poetry transcends the opposition between youth and age which the eclogue otherwise displays, because his combination of wisdom and story attracts both equally' (145). Sensitive to the fiction Spenser narrates, Burrow sees two topical categories represented here: 'love and war.' To these twin topics, we can discern their corresponding generic intimations, as well as their vital relation to a third, the 'tale of truth.'26 In this passage, I propose, Spenser is making one of his most important contributions to the reception of Chaucer. He understands Chaucer to have devised three kinds of novels: 1 'some of love': love lyric 2 'some of chevalrie': chivalric epic 3 'a tale of truth': didactic poetry Spenser's 'Chaucerian' model is important for several reasons. First, Spenser is identifying a generically based Chaucerian Triad. Second, he is dividing Chaucer's 'tales' - perhaps The Canterbury Tales, perhaps the Chaucer canon - into the three divisions that Dante had outlined for medieval French and Italian vernacular poetry in De vulgari eloquentia: 'prowess in arms, kindling of love, rectitude of will.'27 Third, Spenser's three-genre Chaucerian model contrasts with the single-genre models of the Elizabethan amateurs, represented in their amorous and didactic modes by Cuddie and Thenot, who bitterly divide the Chaucerian model between them, neglecting the epic altogether. Finally, the Chaucerian triad intersects with the Virgilian triad of pastoral, georgic, and epic in a striking way. In his Spenser Encyclopedia article on Chaucer, Burrow concludes that 'Spenser's [eight] explicit references to Chaucer thus acknowledge his mastery in three particular kinds: entertaining stories with a moral meaning, complaints of love, and epic narratives of deeds of arms' (145). While Burrow identifies the presence of three forms in Spenser's Chaucer, we might wish to locate the origin of this triad in Dante, relate it to Virgil, and see it represented in Februarie. What specifically does Dante say about the three kinds? Why does Spenser assign the triad to Chaucer? And what precise relation does the Chaucerian triad have to the Virgilian triad? Finally, what do the Chaucerian and Virgilian triads

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 243 have to do with Spenser's career, as represented in Februarie and the Calender as a whole? Let us examine each question in turn. In Book II of De vulgari eloquentia, Dante displays his gift for triadic pattern that is the hallmark of the Divine Comedy by mapping out the current state of poetics in both its universal and historical dimensions. In chapter ii, he sets out to determine 'which subjects in particular are worthy' of 'excellent poets' who 'use the illustrious vernacular' (70). He answers that the subjects should be 'precisely those things which we esteem as most worthy of all/ and from this principle he introduces a specific lexicon for determining it - the psychology that determines worth: the 'tripartite soul ... animal, vegetable, and rational.' With his threefold soul, 'man... walks a threefold path': the vegetable soul seeks the 'useful'; the animal, the 'pleasurable'; and the rational, the 'right.' Since 'we perform our every action because of these three things/ vernacular poets need to determine 'which are those greatest things' (71). The useful seeks 'security'; the pleasurable, 'love'; and the right, Virtue': 'these three things ... appear to be the greatest things, to be treated in the highest way, that is, the things most closely adhere to them: prowess in arms, kindling of love, rectitude of will' (72). Dante then relates this universalist scheme relating subjectivity, action, and literary subject to the literary history of his time: 'On these subjects alone, if I remember rightly, we find illustrious men who have composed poetry in the vernacular: Bertran de Born on arms, Arnaut Daniel on love, Guiraunt de Bornelh on righteousness; also Cino de Pistoia on love, and his friend [Dante himself] on righteousness.' After supplying quotations from these authors for each kind, he concludes: 'But I find no Italian up to now who has any poetry on deeds of arms' (72). Dante's phrase 'any poetry on deeds of arms' indicates that he intends to transpose his three topics on to three corresponding literary forms. In chapter iii, Dante then relates the three subjects to literary form directly, introducing a hierarchy of three kinds - the low sonnet, the middle ballate, and the high canzoni - and he argues that the three 'subjects worthy of the illustrious vernacular are to be treated [only] in the canzoni' (72-3). Finally, in chapter iv he relates form to style, introducing the lower elegiac, the middle comic, and the higher tragic, arguing that the three subjects are to be treated only in the high, tragic style of the canzoni (74). He concludes by relying on his master, Virgil, to distinguish between the great and the mediocre poets: 'those whom the poet in Aeneid VI calls dear to God, and sons of the gods ... who were raised to heaven by their own ardent virtue' and 'those who, immune

244 Patrick Cheney to art and knowledge and trusting only in their own wit, break into song about the highest things': 'let them cease in their presumption, and if they are geese by natural inclination or habitual apathy, let them not dare to imitate the star-seeking eagle' (75). Here Dante appears to present this comprehensive program - of literary styles, forms, life styles, and psychologies - as an Italian version of the Latin model he found in Virgil. Since we have no evidence that Chaucer knew De vulgari, we may wonder why Spenser would assign the Dantean model to him. Until medieval specialists study the reception of the model, however, we will have to continue to wonder. Here we may speculate simply that even though Dante may be identifying a career model applicable to his own canon (as perhaps he hints), Boccaccio for one did not finally think so. As he says to conclude the Teseida (1340-1): Since the Muses began to walk unclothed before men's eyes, there have been those who employed them with graceful style in virtuous discourse, while others used them for the language of love. But you, my book, are the first to bid them sing in the vernacular of Latium what has never been seen thus before: the toils endured for Mars.28 Here Boccaccio presents the Teseida as the fulfilment to the epic void in Dante's program. That is, Boccaccio makes explicit the transposition of the three topics on to their corresponding literary forms. In addition to its form in Boccaccio, the Dantean model shows up in sixteenth-century Italian criticism.29 At the beginning of the century (in 1529), Giovan Giorgio Trissino published his Italian translation of De vulgari, while at the end (in 1595) Tasso published Discourses on the Heroic Poem, which justifies Tasso's inclusion of love in epic: Dante 'says in his book On the Vulgar Tongue that there are three things that should be sung in the most elevated style: salvation, love, and virtue, salvation because it is profitable, love because it is delightful, virtue because it is noble.'30 In England, by contrast, Dante's triad does not show up in such influential Elizabethan treatises on poetry as Sidney's Defence of Poesie or Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie. Consequently, modern specialists in medieval and Renaissance English literature appear to have had little access to the Dantean model.31 Certainly, Chaucer was familiar with the Teseida, as most likely Spenser was; yet Spenser's knowledge of Boccaccio would not necessarily lead him to assign the Dantean model to his native master.32

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 245 More to the point is the general formulation of Burrow: 'Spenser's creative mind ... turned to those of Chaucer's poems which coincided most closely with his own work in hand' (145). Burrow arrives at this principle by noticing that Spenser 'in The Shepheardes Calender and other minor poems draws most on the first two kinds [didactic and love poetry], and especially on Chaucer's love complaints, while in The Faerie Queene he looks most to Chaucer's warlike numbers' (145). With Burrow, then, we can peer through Spenser's eyes to discover all three kinds in the Chaucer canon: such love complaints as the Book of the Duchess, the Complaint of Mars, the Complaint unto Pity, and Anelida and Arcite; such didactic poetry as The Nun's Priest's Tale, The Tale ofMelibee, The Pardoner's Tale, and The Parson's Tale; and such heroic poetry as The Knight's Tale, The Squire's Tale, and The Tale of Sir Thopas, and perhaps Troilus and Criseyde.33 On the three Virgilian kinds, the didactic requires the least explanation, since critics have repeatedly emphasized it. Burrow is especially useful in explaining why Spenser understood Chaucer to be an epic poet: 'for Spenser, as for Dryden after him, [The Knight's Tale] ... was an English model of that heroic or epic kind whose chief subject is fighting' (145). Indeed, Spenser imitates that tale's opening line in the opening to his own completion of The Squire's Tale, in Book IV, cantos ii and iii, of The Faerie Queene.3* Spenser's understanding of Chaucer as a pastoral poet is least intelligible, but the New Poet does present the Old Poet as Tityrus/ and the passage about the herdgroom, green corn-pipe, and Tityrus supplies concrete warrant for precisely that understanding, however much it looks to us rather like a forced appropriation. From this discussion, we might wish to look schematically at the two sets of triads: Career Model

Low

Middle

High

Virgilian Triad Chaucerian Triad

Pastoral Love Poetry

Georgic Didactic Poetry

Epic Heroic Poetry

The value of this scheme is that it shows a striking parallel between the Virgilian and Chaucerian models. Epic is clearly a form of heroic poetry, while georgic is clearly a form of didactic poetry. Although we cannot simply equate pastoral with love poetry, we can recall from the origins of pastoral through its Virgilian manifestations that love had been one of its three principal topics, joining those of song and herd-tending, while from Spenser's perspective the link would be intimate indeed,

246 Patrick Cheney since Sannazaro had been instrumental in virtually equating pastoral with erotic poetry.35 Spenser, then, may assign Virgil's pastoral persona to Chaucer because he understands the Chaucerian career model to be a transposed version of the Virgilian model.36 Generically, the three genres of love poetry, didactic poetry, and heroic poetry may line up with pastoral, georgic, and epic, but the Chaucerian and Virgilian models differ in one significant way. To borrow Robert Edwards's paradigm in the present volume ('Theban Track'), Chaucer's Dantean model is one of 'practice'; Virgil's, one of 'program.' In October, Spenser relies on temporal terms and the imperative mood to indicate career progression when Piers advises Cuddie to move from Virgilian pastoral to epic: Abandon then the base and viler clowne, Lyft up thy selfe out of the lowly dust: And sing of Bloody Mars, of wars, of giusts, Turn thee to those, that weld the awful crowne. (October 37-40) By contrast, in Februarie Thenot relies on conjunctive terms to talk about the relation between love lyric, epic, and didactic poetry: 'And some of love, and some of chevalrie: / But none fitter then this to applie.' Unlike the Virgilian progression, Chaucer's Dantean model looks to be a collection of generic practices. Thenot's phrasing indicates that the English Tityrus has written at times in all three genres, that they are of equal weight and thereby usable for different occasions, and that he himself will rely on only one genre to accomplish his immediate goals. To this general account, we may add two specific points, each emerging from a feature of the poem Spenser imitates in Februarie: The House of Fame. Both points are intimately connected to the question about the relation between the Chaucerian and Virgilian triads. The first point emerges from the passage mentioned earlier on the three types of musicians in Book II: harpers, led by Orpheus; pipers, led by Tityrus; and trumpeters, led by Virgil. The second and third types of musicians clearly correspond to the first and third genres in the Virgilian progression: pastoral and epic. What of the harpers? Could they correspond to the second Virgilian genre: the didactic? Chaucer supplies little detail, but his opening description looks promising: 'Ther herde I pleyen on an harpe / That sowned bothe wel and sharpe, / Orpheus ful craftely' (1201-3). Perhaps we need to recall the famous appearance of Orpheus

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 247 in Book IV of the Georgics, to which Februarie itself alludes, as we shall see. The second point emerges from the conclusion of Joseph Dane: that the three-book division of The House of Fame corresponds to the threegenre progression of Virgil: Book I, Virgilian epic; Book II, Virgilian didactic poetry; and Book III, Virgilian 'pastoral/lyric.' According to Dane, the passage on the three musicians corresponds to the three-part Virgilian structure of the larger poem (70). While acknowledging this matter to be one of speculation, we may wonder whether Spenser found the Dantean model to be located in the poem that he practically plagiarized when composing Februarie.37 In this light, the phrase 'novells of his devise' takes on resonance. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Spenser's use of 'novells' under its first definition: 'Something new; novelty. Obs.' Yet the OED lists two other definitions that are pertinent: 'news, tidings' (Def. 2), which the OED says is closely related to the first; and 'One of the tales or short stories contained in such works as the Decameron of Boccaccio, the Heptameron of Marguerite de Valois, etc.; a short story of this type.' The Yale, Norton, Longman, and Penguin editions all gloss 'novells' with only this third definition, but surely the second also obtains, since Cuddie has 'hear[d]' the novels. In effect, Spenser's word unfolds all three definitions, opening up considerable semantic play: Tityrus/Chaucer's tales are a novelty to Cuddie, who has heard about them (so to speak) through the cornvine. Yet even for Cuddie the word 'novells' has didactic connotation: 'They bene so well thewed, and so wise.' According to Esler, the older generation of the 1540s and 1550s had denounced novelty, while the generation of 1560 had a 'restless search for novelty, for something new in every field from sartorial elegance to literature and religion' (76). He cites Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who reports from Cambridge University: 'news, new books, new fashions, new laws ... and some after new elements, and some after new heavens and hells too' (77). While Cuddie has heard about Tityrus's tales as if they were 'news, new books,' we might wonder why Spenser would present Chaucer as a novelty - since he considers him that 'olde famous Poete.' How can a famous poet be a novelty? Evidently, Spenser is playfully criticizing Cuddie for his ignorance: if Thenot has learned to sing in his youth from Tityrus, Cuddie has merely heard about him (recently). For Cuddie, Tityrus is a learned and moral shepherd who sang in the distant past; for Thenot, he is a voice worthy of being brought from the past into the present. Spenser's fiction narrates precisely that failure: the failure of the younger generation to transact the

248 Patrick Cheney genealogy of poetic succession; the failure of the older generation to persuade the younger to engage in the succession. In terms of Spenser's representation of literary history, Elizabethan culture is on the threshold of a succession crisis - one, we shall see, matching the more famous succession crisis in the political sphere surrounding Queen Elizabeth. Cuddie's refusal to inherit Tityrus from Thenot, and Thenot's inability to pass on his own inheritance, identify both figures as amateur poets. They differ from Spenser, who is making the succession throughout the Calender, including in Februarie. In Book IV of The Faerie Queene (1596), he will make the succession a matter of public record: Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, Of Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled. pardon, O most sacred happie spirit, That I thy labours lost may thus revive, Ne dare I like, but through infusion sweete Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me survive, I follow here the footing of thy feete. (The Faerie Queene IV.ii.32,34) Relying on a trope as old as Ennius, who used it to trace the metaphysical reality of his epic genealogy to Homer (Farrell, 'Greek Lives' in this volume), Spenser imagines himself the benefactor of a spiritual process, by which he breathes Chaucer's 'owne spirit.' Cuddie and Thenot fail to participate in the very genealogy that Spenser is transacting both for himself and for his culture. Yet the phrase 'novells of his devise' also subtly shows Spenser 'overgo[ing]' Chaucer, for it identifies the old famous poet as largely a maker.38 The word 'devise' means 'composed' (Yale Edition 43). In the Dedicatory Epistle, E.K. makes this point: 'Chaucer: whom for his excellencie and wonderfull skill in making ...' (2-3). In other words, Spenser does not consider Chaucer a vates or prophet inspired by divinity, or what E.K. calls 'enthusiasmos/ which he says Spenser emphasized in his lost treatise, 'the Englishe Poete': Toetrie' is 'no arte, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to bee gotten by labour and learning, but adorned with both: and poured into the witte by a certain [enthusiasmos] ... and celestiall inspiration, as the Author hereof else

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 249 where at large discourseth' (Arg.). Evidently, Tityrus's great authority lies in his power to devise novels for his community, but he lacks divine sanction. Spenser overgoes Chaucer by benefiting from the divine process of enthusiasm as the precise mode of his own poetic succession. Ill

If the debate between Cuddie and Thenot contrasts the Chaucerian career model with those of the Elizabethan amorous and didactic amateur, we might come to see the fable of the Oak and Briar extending the career map along the Virgilian path. Specifically, in addition to its other significances, the story of the Husbandman cutting down the Oak to the Briar's disadvantage may represent an explosion of the Virgilian model: georgic fails to mediate the progression from pastoral to epic. The key to this allegory lies in Spenser's literary metalanguage' for trees, emphasized by Harry Berger, Jr, who says of Januarye: The primary message is not "my trouble is like a tree's" but "my plight is like a poet's"' (Revisionary Play 337). Yet trees also trope poetic genres. According to Marillene Allen in her article on 'trees' in The Spenser Encyclopedia, The three kinds of style developed by Donatus in his commentary on Virgil called for distinct landscapes often identified by a particular kind of tree. The pastoral landscape ... was shaded by beech, poplar, willow, or plane; middle poetry was placed in a setting of fruit trees similar to Alcinous' orchard (Odyssey 7.112); and epic action filled nearby forests with pine, ash, or oak' (698). In other words, the metaphorics of the tree grew up naturally in a Virgilian career groundplot. The Oak is thus Spenser's tree of epic, as his superb metalanguage reveals: There grew 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 wondrous hight: Whilome had been the King of the field. And mochell mast to the husband did yielde, And with his nuts larded many swine.

250 Patrick Cheney 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. (Februarie 102-14; emphasis added) Spenser's overt martial metaphor for the oak, 'King of the field/ encourages us to see a pun on 'armes/ while the phrase 'largely displayed' suggests show, artiface, and self-presentation, all of which imbue 'hight' with generic resonance. In November, Spenser represents the paradigm precisely when Thenot defers to Colin Clout in singing the funeral elegy for Queen Dido: The Nightingale is sovereigne of song, Before him sits the Titmose silent bee: Nay, better learne of hem, that learned bee, And han be watered at the Muses well: The kindlye dewe drops from the higher tree, And wets the little plants that lowly dwell. (November 25-32) Later, in the elegy itself, Colin provides the tragic version of this arboreal process, referring to one pertinent species: 'Ay me that dreerie death should strike so mortall stroke, / That can undoe Dame natures kindly course: / The faded lockes fall from the loftie oake' (123-5). The image of Dido as a dying oak with fading leaves falling from her is as poignant as it is literary, for Dido is the Queen of the field, a figure not merely for Spenser's (dead) sovereign (if she were to marry the French Due d'Alencpn) but for his own Virgilian hopes to write her imperial epic.39 Critics writing on the Februarie fable occasionally recall Aeneid IV.4416, where Virgil compares Aeneas to a thoroughly rooted oak tree besieged by high winds, during his dilemma over whether to leave his own Dido: 'Even as when northern Alpine winds, blowing now hence, now thence, emulously strive to uproot an oak strong with the strength of years, there comes a roar, the stem quivers and the high leafage thickly strews the ground, but the oak clings to the crag, and as far as it lifts its top to the airs of heaven, so far it strikes its roots down towards hell.'40 Accordingly, critics also occasionally allude to Lucan's imitation

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 251 of the Virgilian simile in the Pharsalia, describing Pompey's overarching ambition: Imagine a towering oak tree in a lush field of wheat, decked with a nation's ancient trophies, gifts her leaders have consecrated; clinging with roots no longer healthy, it stands fixed by its own weight; naked branches splay leafless across the sky; only its trunk casts a shadow; and even though it totters, doomed to fall with the first East wind, though all around it spinneys of sound timber rise, yet it alone is worshipped.41 According to Judith A. Rosner-Siegel, Lucan's oak simile is 'programmatic; that is, the picture ... of the leader ... is sustained throughout the epic, sometimes even at the cost of historical accuracy' (167-8). Lucan's oak simile is programmatic also in that it models his artistic program as a whole. Referring to Spenser, Lynn Staley Johnson observes, 'The suggestion that the Oak had once been sacred to the rites of England's old religion seems designed to evoke Lucan's description of Pompey in the Pharsalia'; she recalls that DuBellay adapted the oak tree simile to Rome in Sonnet 28 of the Antiquitez de Rome, which Spenser translates as The Ruines of Rome (lines 379-92), and which repeats the topos of the small trees growing up in the shadow of the larger oak.42 Johnson speculates that since 'Spenser probably made this translation fairly early in his career ... it is likely that Lucan's description of the Oak served as the subtext for Thenot's description of himself as a wasted but venerable oak' (69). And she concludes that it is 'possible that Spenser intended his description of the Oak in the fable as his contribution to an elaborate literary dialogue with DuBellay and Lucan' (69n24). Adding Virgil to the Spenserian dialogue, we can conclude that the oak is indeed the arch-image of epic ambition.43 This conclusion helps explain why Spenser's description of the Oak looks like a history of epic itself from classical through Elizabethan times. The central feature of the Oak's story - his decay from strength, health, soundness, leadership, and utility to barrenness, baldness, infestation, and dishonour - resembles Spenser's history of epic in October. There the 'doubted Knights' of epic, to whom Piers advises Cuddie to Turne' after abandoning the base and viler clown, bear 'woundlesse armour' that 'rusts/ with 'helmes unbruzed' that 'wexen dayly browne' (41-2). This advice initially reminds Cuddie of the

252 Patrick Cheney Virgilian career model: Indeede the Romish Tityrus, I heare, Through his Mecoenas left his Oaten reede, Whereon he earst had taught his flockes to feede, And laboured lands to yield the timely eare, And eft did sing of warres and deadly drede, So as the Heavens did quake his verse to here. (October 55-60) In his gloss on this passage, E.K. interprets the allegorical representation: 'In these three verses are the three severall workes of Virgile intended. For in teaching his flocks to feede, is meant his Aeglogues. In labouring of lands, is hys Bucoliques [Georgics]. In singing of wars and deadly dreade, is his divine Aeneis figured' (196-9). Yet Cuddie next complains of the patrons who made Virgil's career possible: 'Mecoenas is yclad in claye, / And great Augustus long ygoe is dead: / And all the worthies liggen wrapt in leade' (61-3).M In Elizabethan England, says Cuddie, 'The vaunting Poets [have] found nought worth a pease, / To put in preace emong the learned troupe. / Tho gan the streames of flowing wittes to cease, / And sonnebright honour pend in shamefull coupe' (69-72). Hence, Cuddie relies on a telling metaphor to represent his frustration with the current state of poet: And if that any buddes of Poesie, Yet of the old stocke gan to shoote agayne: Or it mens follies mote be forst to fayne, And rolle with rest in rymes of rybaudrye: Or as it sprong, it wither must agayne: Tom Piper makes us better melodic. (October 73-8) In Elizabethan England, unlike in Augustan Rome, the poet cannot turn from pastoral to epic, because he conspires with his patron in failing to be up to the task. Like the Oak in Februarie, the genre of epic shoots up its stock only to wither, fall, and die. Tom Piper indeed makes us better melody. In October, perhaps because of the rusty (rather than robust) condition of epic, Spenser presents Piers revising the two-genre Virgilian

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 253

progression with two subsequent phases, both of which are important because they correspond to the shape of Spenser's own career.45 The first phase we may call mid-epic: derived from the Virgilian georgic that Renaissance poetics ousts and that Spenser enfolds into pastoral and epic, it shows the poet regenerating his epic strength through love. Thus, Piers tells Cuddie that after following Virgil in moving from pastoral to epic, he should follow Chaucer by writing love lyric when he becomes tired: And when the stubborne stroke of stronger stounds, Has somewhat slackt the tenor of thy string: Of love and lustihead tho mayest thou sing, And carol lowde, and leade the Myllers rownde, All were Elisa one of thilke same ring. So mought our Cuddies name to Heaven sownde. (October 49-54)

The second phase we may call post-epic: derived from Virgil's plan to turn from epic to philosophy, as well as from 'Chaucer's Retraction' and Du Bartas's rejection of secular for divine poetry, it shows the poet turning from courtly to contemplative poetry.46 Thus, Piers tells Cuddie that when he cannot find a 'place' in 'Princes Pallace' (79-80), he should 'make thee winges of thine aspyring wit, / And, whence thou camst, flye backe to heaven apace' (83-4). In lines 85-96 following, Spenser advertises Colin as the poet who can complete 'such famous flight' (88). In effect, October's four-phase career model imps the Chaucerian onto the Virgilian, yet it goes beyond both. Spenser begins with pastoral and progresses to epic, but then he regenerates his epic strength by writing love lyric, and finally he turns from these three courtly forms to divine poetry. Again, a schematic sketch might help us visualize the complex relations among the Virgilian, Chaucerian, and Spenserian models. Contemplative Forms

Courtly Forms Career Model

Low

Middle

High

High

Virgilian Chaucerian Spenserian

Pastoral Love Poetry Pastoral

Georgic Didactic Poetry Love Poetry

Epic Heroic Poetry Epic

Philosophy Retraction Hymn

254 Patrick Cheney As before, the aim is not to equate the three models but to observe their remarkable correspondence, in the process indicating how Spenser himself might have viewed his relation with the other two. Spenser's career model acquires authority because it predicts the publication chronology of his four major career documents: the 1579 pastoral Calender; the 1590-6 epic Faerie Queene; the 1595 amorous AmorettiEpithalamion; and the 1596 hymnic Fowre Hymnes (Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight). In contrast to the decayed Oak of epic, the Briar is Spenser's tree of pastoral delight, as again the superb metalanguage reveals: 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 wormed 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: Which made this foolish Brere wexe so bold, That on a time he cast him to scold, And snebbe the good Oake, for he was old. (Februarie 115-26) If the Oak in his original health is a figure for epic's utility to the nation, the Briar is a figure for pastoral delight. Thus the two trees, like Thenot and Cuddie themselves, pull apart the twin halves of the Horatian paradigm.47 Whereas the Oak supplies acorns to the Husbandman to feed his swine, the Briar offers colourful flowers for the shepherds' daughters to make garlands.48 This may be utility, but as the image of self-crowning indicates, the shepherds' daughters parody the laureate's self-crowning emphasized by Helgerson (6-7), for theirs is a form of aesthetic narcissism, not a contribution to the public good. Specifically, the Briar is a sweet-rose, as Spenser reports in Amoretti: 'Sweet is the Rose, but growes upon a brere' (26: 1). Thus, throughout the Calender the lover of Rosalind, Colin Clout, selects the briar-rose as his special tree, part of the locus poeticus for his pastoral composition, including his Chaucerian/Virgilian inheritance:

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 255 The gentle shepherd satte beside a springe (All in the shadow of a bushye briere) That Colin hight, which well could pype and singe, For he of Tityrus his songs did lere. (Dec l-A; see 65 and June 7-8) The briar is Colin's tree because it floralizes not merely Rosalind and his bittersweet experience with her but more precisely his prickly sweet roseate poetics organized around her. If the briar is Colin's tree, the nightingale is his bird. In addition to identifying Colin as "The Nightingale ... sovereigne of song/ Spenser associates his persona with the nightingale elsewhere - August (183-6), November (141), and December (79) - in order to represent his own visionary transcendence as the event that prepares the pastoral poet to write epic, the means by which he acquires national authority.49 Thomas H. Cain observes the structural importance of the nightingale image in Februarie: 'Interestingly, the fable's central line [123], though spoken by Thenot, is in praise of the bird of love song, the nightingale' (Yale Edition 38). The central placing of the nightingale draws attention to its importance, yet the details identify the Briar-perched nightingale as a parody of Colin/Spenser, the authoritative pastoral poet on his way to epic. For Spenser, unlike for the Briar and Cuddie, pastoral pleasance has a serious epic function. Thus the Briar's nightingale 'shrowde[s]' itself Cuddie-like in the 'small bushes/ suggesting escapism rather than service, while its song that is 'sweete' yet lowde' creates a cacophony uncharacteristic of Colin. Moreover, the nightingale 'made this foolish Brere wexe... bold'; rather than being the avian inspiration for England's national poet moving from lower to higher genres, this nightingale motivates unpatriotic behaviour in violation of Christian teaching. In Spenser's metalanguage, the Briar and its nightingale figure what happens when pastoral is seen as simply an alternative to epic. Inverting Spenser's pastoral paradigm, the Briarnightingale represents a pastoral poetry exempt from the pastoral of progression. Finally, the Husbandman's profession identifies him as the mediating figure of georgic: Yt chaunced after upon a day, The Husbandman selfe to come that way,

256 Patrick Cheney Of custome for to servewe his grownd, And his trees of state in compasse rownd. (Februarie 144-6) The Husbandman's initial routine service to his 'trees of state' resembles Virgil's declared relation between georgic and epic in the Georgics itself: 'Yet anon I will gird me to sing Caesar's fiery fights, and bear his name in story through as many years as Caesar is distant from the faroff birth of Tithonus' (III.45-7). The Georgics is unique in the Virgil canon for positing a harmonious, progressive relation not merely between the middle and high genres but also between the middle and low ones, as its conclusion testifies: 'Thus I sang of the care of fields, of cattle, and of trees, while great Caesar thundered in war by deep Euphrates and gave a victor's laws unto willing nations, and essayed the path to Heaven. In those days I, Virgil, was nursed of sweet Parthenope, and rejoined in the arts of inglorious ease - I who dallied with shepherds' songs, and, in youth's boldness, sang, Tityrus, of thee under thy spreading beech's covert' (IV.559-66). In other words, Virgil singles out the georgic as the genre that mediates the progression from pastoral to epic. Spenser explodes this tripartite relation when he presents the Briar complaining to the Husbandman of the Oak: 'Him when the spitefull brere had espyed, / Causlesse complained, and lowdly cryed / Unto his Lord, stirring up sterne strife' (147-9). The Briar's complaint is so successful that the Husbandman does not even listen to the Oak's defence: 'his enemie / Had kindled such coles of displeasure, / That the good man noulde stay his leasure, / But home him hasted with furious heate, / Encreasing his wrath with many a threate' (190-3). The Husbandman's hapless responsibility for the destruction of the nightingale's home recalls Virgil's famous simile in Georgics IV, when Orpheus mournfully laments the death of his wife Eurydice, 'draw[ing] ... oaktrees' to him: 'even as the nightingale, mourning beneath the poplar's shade, bewails the loss of her brood, that a churlish ploughman hath espied and torn unfledged from the nest: but she weeps all night long, and, perched on a spray, renews her piteous strain, filling the region round with sad laments' (511-15).50 In short, Thenot's fable of the Oak and the Briar represents the way in which pastoral poets conspire with didactic poets to destroy the prospect of writing epic. What Thenot does not appear to recognize is that his fable is also about the failure of his own didactic poetry to mediate

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 257 the progression from pastoral to epic. For his part, Spenser is apprising himself of the way in which Elizabethan poets misunderstand the sanctity of the Virgilian career pattern so important to England's national poet. IV

Might we particularize Spenser's literary history in the Februarie eclogue? Who is he talking about? To answer this question, we need not lapse into the kind of one-for-one correspondences characterizing criticism earlier in the century. At the same time, we may wish to recognize that the more recent work of Louis Montrose, Harry Berger, and especially Richard Halpern and John Watkins encourages us to be as accurate historically as possible. If Spenser is surveying a generational career opposition, probably he has certain individuals in mind. With characteristic tact, however, he does not make us privy to them, no more than he does Rosalind and numerous other figures in the Calender. Moreover, the revisionist work of Halpern in particular has an unexpected intersection with the traditional work of Paul McLane, especially with regard to Cuddie. If for McLane this memorable figure from three eclogues - Februarie, August, and October - represents Edward Dyer, courtier and poet-friend to Sidney and Spenser himself, for Halpern the young shepherd evokes the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey. Criticism here indeed makes for strange bedfellows, since it is well known that Dyer was deeply influenced by both Wyatt and Surrey. The intersection between recent and older criticism on Thenot is not as substantive, since McLane's candidate for Thenot, the Bishop of Ely, and Chaucer (to my knowledge) did not share a practice in the institution of poetry. Rather than arguing that Cuddie represents Dyer, however, we might come to see the youthful herdgroom as a collage portrait of a generation's amorous poets, and Thenot as a collage portrait of an earlier generation's didactic poets. Since it would take a separate study to compile such a complex set of portraits in detail, a few preliminary observations may here suffice. Historically speaking, Dyer was the English heir to Wyatt and Surrey (especially the latter), becoming the chief poet at Elizabeth's court by 1579.51 Harvey heralded Dyer as 'in a manner oure onlye Inglish poett/ and as late as 1598 he could claim that Dyer's 'written devises farr excell most of the sonets, and cantos in print' (quoted in Sargent 167, 165). Perhaps not remarkably, the features of Dyer's poetry match up

258 Patrick Cheney well with those of Cuddle. In fact, McLane has assembled compelling evidence of the match-up. The most general is their shared commitment to love poetry. Like Cuddie, Dyer expressed 'his natural inclination to poetry/ writes Anthony a Wood, and his 'excellency in bewailing and bemoaning the perplexities of love' (quoted in McLane 266), as all of Dyer's thirteen or so extant poems testify (see Sargent 165-218; and May, 'Edward Dyer'). Several of Dyer's extant poems are pastoral in mode (1,4,7,10); repeatedly, 'delight' is on Dyer's mind (e.g., 2:41-6,3: 42,5:1,23), as is his need for withdrawal (5: 63-4), yet paradoxically so is ambition and the pattern of rising and falling (3: 25-48), sometimes with clear reference to the queen (4: 55-6). Equally important, Dyer joins Cuddie in loving a shepherdess named Phyllis: 'Alas, my hart, mine eye hath wronged thee, / Presumptuous eye, to gaze on Phillis face, / Whose heavenly eye no mortall man may see' (7:1-3).52 One of the most interesting conjunctions, however, lies in a shared commitment to subjectivity. As we have seen, Cuddie says that his 'mind is bent' to the devices of Tityrus's novels, while, according to Sargent, Dyer had as 'His distinguishing characteristic... introspection, his dwelling upon his own mental state' (172), as revealed in 'A Fancy': 'my death is of the mind' (5:11). Finally, two of Dyer's poems have at their centre the arboreal metaphor: 'The lowest trees have topps' (12:1); and 'The Song of the Oak' (6). This latter is important not simply as Dyer's 'earliest datable lyric' but also as the poem he composed for Queen Elizabeth during the Woodstock entertainment in 1575.53 While Spenser may well have drawn certain features of Cuddie from Dyer, he likely did not intend Cuddie to represent Dyer alone. For instance, the notable detail of Cuddie's 'hery[ing] with hymnes thy lasses glove' appears to evoke a well-known incident involving the Earl of Oxford. In his chapter on the Oak and the Briar, McLane argues that the Oak is Leicester and the Briar Oxford, and he accounts for the Briar's sweet smell by referring to the time 'Oxford won for himself the dubious honor of introducing into England embroidered gloves, scented leathern jerkins, sweet bags, and expensive perfume': 'He ingratiated himself with the Queen by presenting her with perfumed gloves trimmed with four tufts or roses of coloured silk. The Queen was so pleased with these gloves that she was pictured with them upon her hands, and for many years after the perfume was called "the Earl of Oxford's perfume'" (70). In response to McLane's allegorical model, we can observe that it is Cuddie whom Spenser associates with gloves. Since the point of Thenot's fable is to associate Cuddie with the Briar,

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 259 we might not be surprised to find such a crossing of historical referents. What is striking is not that Cuddie is Dyer or that the Briar is Oxford but that Cuddie and Oxford were the two prevailing amateur poets in the late 1570s (May, Courtier Poets 54-9), and therefore that Spenser is likely combining features of both, distributing them across his twin representations of Cuddie and the Briar. This kind of historical cross-representation may well have been one of Spenser's secretive strategies for deflecting allegorical detection so much in place elsewhere in the Calender. Perhaps we can call it Spenser's Hymn to (G)love. If figures like Dyer and Oxford inform Cuddie and the Briar, what about Thenot and the Oak? The situation here is less clear, but it seems probable that the chief referents were older poets in the tradition of the Mirror for Magistrates. Among the contributors, two of the chief with well-established links to Spenser are Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) and Thomas Churchyard (1520-1604), both of whom were from the older Burleigh-Elizabeth generation. Sackville is famous today for his superb proto-Spenserian Induction to the Mirror, as well as for his coauthorship of that important pre-Marlovian tragedy, Gorboduc. Like Oxford, Sackville was the recipient of a Dedicatory Sonnet to the 1590 Faerie Queene, wherein Spenser addressed the great lord as more fit for the genre of Elizabethan epic than he himself: 'Thou much more fit (were leasure to the same) / Thy gracious Soverains praises to compile. / And her imperiall Majestic to frame, / In loftie numbers and heroicke stile' (11: 5-S).54 Unlike Sackville, Churchyard was not an aristocrat, and his commoner origin seems more pertinent to old Thenot, as do certain features of his biography and verse: he was a self-proclaimed poet-solider, famous precisely for his 'preoccupations of war, propaganda, and moral exhortations'; thus he could do double duty as both a didactic and a martial poet.55 In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, Spenser describes Churchyard aptly as 'old Palemon free from spight, / Whose carefull pipe may make the hearer rew: / Yet he himselfe may rewed be more right, / That sung so long untill quite hoarse he grew' (396-9) - a tribute Churchyard proudly acknowledged. While further work might well prove productive, I suggest here simply that Spenser in Februarie is historicizing his literary environment with details precise enough to evoke certain practitioners of the Elizabethan art of amateur poetry, some of which we can still partially discern today. While Februarie focuses on Spenser's literary environment, it does evoke a political model of Elizabethan patronage, as lines 127-87 in particular reveal. 'Seest/ says the Briar to the Oak, 'how fresh my

260 Patrick Cheney flowers bene spredde, / Dyed in Lilly white, and Cremsin redde, / With Leaves engrained in lusty greene, / Colours meete to clothe a mayden Queene' (129-32; emphasis added). Dyer was fond not merely of complaining to Elizabeth, but of punning on his own name, which originates in the dyeing trade. Perhaps it does not seem too far fetched to see Spenser here evoking the political model of patronage which so obsessed Dyer (among others). But even in Dyer's own self-punning practice, the political is subsumed under the poetic: 'My song, if anie aske whose greivous Case is such, / Dy er thou let his name be knowne: his folly shewes to much' (5: 77-8; his emphasis). In Februarie, as critics have long observed, Spenser associates the Husbandman with Elizabeth; hence, the equation between Elizabeth and the genre of georgic that I am advancing may appear curious. Perhaps, however, the purpose of the equation is to identify the queen as a primary agent for the explosion of her poet's Virgilian model - an allegorical representation of the very point Spenser implies in October but wisely does not state when he criticizes England for its failure to patronize poets on the model of Maecenas and Augustus. Similarly, as critics have also long observed, Spenser evokes a religious model of Christian doctrine, in which the person of faith foolishly persecutes the Roman Church to the disadvantage of the Reformed Church: For it had bene an auncient tree, Sacred with many a mysteree, And often crost with the priestes crewe, And often halowed with holy water dewe. (Februarie 207-10) But rather than allegorizing dangerous religious practices fully, Spenser again subsumes the institution of the Church under the authority of practising poets, who use their art to transact religious division. Contrary to the received wisdom, in Februarie Spenser does take sides, but not with Cuddie or Thenot.

v The present essay has tried to show how career criticism can illuminate texts, including those that have long remained enigmatic, especially through a mixture of politics, religion, and literature. The Februarie eclogue is not simply a political or a religious allegory of the Eliza-

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 261 bethan era, nor only a timeless generational allegory of youth and age; it is also a complex vocational allegory, by which Spenser reviews the state of English poetry in the late 1570s. In doing so, he manages to write a valuable history of literary careers available from classical and medieval times through the Renaissance. To this extent, Februarie is a photographic negative of the more affirmative October. As Spenser surveys the literary landscape, he finds the two modes of the amateur poet, amorous and didactic, each crippling the political and religious power of the two career models then available: the medieval or Chaucerian model of love poetry, didactic poetry, and chivalric poetry; and the classical or Virgilian model of pastoral, georgic, and epic. By diagnosing the dangers of the literary landscape in the late 1570s, Spenser clears a path for himself as Elizabethan England's premier national poet, the fit heir to both Virgil and Chaucer. From the debris of fallen timber surveyed, England's New Poet can build a new model for a literary career. Grafting Chaucer to Virgil, he hopes naturally to grow beyond both.56

Notes 1 See Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates 55-100, esp. 82,100. On Spenser as 'The Poet's Poet/ see Alpers's article by this title. For a critique, see Rambuss, 'Spenser's Lives, Spenser's Careers'; for a counter-critique, see Cheney and Silberman 5-6. According to Dees, '[cjritical concern with Spenser's "career" has of late become a growth industry' (124). Other work on Spenser's career includes Bernard; Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career; Helgerson, "The New Poet Presents Himself; Miller, 'Spenser's Vocation, Spenser's Career'; and Loewenstein, 'Echo's Ring.' Spenser quotations come from The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Smith and de Selincourt. The i-j and u-v have been modernized, as have other obsolete typographical conventions, such as the italicizing of names and places. 2 See Cheney, 'Spenser's Pastorals.' On 'the Renaissance commonplace, the progression from pastoral to epic,' see A. Webb 8. See also Coolidge; Neuse, 'Milton and Spenser'; and A. Fowler 35, 65,70, 75,221,240-1,252. For the ousting of georgic in the Renaissance, see A. Fowler 240; for Spenser's enfolding of georgic into pastoral and epic, see Tylus. On E.K. as Spenser, see Schleiner; and Waldman. 3 Petrarch wrote his epic before his pastoral, but he published his pastoral first, and he published in other genres as well. Boccaccio published his epic before his pastoral, and he published other works before both.

262 Patrick Cheney

4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

Sannazaro published his pastoral first but then brought out his Piscatorial Eclogues at the same time as his epic. On Petrarch's scrambling of the Virgilian program, see Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight 59-62. Spenser's Proem to Faerie Queene I is well known to be imitating the pseudoVirgilian verses prefixed to late-Augustan, medieval, and Renaissance editions of the Aeneid: 'I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, then, leaving the woodland, constrained the neighbouring fields to serve the husbandmen, however grasping - a work welcome to farmers: but now of Mars' bristling' (repr. Virgil, trans. Fairclough 241; all Virgil quotations will be from this edition). Renwick 34-40, esp. 36; and A.C. Hamilton. In addition to Helgerson, see esp. Montrose, '"The perfecte paterne of a Poete'"; Miller, 'Authorship, Anonymity'; Mallette; McCanles; and Loewenstein, 'Spenser's Retrography.' See Maclean and Prescott, eds: 'In the selections from The Shepheardes Calender we thought it best to replace the "June" eclogue with ["Morall"] "Februarie," an especially instructive and taking poem in recent years for a wide variety of critics and scholars' (x). All Chaucer quotations come from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson et al. On the conjunction of Chaucer and Virgil here, see Maclean and Prescott, eds 542nn2-3; for the imitation from Troilus and Criseyde, see Esolen 292-3. On Chaucer and Virgil in the Calender, see, most recently, Esolen; and Watkins 62-89. For other excellent commentary on Chaucer as Tityrus, see DeNeef 5-7. On nationhood, I have been most influenced by Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood; and Hadfield. For my review of the criticism on nationhood, see Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession 19-25 and 273nn39-43. Chaucer was an MP from Kent and a part of the Kent peace commission. On the fable and its sources, see Friedland, 'Spenser as a Fabulist'; Roberts; Friedland, 'Source'; and A. Patterson 59-61,88-9. For Webbe and Palgrave, see the Variorum Edition, ed. Greenlaw et al. 7: 253; for Hazlitt, see Friedland, 'Source' 224. Oram et al., eds. 38. See also Maclean and Prescott, eds 509nl; and McCabe, ed. 522-3. Thus the situation has not changed since 1950, when Whitaker observed: 'no immediately convincing interpretation of the allegory has been offered' (11). See Brooks-Davies, ed. 38. For the confluence of religious with political allegory in the genre of the Aesopian fable, esp. the political, see A. Patterson 59-61,88-9. For today's readers, King provides leadership for the religious camp: 'Although the double tragedy of the Oak and Briar lacks an explicit topical application, it articulates a double-edged warning

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 263

15

16

17 18

against the religious excesses of both radical Protestants and Catholic recusants ... Spenser issues no defense of recusancy, but he does align himself with reformist elements in medieval Christian thought. "Februarie" takes a qualified stand on reform through its sentiment that it is best to retain whatever goodness inheres in religious tradition while throwing away abuses' (34). See also Hume 43-4; and the following in the Variorum Edition: de Selincourt (7: 254); Greenlaw (7: 261); Long (7: 261); Stirling (7: 261); and Friedland (7: 262). By contrast, Cullen remains authoritative for the social camp: 'The debate that frames the February eclogue is a portrayal at once comic and serious of the perennial conflict of age and youth ... The debate over winter and spring is thus symbolic of the psychological power struggle between youth and age ... The fable is a parody of the order and balance contained in the framework ... age and youth are both incomplete; they need each other ... This is the teaching for the month of February' (34-41). See also the Variorum Edition (Jones 7: 255; Renwick 7: 254; Higginson 7: 254); McLane 262-79, 337-9, who is notable for his identifications of the characters with historical individuals (more of which later); Hoffman 92-7; Shore 14-26; Marx 211-15; Bond; Watson; and Lane. Influenced by Cullen (in particular), recent critics have emphasized the impasse in the debate between Cuddie and Thenot, Briar and Oak, insisting that Spenser himself does not take sides. See Huckaby and Emerson 103, who first saw that the fable deals with old and new poetry; and Montrose, 'Interpreting Spenser's February Eclogue' 70-1, who first situates the eclogue within 'Spenser's career' (abstract). Berger, The Aging Boy,' esp. 36 (see his Revisionary Play 441), divides the factions of Cuddie and Thenot into the Poets and the Stoic Censors. Iser, 'Spenser's Arcadia,' esp. 83-4 (see his 'Renaissance Pastoralism as a Paradigm for Fictionality,' esp. 42-4), joins DeNeef (4) in seeing the eclogue representing the generic forms that poets produce out of their traditions. Halpern 176-214, esp. 196, sees the Briar and Oak as two aesthetics, with the Briar recalling Wyatt and Surrey and the Oak Chaucer and other medieval poets. Finally, Watkins (see 82-6) is especially important to the present argument because he translates the literary geography to Spenser's appropriation of Chaucer and Virgil, in the process constructing a genealogy for the influence of Chaucer's didactic poetry into the sixteenth century. E.g., Yale, Norton, Longman, and the newly published Penguin; see also Heninger 646. Esler xiv. Esler summarizes his remarkably pertinent generational narrative for the latter half of the sixteenth century in terms which were written right at the moment the generational guard was changing: 'The older Elizabethans repeated like a litany the lesson of their own lives: that the

264 Patrick Cheney

19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

ambitious courtier or counselor was the most dangerous of public enemies. To this basic denunciation of a great social evil, they added still more impressive warnings, supporting their empirical knowledge with religious, scientific, and poetic verities. They pointed out that ambition, accompanied always by the mortal sins of pride, avarice, and envy, was a terrible sin against God ... And they stressed the certainty of failure - and hence the futility of aspiring - by giving new life to the ancient image of Fortune's wheel, and by repeating the timeless words of Ecclesiastes ... This in fact remained the orthodox view of ambition throughout the reign ... And yet, if there was one quality in which this younger generation abounded, it was extravagant ambition' (49-50). Spenser uses forty-seven avian images in the Calender, and thirty-seven sustain literary significance (Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight 80; on pipe and bird, see esp. 81 and 268n6). For different commentary on Spenser's appropriation of Chaucer here, see Watkins 85. If by pastoral we mean a literary work dealing with the life of shepherds and herdsmen (Alpers, What is Pastoral?) Chaucer wrote no works formally in the pastoral mode. Consequently, Cooper has little to say about Chaucer (cf., e.g., 54,122,152,153,155): 'Chaucer's only lines of bergerie spring out of the mention of musical instruments,' quoting HF1223-6, which 'Gavin Douglas and Spenser both borrowed ... and Lydgate developed' (54; see 157-8). In his article on Chaucer in The Spenser Encyclopedia (144-8), Burrow observes: 'Since Chaucer did not cultivate pastoral, he had little to contribute to Spenser's shepherds' world - only the delightful cameo of the "lytel herdegromes" (House of Fame 1224-6), which Spenser thriftily used twice (SC, Feb 35-41, FQ VI ix 5)' (145). We could add the nightingale simile at Troilus and Criseyde III.1233-9, important to line 123 ofFebruarie. For more detail on the poets in Helgerson's amateur class, see May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets. Brooks-Davies says that the 'girdleXcestus symbolizes marriage, chastity, and love,' citing FlorimeU's girdle at FQ III.vii.31, IV.v.2-6 (ed. 42). For the high position of the hymn in the Renaissance hierarchy, see Hardison 70. See also Rollinson. These include the Variorum Edition; the Yale Edition; the Norton; the Longman; and the Penguin. Similarly, Watkins quotes the passage, but he erases the phrase 'some of chevelrie' (84), perhaps because he is emphasizing Chaucer's didactic poetry. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia Il.ii, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, trans, and ed. Shapiro 72.

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 265 28 From 'Words of the author to his book/ Teseida XII.84; trans. McCoy, The Book of Theseus 328. 29 I can find very little work on the model; Weinberg has a few incidental references, seeing it as a commonplace of quatrocento criticism (1:96): 'What Dante had to say, besides, sounded so much like what writers in these years were saying that it did not fall at all strangely upon the ears of contemporaries.' Most studies of the Dante-Chaucer connection focus on the influence of the Divine Comedy: e.g., Neuse, Chaucer's Dante; Taylor; Schless; Wetherbee; and Shoaf. The most recent discussion of Chaucer in Spenser and the Renaissance does not discuss this topic: Krier, ed., Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance. See also Miskimin; Lasater; and Hieatt. 30 Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem Il.xviii, repr. Gilbert, Literary Criticism 486. On Trissino, see Weinberg 1: 96. 31 It does not show up in any of the treatises reprinted in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith. Cf. Ascham's four-genre model in The Scholemaster. comedy, tragedy, epic, and lyric (repr. Smith, ed. 1: 23). 32 On Spenser and Dante, see esp. Kirpatrick; and Tosello. For Spenser's possible knowledge of the Teseida, see Mulryan. 33 On Troilus and Criseyde as an epic, see Maresca. Thanks to Craig Berry for this reference. 34 See Cheney, 'Spenser's Completion of The Squire's Tale.' On Chaucer as an epic poet who imitates Dantean epic, see Neuse, Chaucer's Dante. 35 On song, herding, and love as the three activities of pastoral, see Halperin 61; on Sannazaro's eroticizing of pastoral, see Cheney, 'Spenser's Pastorals.' 36 One Renaissance writer whom Spenser knew appears to have seen the transposition: Ronsard. In a poem on his colleague J. de Boyssieres, Ronsard writes: 'For practice, Virgil sang his pastoral, / And later sang Aeneas the Trojan: similarly / Boysseres sang his amorous torment / And now sings Hercules in the long heroic line' (quoted in Prescott, "The Laurel and the Myrtle' 65). 37 Professor Robert R. Edwards writes to me as follows: The Chaucerian model bears resemblance to the three passages where Chaucer himself lists his works and offers some indication of what his taxonomy (if not his genre theory) might be: Legend of Good Women F Prologue 417-30 [= G 40520]; Man of Law's Prologue 11.45-89, and the Retraction at the end of The Parson's Tale (X.1081-92)... Alceste's defense of the poet against Cupid's charge about "translacioun" (namely, the Romance of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde) in LGW has a four-fold taxonomy: narrative love poems, translations, lyrics, and "other holynesse." We might see the narrative love poems and the "translaciouns" as two sides of the same coin, which would give us narrative, lyric, and didactic poetry. The General Prologue differs

266 Patrick Cheney

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50

only in substituting the term "besynesse" (G 412) for "holynesse" and in adding Chaucer's translation of Innocent Ill's De miseria humanae conditionis to his list of didactic works. The listing in the Man of Law's Prologue portrays Chaucer as an Ovidian writer and lists elegiac topics; the list does not match the extant legends in LGW, and there are textual variations over the exact number of ladies supposedly recorded therein. ML also takes a shot at Gower by noting that Chaucer does not tell tales of incest, while Confessio Amantis rehearses the story of Canacee and devotes most of Book 8 (purportedly on lust) to the story of Apollonius of Tyre. The Retraction seems to work off the same basic taxonomy as LGW, while trying to distinguish between sinful and efficacious works: "translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees" and sinful Canterbury Tales, lyrics, but also the translation of Boethius "and othere bookes of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee and devocioun." If we remove the criterion of use, the largescale categories are narrative, lyric, and didactic writing' (personal communication, August 1999). According to Harvey, Spenser told him that in writing The Faerie Queene he hoped to 'overgoe' Ariosto (repr. Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays I: 115-16). McLane 27-46; Bednarz. See Hoffman 96-7. Lucan, Pharsalia 1.136-43; trans. Joyce, Lucan: 'Pharsalia.' See W.R. Johnson 73—4. For Lucan's imitation of Virgil's simile, see Ahl 157, 224; and RosnerSiegel 166n5. On Lucan's imitation of Virgil in general, see esp. Hardie. L.S. Johnson 69. See also Prescott, 'Spenser (Re)Reading de Bellay' 133-6. Cf. Greene 225-6. See Berry 140. For the details laid out in this paragraph, see Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight 27-38; cf. Cheney, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession 61-5. On Virgil's proposed turn to philosophy, see Donatus, section 123, trans. Wilson-Okamura. On Du Bartas, see Prescott in the present volume. Helgerson recalls that this was one of Spenser's own fears for himself: 'Long ago the gods made me the gift of delight, but not of the useful. O would they had given me the useful, even now, along with the delight' (quoted in Self-Crowned Laureates 79, citing Variorum Edition 10: 256-8). The flower is a well-known (Renaissance) commonplace for poetry; the acorn, perhaps a less well-known commonplace. Richard Mulcaster, Spenser's teacher at Merchant Taylors' School, speaks of 'the poet's akecorns' (quoted in Berger, Revisionary Play 319). Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight 77-110, esp. 77-80. See Segal 23,45-6,75-8; Putnam 310-11; and Greene 125. For two imitators

Spenser's Februarie Eclogue 267

51

52

53 54

55 56

of the simile before Spenser, see Petrarch, Rime sparse 311:1^4; and Gascoigne, Complaynt ofPhylomeme, in The Complete Works, ed. Cunliffe 2:1 81. On Spenser's use elsewhere of Virgil's georgic nightingale, see J.N. Brown. Early in the twentieth century, Sargent notes that Dyer 'flourished chiefly in the 1570s/ concluding that 'Of all the courtly poets of Elizabeth's reign' Dyer 'came ... definitely the earliest... Dyer's poetic mould had been set before the advent of Spenser and Sidney. This marks him off not only from these two men, but from the great chorus of Elizabethans who followed them and benefited by their skill... Dyer's poetry, in fact, springs from the period ... between Surrey and Spenser. His true contemporaries among professional poets included Googe, Tusser, Churchyard, Turbervile, and Gascoigne' (166-7; all quotations from Dyer's poetry come from Sargent, Appendix). Near mid-century, McLane calls Dyer 'one of the earliest and finest of Elizabethan lyric poets ... Dyer is, I think the only poet of the time who in 1579 could be called "the perfecte paterne of a Poet" - as Cuddie is called in the Argument before October. For almost twenty years he had been recognized as the model courtly poet' (266,272). At the end of the century, May remarks that 'Dyer wrote some of the most widely circulated and influential verse of Elizabeth I's reign ... From the mid 1580s ... he was identified as a poet by such contemporaries as Puttenham, Harington, Geoffrey Whitney, Gabriel Harvey, as well as in England's Helicon and Belvedere' ('Edward Dyer' 80, 82). Dyer had no monopoly on this pastoral name, which is as old as Theocritus and Virgil, but it was used very little in England before 1579, if at all. Most of the hits on the English Poetry Database date afterwards and come from translations of Ovid's Tristia, esp. the Heroides. May, 'Edward Dyer' 82. "The Song of the Oak' was published in the 1585 The Queenes Majesties entertainment at Woodstocke; see Sargent 207. In 'Sacvyles Olde Age/ Sackville acknowledges his great debt to Chaucer: 'In muses while I pass away the time, / Of Troilus the doble woe to hear, / The Knight's story, and of the Reeve's rhyme, / The Miller's tale and eke of Chaunticlere' (85-8; transcription compliments of Professor Germaine Warkentin, for which many thanks). See Zim and Parkes. Gaffney 132: 74. For help in thinking through the Virgilian and Chaucerian dimensions of this essay, I am indebted to Judith H. Anderson, Craig A. Berry, Colin Burrow, Joseph Farrell, and Theresa M. Krier. For help with the research, I would like to thank Todd Preston. Finally, for judicious reviews of the manuscript, I am grateful to John Watkins and Robert R. Edwards.

TEN

Cervantes and tl The Portrayal of a Litera Frederick A. de Armas

Throughout his literary career, Cervantes was engaged in a conversation and a contest with the classical authors of Greece and Rome. From his early pastoral romance La Galatea (1585), whose very title evokes the Ovidian myth of Polyphemus's love for the nymph Galatea,1 to his posthumously published Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), where Cervantes sought to assure his fame by rivaling Heliodorus's Aethiopica,2 his works constantly call upon the textual remains of the ancients. From the ancient monuments of Rome's pagan past as depicted in Don Quixote (2:95) to the detailed description of the sixteenthcentury city in the last book of the Persiles, Cervantes' texts are continually revisiting the 'eternal' city, finding in its buildings and works of arts archaeological links to its imperial past. Cervantes' archaeological interest in rediscovering the remains of the ancients probably derives from his voyage to Italy.3 Following his sojourn in the peninsula from 1569-75, Cervantes spent his life 'desiring Italy.'4 We can document his attempt to return to the Italian peninsula on at least two occasions: first when he wanted to follow Ascanio Colonna there in 1585 (Colonna was named Cardinal in 1586) and later when the Conde de Lemos was named viceroy of Naples in 1610. But these would-be patrons did not invite him. The memory of those early years in Italy and the desire for Italy (and consequently for its art, architecture, and culture) are carefully inscribed in Cervantes' texts. Cervantes' interest in the ancients is not an erudite and philological one. He did not know Greek, and he knew just enough Latin to be hired by Cardinal Acquaviva in Rome. His interest in the ancients has to do

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 269 with visuality and culture. After all, Cervantes' first real confrontation with the ancient past was a visual one - when he came face to face with the art and architecture of Rome. Here he must have seen many of the frescoes by Michelangelo and Raphael, artists he mentions in the Persiles. Indeed, the sonnet on Rome in the Persiles is enunciated as a group of pilgrims view the city from Monte Mario. The text tells us that before entering Rome they passed through the gardens of the Villa Madama (427) - a villa designed by Raphael. As Roger Jones and Nicholas Penney state: 'His [Raphael's] plan for the Villa Madama was also very much a literary enterprise, drawing extensively on accounts of ancient Roman architecture and particularly on the letters in which the younger Pliny described his Villas' (226). Another of Raphael's last projects which he also did not complete was 'that of drawing up, on the basis of excavation and the evidence of ancient writers, a scientific reconstruction of the original appearance of the whole of ancient Rome' (Jones and Penny 199). It is this interest in the archaeology of the ancients coupled with a strong admiration for what Renaissance artists were doing, that led Cervantes to his own initial archaeological project - the re-creation of the ancient 'Spanish' city of Numancia - a city he modelled after Troy and Rome.5 The tragedy of Numancia, an epic re-creation of the myth of origins of a city based on Virgil's Aeneid,6 may have led him to consider yet another great Virgilian myth, that of the origins of a great poet. Throughout the early modern period, European poets sought to emulate the career patterns of the ancients. While critics have shown that authors such as Chaucer, Spenser, and Marlowe were cognizant of such patterns and used them in their works and in their careers,7 little has been said of the use of the ancient cursus by early modern Spanish writers. This essay is an attempt to begin to remedy this omission by studying Cervantes' literary career in terms of the Virgilian cursus, redefined in the Middle Ages as the Virgilian Wheel. As Ernst Curtius has pointed out, the Rota Virgilii, which became a commonplace in medieval rhetoric, 'was worked out from Aelius Donatus' commentary on Virgil ... This distinguishes three styles, to which certain occupations, trees, and animals correspond, and which were based upon Virgil's Bucolics, Georgics, and the Aeneid respectively' (201-35). Using what were once considered to be the first four lines of the Aeneid, the three styles also became the three stages that the poet must master in his literary career, thus establishing the 'myth' of the poet, one that entailed a specific career pattern:

270 Frederick A. de Armas I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, then, leaving the woodland, constrained the neighbouring fields to serve the husbandmen, however grasping - a work welcome to farmers: but now of Mars' bristling. (Virgil 1: 241) In other words, the poet must begin with pastoral, move to the farming fields of the Georgics, and end in the martial fields of epic. His final epic triumph is also the triumph of empire, for Virgil traces in his epic the origins of the Roman Empire, beginning with Aeneas's flight from Troy and ending with the predicted Golden Age of Augustan rule. Thus poet and empire must begin with small steps and end in a grand poem that evinces imperial triumph. In this essay I will argue that Cervantes' career consciously follows this pattern. He begins with pastoral, continues with an apprenticeship in epic, and culminates with epic. Although he wrote texts that do not correspond to this pattern, he followed it in most of his major works so that his career would be associated with the Virgilian cursus. But why follow Virgil's career, a cursus that culminates in the epic? As David Quint has explained, 'the Aeneid had, in fact, decisively transformed epic for posterity into both a genre that was committed to imitating and attempting to 'overgo' its earlier versions and a genre that was overtly political' (8). Cervantes' conviction that his writings are of the highest quality and should earn him everlasting fame,8 led him to attempt to 'overgo' earlier versions of epic. He begins with early experiments such as La Numancia, continues with an apprenticeship to epic, Don Quixote, and culminates his career with an epic in prose, Persiles y Sigismunda. Furthermore, his constant preoccupation with the fate of the Spanish empire, make of epic the ideal genre for him. Cervantes' imperial ideals will find an echo in Virgil, whose hero, Aeneas, was claimed as ancestor by Charles V and Philip II, architects of a new Spanish empire (Tanner 119-45). And, Cervantes' qualms about the Spanish imperial project will be incorporated in his works through allusions to Lucan, the main classical exponent of epics of the defeated. In the end, he finds Heliodorus a more appropriate model for the modern epic. It would be impossible to cover Cervantes' literary career in a short space. Consequently, this essay will focus on two major examples of career statements in Cervantes. The first is found in the prologue to La Galatea (1585), while the second derives from Don Quixote, I (1605). The essay will conclude with a brief look at the work that Cervantes described as the culmination of his literary career, the Persiles y Sigismunda.

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 271 I

La Galatea (1585) connects very clearly with Cervantes' Italian sojourn. Here he tells the reader that he served Cardinal Acquaviva in Rome (152). This pastoral also contains a clear announcement of Cervantes' projected career, thus connecting his vision of Rome to the discovery of an ancient career pattern. Indeed, the prologue to La Galatea is perhaps the most succinct statement of his intention to follow the Virgilian cursus. The first words of the prologue speak of 'La ocupacion de escribir eglogas en tiempo que, en general, la poesia anda tan desfavorecida' (the occupation of writing eclogues at a time when, in general, poetry is in disfavour) (155).9 Even though it is mainly a prose work, Cervantes views his pastoral novel as a Virgilian eclogue. And in this resides both Cervantes' imitation of the ancients and one of his major innovations. This statement is the first evidence of the writer's own representation of himself as a new Virgil. Although imitating the myth of the poet, he modifies it since Cervantes' stated aim is to become a prose Virgil. After all, Virgil's Eclogues had been translated by famous Spanish poets such as Juan del Encina (1496), Fray Luis de Leon, and Francisco Sanchez de las Brozas (Lopez Estrada 110-21). Cervantes is neither translating nor creating a verse imitation. His innovation consists of creating a prose imitation. Although Cervantes' Galatea comes closer to the modern pastoral tradition of Sannazaro and Montemayor, the prologue foregrounds the Virgilian origins of his text and his own desire to create a prose romance that also differs from his models. The most important single element in the prologue is Cervantes' justification for writing these pastoral eclogues: 'enriquecer el poeta considerando su propia lengua, y ensenorearse del artificio de la elocuencia que en ella cabe, para empresas mas altas y de mayor importancia' (to enrich the poet by dealing with his own language and to become master of the art of eloquence that [poetry] embodies so as to use it in higher and more important endeavours) (156). Here, Cervantes advocates first of all the use of Latin to enrich the vernacular. It has been argued that the real linguistic revolution of the Renaissance was not the restoration of classical Latin, 'but the national vernacular writers' invention of neoclassical styles in the modern European languages' (Rivers 25). The prologue to La Galatea argues for this new language and style, following Cicero and Virgil, who invented a classical Latin; and Boscan and Garcilaso, who 'invented' classical written Spanish. The enrichment proposed by Cervantes is not only of language, but also of

272 Frederick A. de Armas culture and ideas. In addition to its many Latinisms, La Galatea contains numerous borrowings from Italian Neoplatonists. More importantly, Cervantes argues that this enrichment must start with the lower poetic forms and proceed to the higher ones. In Virgilian fashion, then, Cervantes is telling his reader that eclogue is but an apprenticeship for the higher forms - mainly epic. As John S. Coolidge has noted, there is a sense of hierarchy in the Virgilian progression, but it was exploded through the use of the common ancient phrase 'to compare great things with small' (2).10 Coolidge adds: 'Small things not only provide relief from great concerns; they also contain the promise of great things to come. The movement of withdrawal is combined with the contrary suggestion of a movement forward from small things to maturity' (10). Indeed, Cervantes makes his reader aware that he is still young and he must thus withdraw to the eclogue: 'y la edad, que, apenas salido de los limites de la juventud, da licencia a semejantes ocupaciones' (and an age that, hardly passing beyond the limits of youth, gives licence for such occupations) (156).11 In mentioning the question of age, Cervantes may be making a reference to the long allegorical tradition of Virgilian exegesis where the Aeneid was seen as representing the different 'stages of man's life from infancy to old age' (Conte 286). In ancient times Fulgentius had interpreted each of the twelve books of the epic as a stage in man's life, while in the Middle Ages Bernardus Silvestris argued that there were only six stages in Virgil's poem, each represented in the first six books. Since the sixth book contains a journey to the underworld, it must represent 'the passage to the next life' (Conte 287). As Coolidge has explained, this 'regression' in youth means a future 'progression/ This progression is hinted at in the Galatea in a series of ways. The most important is that the pastoral 'hides' the higher genres and ideals within it. For this reason, eclogues and georgics may seem audacious. Virgil uses the term ('audacibus') to describe his 'handbook on farming' (Coolidge 14).12 Cervantes follows suit and says that in his publication of the Galatea he has 'dado muestras de atrevido' (given hints of his audaciousness) (157). Where is the daring and audaciousness? As in Virgil, it is in the promise of future works which take on graver questions such as those of war and empire. I would argue that Cervantes takes pastoral eclogue to the very edge, to the point where Mars begins to sing and Venus (or in this case the chaste Galatea) loses ground to the epic impetus. These epic questions are often muted, hidden, shaded, in the pasto-

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 273 ral. But Cervantes is bolder than other writers. In the prologue to the Galatea he actually points to Virgil's eclogues to justify his mixture of philosophy with amatory pastoral: 'el principe de la poesia latina fue calumniado en algunas de sus eglogas por haberse levantado mas que en otras; y asi no temera mucho que alguno condene haber mezclado razones de filosofia entre algunas amorosas de pastores' (the prince of Latin poetry was slandered for having risen higher in some eclogues than in others; and thus I will not fear that someone may condemn my having mingled philosophical questions amidst the shepherds' amorous speeches) (158). Here, Cervantes is referring to the Fourth Eclogue where Virgil takes up the prophetic mantle of the epic poet to predict a new Golden Age. That Cervantes' Galatea, like Virgil's eclogues, hides a political/philosophical concern in the shade of the pastoral world is clear even from the prologue where the Spanish writer warns that 'muchos de los disfrazados pastores de ella lo eran solo en el habito' (many of the disguised shepherds in the work are only shepherds in their clothing) (158). The outside world, the concerns of the city, intrude in the pastoral, where they are left hidden for another day. It is no coincidence that the centrepiece of the last book of this pastoral is the appearance of Calliope to the shepherds. The Muse clearly identifies herself as the ruler of epic: 'Mi nombre es Caliope... yo soy la que hice cobrar eterna fama al antiguo ciego natural de Esmirna, por el solamente famosa; la que hara vivir el mantuano Titiro por todos los siglos venideros, hasta que el tiempo se acabe; y la que hace que se tengan en cuenta, desde la pasada edad hasta la edad presente, los escritos tan asperos y discretos del antiquisimo Enio' (My name is Calliope ... I was the one who made eternally famous the blind man from Smyrna; the one that will give life to the Mantuan Tityrus throughout the centuries, until time itself comes to an end; and the one that makes others take into account, from ancient times to the present, the rough and prudent writings of the most ancient Ennius) (561).13 The Muse thus surrounds herself with ancient exponents of epic: Homer, Virgil, and Ennius. Interestingly, Calliope refers to a pastoral character in Virgil, rather than to an epic one. But Tityrus is not just any pastoral character. He embodies pastoral itself. By evoking Tityrus, Cervantes brings together the three ancient genres as defined in the Virgilian cursus: Tityrus is a character in the eclogues; his name is used as a symbol of eclogue in the Georgics;u and it is found in Virgil's recusatio, his reasons for not singing epic, in Eclogue VI. It has been suggested that this recusatio serves to predict epic, and that here Virgil is envision-

274 Frederick A. de Armas ing his poetic future. Responding to Joseph Farrell's warning that this brief prospectus is Very misleading' (314), Patrick Cheney explains that Virgil 'is projecting his epic but failing to predict the actual form that the Aeneid took' (Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession 33). Cervantes, in La Galatea, is also predicting his career's culmination in the epic, but failing to predict its actual form. From these passages it is clear that Cervantes' Virgilian career program was not developed haphazardly, but was audaciously announced in his youthful pastoral of 1585. II

Turning to the prologue of his second published prose work, the first part of Don Quixote (1605), a reader would at first be hard-pressed to discover any further announcement of a Virgilian career. Although Virgil is mentioned, his name comes up as part of a satire on the misuse of erudition. And yet, the allusion to Virgil's Circe (1.56; 29)15 does bring up the question of imitation and emulation in the epic, since references to the sorceress in the Aeneid derive from Homer. Furthermore, a reference to the thief Cacus (1.56; 29), a figure so clearly developed in the Aeneid, brings up the question of the limits of imitation. When does it become literary thievery? These allusions to Virgil alert the reader to the cleverly concealed uses of the Aeneid in Don Quixote. Indeed, it has been argued that Cervantes' parody of the novels of chivalry in Don Quixote is but 'a smokescreen intended to mask Cervantes' primary intention in Don Quixote, which was to imitate and improve upon Virgil's Aeneid' (McGaha 34). Rather than discussing in detail the prologue and the imitation of Virgil in the 1605 novel, I would like to focus on a pastoral episode in Don Quixote. The Grisostomo and Marcela story interpolated in chapters 11 to 14 evinces Cervantes' continuing concern with the cursus. Here, Grisostomo, a former student from Salamanca, now disguised as a shepherd, attempts to woo Marcela by writing countless poems about her (1.179; 103). When she fails to respond to Grisostomo's passion and his verse, he lets himself die, and orders that his poetry be destroyed. A traveller who along with Don Quixote comes by in time to attend the funeral, argues that Grisostomo's poetry should be preserved. Vivaldo uses as an example Augustus Caesar's decree disallowing the clause in Virgil's will where he ordered that his Aeneid be burned: 'Y no le tuviera bueno Augusto Cesar si consintiera que se pusiera en ejecucion lo que el divino Mantuano dejo en su testamento' (It would not have been right in Augustus Caesar

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 275 himself if he had consented to carry out all that the divine Mantuan ordered in his will) (1.179; 103). Unable to counter this ancient example, Grisostomo's friend, Ambrosio, allows some of the poems to be rescued from the blaze. Cut down in the prime of his life, Grisostomo's poetic works consist of some sacred poems and plays written earlier in life and his amorous poems composed while disguised as a shepherd. His disguise would link these poems with the Virgilian eclogue. These two Virgilian gestures, the writing of amorous poetry by shepherds and the order that his poetry be destroyed, alert us to the possibility of a cursus. It may be argued that, since Grisostomo's life was cut short the text may be challenging the notion of an ideal career. After all, how can a poet plan to fulfil a cursus when the length of life is uncertain? But I would claim that such a challenge is countered in the works written by and about Grisostomo, texts that evince his ability to follow the ancient cursus in spite of his short life. The allusion to Virgil's will serves to contextualize Grisostomo's career pattern. For Arturo Marasso, Cervantes is here recalling the Life of Virgil by Donatus, a work that he claims had been included in the Spanish translation of the Aeneid by Gregorio Hernandez de Velasco.16 As noted above, Donatus had underlined the concept of the Virgilian Wheel. It is this wheel that turns Grisostomo's poetic fortune. Grisostomo's first significant career move is the composition of pastoral amatory works. He does this as he disguises himself as a shepherd. As part of his new identity, Grisostomo uses the appropriate locale, the pasture, the corresponding animal, the sheep, as well as the appropriate tree, the beech: 'No esta muy lejos de aqui un sitio donde hay casi dos docenas de altas hayas, y no hay ninguna que en su lisa corteza no tenga grabado y escrito el nombre de Marcela' (Not far from here is a place where there are about two dozen great beeches, and every one of them has Marcela's name cut on its smooth bark) (1.166; 94). Furthermore, the notion of writing on the beech tree is clearly Virgilian. In Eclogue V Mopsus states: 'Nay I will try these verses, which the other day I carved on the green beech-bark, and set to music, marking words and tune in turn' (5.13-14; 1.35). Thus we have writing within writing, carved trees within Virgilian and Cervantine pastorals. But as Cervantes made very clear in the Galatea, eclogue is but the first step toward epic. In addition to the recusatio there are other ways in which epic is inscribed in the Virgilian eclogues. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue sings of the return of a Golden Age to strife-bound humankind. Virgilian epic represents the final battle that will bring about this

276 Frederick A. de Armas mythic age of peace and plenty. As Richard Neuse explains: 'When Aeneas visits Latium, Evander's pastoral realm and the future site of Rome, he learns that this was once the place where Saturn established the golden age. With hints like that we may be permitted to close the Virgilian circle on the assumption that in the Aeneid Virgil foresaw the fulfillment of history in Augustan civilization as the historical incarnation of the golden-age Arcadia' (610-11). It is thus no coincidence that the Grisostomo episode is preceded by Don Quixote's own speech on the return of the Golden Age. Although it is another aspect of eclogue, this speech points to martial concerns. In order to bring back that first age, a perfect empire has to be established. In Cervantes, Don Quixote is the mock-hero who will attempt to bring back this Golden Age. The Aeneid foretells how this Golden Age will come about during the reign of Augustus. Don Quixote's imperial aim is thus Virgilian in nature, wanting to bring back a peace concomitant with universal rule. The Spanish empire would thus emulate the ancient Augustan rule. But, the knight's bumbling impotence may well reflect the failures of Spain's imperial program. As stated above, while the Virgilian epic represented the triumph of imperialism, Lucan's Pharsalia was the ancient epic of the defeated. Within the novel, Cervantes shows both Don Quixote's Virgilian aspirations and the defeats of Lucan. Returning to Grisostomo, I would argue that in spite of his early death he does fulfil the cursus in a new and original manner, a manner that recalls La Galatea. When Grisostomo details the 'pagan' elements that must be followed during his funeral, he is consciously borrowing from Virgil. Gone is the beech tree of lovers. It is replaced by 'funereal cypresses' as in the final rites for Misenus in the sixth book of the Aeneid (6.216) and as in the rites for Meliso in the Galatea.17 The tree of eclogue has been replaced by a tree which connotes death within the epic. In asking that his poetry be burned, Grisostomo is also, as noted, following the lead of Virgil - specifically of the poet who had already written his epic. And, when Grisostomo's last poem is saved from the fire, as Virgil's Aeneid was saved by Varius and Augustus, the work turns out to be contaminated by epic, evincing Grisostomo's slow but inexorable move from low to high style.18 Grisostomo's 'Cancion desesperada' (Despairing Verses), which is read aloud by Vivaldo, focuses on the lament for a lost love. But the amatory poem is replete with epic images. The vision of the underworld in the poem is intended to rival Aeneas's catabasis in the sixth

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 277 book, from where Cervantes had already borrowed the funeral rites for Grisostomo. Virgilian epic images of the three-headed Cerberus (Aeneid 6.417; 1.535),19 of Tityus tormented by the 'monstrous vulture with crooked beak' who 'gnaws at his deathless liver' (6.595-600; 1.547),20 of Egion 'outstretched on spokes of wheels' (6.616-17; 1.549),21 and of Sisyphus who rolls a huge stone (6.616; 1.549)22 become in Grisostomo's poem dreaded visions and torments that the dying lover expects to encounter. And indeed, as in the Aeneid, Grisostomo could well find himself in the Mourning Fields where 'those whom stern Love has consumed with cruel wasting are hidden in walks withdrawn, embowered in a myrtle grove' (Aeneid 6.441-4; 1.537). It is here that he may expect to find his Marcela as Aeneas discovered Dido in a less than happy reunion.23 By using the sixth book of the Aeneid, Grisostomo elicits an expectation of prophecy. After all, it is in the underworld that Aeneas found out about his future. There are no prophetic remarks in Grisostomo's poem, except the expectation of his own death. This mournful prophecy contrasts with Don Quixote's triumphant vision of the return of a Golden Age and serves as a foreshadowing of the knight's failures. In an ironic twist typical of Cervantes' style, the epic images of Grisostomo's last poem do not always derive from Virgil's Aeneid. There are some that imitate Lucan's Pharsalia, a work that, as noted above, 'counters' many of Virgil's ideals, structure, and style.24 As with the Aeneid, it is the sixth book of the epic poem that becomes the model for Grisostomo. Here, the witch Erichto, in order to perform a necromantic resurrection, screams at a dead body with sound 'untunable and far different from human speech. The dog's bark and the wolf's howl were in that voice; it resembled the complaint of the restless owl and the night-flying screech owl, the shrieking and roaring of wild beats, the serpent's hiss ...' (6.687-90).25 In Grisostomo's 'Cancion desesperada,' it is the poet-lover himself who uses these witching sounds in order to express the disharmony created in his heart by Marcela's alleged cruelty. Grisostomo makes use of Lucan's necromancy in a metaphoric sense. First of all, Grisostomo's poem contains a voice that will be heard after death. It represents his own lament emerging from the grave. Not only is he revivifying his own voice, but also that of the ancient epic poets. He not only wishes to bring back to life Virgil's epic body, but he seeks to combine it with that of Lucan, Virgil's rival.26 Claiming that to express inordinate grief he needs 'nuevos modos' (a

278 Frederick A. de Armas manner new) (1.181; 104), the poet shocks his audience (and his beloved) with witching sounds, necromantic resurrections, and the 'unnatural' blending of two opposing epic voices in one work or body. The result is a carefully 'untunable' poem which dares to rival not only the greatest of all epic poets, but also his opponent. This disinterment of two great ancients shows that in death, Grisostomo has more than fulfilled the Virgilian cursus. His new song combines eclogue and epic, Virgilian and counter-Virgilian voices in a tour de force that seeks to show how even in a short work and in a brief life a poet can emulate the ancient cursus. But Grisostomo's triumph as poet is based on a rejection of a number of Christian principles. Grisostomo commits suicide and embraces the pagan underworld. He also accepts something that was viewed as dubious even by the ancients - the practice of necromancy. Grisostomo's dubious practices (paganism, necromancy, suicide) point to pagan elements within the ancient cursus in order to overcome them. Grisostomo's name recalls that of John Chrysostom, a Christian orator and saint whose honeyed voice was used to convert pagans. The shepherd's name in Don Quixote points to the conscious turning to Christianity of Cervantes' epic heroes: Don Quixote will abandon epic practices to die as a good Christian. More importantly, Cervantes' last work, his epic Persiles, will end with a successful pilgrimage to Rome and with a Christian vision of empire that rivals Virgil's evocation of a Golden Age. By inscribing pastoral (and the ideal of a Golden Age) within Don Quixote, Cervantes may be showing us where he has been and where he is headed. Cervantes begins his career as a novelist with pastoral in Galatea, a work which parallels Virgil's Eclogues. He recalls this initial move in the pastoral episode in Don Quixote, but also shows how it is meant to culminate in epic. No matter the length of life, the poet can point to epic in his compositions. Don Quixote, in this scheme, points to epic but cannot be conceived as an epic. Rather it may be viewed as yet another step toward this culminating moment, as an apprenticeship to epic.27 Among Virgil's juvenilia was the Culex, an epyllion 'conceived as a parody of serious epic, or rather, a reduction of it to a small scale... It is obvious that its style and content caused the ancient critics to see this clever work as a plausible preliminary exercise for a poet who was destined for poetic genres far more solemn' (Conti 432). Certainly Don Quixote is much more than a brief epic parody, where a gnat or mosquito becomes the heroic protagonist. But we do have a lesser than

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 279 heroic character who partakes of adventures that imitate in a comic manner many of the Virgilian epic episodes, and whose defeats recall Lucan's Pharsalia. If Don Quixote was an apprenticeship, it was one that yielded totally unexpected results.

Ill As his life energies begin to ebb, Cervantes appears ready to unveil the final product of a 'perfect' Virgilian career. This is to be his Persiles y Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617. For his final epic in prose, Cervantes will not contrast Virgil's imperial verses with Lucan's epic of the defeated. He will concentrate on triumph and on a peaceful rule achieved through love. The Persiles is an imitation of Heliodorus's Aethiopica, a romance that was viewed during the epoch as a work akin to epic.28 As Alban K. Forcione explains, the discovery of Heliodorus's romance came at a key moment in European fiction: 'Educated circles, from the early sixteenth century on, universally condemned the popular romances of chivalry ... and seized upon the newly discovered Aethiopica of Heliodorus as an alternative type of prose fiction' (Cervantes, Aristotle and the Persiles 85-6). Indeed, the Greek romance was equated with the epic. In Spain, Lopez Pinciano's Philosophia antigua poetica (1596) compares Heliodorus's work with the epics of Homer and Virgil, showing how it at times surpasses the epic masters.29 Aware of this situation, then, Cervantes turns to Heliodorus. As he explains in the Dedication to the second part of Don Quixote, this future work will be 'el mas malo o el mejor que en nuestra lengua se haya compuesto, quiero decir de los de entretenimiento; y digo que me arrepiento de haber dicho el mas malo, porque segun la opinion de mis amigos, ha de llegar al estremo de bondad posible' (either the worst or the best written of books of entertainment in our tongue - but I must say that I repent of having said the worst. For, according to the opinions of my friends, it will attain the highest possible excellence (2.38; 465-6). In this statement Cervantes portrays himself as a writer who dares to successfully compete and even surpass Heliodorus's epic and thus complete his career in this manner. And, like Heliodorus, Cervantes' 'epic' is written in prose.30 As Forcione has pointed out, the Persiles is replete with allusions and techniques from the classical epic.31 It is no coincidence that many of these are Virgilian. After all, Cervantes' stated aim in the prologue to the Galatea was to become a prose Virgil. However, one may object that

280 Frederick A. de Armas an epic should avoid the matters of Venus and concentrate on those of Mars. The Persiles is a story of love. But it is much more than that - it is a tale of dynastic succession, of the love between Persiles, second son of the king of Tile (Thule), and Sigismunda, daughter of the queen of Frislanda. It is a love that seems impossible, since Sigismunda is courted by Magsimino, the first son and true heir of Thule. And Magsimino, as Forcione remarks, 'is constantly occupied in waging war' (Cervantes' Christian Romance 105). Cervantes' epic text is one that shows how love, not war, leads kingdoms to prosper and empires to grow. And Persiles' kingdom, although in the far north of Europe, is clearly associated with Virgil's imperial vision. When 'discovering' at the end of the novel who Persiles really is, the text actually cites from the beginnings of the first Georgic: 'cuyo nombre era Tile, a quien Virgilio llamo Tule en aquellos versos' (whose name was Tile, a place that Virgil called Thule in those verses) (1.30,1.83; Cervantes 465). The section of Virgil's poem cited in Cervantes deals with a discussion of the spheres that Augustus Caesar's divine nature will rule: the cities and lands, the seas (which include the 'farthest Thule'), or even the heavens where he can create a new zodiacal sign between Virgo and Scorpio, that is, Libra. It may be that the Spanish text is establishing a link between Persiles and Augustus. It would thus make Persiles a new imperial ruler - one akin to the current Spanish kings. If read from this political context, the work could contain both praise and warning. If the Spanish empire is to prosper, a new policy, one of diplomacy rather than war, is needed. The Augustan golden age was an era of peace, where strife was left behind, as borders were considered secure. Cervantes' last novel not only serves to complete the cursus, but also evinces another element of completion - it is a pilgrimage from the northern lands to Rome, where the main characters are reconciled with each other and with the church. The north in the text is often associated with the darkness of ignorance and evil. It is a place where cannibalism, lycanthropy, witchcraft, and other malefic practices thrive. Rome is its opposite and thus the pilgrims strive to reach it. As Forcione explains: 'The point of repose continues to elude them until they emerge from darkness and the sea and reach Rome, that point which images Augustine's center of repose, God and the Heavenly City' (Cervantes' Christian Romance 33). Cervantes' final epic thus contains a perfect sacred closure for a Christian literary career: 'Roma es el cielo de la tierra' (Rome is the heaven of this earth) (Persiles 192). The problematics of the pagan elements contained within a Virgilian career are thus re-

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 281 solved in this epic that foregrounds Rome as the centre of Christianity. If we are to view the Persiles as a work that represents the culmination of Cervantes' career, his ideal epic and a text that shows sacred closure in Rome (both as a City of God and a Virgilian representation of empire), we must see it as being consciously his last work. And this seems to be the case. Cervantes begins his Dedication to the Conde de Lemos using an old poem: Puesto ya el pie en el estribo, Con las ansias de la muerte, Gran senor, estas te escribe. With my foot on the stirrup With death in pursuit These words, Great Sir, I write to you.

(45) He then explains:' Ayer me dieron la Extremauncion y hoy escribo esta' (Yesterday they performed the Last Rites and today I write you this) (45). Cervantes believes that he is dying. It would seem, then, that Cervantes had saved his Christian epic, an epic of political reconciliation and religious vision, for his last moments, to establish closure to life and career. And yet, in this very same Dedication he announces a whole series of future works. He actually mentions three texts on which he is working: a second part of Galatea, the Semanas del jardin, and the Bernardo (46). This would seem to undo the Christianized Virgilian cursus. If he saw the Persiles as a culmination and end, the author should not be announcing future works. Paradoxically, this announcement is the final proof that Cervantes was intent in following a Virgilian career. For these three works replicate the Virgilian cursus. The Galatea refers to the first stage of the Virgilian wheel, the eclogue or pastoral; the Semanas del jardin has a title that brings up the image of the garden and gardening, thus recalling the Georgics. This second stage of the Virgilian wheel, often forgotten by medieval and Renaissance practitioners of the cursus and neglected by Cervantes in his first attempt to complete the ideal career - is now revived in a vision of future possibilities. The third title, the Bernardo, is in all probability another epic,32 thus completing the Virgilian wheel. This announced second cycle of eclogue, georgic, and epic may be both an attempt to affirm the Virgilian cursus just com-

282 Frederick A. de Armas pleted with the Persiles and an attempt to forestall closure - an attempt to deny death and return to beginnings. In his final moments, Cervantes depicts himself as a poet who can replicate Virgil not once, but twice. Cervantes' literary career, then, is dual in nature. He is both an innovator and a continuator. When he let loose his crazed knight down the dusty roads of La Mancha, little did he know that he was on his way to creating a new genre. Instead, Cervantes viewed Don Quixote as a move toward epic, but an epic in prose.33 Cervantes consciously describes his literary career in terms of the Virgilian cursus. He begins with the Galatea, a Virgilian eclogue; he continues with Don Quixote, an apprenticeship for epic; and he ends with the Persiles, the epic of closure for life and work, an Augustan amorous epic of political dynasties and Christian fulfilment. These works are all written in prose, thus returning us to the notion of innovation - Cervantes as a prose Virgil. Furthermore, in a form of bravado or wishful thinking, the author imagines yet a second cursus, the second wheel to his chariot, where he will again follow the Virgilian author and thus become twice greater than his model. This vision would not be fulfilled, since Cervantes died with the completion of the Persiles. But it is enough that he dreamed it possible. Notes 1 On the relationship between Cervantes' pastoral and Raphael's painting of Galatea, see Dudley. 2 In the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares Cervantes calls the Persiles 'libro que se atreue a competir con Heliodoro' (a book that dares to compete with Heliodorus) (1: 65). In the Prologue to Don Quixote, Part Two (1615), he announces that he is finishing the Persiles and the second part of Galatea (2:37). 3 In both the Persiles and in one of the Novelas ejemplares (1613), 'El licenciado Vidriera/ Cervantes traces a voyage from Spain to Italy. Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the Spanish writer's sojourn from these fictional clues. 4 This phrase is derived from Cahill's collection. 5 On the 'archaeology' of Numancia as based on the reconstruction of Troy and Rome, see Johnson; and de Armas. 6 On La Numancia's epic qualities, see Bergmann; and de Armas.

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 283 7 For Spenser's and Marlowe's literary careers, see Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight and Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession. For Chaucer's use of the Rota Virgilii, see Dane. 8 These convictions are clearly expressed in his Viaje del Parnaso (Voyage to Parnassus). In Don Quixote, Part Two, he announces that his next work, Persiles y Sigismunda 'ha de llegar al extreme de bondad posible' (will attain the highest possible excellence) (2.39; 466). 9 All translations from the Galatea are my own. 10 When Tityrus states: 'I used to compare great things to small' (Virgil 1: 5), it seems like 'regression' but this retreat, according to Coolidge, hides great events and promises a future progression. 11 Cervantes was thirty-eight at the time, and the period of 'juventud/ considered by Huarte de San Juan as the third age, was conceived by him as lasting from twenty-five to thirty-five (Cervantes, Galatea 156 -10). 12 'Yea, and thou, O Caesar, whom we know not what company of the gods shall claim ere long ... do thou grant me a smooth course, give assent to my bold enterprise' (Georgics 1.40; 1: 83). 13 Cervantes could have derived the notion of Ennius's rusticity from Donatus's Life of Virgil where Virgil states that 'he was culling gold from Ennius' dung.' 14 He claims this in the Georgics: 'in youth's boldness, sang, Tityrus, of thee under thy spreading beech's covert' (4.565-6; 1: 237). Aenius cites this passage in his Life of Virgil. 15 I am using Cohen's translation of Don Quixote. The page for the English translation is found after the semicolon. 16 The Life of Virgil was written by the famous fourth-century grammarian Aelius Donatus, who was, until the last century, confused with Claudius Donatus, the author of Interpretations Vergilianae (Conte 628). On Cervantes' use of Donatus, Marasso states: 'No se en que edicion de Hernandez de Velasco aparecio por primera vez la Vida de Virgilio de Claudio Donate. Cervantes la recuerda elegantisimamente' (I do not know in what edition of Hernandez de Velasco the Life of Virgil by Claudius Donatus appeared for the first time. Cervantes recalls it in a very elegant manner) (83). In his bibliographical annotations on Hispano-classical translations, Theodore S. Beardsley does not list the Donatus biography as part of Hernandez de Velasco's text. He does state that 'all the printings prior to 1574 contain only the 12 books of the Aeneid [in verse]... and the Carta [Letter] of Augustus Caesar in praise of the Aeneid' (46). Nor does Beardsley mention Donatus's biography in the contents of the revised edition of 1574 (52-3). Cervantes could have been alluding to Augustus Caesar's letter as trans-

284 Frederick A. de Armas

17

18

19 20 21 22 23

24

25

lated by Hernandez de Velasco or he may have used another text for Donatus's biography. Marasso clearly shows that Cervantes is following in the Quixote the Hernandez Velasco translation and not the Latin Aeneid. The Spanish translation adds the yew-tree to the cypress (84). Cervantes follows suit: 'vieron que, por la quiebra que dos altas montanas hacian, bajaban hasta veinte pastores, todos con pellicos de negra lana vestidos y coronados con guirnaldas, que, a lo que despues parecio, eran cual de tejo y cual de cipres (they saw coming down through a gap between two high mountains some twenty shepherds, all in skins of black wool and crowned with garlands which, as they made out later, were, some of them, of yew and some of cypress) (1:177; 101). Marasso adds that the use of arboreal crowns was also typical of funereal rites, as in the first anniversary of Anchises' death where it is commanded: 'Be silent all, and wreathe your brows with leaves' (Virgil, Aeneid 5.71; 1: 451). There is, of course, the problem of the middle style. Where are the Georgics? Perhaps it is merely sufficient for Cervantes to point out that both Marcela and Grisostomo are children of rich farmers. They do not write georgics since they are living embodiments of this style. It should also be noted that the three steps of the Rota Virgilii were not always followed. Indeed, Traugott Lawler claims: 'Nor has any poet ever followed the pattern altogether strictly: neither Spenser nor Milton produced anything really comparable to the Georgics' (54). I am indebted to Antonio Sanchez Jimenez for this reference. 'Y el portero infernal de los tres rostros' (And the three-faced infernal porter) (1.184; 106). 'Ticio tray a su buitre' (Let Tityus bring his vulture) (1.184; 106). 'y ansimismo / con su rueda Egion no se detenga' (Nor Ixion delay with wheel accursed) (1.184; 106). 'Sisifo venga / con el peso terrible de su canto' (And Sisyphus with his oppressive stone) (1.183; 106). For Marasso, there is a clear relationship between Dido and Grisostomo: 'Dido murio por Eneas; Grisostomo por Marcela. Una misma crueldad y una identica desventura arrastran al suicidio a los dos enamorados' (Dido died for Aeneas; Chrysostom for Marcella. The same cruelty and the same fate lead the two lovers to suicide) (85). Cervantes had also used both epic poets in Numancia. In this tragedy, Act I is Virgilian in tone while the second act imitates Lucan's Pharsalia. On this subject, see de Armas, 116-53. After citing the translation of the Pharsalia by Martin Lasso de Oropesa,

Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel 285

26

27 28

29

30

31

32 33

Marasso concludes that Trobablemente Cervantes incorpora el texto latino de La Farsalia' (Cervantes probably incorporates the Latin text of the Pharsalia) (88). Beardsley provides bibliography concerning the date of the first edition which may have been published sometime between 1535 and 1540 (33). There is a second augmented edition of 1578 (54). According to Greene, the concept of imitation can be related to necromancy. One must ask of a text that imitates a classical model 'whether the necromantic disinterment is brought off, whether the Latin text emerges still mummified from the tomb, or shrunken and thin, or merely ornamented, or whether rather an authentic resurrection has occurred' (37-8). On epic elements in Don Quixote, see de Armas 1-6; Marasso; McGaha; Wofford; and Wolford. Cervantes viewed Heliodorus's romance through the prism of Tasso's poetics and of his invention of the Renaissance epic. Thus, the Persiles also imitates Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated (Forcione, Cervantes' Christian Romance 66-68). As Forcione explains: 'In its in-medias-res beginning and delayed exposition it even surpasses Virgil's and Homer's epics, for the reader's interest in discovering the events preceding the beginning is kept alive until the exact midpoint of the work' (Cervantes' Christian Romance 9). In Don Quixote, the priest asserts: 'la epica puede tambien escrebirse en prosa como en verso' (for the epic may be written in prose as well as in verse) (1: 567; 426). O'Neil summarizes some of these elements in her article on Cervantes' prose epic. She also uses Bakhtin's definition of epic to study the Persiles. For an opposing view, see de Armas Wilson who argues that in the Persiles 'Cervantes gives the death knell to the prestigious imperialist epic so venerated by Sidney' (35-6). It would deal with Bernardo del Carpio, a Spanish hero and rival of the French epic hero, Roland. Cervantes expresses the possibility that the epic can be written in prose towards the end of the 1605 Don Quixote: 'que la epica tambien puede escrebirse en prosa como en verso' (for the epic may be written in prose as well as in verse) (1.567; 426).

ELEVEN

Epic Violence: Captives, Mo Empire in Cerv Alvaro Molina

While it would probably take volumes to fully trace the shape of a literary career like that of Cervantes, F. de Armas successfully illustrates through various landmarks the author's awareness of and efforts to imitate Virgil's career model, also known as the Virgilian cursus.1 In the present analysis I will not attempt to pursue the proposed overarching progression from pastoral to epic in Cervantes' career, but rather focus on a few moments in his writings which emulate typically Virgilian epic devices. Effectively, I will move inside one of the phases in Cervantes career outlined by de Armas - the epic phase. By looking at passages related to the Spanish Empire, Algerian captivity, and the Spanish moriscos,2 I will draw attention to a particular rhetoric of violence within those epic passages. They all share (even the one text not attributed to Cervantes directly) the same characterization of violence as originating in either infidel 'cruelty' or Christian heroic 'virtue.' In the final analysis, I believe there is a development from Cervantes' earlier to later works in the representation of those epic formulas, and this sheds light on the author's overall approach to his imitation of the classical epic genre. One of the discourses of violence most readily available to Cervantes was the long-standing military and religious rivalry between Christians and Muslims. In the sixteenth century this confrontation took centre stage in the Mediterranean through the Spanish and Turkish - or Ottoman - Empires. Rene Girard has postulated that in human civilizations state and religion often promote a 'good' type of violence, which allowed them to originate in the first place.3 Without taking Girard's theory too far, it would be safe to argue that those two world super-

Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes 287 powers, Turk and Spanish, held deep religious justifications to fuel their violent confrontations for survival, expansion, and supremacy. Their clashes escalated in the last few decades of the sixteenth century and eventually led to the complete expulsion of the moriscos from the Spanish peninsula in 1609. The impact of these events on Cervantes and his possible authorial positions has received a great deal of critical attention. Issues worthy of study such as political ideology, historical accuracy, and intertextuality, however, do not tend to leave much room for questions on literary genre - let alone literary career - beyond a few salient references to Cervantes' revolutionary posture towards neoAristotelian theories.4 Thus, in the following pages I will address specific aspects of the epic genre that I find present in well-known Cervantine texts on captivity and the moriscos. The epic genre certainly would have been an unavoidable subject had Cervantes written a classical saga devoted to the infidel/Christian rivalry, or had he followed the Homeric or Virgilian poetic models in a tangible way, like his contemporary Alonso de Ercilla did in La Araucana (1570/1578/1587), based on the Spanish conquest of the Indians of Chile. However, it can be said that the lack of a classically shaped epic poem among Cervantes' writings did not stop him from attempting to broach the topic, and methods, of the epic at various points. Namely, in La Numancia one can see the makings of epic triumphalism. In the Information de Argel (1580), and in Diego de Haedo's Didlogo de los Mdrtires de Argel (1612), one also finds ingenious constructions of the author as an epic hero. The story of the captive in Don Quixote (1605) captures a mini-Virgilian episode of heroism and romance. Finally, in Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda (1617), the episodes of the counterfeit captives and the prophecy of the morisco Jarife reveal an epic theme in a shockingly humorous tone, something that in my opinion illustrates Cervantes' conflicted posture toward the full-length classical epic. But, what does epic, or more specifically Virgilian epic, mean after all? David Quint's insightful study Epic and Empire proposes crucial ideas in this regard. In a detailed analysis of a passage from Book VIII of the Aeneid - the description of Aeneas's shield and the battle of Actium it portrays - Quint affirms: The struggle between Augustus and Antony pits West/East, continuing a pattern of epic confrontation that Virgil found in the Iliad' (24). Part of this project is the ability to create sharply drawn sides and attribute a negative image of otherness to the enemy. Among other things, the East represents the cruelty and violence of

288 Alvaro Molina warfare, plus an unmeasured wealth that breeds corruption, while the West stands for order, sobriety, and warfare as pacification (28). The woman as seductress also comes from the East - Cleopatra, Dido trying to divert the Western male soldier - Antony, Aeneas - from his mission (34). Virgil's epic also relies on narrative teleology, since it was written for the 'winners' and had the ability to 'join beginnings purposefully to ends' (46). For instance Aeneas's victory over the Etruscans is foreshadowed in his shield by Augustus's future victory at Actium, showing how 'the struggle had all along been leading up to its victory' (45). Another good example of epic teleology for Quint is the sixteenthcentury parallel drawn between the battles of Lepanto and Actium by both Ercilla in the Araucana and Juan Rufo in his Austriada (1582). These poets represented Juan de Austria in the battle of Lepanto surrounded with symbols of his late father, Charles V, just as Virgil's Augustus had fought Antony with the blessings of his father figure, the deceased Julius Caesar. Charles V's title of Holy Roman Emperor thus lends to the winning side of Lepanto, the 1571 alliance of Christendom against the Turks, the aura of an Actium waiting to happen: a 'second Actium' (49). Turning to Cervantes, one is struck with his rather Virgilian ability at creating in a few strokes the same type of rhetorical 'shields' or images that celebrate an imperial ideology like that of the Habsburgs. Cervantes himself was trained as a 'winner' in Lepanto, where he served under the command of Juan de Austria, and was well acquainted with Ercilla's and Virgil's epics. At the outset of his literary career he wrote a tragedy, El cerco de Numancia, also known as La Numancia, which contains a great deal of epic nationalism. Several critics have written about this play's studied ambiguity toward the Spanish Empire, or even about its anti-epic message.5 These are important distinctions. It is indeed plausible that the author had anti-nationalism in his mind. Yet at the surface-level of representation, his craft and artistry are perfectly capable of displaying a symbolism and a narrative teleology comparable to Virgil's: jQue envidia, que temor, Espana amada, te tendran mil naciones extranjeras, en quien tu reniras tu aguda espada y tenderas triunfando tus banderas! (521-4) What fear and envy, O beloved Spain, Shall bear to thee the nations strange and brave;

Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes 289 Whose blood shall serve thy flashing sword to stain, O'er whom thy banners shall triumphant wave!6 Thus prophesies the allegorical figure of the river Duero in Act I, after lamenting the present inevitable fortune of the Numantians, or 'espanoles' (Spaniards), who commit collective suicide rather than surrender during the siege of the Romans. For all the profound ambiguities that besiege the play itself, one still senses the rhetorical force of the Duero's prophecy. Just as for Virgil the Troy that was defeated by the West in the Illiad became the new West and the winner, Rome, so for the Duero the Numantians would in time become the Spanish Empire, the new Western superpower with the ability to narrate its own history and its own epics - exactly as the Duero is doing through Cervantes' hand. The historical beginnings and the fruition of Spain's victory thus appear in a perfect teleological fashion. Yet, if the epic is a narrative of power, a 'Western' genre where the winners congratulate themselves on their victories, one could look at the wider context and see that the battlefields are not the only spaces where power, violence, and self-congratulation are deployed. Quint concedes that in Virgil's poem Augustan ideology is accompanied by an undercurrent that 'criticizes' and 'complicates' (23) its official party line. Nonetheless, it still seems a fair characterization of the epic - as narrative - to say that it rests on official values on and off the battlefield - i.e., in the way the winners portray themselves and their enemies, the constant emphasis on what it is that makes them superior and why they need to go to battle and fight the enemy in the first place. Even before Cervantes wrote la Numancia, c.1581, we know of an earlier text which bears his authorial mark, La information de Argel, written in 1580, which clearly thematizes some of those values. Cervantes prepared the questions of that document after his return from Algiers, for the sworn depositions of various witnesses to his captivity from 1575 to 1580. Thus, it had the format of an Inquisition document, though it was not officially one since the questionnaire was conducted privately, not by that institution. Carroll Johnson reads it as Cervantes' first work of fiction, arguing how the author constructs an image of himself in Algiers no differently from how he constructs the character Don Quixote in his later novel ('La construction' 25). The questions and answers that plot this 'Serbantes' character seek to establish - among other things - his linaje, that is, his class and ethnicity, and his exemplary Christian behaviour as a cautivo. So for example, quotes Johnson:

290 Alvaro Molina Serbantes ... vivio siempre como catolico y fiel cristiano, confesandose y comulgandose en los tiempos que los cristianos usan y acostumbran, y que algunas veces se ofrecia tratar con algunos moros y renegades, siempre defendia la fe catolica posponiendo todo peligro de la vida, y animaba a algunos que no renegasen, viendoles tibios en la fe, repartiendo con los pobres lo poco que tenia, ayudandoles en sus necesidades, asi con buenos consejos como con las buenas obras que podia. (59) Serbantes ... always lived as a Catholic and faithful Christian, receiving Confession and Communion at the times Christians are accustomed to, and sometimes he also offered to deal with Muslims and renegades, and he would always defend the Catholic faith putting his life at risk, and he would encourage some not to become renegades, seeing them lukewarm in the faith, sharing with them the little he had, helping them in their needs, with good advice as well as with the good works feasible to him.

This description, at face value, could be compared to a saint's life narrative, or seen as the perfect credentials for the canonization of a cautivo. However, given that Cervantes himself masterminded the project, it would be a saint's autobiography, to follow the analogy, and one would expect perhaps a humbler version, with reference to God's mercy, temptations and struggles, falls and victories, etc., like those of St Augustine's Confessions, for example. But instead one gets 'Serbantes,' a duty-bound and pious Aeneas-type, an epic hero of the Virgilian mould, without a single tragic flaw. Cervantes clearly intended to impress, or as appears in the prologue, to obtain merced from the king. The document then seems closer to being another Virgilian 'shield' than anything else. In this case, chances are Cervantes was quite literally seeking to shield himself from any suspicions of having wavered in the faith as a captive, or as it was known then, of having been a renegado, something not at all rare among captives. Historically, Cervantes had ample reason to seek the protection of a document like this one. In sixteenth-century Spain religion as a belief system was imposed on Jews and Muslims - converses or moriscos - who after 1492 had been effectively forced either to convert or to pretend they were Catholic. To adjust within the new Spanish Empire required everyone to follow certain rules of religious observance and to stay away from heresy. From the mid-fifteen hundreds onwards there was also the added variable of legally complying with statutes of limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, if one wanted to enter military orders, colegios

Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes 291

mayores, travel to the New World, or enjoy a meaningful public recognition. Having been a recent captive - and considering the possibility some Cervantists advance that he was born to a converso family Cervantes at this point felt he had to come to terms with a limipieza de sangre status and a Christian exemplarity status in the eyes of the authorities. Toward the end of the questionnaire of La information, it appears that a certain Dr Juan Blanco de Paz has threatened to accuse Cervantes before the Inquisition for behaviour improper for a Christian, something the witnesses label as envy and fear that Cervantes would tell of Blanco's own irregular behaviour while in Algiers. The details are not as important as the fact that the document functions as both a shield and a weapon for Cervantes, in a rhetorical attack that spares no efforts to make the strongest possible case. Such use of rhetoric shows again to my mind - that the author is relying on methods of epic characterization. Not only does he project an image of conformity with established norms and distance from heterodoxy, but he becomes the exemplar and the embodiment of those norms: 'siempre defendia la fe ... se ofrecia tratar con moros y renegades/ etc. (he would always defend the faith... he would offer to deal with Muslim and renegades), etc. His heroism is made to stand out against the foil of not only other people's needs, but also of their vices and hostilities. Another text that portrays Cervantes as a hero among captives is Diego de Haedo's Topografia e Historia General de Argel, published in 1612, although there has been some debate over its authorship. Even a recent theory maintains that Cervantes himself was the author, while most scholars now attribute the work to his friend Antonio de Sosa, a fellow captive.7 In any case, we find out in volume 3 that a plan by several captives to escape from Algiers was headed by 'Miguel de Cervantes - un hidalgo principal de Alcala de Henares' (Miguel de Cervantes - a noble gentleman from Alcala de Henares) (163). Yet they are betrayed by another Christian who was supposed to help them obtain a boat. Instead, he renounces his faith and turns them in to the Algerian king for a profit, 'como otro Judas' (like another Judas) (163). The renegade then brings guards to arrest the captives while they are hiding in the cave of a garden. But the Judas role somehow suggests that there must also be a Christ figure. The scene in the garden reinforces that image as it is reminiscent of the Passion narrative in the Gospel - the seizing of Christ in the Garden of Olives. The narrator continues to expound on the captives' plight while in the cave,

292 Alvaro Molina

their illnesses and misfortunes, and he highlights Cervantes' heroism: [estuvo] sustentandolos Miguel de Cervantes con gran riesgo de su vida; la cual cuatro veces estuvo a pique de perderla - empalado o enganchado o quemado vivo - por cosas que intento para dar libertad a muchos. Y si a su animo - e industria y trazas - correspondiera la ventura, hoy fuera el dia que Argel fuera de cristianos, porque no aspiraban a menos sus intentos. (164) Miguel de Cervantes supported them, with great risk to his own life, which he almost lost four times - impaled or hung or burnt alive - for things he tried in order to give liberty to many. And if his spirit - as well as his cleverness and skill - had been aided by fortune, today Algiers would be all Christian, since his attempts were no less ambitious.

Cervantes thus becomes the Christ figure of this narrative, since he would gladly die for the salvation of his own and for that of his enemies the infidels. After such hyperbolic praise there is yet another remark of his heroism: 'De las cosas que sucedieron ... y del cautiverio y hazanas de Miguel de Cervantes, se pudiera hacer una particular historia' (Of the things that followed ... and of the captivity and heroic deeds of Miguel de Cervantes, one could make a particular history/story) (164). To construe this statement as one last allusion to a Christ figure it might be enough to quote a well-known passage from the Gospel of St John: 'But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books' (21:25).8 Not only does Haedo's history seem to build the character of Cervantes as an exemplary captive-cum-Christ-figure, but it also suggests that this particular hero deserves an exclusive 'historia' in praise of his 'hazanas.' And history-as-triumph, implied by 'hazanas,' could been seen as the fundamental 'narrative shape' of the epic (Quint 33). Thus, both Haedo's history and La information de Argel contribute to the construction of an epic hero and to his insertion into a Spanish/ Christian epic narrative. All this epic heroism, moreover, would not be truly tested without the explicit background of hostility and violence. Quint points out how the cruelty of the enemy is a characteristic aspect of the representation of violence in the epic. In Haedo, Cervantes is threatened with being 'empalado o enganchado o quemado vivo,' a mere hint at what Muslims regularly did with rebel captives. In this text cruelty acquires its

Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes 293

full meaning in the light of a Christian/Muslim confrontation, as the title of this section bears out: 'Dialogo de los martires de Argel' (Dialogue of the Martyrs of Algiers). Martyrdom becomes the quintessential sign of heroism for those who suffer violent death. One may see, then, the formation of an official rhetoric in regard to Algiers, to the enemy, and to the type of captivity that is expected of Christians. This type of discourse, which we have so far termed epic, Virgilian, loaded with triumphalism and depictions of warfare and violence, pervades Cervantes' writings about captivity, just as it does Haedo's Topografia. The story of the Cautivo in Don Quixote 1:39-41, lays out rather clearly in my opinion the political and cultural war between the Spanish and the Ottoman Empires, with a host of epic literary devices. As we recall, Zoraida and Ruy Perez de Viedma arrive at the inn where the main characters of the novel have gathered, and the innkeeper prepares dinner for them - a perfect Virgilian device on the part of Cervantes to get several people to listen to a tale of travel and adventure. But before Ruy, 'el cautivo' (the captive),9 has had a chance to narrate anything significant beyond Zoraida's name and her wish to be a Christian, Don Quixote feels moved to launch into a full-length discourse on arms and letters. As the reader knows by now, Don Quixote's pearls of wisdom on such matters appear unannounced, as sudden rhetorical outbursts throughout the novel, as in the episode of the fulling mills or that of the goatherds. The gist of his dissertation this time is that the end of arms, peace, is greater than the end of letters, distributive justice (466). Henry Higuera has explored Don Quixote's project to bring about a new Golden Age by means of arms and the profession of knight-errantry. This critic also notes how in the speech at the inn there is a 'tension between praising peace and loving [military] glory' (63), a tension which comes up every time Don Quixote elaborates on that topic (see 1:11, 1:20, 1:37, 2:1, 2:16). In the process, he argues, Don Quixote gradually turns away from peace as the highest good in favour of glory and military virtues (65). So, one might say, Don Quixote reflects on the usefulness of war, or of institutionalized violence, right before Ruy begins his tale. The audience, quite significantly, is entirely taken in by what he has to say: 'El cura le dijo que tenia razon en todo cuanto habia dicho en favor de las armas, y que el, aunque letrado y graduado, estaba de su mesmo parecer' (471) (The priest said that there was much justice in all that he had said in favour of arms, and that he was of the very same opinion himself) (345). Whether or not we take seriously these words - given the priest's frequent manipulations

294 Alvaro Molina

of Don Quixote with well-meant lies - the 'cautivo' finally gets to talk after dinner at Fernando's request, and we realize that he indeed is involved in a project very similar to Don Quixote's discourse: military glory. He begins with a short biography that reassures us of his oldChristian linaje and his family history in the military - the stuff heroes were made of at that time. As he recounts adventures at sea with the Spanish navy and the way he came to be a captive in Algiers, his audience seems most supportive: a room full of Spaniards, who have been culturally trained from several centuries of waging war against Muslims. Yet he does not move on directly to the story of how he met Zoraida, which is what sparked their curiosity, but instead he dwells for several pages on particular dates and events, with explicit indications of who is 'el enemigo comun' (the common enemy), which the glorious battles, who the noble military figures, the despicable Muslim leaders, etc. (475-86). Of special interest is the fact that he ends with a mention of 'un soldado espanol llamado tal de Saavedra' (486), (a Spanish soldier, called something de Saavedra) (355), whose heroism and extraordinary status among captives made him capable of standing up to the cruel king Azan Aga without being tortured, killed, or mutilated. This is no other than Cervantes himself, of course, appearing again as a historical figure. The similarity of this passage with Haedo's history is more than obvious and has been pointed out already. Ruy Perez then says: Si no fuera porque el tiempo no da lugar, yo dijera ahora algo de lo que este soldado hizo, que fuera parte para entreteneros y admiraros harto mejor que con el cuento de mis historia. (486) If it were not for the lack of time I would tell you something about that soldier's deeds which you would find more entertaining and surprising than this story of mine. (356)

Such remarks sound again like an announcement for a possible epic in praise of our hero. This part of the tale could in fact be seen as a type of epic newscast/pep rally designed to inspire and entertain. Was not the epic originally a form of oral tradition and entertainment anyway, where the rhapsode would sing of heroic deeds? In this instance the entertainment becomes interactive when a nobleman from the audience is able to recite two elegaic sonnets that Ruy mentions were

Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes 295

composed by a fellow captive, Pedro de Aguilar, who turns out to be this nobleman's brother - one of those amazing coincidences so characteristic of Cervantes. As a short parenthesis, this epic/rhapsodic moment of entertainment is similar to the brief episode of the false captives in the Persiles, 111:10. Two young men appear in a small town to recite their adventures at sea, how they were captured and brought to Algiers. They even have a 'lienzo' (343), a canvas that portrays the sequence of their misfortunes. They emphasize the cruelty of their Muslim captors, who would beat them up with the arm of another dead slave. But their identity is quickly unmasked and their story discredited by one of the elders in town. He has really been a captive himself and realizes they are making things up about the city of Algiers. The episode provides comic relief, and for that reason it has been compared to an 'entremes' (one-act farce).10 However, there is also the serious theme of military glory and epic triumphalism. As it turns out, the enraged elders in the end leave the youth's fraud unpunished, even after a severe sentence was handed down, simply because the students claim they were on their way to join the military and wage war against the Muslims. Somehow, then, this comic and quasi-picaresque interlude turns into yet another potential epic, with two heroes in search of a glorious victory. Ruy's narrative in Don Quixote also acquires more serious epic undertones. As we mentioned, he spends several pages in characterizations of battles and enemies, which are highly suggestive of the West/East dichotomies Quint indicates. Ruy takes us through every major battle that took place in the Mediterranean in the early 1570s: starting with the 'felicisima Jornada' (most glorious battle) of Lepanto in 1571; the failed operation at Navarino in 1572; the capture of the galley La Presa by La Loba that same year - interesting symbolism there, too; the taking of Tunez in 1573; the loss of La Goleta in 1574; and some other minor episodes. In all these cases the heroism of 'el serenisimo Don Juan de Austria' or other generals shows forth in the victories, while in the losses we are told that 'el cielo lo ordeno de otra manera' (478) (Heaven ordained otherwise) (349), or that losing 'fue particular gracia y merced que el cielo hizo a Espana' (480) (Heaven bestowed a special grace and mercy on Spain) (351). Nothing reveals better the teleology of victory than saying heaven ordained it so, and nothing redeems a lost battle better than saying the same thing, even when Ruy admits, 'El cielo lo ordeno ... por los pecados de la Cristiandad, y porque quiere y permite Dios que tengamos siempre verdugos que nos castiguen' (478) (Heaven

296 Alvaro Molina ordained it so ... for the sins of Christendom, and because God ordains that there shall always be some scourge to chastise us) (349). The losses become expiation for sins, which is Christlike and, therefore, heroic. The insistence on pointing out the cruelty of every Muslim character introduced in this brief history also represents, again, a typical epic device. The story of the son of Barbarroja is particularly shocking, with him being bitten to death by galley slaves as punishment for his own cruelty (479). The kings of Algiers as well, Uchalin and Azan Aga, are described almost entirely in terms of their cruelty: 'Azan... el mas cruel renegado que jamas se ha visto' (485) (the most cruel renegade ever seen) (354). Uchalin's violence shows particularly in how he became a renegade of Christianity: 'Renego, de despecho de que un turco, estando al remo, le dio un bofeton, y por poderse vengar dejo su fe' (484) (He turned renegade, in his fury at a Turk who had given him a slap on the face while he was rowing. In fact he renounced his faith to get his revenge) (354). These clear-cut distinctions of good and evil characters continue into the story of Zoraida, although as one reads on they become somewhat complicated. Zoraida appears as a fervent convert to Christianity, even though we know she does not yet speak 'cristiano' (462). In her letters to Ruy she claims to have seen the Virgin Mary in an apparition, and feels compelled to live in Christendom yet severely threatened, should this information be known. In her first letter she explains: 'Desto tengo mucha pena ... que quisiera que no te descubrieras a nadie; porque si mi padre lo sabe, me echara luego en un pozo, y me cubrira de piedras' (490) (That worries me very much. I do not want you to take anyone into your confidence, because if my father finds out he will immediately throw me down a well and cover me with stones) (359). These are severe terms and they reveal a complete lack of trust in her father. But she may have good reason. Agi Morato's reaction when he learns of her conversion is quite shocking. He insults her and calls her a prostitute, in so many words, declaring her a 'mala hembra' who knows that 'en vuestra tierra se usa la deshonestidad mas libremente que en la nuestra' (507) (a wicked woman ... who knows that immorality is more freely practised in your country than in ours) (375). This invective could confirm Zoraida's earlier fears for her life, or it could be construed simply as a father's natural reaction to his daughter's profound betrayal and escape plans. It also offers a representation of the enemy from an Eastern perspective, with an accusation of immorality that actually resembles Western travel literature regarding the East, oddly enough.

Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes 297

Whichever meaning we find in their words, this father/daughter relationship gone amuck remains one of the most striking features of the story. Agi Morato's categorical 'vuestra tierra' vs. 'la nuestra' (your country vs. our country), delineates the conflict in an epic fashion, West vs. East. Zoraida does indeed move West, but only after leaving her father injured, desolate, and threatening suicide in the East. Some have seriously questioned how 'Christian' could Zoraida be when she treats her father that way.11 One could defend her by pointing out how she conforms to the gospel: 'No one who prefers father or mother to me is worthy of me ... I have come to bring the sword' (Matt.lO:34-8). But the Bible also speaks of honouring one's father, and St Paul exhorts his listeners continually to family unity. Thus the dilemma is set: is Zoraida a heroine and a Christlike figure like Ruy, 'Cervantes/ or is she a cruel, self-interested Muslim woman who does not care for her own kind? The text, to my mind, may raise the question of Zoraida's consistency with Christianity, but only for dramatic appeal, to show her inner conflict. Meanwhile, the narrative makes a strong case for her having to leave Algiers in order to pursue her new religion. So she is most clearly cast as a hero, not a cruel and ungrateful daughter. In the process, both listeners and readers of this tale receive a powerful endorsement of their prejudices against Muslims, that is, people like Agi Morato hate Christians, make captives, and display cruelty toward them. This is why Ruy and Zoraida have to act very cautiously, for example pretending they don't know each other when they meet in the garden in front of Agi Morato, if they want to save their lives. Zoraida's 'violence' to her father and her culture thus becomes an emblem of Spanish imperialism, with a perfectly consistent religious justification, and as such constitutes heroic virtue. In the end, however, the violence of this part of the story - as opposed to the historical introduction - is tamed to a great extent. There are no deaths nor grave injuries. A happy ending instead is served at the social level, with a marriage; at the religious, with a new convert - or two, counting a repentant renegade who travels with them - and at the literary with a closure that brings together the two Perez de Viedma brothers, Juan and Ruy. The ending thus ties up with the beginning while glorifying the West, Christendom, and by adding a beautiful new citizen to the Spanish Empire. Quint's remarks on how the epic portrays women from the East as seductresses is also significant here. In his study Quint speaks of the difference between the Epic as teleological narrative of power versus Romance as the episodic diversion from that epic plot line. Epic has a clear finality, whereas Romance is open-ended or it seems to lead

298 Alvaro Molina

nowhere, thus threatening to destroy the epic plot (34). Aeneas and Dido's romance represents the classic example. But Cervantes' take on the seductress theme is rather more complicated. Zoraida does seduce Ruy, and she does indeed end his career in the military, if they are to marry and settle down. But on the other hand, her diversion takes him away from the bigger diversion of captivity, and as we just saw, back on track where the narrative of official values can properly close. So it becomes hard to decide whether the encounter with Zoraida represents a 'subversion to the epic,' as Quint would have it in the classical examples, or a subversion to the idea of open-ended and distracting Romance. Then again, the possibilities here are even more complex, when one considers that the story of Ruy and Zoraida within the novel at large is a rather digressive episode. One could even say that it represents an epic episode within the larger story of Don Quixote, but then one would have to decide whether Don Quixote's story is epic or not, and whether the tale of the Cautivo is subversive to it. Another problem arises from the historical context if one asks whether the official values have actually been well served. Cervantes wrote this story sometime shortly before 1604, as the public debate on the expulsion of the moriscos was raging. The moriscos, baptized yet culturally and linguistically autonomous, had been responsible for uprisings and civil wars in Granada, 1568-70, after which many were sent in a diaspora around the peninsula. Their definitive expulsion was decided in 1609, starting with Valencia. Michael Gerli explains this historical fact as a type of Spanish 'manifest destiny/ which is another way of explaining epic teleology. That is to say, 1609 represented the fruition of the Reconquest which had taken over Granada in 1492. Politically, at least, it was accomplished in 1492, but the peninsula had yet to be cleansed of the last Arab, something which Philip 'Hermenegild' the Third finally realized. The name Hermenegild actually merges his identity with the patron saint of the Reconquest (Gerli 45). So, as others have done, and as we saw with La Numancia, Gerli expounds on deeper meanings, and on the implications of Zoraida's role. He concludes that Cervantes meant to 'rewrite ... Spain's foundational fiction of Reconquest,' and to turn it into 'a parable of and a plea for racial, cultural, and ideological tolerance' (42). That may very well be so, and the literary, social, and religious order brought about by the end of Cervantes' Cautivo may be in consequence more an illusion than an expression of imperialistic values and authority. But as literary illusions go, I would say, this one works remarkably well.

Captives, Moriscos, and Empire in Cervantes 299

To be sure, it might help to determine whether a new Christian like Zoraida, coming to Spain in 1588 and marrying into an old Christian family, would have been forced back to Algiers more than twenty years later, after 1609. It seems that 'assimilation' alone did not keep many morisco communities in Castille or in the south from deportation. Yet the assimilation in Zoraida's case seems to suggest she might well have been able to stay in northen Spain as part of the Perez de Viedma family. Such hypothetical are obviously difficult, if not impossible, to answer. It would provide an interesting study to compare her story with the situation of Ricote and his family in Don Quixote, Part II. In any event, the case for Cervantes' tolerance of moriscos who wished to assimilate seems to have been made quite strongly already.12 What seems less emphasized about this story, in my opinion, is the systematic rhetoric of violence found at the literal level against the Muslim religion and culture. One similarly epic moment that remains in the career of Cervantes is a famous passage in his last published work, the Persiles, 111:11. Right after witnessing the performance of the false captives, Periandro, Auristela, and company make their way into a small morisco community on the coast of Valencia. Here they are warned by Rafala, a young and fervent Zoraida-esque character, that they should not spend the night, as they have been deceived by her father and will be taken away to Algiers, along with the entire town. So they escape into the fortified church, where they meet another truly Christian morisco, Jarife, 'moro solo en el nombre' (Moor only in name) (355), who spontaneously declaims an elaborate epic prophecy on the expulsion of the moriscos. Critics often analyse this scene to find further evidence of Cervantes' position on this issue or to fix its date of composition.13 The scene is nonetheless a beautiful piece of Virgilian rhetoric, even if somewhat short and isolated, where Jarife exhorts King Phillip III to carry out the expulsion and conform to God's will for Spain: 'jEa, pues, vuelvo a decir; vayan, vayan, senor, y deja la taza de tu reino resplandeciente como el sol y hermosa como el cielo!' (Go, then, I say again: let them go, let them go, my Lord, and allow the vessel of your kingdom to shine splendid like the sun and beautiful like Heaven) (359). The entire speech is filled with praise for the monarchy, with allegories where the king is seen as a messiah or even a Moses figure who has been 'profetizado' (prophesized), to fulfil this mission and lead his people in this 'rincon del mundo donde esta recogida y venerada la verdad de Cristo!' (corner of the world where Christ's truth is con-

300 Alvaro Molina

tained and venerated!) (356). So Spain appears as some kind of promised land, a chosen vessel, 'taza de tu reino/ Two main ironies undermine this vision, however. One is often pointed out, when Jarife explains that 'nuevos cristianos viejos' (new old-Christians) (356) will populate the deserted lands where moriscos used to live. The choice of words could not be any more confusing, since moriscos were already 'nuevos cristianos' (new Christians). The other is in the comparison of the expulsion of moriscos to the biblical expulsion of the Jews in the Old Testament: 'Que si los pocos hebreos que pasaron a Egipto multiplicaron tanto ...