Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare [1 ed.] 9781501703812, 9781501700019

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Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University Press,

Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved.

PETRARCHISM AT WORK

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

PETRARCHISM AT WORK

Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved.

CO NT EX T UA L ECO NO MI ES I N T H E A G E O F S H A K ESP E A R E

Wil l iam J . Kennedy

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

This book has been published with the aid of a grant from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University. Copyright © 2016 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2016 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kennedy, William J. (William John), 1942– author Title: Petrarchism at work : contextual economies in the age of Shakespeare / William J. Kennedy. Description: Ithaca ; London : Cornell University Press, 2016. Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015035334 | ISBN 9781501700019 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: European literature—Renaissance, 1450– 1600—History and criticism. | European literature— Renaissance, 1450–1600—Economic aspects. | Petrarca, Francesco, 1304–1374—Influence. | Shakespeare, ­William, 1564–1616. Classification: LCC PN731 .K46 2016 | DDC 809/.031—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035334 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

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To Nikoletta, Rónán, Andreas, and Esmé

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

Conte nts

Acknowledgments ix A Note on References  xi

Introduction: The Marketplace of Mercury

1

Pa rt One:   Petrarch and Italian Poetry

1.  Petrarch as Homo Economicus35 2.  Making Petrarch Matter: The Parts and Labor of Textual Revision

55

3.  Jeweler’s Daughter Sings for Doge: Gaspara Stampa’s Entrepreneurial Poetics 76 4.  Incommensurate Gifts: Michelangelo and the Economy of Revision

100

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Pa rt Two:  Pierre de Ronsar d and Pléiade A esth e tics

1.  Polished to Perfection: Ronsard’s Investment in Les Amours133 2.  Ronsard Furieux: Interest in Ariosto

154

3.  Passions and Privations: Writing Sonnets like a Pro in Les Amours de Marie174 4.  The Smirched Muse: Commercializing Sonnets pour Hélène193

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

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Part Three:  Shakespeare’s Sonne ts and the Economy of Petrarchan A esth e tics

1.  To Possess Is Not to Own: The Cost of the Dark Lady and the Young Man

219

2.  Polish and Skill: Will’s Interest and Self-Interest in Sonnets 61–99

243

3.  Owning Up to Furor: The “Poets’ War” and Its Aftermath in Sonnets 100–126

264

4.  Shakespeare as Professional: The Economy of Revision in Sonnets 1–60

285

Conclusion: Mercurial Economies

313

Works Cited as Primary Texts  323

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Index 327

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

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Ack now l edgme nts

I thank the Bogliasco Foundation for the generous gift of a fellowship at its Study Center in Liguria, where I assembled the first draft of this book in spring 2006 in the energizing company of scholars and artists from Europe and the United States. Closer to home I thank Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities for the gift of a faculty fellowship in spring 2009, with a grateful nod to its director, Tim Murray, and a cadre of fellows who welcomed my watery contributions. While refining the claims of this book, I had the great pleasure of serving on the board of the Renaissance Society of America with other board members who stimulated, informed, and guided my incursions into fields other than my own. As always I am deeply indebted to continued support from my colleagues at Cornell, particularly those in the department of Comparative Literature and those engaged in medieval and Renaissance studies across the university’s various Humanities departments. For timely insights, warm encouragement, and favors at other universities, I thank Cécile Alduy, Albert Ascoli, Patrick Cheney, JoAnn DellaNeva, Marissa Galvez, Indira Ghosse, Roland Greene, Thomas Hunkler, Stefano Jossa, Victoria Kirkham, Marie Rose Logan, Dennis Looney, Mario Mignione, Susan Noakes, Walter Stephens, and John Watkins. I further thank Dana Stewart and Olivia Holmes for their permission to use in the first two chapters of part 1 some paragraphs from my article “Public Poems, Private Expenditures: Petrarch as Homo Economicus,” which appeared in Mediaevalia 32 (2011): 99–121. At Cornell University Press, I stand in awe of its Editor-in-Chief Peter J. Potter for his magnanimous efforts to bring this book to life, its Production Editor Sara R. Ferguson for her expert guidance through the jungle of publication, its Director of Marketing Mahinder S. Kingra for his ingenious solutions to the challenges of modern distribution, and my eagle-eyed copyeditor Deborah A. Oosterhouse for her unstinting care in smoothing out a craggy manuscript. Finally, no one could have benefitted from a more helpful and attentive pair of press readers than I did. Between them, Timothy Hampton and Christopher Warley led me to clarify my argument, tighten its focus,

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x    A C K N OW L E D G M E N TS

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and extend its implications. I’m especially grateful to them for signaling my errors of judgment. Those that remain, remain roundly Taurean. The dedicatees are four young people who I hope will continue to share a love for books, the performing arts, and whatever else Mary and I cherish.

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A A Note on R e fe re nces

Quotations from primary texts used more than once refer to editions named in the Works Cited section. All other primary texts and references to scholarly and critical studies appear in the footnotes. As my copy-text for Petrarch’s Rime sparse I use Marco Santagata’s now standard edition, but I have profited greatly from the older annotated editions of Gianfranco Contini and Giosuè Carducci listed in Works Cited. As my copy-text for Ronsard’s poetry I use the Pléiade edition of Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, but I have also profited from annotations in the older editions of Henri and Catherine Weber and of Paul Laumonier listed in Works Cited. As my copy-text for Shakespeare’s sonnets, I quote from Stephen Booth’s edition, with references to annotations from other editions listed in Works Cited and in individual footnotes. For Shakespeare’s remaining nondramatic poetry, I quote from Colin Burrow’s edition. For Shakespeare’s plays, I quote from The Norton Shakespeare. For translations of Petrarch’s Italian poetry, I quote from Robert Durling’s Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, though in a few cases I have modified the latter to concur with my critical understanding. Quotations from scripture are taken from the Geneva Bible of 1560, nearly contemporary with the major poetic texts discussed in this book. All other translations from primary sources are my own, except where specified in footnotes.

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved.

PETRARCHISM AT WORK

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

Copyright © 2016. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

Introduction

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The Marketplace of Mercury

Wily Mercury, quicksilvered and golden tongued. Boy-god, son of Jupiter by Atlas’s daughter, he’s a trickster, thief, and master of deception. He’s as well the inventor of the lyre, a messenger from the gods, and the escort of souls to the underworld. On the day he was born, he stole Apollo’s cattle but compensated for it by presenting the older god with a lyre fashioned from the shell and guts of a tortoise. Pleased with this gift, Apollo recommended Mercury to Jupiter for service as divine courier. In his Greek incarnation as Hermes, Mercury delivered communiqués from Olympus that often seemed “hermetic” or abstruse in their wording. Armed with “hermeneutic” skills to decipher their meaning, he kept their import secret when necessary or revealed it when opportune. In these capacities Mercury served as a tutelary deity for writers, orators, poets, and musicians.1 With his agile wit, verbal dexterity, artistic touch, and willingness to test limits, Mercury also served as a tutelary deity for merchants and mercantile activity (merx ‘merchandise, goods’ derives from an archaic and abbreviated form of Mercurius).2 As the Roman patron of trade and commerce, 1.  For Mercury/Hermes’s various functions, see Karl Kerényi, Hermes, Guide of Souls [1944], trans. Murray Stein [1976] (Woodstock, Conn.: Spring, 1996), and Norman O. Brown, Hermes, the Thief: Evolution of a Myth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949). 2.  For Latin etymologies I rely upon Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue Latine (Paris: Klincksieck, 1932), here 580. 1

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2    I N T R O D U C T I O N

he ­safeguarded payments (merces ‘payment, reward’), gift-giving, and other forms of economic transaction and exchange. Well-furnished to clinch a deal, he protected mercatores ‘merchants, tradesmen’ and mediated their various mercaturae ‘trades, transactions’. As a veteran of commercial travel (statues of his likeness served as road markers called “herms”), Hermes/Mercury performed emissary duties and was appreciated for his intercessory powers (the word “mercy” derives from his Roman name, through medieval Church Latin, for the bestowal of God’s favor upon those who’ve earned it: compare Italian mercede ‘mercy’ and French merci ‘thanks’).3 This book will focus on competing claims about quicksilver eloquence, vatic inspiration, and hermeneutic skills among Renaissance poets, and upon choices that they made for their writing, their literary careers, and the professionalization of their craft. Its ground is the intersection of aesthetics and economics in European Renaissance poetry, and its principal actors are Francesco Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pierre de Ronsard, and William Shakespeare. At the start, a tension between two views of poetry animates Petrarch’s fourteenth-century Rime sparse, each of which relates differently to economic issues figured in the text. One view associates poetry with inspiration, intuition, and a representation of transcendent reality; the other associates it with rhetorical technique, verbal play, and the vocalic manipulation of linguistic elements. In literary and rhetorical theory two centuries later, these views would come to represent the dominant principles of a Platonic aesthetics (focused on visionary furor) and an Aristotelian poetics (focused on the art or craft of writing poetry), both of them transmitted to the late Middle Ages through Horace’s Epistle 2.3 ad Pisones. Economic consequences follow from these principles, the first based on the value or worth of a divinely endowed talent, rewarded by the autocratic largesse of high-ranking patrons; the second based on craftsmanship and skill acquired through instruction and hard work, rewarded by definable criteria of merit. With Petrarch, these implications appear rooted in medieval theological assumptions. On the one hand, the Platonic formulation corresponds to an earlier, largely Augustinian view in which art, like wealth, reflects God’s plenitude and abundance as a gift to humankind and is therefore a good. The artist’s visionary furor reflects the natural inequality of human beings whom God endows with economic gifts and talents that are highly developed in some and less so in others, imposing on their recipients a moral obligation 3.  For Italian and French etymologies I rely respectively on Salvatore Battaglia et al., Grande Dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1961–2002), here 10:133–46, and Le grand Robert de la langue française, ed. Paul Robert, 9 vols., 2nd ed. (Paris: Robert, 1986), here 6:415–18.

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to use them toward productive ends. On the other hand, the Aristotelian formulation corresponds to a later, largely Scholastic view in which art constitutes a particular skill or mechanical handiwork exercised for profit in proportion to the amount of labor power or exchange value expended upon it or to the degree of satisfaction or utility value inherent in it. The artist’s skill reflects training, specialization, and accomplishment and is directed toward purposeful gain in the marketplace. Here the material components of Petrarch’s poetry assume some importance, literally readable in the author’s working papers and successive drafts whose revisions bear evidence of his technical skills. In this regard, as in others, Petrarch is a homo economicus who conserves and exploits the material resources of his art. The first two chapters of part 1 in this book focus on Petrarch’s legacy to later Renaissance poetry.

Aesthetics, Economics, Professionalism: The Case of Petrarch

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In Petrarch’s time, the economic coordinates for these paradigms seem only barely emergent. A Platonic aesthetics would take distinctive shape in the late fifteenth century with Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato’s works into Latin and subsequent humanist commentary on them.4 An Aristotelian aesthetics would emerge after Aldus Manutius’s publication of the Greek texts of his Rhetoric and Poetics in 1508, with their various translations into Latin and Italian and the rise of commentary on them.5 Still, Petrarch’s grasp of 4. See Phaedrus 245bc for poetic furor and Republic 2.376–78 for Socrates’s endorsement of music and edifying narrative (ameliorating his hostility to poetry and drama in Republic 10.595–608). For Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Phaedrus, see Ficino, Commentaries on Plato, trans. Michael J. B. Allen, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 38–103; and Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 41–67. For Aristotle’s rejection of Socrates’s hostility, see “Marsilio Ficino and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy” in John Monfasani, Greeks and Latins in Renaissance Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 179–202. For Ficino’s pivotal role in the humanist culture of disputation, see Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 80–114. 5.  The recovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric began with George of Trebizond’s Rhetoricorum libri V (1434) and its claim that a learned person “will appear destitute of all knowledge unless he also adorns and illuminates what he teaches.” See Wayne A. Rebhorn, ed. and trans., Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 30. For George’s synthesis of Aristotle with other Greek rhetoricians, see John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 201–29. Other landmark publications include Latin translations of the Rhetoric by Ermolao Barbaro in 1479 (printed with Daniele Barbaro’s commentary in 1544) and by Marcus Antonius Maioranus in 1550; a Latin translation of the Poetics by Giorgio Valla in 1495 and Alessandro de’ Pazzi’s improved Latin translation in 1536; Latin commentaries on the Poetics by Francesco Robortello in 1548 and Pier Vettori in 1560; and Italian translations of the Rhetoric and Poetics by Bernardino Segni in 1549.

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their competing principles via Horace’s formulation of them, and his grasp of their consequences for the economics of literary production and distribution, had an impact on his own vernacular poetry.6 Two centuries later they had an impact upon the reception and imitation of his poetry by such writers as Stampa, Michelangelo, Ronsard, and Shakespeare. As with Petrarch, each recognized the exchange value of his or her work as a perfected object. But each also recognized the utility value of pleasure that his or her work conveys to readers through its sound structure, its semantic nuance and syntactic density, its figural inventiveness and tropological ingenuity, its performativity as song, witty repartee, and narrative or dramatic discourse. As it happens, just-price theory in the late Middle Ages had acknowledged these features in assessments of artistic value.7 As articulated by the controversial but influential Franciscan scholar Pietro Olivi (1247–98), this theory echoes late Roman contract law by acknowledging the right of parties to negotiate a sale for whatever price they might agree upon without fraud or malice.8 A justum pretium ‘just price’ calculates the worth of an artifact as something separate from the value of its materials or the time spent crafting them.9 It accommodates the buyer’s subjective pleasure, a “magis et minus beneplacitum nostre voluntatis” ‘greater or lesser pleasure of our will’, in judging the work to be beautiful or satisfying and worth enjoying ownership and access to it: “Pensatur in respectu ad nostrum usum et utilitatem quam secundum absolutum valorem suarum essentiarum” ‘It is construed rather in relation to our use and utility than according to the absolute value of their constituent parts’ (55). It also accounts for the value of the producer’s expertise in terms of time and effort required to learn and practice a certain skill: “Si ad altiora offitia . . . exigitur maior peritia et industria et amplior sollicitudo mentalis” ‘So for the higher professions a higher degree of experience and application and a deeper degree of mental care is demanded’ (57). Here the key terms are officium (Olivi’s plural form is offitia) ‘official employment,

6.  For the singularity of Petrarch’s lyric voice as a feature associated with his reception of Horace, see Ullrich Langer, Lyric in the Renaissance from Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 21–48. 7. See Liana Farber, An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 38–68. 8.  See Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange,Value, Money, and Usury according to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200 –1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 345–73. 9.  Quotations are from Pietro Olivi, Tractatus de emptionibus et venditionibus, with his Tractatus de usaris and his Tractatus de restitutionibus in Un trattato di economia politica francescana, ed. Giacomo Todeschini (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1980), here 53. For background, see Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools, 358–64.

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profession’ (from opificium ‘workmanship’); peritia ‘inclusive experience’; industria ‘meticulous application’; and sollicitudo ‘careful attention’. In late medieval vernaculars the Italian mestiere, Old French mestier/métier, and Middle English mastery capture these components.10 Each word derives through Church Latin from the Greek nouns μυστήριον ‘secret ritual or rite, religious ceremony’ and μύστης ‘one who is initiated among followers of a rite’. A distinction between sacred and secular marks their Latin cognates ministerium with respect to the duties of churchly office and the minister who performs them, and magisterium with respect to the teaching of practical skills and the magister who transmits them.11 The word mestiere does not appear in Petrarch’s Italian poetry. In his Latin prose, its closest approximation is ars ‘art or craft’, with a distinction in Familiares 10.5 between artes mechanicae, which provide for life’s necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, and artes liberales, which advance the pursuit of poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology.12 In the sixteenth century Giorgio Vasari imputes to mestiere a mechanical sense of following rules or protocol. In Life of Michelangelo (1550, rev. 1568), Alfonso d’Este’s supercilious agent approaches Michelangelo about his now-lost painting of Leda and earns the artist’s rebuke with the question “che mestiero fussi il suo” ‘what might his job be’.13 Vasari attributes to the noun professione a level of specialized competence when he writes that the young Michelangelo’s sketch for a mural in the Palazzo Vecchio shows “quanto sapesse in tale professione” ‘how much he knew about his profession’ (2:889/1:341).14 The following chapters will trace a network 10.  See Battaglia et al., Grande Dizionario, 10:227–32; Le grand Robert, ed. Robert, 6:166–67 and 473–74. 11. For magister, see Ernout and Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique, 551–52; for minister, see ibid., 586–87. 12.  Familiares, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, in Francesco Petrarca, Opere, ed. Mario Martelli, 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1975), 2:274; English translation in Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo Bernardo (Albany: State University of New York Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975–85), 1:41. Subsequent references to both works appear in parentheses as (2:274/1:41). 13.  Quotations from Giorgio Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, 5 vols. (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1962), 1:68, with commentary in 3:1101–02; translations from Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 1:372. See the accounts of William E. Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 339, and Michael Hirst, Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame, 1475 –1534 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 242–43. 14.  Derived from the Latin verb profiteor ‘to declare publicly’, the Italian professione first refers to a public declaration of duty or belief, as in a profession of virtue or faith (Battaglia et al., Grande Dizionario, 14:502–4). The new meaning is registered in Ariosto’s Il Negromante (1520, rev. 1529), which mocks the play’s titular character as one who, “hardly knowing how to read and write, practices the profession [  faccia professione] of philosopher” (2.2.643–45). In Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), Federigo Fregoso delineates the courtier’s “principale e vera profession” ‘principal and

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of associations among these ideas in sixteenth-century aesthetic (especially poetic) and economic practice. Our modern and deeply theorized categories of aesthetics (as distinct from a formal poetics rooted in classical literature) and economics (as distinct from a moral or political philosophy rooted in classical and late medieval concepts of social justice) are anachronistic to the European Renaissance.15 Still, several recurrent features of these categories begin to inflect sixteenth-century thinking about literary and artistic production. The concept of “aesthetics” is less a matter of Kant’s interesseloses Wohlgefallen than of Michelangelo’s concetto and superchio in his sonnet 151, or of Shakespeare’s “perspective” and “skill” in his sonnet 24, and it conveys an idea of mental concentration and moral solicitude. The concept of “economics” is less a matter of Adam Smith’s “Wages and Profit” in the commercial or mercantile “System” than of late Scholastic ethics concerning distributive justice, fair wage, and labor theories of value, along with ascendant humanist revaluations of entrenched attitudes toward usury, interest, fluctuating gold and silver standards, rising markets, cultural exchange, professionalization, and technological innovation.16 These issues play themselves out in Petrarch’s monastic world, Stampa’s salon society, Michelangelo’s gift economy, Ronsard’s court culture, and Shakespeare’s emerging mercantile world. What binds these various societies and cultures is a shared sense of experience and application, calling and vocation, conveyed through an emergent sense of profession and a still unformed sense of professionalism. Five recurrent features of the latter converge in the sixteenth century. Three relate specifically to safeguards concerning support, initiative, and focus in an exchange economy. The first is membership in an academy, society, or ­literary salon,

true profession’ of arms (1.17). The OED cites Lodowick Bryskett’s translation of Stefano Guazzo’s Discourse of the Civil Life (1582, pub. 1606) as the earliest English occurrence of “profession” in its modern sense. Le grand Robert cites Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670; “profession de musique,” 2.3.12) among its earliest applications to the arts. 15.  Both terms originate in the late eighteenth century, with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Aesthetics, 1750) and Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790) giving definition to aesthetics as the science of perception and disinterested satisfaction, and Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776–89) defining a “political economy” through the division of labor and production and the distribution of wealth. 16.  For emphasis on these features rather than on premodern forms of commercial capitalism in economic discourse, see Dennis Romano, Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy c. 1100 to 1440 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 153–220; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 83–113; Jotham Parsons, Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 17–59 and passim; and Samuel Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 17–52.

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T H E M A R K E T P L A CE O F M E R CU R Y     7

where the presence of like-minded writers, artists, and musicians bolsters a sense of personal confidence along with fairness and self-worth as “confidence multipliers” that follow from it.17 Such groups may welcome amateurs as well as professionals, but while the former participate in order to acquire a veneer of culture and sophistication as a social asset, the latter aim to learn from, collaborate with, and compete against their peers. The group acts as a surrogate guild (in the Renaissance there were no guilds for poets, though there were for musicians and visual artists), enabling its participants to benefit from a social, cultural, and economic trust available to members of late medieval artisan associations and early modern trade companies. Their “like-mindedness” does not imply conformity; quite the opposite, in fact, for literary participants. By constituting self-defined institutional groups, writers profess their commitment to a shared interest in form and formal structure as a bulwark against unthinking con-formity. The form that gives shape to their literary work consequently becomes an index and register of their historical awareness.18 A concomitant feature is entrepreneurship, prompting some participants to look beyond the group for further opportunities. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century technologies mark a transition from the narrowly defined patronage of a gift economy to the expanded preferences of an exchange economy.19 By definition, entrepreneurs cast a wide net for untried markets in fluctuant and often idiosyncratic circumstances. Alert to opportunity, the literary sort use their rhetorical skill—their greatest asset—to attract attention to their work for patronage, purchase, or distribution within the limited market conditions of the sixteenth-century book trade.20 A third feature, derived from the other two, is a focus on self-definition and self-critique. While amateur poets may celebrate variety, experimentation, and dilettantish indulgence, professional poets replace these features with a critical assessment

17.  See George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 11–25 and 157–76. For the resultant loosening of public interests, see Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 342–54. For the early modern rethinking of social alliances, see Hannah Wojciehowski, Group Identity in the Renaissance World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 46–53 and 70–75. 18.  Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 225–61. 19.  I’m thinking especially of print technologies, long-distance travel, and the mechanics of book distribution. For gift exchange economies, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 171–83. 20.  Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 42–64.

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of what is irreplaceable in their art.21 They venture away from the specter of false consciousness and its idealizing illusions and supplant them with the stimulus of labor in pursuit of socially defined use and exchange values.22 Two remaining features relate to behavioral characteristics of individual writers. Foremost is the individual’s commitment to perfecting craftsmanship and technique through a process of contraction and expansion, redaction and revision. This commitment acknowledges seams, imperfections, and unfinished thoughts even in a terminal redaction, and it directs attention toward such gaps as markers of social conflict and economic antagonisms.23 The final recurrent feature of professionalism is the writer’s capacity to reflect upon the boundaries of his or her work. Amateurs write what they choose to write. Professionals position themselves to meet their clients’ requests, but always according to the norms of a generic competence that they challenge, contest, transform, and internalize. They articulate their insights through a discourse and performativity that set competing claims of matter against form, rhetoric against poetics, immanence against transcendence, and studied craftsmanship against inspiration.24 If some Renaissance writers see labor as the origin of value, they resist quantifying its outward appearance in their work. In so doing, they presage a later perception that the source of value is not undifferentiated labor, but rather an abstracted and highly differentiated “labor power” that gives rise to a labor theory of value and its redistribution of raw labor value.25

21. For this “Darwinian wedge,” see Robert Frank, Darwin Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 16–29. On consumer demand in a premodern market, see Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550 – 1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 52–91; Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 19–62; and Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9–25. 22.  Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 178–221. 23.  Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:37–54, and Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 43–49 and 93–95. For Adorno’s continuing relevance to literary theory, see Jonathan Culler, The Theory of Lyric (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 330–36; Robert Kaufman, “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 254–75; and Peter Hohendahl, The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theories Revisited (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 24.  For the performative character of lyric poetry and its link to the creative power of language, see Culler, Theory of Lyric, 122–31. 25.  See Eric Olin Wright, “The Value Controversy and Social Research,” and Anwar Shaikh, “The Poverty of Algebra,” in The Value Controversy, ed. Ian Steedman (London: Verso, 1981), 36–74 and 266–300.

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Each of the five poets studied in this book presents a challenge or exception to one or another of these features. Petrarch conjures his entrepreneurial efforts to attract elite patronage and support; channels his intense, even obsessive literary focus to renovate Latin and vernacular poetry; embraces microscopic habits of practice and revision to craft his style; and moves toward a macroscopic theoretical understanding of literary language in relation to literary expression.26 Yet throughout his long career he retains no long-term membership in any school, coterie, court society, or intellectual movement. The hundreds of letters collected in his Familiares, Seniles, and Sine nomine situate him as an independent agent forging his own identity, a writer outside the bounds of church, school, and courtly patronage systems. The form of his self-presentation overlaps with that of a homo economicus in an emerging commercial world, where we encounter the rise of isolated, self-interested, rational human beings intent upon maximizing their gains. To abet these efforts, Petrarch cultivates a literary persona as a homo litterarum, an expansive writer whose sheer quantity of work underscores his design to capture attention on a large scale. As a tonsured cleric, Petrarch qualified for ecclesiastical benefices that provided him with income and free time to pursue his writing. A rough sketch of his economic support includes a nonresident canonry at the cathedral of Lombez in Gascony, recommended in 1335 by Cardinal Giovanni Colonna (to whose administrative staff he was attached from 1330 to 1347); another at the Cathedral of Pisa, awarded in 1342 by Pope Clement V; a canonry and house at the Cathedral of Parma awarded in 1346 by the same pope (there he received news of Laura’s death two years later); and a canonry and house at the Cathedral of Padua, recommended in 1349 by Jacopo da Carrara, lord of Padua (where he resided periodically until 1368). Between 1353 and 1361 the Visconti family provided him with a residence in Milan, and between 1362 and 1368 the Venetian Senate provided him with one near the ducal palace. In 1370 Francesco da Carrara had a house built for him at Arqua, where he died in 1374. Over the years Petrarch sought patronage and protection from King Robert of Naples; Azzo da Correggio, sometime ruler of Parma; and Pandolfo Malatesta, a military commander formerly in service to Milan; but no records attest to substantial support by any of them.27 26.  For Petrarch’s conception of a “professionless profession,” see Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Profession in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 27–44. 27.  For Petrarch’s efforts to court these men, see Familiares 22.1 to Pandolfo and Seniles 13.8 to Azzo. For his orations on behalf of Giovanni Visconti, the Venetian Republic, Francesco da Carrara, and others, see Victoria Kirkham, “Petrarch the Courtier: Five Public Speeches” in Petrarch: A Critical

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Petrarch’s Italian poetry inscribes his unique status as a mobile “man in the middle” whose autonomous identity in a late medieval environment of interlocking loyalties and corporate affiliations is retrospective, provisional, and transitional. The poet responds with his commitment to craftsmanship and style. Like his ever-evolving persona, his individual texts undergo alteration, change, verbal adjustment, and critical displacement. He happens to be one of the first European authors from whom a number of working papers and successive drafts has come down in appreciable order, enabling us to trace the evolution of his texts and editorial decisions over several decades. The codex of these drafts displays his many erasures, insertions, transpositions, and inversions as visible signs of craftsmanship, skill, and rhetorical technique.28 Here Petrarch’s understanding of himself as a craftsman of style converges with his critical understanding of the Rime sparse as a product of poetic labor. His poetry takes shape at an intersection of matter and form where form comes to matter most when the poet transacts its material components—its grammatical structures, oral-aural sound patterns, figurative arrangements, and tropological turns—into vehicles of embodied meaning. His poems unfold as dramas that pit competing claims against each other and energize them with the freedom and constraints of meter and rhyme, syntax and semantics, etymological wordplay and literary allusion. At times, Petrarch appears deeply skeptical about the moral and intellectual worth of his vernacular efforts, bedeviled by an anxiety that his texts generate surface reflections with no inner truth value. It often happens, however, that exactly when his poems—and those of his sixteenth-century imitators—look most playful, most dispersive, most technically brilliant, they also penetrate to the depths of human consciousness, cultural development, and historical situation. This embodiment of meaning in the play of language constitutes his legacy to the later Renaissance. It’s a legacy achieved through the labor of drafting and redrafting, revision and emendation, as poets polish their rhymes, energize their rhythms, and display their originality, proceeding quietly but steadily in the solitude of their studies, surrounded by sheaves of parchment or paper,

Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 141–50. For Petrarch’s benefices, see Ernest Hatch Wilkins, “Petrarch’s Ecclesiastical Career,” in Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 3–32. 28.  This codex is housed in the Vatican Library as Vaticano Latino 3196. As I’ve argued in my Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 18–19, the poet’s concern for style shows an appreciation of Marcus Varro’s De lingua latina (127 CE). For a poetics based on Varronian principles, see Frederick Ahl, Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 22–51.

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sharpened quills, jars of ink, stacks of books, and the flicker of candle or oil lamps well past midnight.

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Sixteenth-Century Italy: Gaspara Stampa and Michelangelo Buonarroti Chapters 3 and 4 of part 1 in this book focus upon the poetic achievements of Gaspara Stampa and Michelangelo Buonarroti in mid-sixteenth-century Italy. Among Petrarch’s many Renaissance commentators, Lodovico Castelvetro (1507–71) de-idealizes the poet’s work in his Le rime del Petrarca brevemente sposte (1550s, published 1582) by examining his heterodox sources in scripture, classical Greek and Latin texts, Italian Stilnovist poetry, and Dante. Castelvetro wrote one of the best vernacular commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics, his Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (1570), which articulates a pragmatic labor theory of value for poetry as well as a claim for its utility value based upon the reader’s satisfaction in engaging with the text. From the outset Castelvetro mocks the idea of poetic furor as a fabrication by self-serving poets whom Plato regarded with suspicion and expelled from his republic.29 He instead favors Petrarch’s emphasis upon craftsmanship, and from the poet’s letter to Tommaso da Messina he cites with approval the inventiveness of worms that create silk from their own viscera (1:94–95/41–42).30 To assess the value of a poem, “the sole consideration is the labor and effort [  fatica et industria] which it requires of the poet” (1:186–87/66–67). Poets become “objects of greater admiration” to the degree that they appear virtuosi of style (1:241/90) with a profusion of rhetorical techniques that afford pleasure to readers by engaging them in “abundant [più largo]” if not “more proportionately intense” intricacy (2:368/321).31 With his emphasis on authorial craftsmanship and skill, Castelvetro points to a growing professionalization of writerly arts in the mid-sixteenth century. 29.  References are to Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1979), here referring to 1:91–92, and to Andrew Bongiorno, trans., Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984), here on 37–38. Subsequent references to both works appear in parentheses as (1:91–92/37–38). 30. See Familiares 1.8: “quorum ex visceribus sericum prodit” ‘from whose viscera silk comes forth’ (2:275/1:41). The silk industry had been introduced to northern Italy through Muslim Sicily c. 1272; see Frank A. C. Mantello and Arthur G. Rigg, Medieval Latin (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 479. For the relevance of this trope to Michelangelo’s sonnet 94, perhaps alluding to his brothers’ artisanal membership in the Florentine Wool and Silk Guild, see below, chapter 1.4, n. 33. 31.  For Aristotle’s ethics of pleasure, see Ullrich Langer, Penser les forms du plaisir littéraire à la Renaissance (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2009), 154–64. For sound patterning at the roots of lyric poetry from antiquity to the present, see Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 173–85.

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The development of print technology and the growth of literacy created a market for informational books in the arts and sciences as well as in various trades and commercial enterprises. Among them are such broad-based encyclopedic treatises as Tommaso Garzoni’s La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo ‘The Universal Marketplace of All the World’s Professions’ (1585, with twenty-eight subsequent editions) and Cesare Vecellio’s lavishly illustrated De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo ‘Ancient and Modern Clothing from Various Parts of the World’ (1590) and Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo ‘Ancient and Modern Clothing from the Whole World’ (1598), both of which associate dress with status and occupation.32 These books demarcate a highly stratified sense of expertise and specialization that had long marked business and commerce in Venice. Garzoni offers a particularly elaborate treatment of the division of labor and social distinction. His delineation of 155 vocational categories and 545 skilled occupations runs the gamut from academics, agriculturalists, and arithmeticians to poets, potters, and prostitutes. The first edition of his compendium ends with a lengthy chapter on “Poets” (to which the second edition in 1587 adds a shorter chapter on “Humanists”).33 It situates poets and humanists outside the economic marketplace as observers of its frenetic activities. The genres that Garzoni highlights are neither heroic epic nor tragic drama, but instead satiric verse and the laudatory epigram “che in un subito t’abbassa nel centro della terra, e in un subito t’alza per fin sopra Olimpo” ‘that in one instant lowers you into the earth’s center and in another raises you above Olympus’ (1482). Ludovico Ariosto emerges as his most frequently quoted poet and—not surprisingly—Mercury as his most frequently cited mythological figure. Poets themselves are “i Mercuri che portano con la lingua loro l’eccelse lodi di quelli fino al cielo” ‘Mercuries who with their tongues transport the highest praises of [their friends and associates] all the way to heaven’ (1485). The author iterates every writer’s need to flatter patrons, rival authors, and prominent critics, and he ends by recounting a critical exchange on a Latin elegy composed by a prominent patrician, whose “termini di modestia che sono usati fra persone civili” ‘expressions of modesty deployed by polite individuals’ (1495) illustrate the civic functions of poetry.

32.  See George W. McClure, The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 70–156. For Vecellio, see Clothing in the Renaissance World, ed. and trans. Margaret Rosenthal and Ann R. Jones (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008). 33.  Quotations are from Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 2:1472–1525 on “Poets” and 2:1526–29 on “Humanists.”

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If we revert to an earlier moment in sixteenth-century Venice, we find its culture poised at a turning point in literary professionalization. Here a symptomatic figure is Gaspara Stampa (1522-25?–1554) who assigns Mercury a cameo appearance in sonnet 4 of her Rime (1554), “Quando fu prima il mio Signor concetto”  ‘When my Lord was first conceived’.34 Various deities confer special gifts upon her beloved Collaltino di Collalto: “Eloquentia Mercurio; ma la Luna / Lo fè gelato più, ch’io non vorria” ‘Mercury [gave him] eloquence, but the Moon made him colder than I might have wished’. Despite his eloquence—which partly refers to his skill as a poet—differences in the social and economic status of each challenge their union. He is a nobleman with a landed estate near Treviso and clientage ties to the powerful Farnesi family. She is the daughter of a Paduan jeweler-merchant (protected by Mercury, the patron of commerce), upon whose death she was brought to Venice in the 1530s by her mother. The disparity of status and rank between them could only doom any prospects for their future together. In the absence of manuscript evidence, there’s scant documentation of Stampa’s lexical, syntactic, or tropological revision. On the level of rhetorical imitatio, however, her entire project constitutes a sensational work of revision in its feminine regendering of male-authored Petrarchan figures, tropes, and dramatic situations. It resonates with the salon culture of sixteenth-century Venice in which she participated as a writer and solo performer of her verse, the latter most likely with self-accompaniment on a lute or other stringed instrument. Her self-critique is unmistakable as she creates a lyric persona with a distinct character, style, voice, and form of address. Her metaliterary reflections emerge in poems addressed to Collaltino and to literary associates with whom she might have collaborated in shared endeavors. For all Stampa’s intimations of belonging to a salon culture, however, there’s no record of her membership in any single salon, no traces of support from any particular patron or sponsor, no overt signs of self-promotion. It’s tempting to imagine Stampa turning her elusiveness into a critical virtue as she moves from circle to circle of experts and amateurs. Her anonymity and lack of binding attachment provide her with vantage points from which to evaluate her social environment and its artistic practices, edging her toward a critique of the Venetian ideology that subtends both.

34.  Quotations are from Gaspara Stampa, The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime,” a Bilingual Edition, ed. Troy Tower and Jane Tylus, trans. Jane Tylus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); all translations are my own.

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Stampa’s public life spawned rumors about her sexual entanglement with prominent Venetian noblemen, including the aged doge Andrea Gritti.35 The scandal only hints at the link between aesthetic and economic concerns underlying her Rime. In aesthetic terms her poems cultivate a distinctive style that rescues them from bland conformity. In economic terms, she was the daughter of a jeweler-merchant, and she took into her own hands the shaping of a career that validated her aspirations. Her poems negotiate among differences between patron-sponsored courtly environments and an emerging salon society where she associated with eminent artists, musicians, and literary peers. The posthumous publication of her poetry under her sister’s supervision smacks of a business deal negotiated with the Venetian printer Plinio Pietrasanta. Beyond these precincts, Stampa guarded the details of her everyday life so that her work comes to us as aesthetically mediated, economically indeterminate, and socially anonymous. The first part of this book ends with a consideration of Michelangelo’s private poems and gift drawings sent to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. There’s no denying Michelangelo’s intense concentration on the visual arts of sculpture, fresco painting, drawing, and architectural design, but the scattered drafts of his poems, their recurrent emendations, and the unfinished state of many suggest only a casual literary engagement.36 Michelangelo’s habits of work challenge many sixteenth-century assumptions. He belonged to no single movement, school, academy, group, guild, or coterie, but he dispensed his work grandly among many patrons and sponsors (often at an equally grand price) as well as among friends and fellow artists (as freely bestowed gifts). From an entrepreneurial perspective, he nurtured a reputation for solitary genius, one that enhanced the social and economic value of his work. In the visual arts he concentrated on sculpture and fresco painting, media that prove resistant to casual reworking and revision, but for which he found compensatory solutions.37 By contrast, the manuscript pages of his poetry display prodigious feats of rewriting and revision. And in return they

35.  Records in the Archivio di Stato di Padova establish that Stampa was instead married to a distant cousin of the Gritti family, the Paduan cittadino Andrea di Giovanni de San Martin, and that she bore him two daughters, Elizabetta and Sulpizia. See Stefano Bianchi, La scrittura poetica femminile nel cinquecento Veneto: Gaspara Stampa e Veronica Franco (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2013), 35–36. 36.  For Michelangelo’s intense focus on his artwork, see Douglas Biow, Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Renaissance Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 92–129. 37.  Contemporaries report that he worked with great speed, making quick adjustments to frescos before their plaster dried and to sculptures despite the resistance of stone; see Wallace, Michelangelo, 141–46.

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reveal his intense concern with both visual and literary production and with hermeneutic skills of interpretation. Among the recipients of Michelangelo’s poetry, Cavalieri and Colonna belonged to the nobility and were personal friends of his, but they never provided him with formal patronage. Michelangelo sent both of them poems and drawings as gratuitous expressions of intimacy with them. His pencil and chalk drawings sent to Cavalieri and Colonna show no evidence of having been retouched, though a letter to Cavalieri offers to supply a new and improved version of one of them if requested.38 His verse on the other hand evolves in multiple drafts that teem with redaction, and conspicuous parallels link them to his drawings.39 The pictures intended for Cavalieri depict various mythological actions (the rape of Ganymede, the punishment of Tityus, the fall of Phaethon) that, like the poems addressed to him, carry markedly erotic overtones.40 Those executed for Colonna depict scenes of Jesus’s crucifixion and Mary’s lamentation that, like the poems addressed to her, express strong religious devotion. One early drawing sent to neither of them, the Saettatori ‘Archers Shooting at a Herm’ (Windsor Castle, Royal Library), deserves attention for its concern with social, sexual, professional, and economic issues in this phase of Michelangelo’s work. Likely completed in Florence before the artist moved to Rome, it anticipates the topics of his poems and other drawings sent to Cavalieri.41 It depicts nine people in various poses aiming at a target on a road-marking “herm,” shooting at it with invisible arrows from invisible bows. At least three constructions of its meaning seem possible. In one, the weapons’ invisibility suggests that the action is a mental one, conveying great intellectual focus and energy. Because Hermes’s communiqués were often opaque, the action may refer to the capacity of well-aimed explication to interpret enigmatic images and utterances.42 And, further, since such images and utterances can be deciphered on multiple levels of meaning, the work of understanding them can range dialectically afield and may encompass competing and even contradictory claims in bono and in malo—both in a good sense as exemplifying something virtuous, heroic, and praiseworthy, and in a

38.  See Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 226–34. 39.  See ibid., 53–68 and 235–86. 40.  For Vasari’s reference to these pictures, see La vita di Michelangelo,1:118, with commentary on 4:1882–1925, and Lives of the Artists, 1:420. 41.  See Hirst, Michelangelo, 261–63. 42. For the significance of Hermes in the post-Homeric “Hymn to Hermes,” see Kerényi, Hermes, 51–88, and Brown, Hermes, the Thief, 66–101.

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negative sense as exemplifying something evil, perverse, and culpable. In bono the archers might represent the strenuous efforts needed to understand the artist’s work. In malo they might represent misguided efforts to do so. The hermeneutic principle of construing a single figuration in different senses according to different contexts had shored up biblical exegesis since at least St. Augustine’s description of it in De doctrina Christiana 3.25. It undergirds interpretations of medieval and Renaissance visual and poetic art that juxtapose contrasting figures and tropes, and it subtends much of Michelangelo’s work in both media.43 These principles contribute to a second understanding of the drawing in which the archers appear spurred on by the force of a natural urge.44 For beings endowed with intellect and will, this urge concentrates their desire for love and beauty, whether in bono for a spiritual object of love and beauty or in malo for cupidinous and degenerate objects. The figure of Cupid sleeping at the bottom of the herm suggests that he may be a particular target of the archers, referring to an oscillation of the artist-poet’s libidinous desire between poles of good and bad. A third interpretation proceeds from the role of Hermes in his Roman incarnation as Mercury, the patron of commerce and mercantile activity. Both in bono and in malo the god stands impassive against an onslaught of those who contend against him. In the commercial world of art, the archers may figure so many talented competitors—each accomplished in his or her skills—striving for the success that Michelangelo has attained in bono. Their sensuousness may suggest in malo his vulnerability to the physical beauty of those who wound him with the shaft of love. Like the knavish Mercury, he conceals these failings from the casual viewer while leaving them open to interpretation by patient observers. All three understandings converge upon the artist’s self-revelation as one who pursues beauty and love in bono as objects of spiritual perfection and in malo as inducements to degenerate behavior, merchandising his art in sober consideration of its import, again in bono and in malo. In the moral meditation upon life and art that Michelangelo’s Rime sketch, Petrarchan conventions mediate the speaker’s

43.  “Things signified are contrary when one thing is used as a similitude in a good sense and in another place in an evil sense,” in St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 100. For literary applications, see Carol V. Kaske, Spenser’s Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 27–28 and 54–56. For the coincidence of opposites in Pico’s poetica theologica, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 17–25. 44.  Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 228. For the drawing’s source in Petrarch’s sonnet 133, see Hirst, Michelangelo, 375, n. 87.

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self-critical stance in surprising ways. Jostling with a Neoplatonic terminology that describes his artistic vision, Michelangelo articulates an aesthetics firmly grounded in Aristotelian assumptions about poetic practice and its economic consequences.

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Gallic Inflation: Pierre de Ronsard, Prince of Poets and Poet of Princes In France, the first major humanist inquiry into economic theory was the treatise De asse ‘On coin’ (1516) written by Francis I’s royal secretary Guillaume Budé (1468–1540). It appeared at a time of financial crisis provoked by costly invasions into Italy and wars against Spain’s Charles V. Budé trains his humanist methodology not just on the recovery and understanding of texts about the economies of ancient Greece and Rome, but on their exemplarity and applicability to the present. In its dialectical engagement with the past, Budé’s treatise on monetary weights, measures, and units of exchange in antiquity typifies the rhetorical scope of humanist economic discourse.45 It begins with texts by Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), endorsing his rational approach to the extrinsic and wholly arbitrary value of coins and precious metals in opposition to superstitious beliefs about their intrinsic and occult powers.46 But the author soon modifies Pliny’s reasoning by citing conflicting evidence from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Columella, and Suetonius, as well as from Demosthenes, Xenophon, Plutarch, and others. Budé analyzes their complex usage of words about money and monetary transactions and criticizes imprecision in their mathematical calculations and practical applications: “Ego vero antiquos quoque illos, homines ut nos fuisse puto, liqua etiam scripsisse quae parum intelligerent”  ‘As for me, I think that the ancients themselves were humans like us, and that they came to write about matters that they barely understood’.47 Whatever the outcome, he forges ahead with

45.  For corresponding humanist approaches, see Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 14–35. For De asse in relation to Budé’s Institution du prince and De philologia, see Marc Bizer, Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33–51. 46.  See Jean-Claude Margolin, “Pour une lecture humaniste du De asse,” in Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France, ed. Grahame Castor and Terence Cave (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 1–25, and Alain Michel, “L’Or dans le De asse,” in L’Or: Temps de la Renaissance, ed. M. T. Jones-Davies (Paris: Centre de Recherches sur la Renaissance, 1978), 5–14. For Budé’s application of philology to Roman Law, see Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 53–85. 47.  Quotations from Budaei Operum libri V (Basel: Nicolaus Episcopius Iunior, 1557), here 9.

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bold speculation about historical consequences, fueling a complex narrative about moral issues concerning gain and loss.48 With Pliny, Budé argues that in the aftermath of Nero’s disastrous reign, money came to signify social distinction and power, which in turn came to incite greed and avarice.49 He finds parallels with the onset of inflation during the reign of Louis XII. Exploiting the medieval trope of France as a garden, Budé notes that the Gallic kingdom offers a perfect geographical location and extraordinary natural resources for the use and enjoyment of its populace: “Mitto temperium caeli & quod utriusque maris cinctu & commercio commode comiterque habitatur” ‘I leave aside its temperate climate and the mildness of its weather and the fact that friendly and agreeable commerce is available through its seaports on both [Mediterranean and Atlantic] shores’ (169). Appropriating the Roman narrative of decline, he laments that mismanagement during Louis’s reign has led to bankruptcy and ruin. But as with the installation of Vespasian as emperor after Nero, the recent coronation of Francis I portends recovery: “Omninoque ea tunc hominum constans erat opinio, hactenus expiata nostra esse peccata, Francicique regni maiestatem suo genio restitutam”  ‘And certainly it was then the firm consensus that our mistakes up to this point have been corrected and that the grandeur of Francis’s kingdom has been restored through his talent for rule’ (303). France now beckons the citizenry to nurture its assets, mend its economy, and bring prosperity back to the realm. Royal counselors influenced by Budé proceeded to focus their economic discourse upon particular applications affecting the mechanics of pricing, configuring legitimate rates of interest, and codifying legal and commercial contracts.50 On the eve of the Council of Trent, the Valois monarchy enlisted its humanist scholars to secure papal approval for policies associated with moderating rates of interest on borrowed money and regulating the transmission of family property through marital arrangements. Charles Du Moulin (1500–66), a legal advisor to both Francis I and Henri II, served the interests 48. See Marie-Rose Logan “Writing the Self: Guillaume Budé’s Poetics of Scholarship,” in Contending Kingdoms, ed. Logan and Peter Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 131–48; Logan, “Gulielmus Budaeus’ Philological Imagination,” MLN 118 (2003): 140–51; and Alan Stewart, “Humanity at a Price: Erasmus, Budé, and the Poverty of Philology” in At the Borders of the Human, ed. Erica Fudge et al. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 9–25. 49.  For the humanist topos of use and honor, see Hampton, Fictions of Embassy Literature and Diplomacy, 45–72. 50.  Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (London: Allyn & Unwin, 1954; reprint London: Routledge, 1994), 112. See also James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 277–88.

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of the crown in the first instance with his Treatise on Contracts and Usury, which legitimized the payment of interest in civil contracts (1547), and in the second instance by collaborating with Gilles Bourdin on their Conseil sur le fait du Concile de Trent (1564), which transferred issues concerning marriage to the jurisdiction of secular parlements rather than ecclesiastical courts.51 Four years later Jean Bodin (1530–96), the Parisian jurist and eventual advisor to the crown on the theory of sovereignty, sought to shore up the royal treasury by outlining a quantity theory of money in which wealth begets wealth as money circulates and recirculates, consumption spurs demand, and suppliers respond with innovative products. Contextualizing these developments, the second part of this book will show how France’s preeminent poet, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), appropriated this discourse of interest and self-interest when he emerged (reluctantly, as we’ll see) as a Petrarchan love-poet in Les Amours (1552–53). Fairly late in his career, Ronsard assigned Mercury/Hermes a mediating role at the intersection of art and commerce in his ecphrastic poem La Lyre (1569). Here the boy-god invents the lyre seemingly on a whim, but yet “par un art nompareille” ‘with incomparable know-how’ (392), and he offers it to Apollo “en contre-eschange”  ‘in counter-exchange’ (407) to settle accounts with the muses’ patron after having stolen his cattle.52 The poem illuminates Ronsard’s conception of his art as he undergoes a decline in creativity. A younger version of himself had celebrated the power of fureur in launching his verse. Taking an early cue from Platonic aesthetics, he aspired to numinous heights in his Odes (1550–52) and Hynnes (1555–56), and later in his political Discours (1562) and his epic Franciade (1572). But as his passions cooled and his critical reputation sagged, his reasoning about art took a new turn. Craftsmanship and skill, and especially his showcasing of them in massively revised and radically reorganized “collected works” became the poet’s priority.

51.  For the former, see Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 73–108, esp. 104–5. For the latter, see Jean-Louis Thireau, Charles Du Moulin (1500 –1566): Etude sur les sources, la méthode, les idées politiques et économiques (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 49–52, 68–73, and 79–81. 52.  All quotations and numbering of texts are from Pierre de Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), here 2:698. This edition, based on Ronsard’s Oeuvres of 1584, includes detailed apparatus about the major revisions and collective rearrangements. For Ronsard’s use of the figure of Mercury, see Daniel Ménager, Ronsard: Le roi, le poète, et les hommes (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 116–28. For La Lyre and Ronsard’s aesthetic theory, see Carla Zecher, Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments, Poetry, and Art in Renaissance France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 24–54 and 64–70.

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With Ronsard, all five considerations about sixteenth-century professionalism and its economic concomitants apply. The poet named other poets—among them, Joachim Du Bellay, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Olivier de Magny, Etienne Jodelle—as members of his “brigade,” but for long periods he sought isolation and even alienation from them. He explored commercial outlets that they eschewed, though not for reasons we might take for granted. He cultivated an awareness of the mechanics of the book trade, less to maximize payment from sales (publishers and booksellers received the lion’s share) than to invite elite readers to join his community of connoisseurs, to flatter them with the aura of superior taste, and—most important—to open doors to court patronage. In matters of self-definition and self-critique, Ronsard refracted his focus across various genres of epic, ode, mythological and cosmological hymns, elegies and pastoral poems, and political discours. Multiple editions of his revised Oeuvres (six in his lifetime and a seventh posthumously) invite readers to trace his progress poem by poem from one redaction to another. The public visibility of his emendations in print—and doubtless each single one implies scores of others in long discarded manuscripts—illuminates Ronsard’s shift from a Platonic poetics of fureur to an Aristotelian poetics of craftsmanship and skill. Ronsard, in short, invested in his own name-brand to secure a robust patronage.53 The poet, like Petrarch, was tonsured and had taken minor orders that qualified him to receive rentier income from ecclesiastical benefices. His father, Louis de Ronsard, was lord of the Gastine forest bordering his ancestral manor, La Possonnière, at the village of Couture west of Vendôme and north of Tours. Like other cadet sons of landowning nobility, he aspired through a humanist education to renew his family’s legacy with a position in the expanding court bureaucracy. Though early bids for patronage—notably from Charles de Guise, the cardinal de Lorraine, his childhood classmate at the College de Navarre in 1534—proved unsuccessful, his tonsure brought some payoff in his late twenties. Through his cousin Charles de Pisseleu, bishop of Condom, he obtained a curacy at Mareuil-lès-Meaux in 1552, and two years later—possibly through Cardinal Jean du Bellay—he accepted a curacy near Le Mans. In 1560 after the death of Joachim Du Bellay, he acceded to his friend’s archdeaconate at Château-du-Loir. A considerable advance came in 1563 when the thirteen-year-old Charles IX awarded him an annual income of 1,200 livres tournois, which Henri III renewed 53.  See Cécile Alduy, “Lyric Economies: Manufacturing Value in French Lyric Collections,” Renaissance Quarterly 6 (2010): 721–53. The following biographical details draw upon the chronology in Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, 1:xxxix–xcii.

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in 1578. A half dozen benefices followed. Among them was the priory of Saint-Cosme on the Loire River west of Tours, granted by Charles IX in 1565. In 1566 he rented a comfortable priory at Croixval, four miles east of La Possonnière. After 1568 he lived there and periodically at Saint-Cosme where he died in December 1585. The word that Ronsard uses to denominate his career is métier, cognate with the Italian mestiere and—resonating with his glorification of fureur—evocative of its sacral significance.54 Increasingly, however, he mutes this association. In 1560 an elegy addressed to a soon-to-be disgraced royal counselor Pierre L’Huillier argues that in most professions the skills learned in youth survive throughout maturity: Mon L’Huillier, tous les arts appris en la jeunesse Servent à l’artizan jusques à veillesse Et jamais le mestier en qui l’homme est expert, Abandonnant l’ouvrier, par l’âge ne se pert. (Céard 2:105, lines 1–4)

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L’Huillier, all the arts learned in youth assist the artisan well into old age, and the profession in which one is skilled, never abandoning its practitioner, is never lost in old age. With poetry, however, the power of fureur diminishes over time so that one “ne se voit jamais d’une fureur saisie / Qu’au temps de la jeunesse” ‘never seems seized by a fureur, except in the season of youth’ (lines 14–15). Only in youth does fureur “s’enfle dans nos coeurs, nous trouvant d’avanture / Au mestier d’Apollon preparez de nature” ‘swell up in our hearts, finding us perchance disposed by nature for Apollo’s profession’ (lines 21–22). The speaker mournfully concludes that after the age of thirty-five (Ronsard’s age at the time), poets can rely only upon acquired skills when they practice their métier. Lumbered by a sense of not having lived up to his potential, Ronsard in 1561 addressed his poem Le Procès ‘The Trial’ to Charles de Guise, cardinal de Lorraine. Unpublished until 1565, the poem stages a mock trial against its addressee with Calliope as Ronsard’s attorney and Apollo as judge. They arraign the cardinal for breaching his promise of patronage and—equally to the point—for hesitating to acknowledge the poet’s technical skills. Guise 54.  Ronsard used the noun profession only once, in its older sense as “a manifestation of some practice or belief ” in a chanson addressed to Olivier de Magny, “Qui veut sçavoir Amour” ‘Whoever would know Love’ (Céard 1:235), originally in the Second Livre des Meslanges (1559), to describe Love as a “profession de flatter et de plaire” ‘public display of flattery and pleasantry’ (line 24).

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himself is an accomplished rhetorician who, with Mercury’s tutelage, engineered the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559: “Vous fustes envoyé comme un sage Mercure / À Chasteau Cambresis, pour en prendre la cure” ‘You were sent to Cateau-Cambrésis as a wise Mercury to effect a resolution’ (Céard 2:71–77, lines 99–100). Ronsard later calls upon the parents of other disappointed poets: Hà! Que vous fustes fols pauvres peres, de faire Apprendre à vos enfans le mestier literaire: Mieux vaudroit leur apprendre un publique mestier, Vigneron, laboureur, maçon ou charpentier, Que celuy d’Apollon, . . . [qui] Les fait estimer fols, furieux, insensez. (lines 183–90)

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Ah, how foolish you poor fathers were for encouraging your children to take up the literary profession. It would have been better for them to learn a public trade, to become a vintner, laborer, mason, or carpenter, rather than the career of Apollo, . . . which makes them seem foolish, frenzied, or out of their minds. Inevitably, then, the poet abandons his own purchase upon fureur. In part 2 I’ll argue that this process begins in Les Amours (1552, expanded in 1553, and revised for his Oeuvres of 1560) when Ronsard devotes himself to painstaking appropriations of Petrarchan materials in order to attract a readership. The thematic concerns of these poems enact his determination. In Les Amours, the lover’s effort to promote himself to his beloved matches the poet’s effort to sell his work to patrons, a publisher, and a reading public. In each case it generates an ongoing war of attrition among the participants. With Cassandre, after years of wooing her mind, the lover would settle for her heart, but it isn’t available. Much of his professional strategizing he drew from the model of Ariosto, whose career provided a compelling example of literary entrepreneurship. Famed as an epic poet who polished his Orlando Furioso to perfection through incessant revision, Ariosto cultivated habits of work that influenced Ronsard even more than specific features of his style or form managed to do. As part 2 will show, Ronsard’s career moves through multiple stages of experiment in the 1550s and 1560s. His various modes and styles range from Petrarchan and Ariostan to Ovidian and Anacreontic, all as the shape-shifting poet drafts verse on consignment to court noblemen for their customized pleasure. To this rentier paradigm Ronsard brought a sense of how he might

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package and remit, charter and promote his poetry so as to maximize his readership.55 The concept of offering successively revised and augmented editions of his Oeuvres, beginning in 1560, became for him a way to reclaim, revise, and—changing the address and narrative situations of his commissioned poems—reassign them to a Second Livre des Amours on the topic of his love for Marie de Bourgeuil. Finally, in his late career Sonnets pour Hélène—requested by the queen mother Catherine de’ Medici for her aloof handmaid Hélène de Surgères—the speaker fabricates a blend of nostalgia, admiration, comedy, and even a touch of self-contempt. Ronsard’s versatility almost obscures the way in which these poems communicate a sense of the changing social, cultural, and economic history of past decades. Sonnets pour Hélène, like Les Amours, renders an exceptionally honest confrontation with personal, professional, and commercial issues of Ronsard’s age.

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Shakespeare on the Cusp of Mercantilism One of the earliest treatises on economics in post-Henrician England is an anonymous dialogue among a knight, doctor, merchant, husbandman, and craftsman, each arguing on grounds relevant to his profession. Titled A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England (written in 1549 but not published until 1581), its possible author is Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77), one time vice-chancellor of Cambridge and then principal secretary to Edward VI and later to Elizabeth.56 Among its forward-looking contributions is a dynamic view of the social process in which an individual’s self-interest, rationally managed, contributes to communal prosperity and material well-being. Though “every man will seek where most advantage is,” all must strive to ensure that whatever “is profitable to each man by himself ” will emerge as “profitable to the whole Commonweal” (52). This will happen when the polity increases its forces of production and especially when it invents “divers other more feats and occupations whereby our people might be set at work” (88). In a long passage added just before publication, the author’s case resonates with Bodin’s rhetoric of abundance when he points to “the great 55.  For what economic historians call “Schumpeterian rent” (as opposed to “factor rent”) for the value of hiring out land, labor, and specialized services, see Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 932–38, and Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, trans. by Redvers Opie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), 152. 56.  Quotations are from A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 145; the editor attributes its authorship to Smith (who deleted his name because of his criticism of Tudor fiscal policies) rather than to the often cited John Hayles, xviii–xxvi.

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store and plenty of treasure which is walking in these parts of the world, far more in these our days than ever our forefathers have seen” (145). For our purposes the Discourse’s most striking contributions are its efforts to carve out a new philosophical area of study devoted to economic inquiry and its plea to appoint one of its practitioners to serve as an advisor to the king: “What Commonweal can be without either a governor or counselor that should be expert in this kind of learning?” (29). Some English writers responded to earlier proposals with retrogressive views. In his Discourse on Usury (1572), Thomas Wilson (1525–81) depicts the responses of a preacher, merchant, common lawyer, and learned professor of civil law to legislation a year earlier that had legalized interest rates up to 10 percent. Some economic historians consider this dialogue an outmoded rejection of those rates, summarized by the preacher’s view that a Christian should condemn all forms of usury. Still, its participants deploy the rhetoric of sixteenth-century economic discourse to debate the issue in utramque partem ‘on both sides’.57 We might expect as much from its author whose earlier books include a manual of logic, The Rule of Reason (1551), and a treatise on The Art of Rhetoric (1553, expanded in 1560, reprint 1585). The merchant, for example, explains unapologetically that he’s in business “but for interest, and by exchange, and I thinke no man can disalowe eyther interest or exchange.”58 Yet in the name of justice he cheerfully agrees to limit his borrowing fees, “that there might bee a rate appointed, beyond which noe man shoulde passe” (346). The professor formulates a scholarly account of opposition to usury in ancient Rome and medieval Christendom, thereby endorsing Budé’s claims about the relativity of monetary practice (330). When he recounts Du Moulin’s arguments about indemnifying lenders with a fair payment of interest (343–44), he mediates powerfully between the preacher’s dogmatic zealotry and the lawyer’s pettifogger expedience. Wilson’s disputation puts to a test the strident rhetoric of subsequent economic discourse in England.59 In 1601, for example, the Huguenot immigrant merchant Gerard de Malynes (1586–1641) published a scathing Treatise of the Canker of England’s Common Wealth. Its operative trope is catachresis or exaggeration, which Wilson had defined as “abusion . . . when for a 57.  For a trenchant analysis, see Thomas O. Sloane, On the Contrary: The Protocol of Traditional Rhetoric (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 240–74. 58.  Quotations are from Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, ed. R. H. Tawney (London: Bell, 1925), here 250. 59.  For an elegant summary of this discourse in terms of credit, thrift, interpersonal obligation, and diligence, see Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 203–16.

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certain proper woorde we use that which is most nighe [as in] calling some water, a fishe ponde, though there be no fisshe in it at all.”60 Malynes blames mercantile losses upon bankers who exploit fluctuation in foreign exchange rates by manipulating the flow of continental specie to their own advantage. In doing so they create an imbalance in trade “according to plentyie or scarcitie of money.”61 In Malynes’s calculus, this imbalance “consisteth in the price of commodities and not in the quantity or qualities of them” (17), here contravening Bodin’s insights about the velocity of monetary circulation and its effect upon the production of wealth. Elsewhere Malynes rejects Bodin’s argument that a gain in specie from domestic export generates a rise in local prices while a loss of specie from foreign import generates a decline: “On the contrary with vs here in England, plenty of money maketh the price to fall, and scarcity of money maketh the price to rise” (28). In his view, trade relations with the continent threaten rather than revitalize England’s economy. Money as a medium of exchange becomes a commodified object of exchange, and its drainage from English coffers approaches a level of exhaustion.62 With respect to cultural relations, foreign importation seems to work in reverse. In 1584 the press of Gabriel Buon in Paris issued the sixth edition of Ronsard’s Oeuvres in deluxe folio and three years later its seventh edition (posthumously) in ten duodecimo volumes. At least some copies must have reached England where Ronsard’s political reputation as Valois propagandist competed unfavorably against his literary reputation as the “Prince of poets and poet of princes.”63 To Elizabethan sophisticates, whatever their distaste for his politics, Ronsard wore this mantle at a time when England’s book trade hardly distinguished between amateur and professional authors. Supply of inheritance allowed some landed gentry and new nobility (Philip Sidney, Walter Ralegh, Fulke Greville) and sons of wealthy burghers ( John Donne) to indulge

60.  Thomas Wilson, Art of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas J. Derrick (New York: Garland, 1982), 349. 61.  Quotations are from Gerard Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of England’s Common Wealth (London: Richard Field for William Iohnes, 1601), here 15. The Stratford-born Richard Field also printed Shakespeare’s debut poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), as well as Love’s Martyr (1601). For analysis of the writing of Malynes and his successors Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun, see Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance: An Intellectual History of SeventeenthCentury English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 26–97. 62.  See David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580 –1680 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 39–43. For the influence of rhetoric in merchant handbooks on London city comedy, see Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2002). 63.  See Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1978), 76–131.

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in w ­ riting serious poetry.64 University education allowed others of humbler origins to pursue the muses while holding down bureaucratic service jobs (the draper’s son Edmund Spenser) or tutoring sinecures (the music-master’s son Samuel Daniel). Writing for the theater attracted some university graduates, but its rewards failed Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, and Thomas Lodge, who for the most part led tattered and dissolute lives. But Shakespeare? True, his Ovidian Venus and Adonis (SR 18 April 1593) and his classically styled Rape of Lucrece (SR 9 May 1594) earned him well-documented respect.65 His authorial name as a dramatist, however, didn’t appear upon title pages until the quarto editions of Love’s Labor’s Lost and Richard II in 1598.66 As for his sonnets, he withheld them from publication until 1609 (SR 20 May). Composed at various times from 1592 onwards, perhaps as several short cycles on topics of procreation, poetic immortality, rival poets, London culture, and an affair with a Dark Lady (among other concerns), these poems were circulated in manuscript among a select readership. They lent themselves shrewdly to revision and coordination into a sequence with some narrative development. Reaggregated, they owe little to accidents of chronology and much to a sense of dramatic tension, belatedly confirming Shakespeare’s maturation as a poet-playwright.67 The third part of this book will argue that, across a decade and a half of distributing, redistributing, and strategically revising his sonnets, Shakespeare contributes to a new concept of authorship. In the reprobate persona of their speaker, he imparts a distinctive twist to the variously prodigal personae of Sidney, Greene, Nashe, Donne, Ben Jonson, and others.68 Unlike them, he flaunts no university, Inns of Court, or Westminster School polish. With Greene’s 64.  For social background and the near obsolescence of patronage, see Edwin Haviland Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England: A Study of Nondramatic Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 14–26, 94–101, and 149–65. 65.  Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 25–55, 82–89, and 146–59; Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and William Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 91–98. 66.  The quartos of Henry VI, Part 2 and Titus Andronicus in 1594, of Henry VI, Part 3 in 1595, and of Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II in 1597 appeared anonymously. For Shakespeare’s career as a poet-playwright, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 56–77. 67.  For Shakespeare’s habit of revision as a persistent activity, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakes­ peare: An Ungentle Life (London: Methuen, 2010), 247–51. For his strategic manipulation of poetry and drama, see Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17–48 and passim; for the discourse about poetry in his plays, see Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–28. 68.  For tensions between ritual and fictionality in lyric personae, see Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 122–25 and 226–43.

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rebuke in the prefatory Epistle to A Groats-worth of Wit (1592) casting him as an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” Shakespeare had a fair amount to prove against his critics.69 As finally published, Sonnets and the accompanying A Lover’s Complaint display a poetic virtuosity that links him to an earlier generation of poets that includes Sidney and Spenser. A profile of Shakespeare’s theatrical career in relation to Sonnets engages all the professional features of collaboration, entrepreneurship, self-criticism, revision, and metapoetic reflection sketched earlier. In June 1594 the outdoor theaters of London’s Shoreditch suburb reopened after frequent closure since June 1592 because of plague. During the interval Shakespeare had published Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Lord Chamberlain’s newly consolidated company performed at James Burbage’s Theater upon its reopening, where the company operated as a shareholding syndicate whose eight or so senior actor-managers pooled their profits and losses.70 In Christmas week 1594 Shakespeare’s name appears in a record of payments for two of the company’s private performances at the queen’s Greenwich palace.71 Love’s Labor’s Lost, which made its public debut around this time, gestures toward such professional camaraderie as it depicts the “poetical” efforts of four “fellow-scholars” in a “little academe” (1.1.13–17) to win amorous affection.72 The young men roundly critique one another’s verses as “pickpurses in love” (4.3.203; the line echoes Sidney’s “I am no pick-purse of another’s wit” in Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 74) as they anatomize their poetic “fury” (4.3.223) and authorial “rage” (5.2.418). They also comment on the rhetoric of diplomacy and law (Biron’s denunciation of meaningless oaths, “Oh, never will I trust to speeches penned,” mischievously expressed in a quasi-sonnet form, 5.2.403–16), religion (Rosaline’s mandate to “purge” Biron’s “sins” in 5.2.804–40), and money

69.  For Greene’s derision of Shakespeare as an actor-author, see Bart Van Ess, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 35–55, and Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare Only (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 151–54. In Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan (London: Arden Shakespeare-Methuen, 2011), 37–45, Katherine Duncan-Jones defends the claim that the real author of the Epistle to A Groats-worth of Wit was its publisher, Henry Chettle, who used Greene’s name to cash in on its value. 70.  Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 159–69 and 184–88; Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 201–25; and James Schapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 1–20. 71.  For the company’s influence on his work, see Van Ess, Shakespeare in Company, 56–75 and 251–62. For the prior influence of Lord Strange’s company, see Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 280–319. 72.  For Sidney’s influence, see H. R. Woudhuysen’s notes to his Arden edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998) and Indira Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2008), 33–51.

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(the play’s recurrent economic exchanges and tropes). The poet-playwright had entered an arena of competition and collaboration that he celebrated and delighted in, and there he honed his poetic skill.73 Within two years, Burbage purchased the Blackfriars’ refectory hall for use as an indoor theater. When local officials later balked at his plan, his sons Richard and Cuthbert persuaded the company’s five leading shareholders—now including Shakespeare—to join them as principal investors in building a new outdoor theater, the Globe in Southwark.74 The playwright had just scored a great success in Romeo and Juliet (1595) with its prologue sonnets, its sonnet shared by the two lovers (1.4.204–17), and the flippancy of Mercutio (his name a riff on “Mercury”) about “the numbers that Petrarch flowed in” (2.3.36–37). And shortly he would dramatize in The Merchant of Venice (1596–97) the effects of usury and self-interest upon a world of commercial transaction and exchange.75 With its titular evocation of merx, the play explores different conceptions of a market mentality. For Shylock as he spars with Antonio over the biblical account of Jacob’s profit in mating Laban’s sheep, prosperity derives from the “skillful” application of human know-how (1.3.78).76 For his opponent, wealth is the result of divine foreordination, “swayed and fashioned by the hand of heaven” (1.3.87). Despite the latter’s endorsement of Reformation orthodoxy, every action in the play bears out Shylock’s emphasis upon intellectual resourcefulness and mental agility. When his usury turns vengeful, Portia deploys her hermeneutic skill to adduce “the quality of mercy” (4.1.182–203, another semantic evocation of Mercury’s name) and its reinforcement of contractual limits against shedding any “jot of blood” (4.1.304).77 73.  For the play’s competition of styles, see Thomas M. Greene, The Vulnerable Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 140–58. 74.  By the time this venue opened in 1599, Shakespeare claimed 10 percent ownership with clout to shape scripts, policy, and profits. For his theatrical practice at the time, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594 –1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 23–27 and 153–75, and Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 101–14; for his “self-concealing authorship,” see Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, 31–62. 75. For the play’s emphasis upon Venetian decadence in the context of England’s emergent mercantile empire, see Carole Levin and John Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 119–40. For the author’s personal investment in the character of Shylock, see Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 76.  For its association with the taint of usury, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 52–82. 77.  For the metonymic relation of “blood” to family, religion, and society, see Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 126–35.

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Amid an efflorescence of creativity in the late 1590s and early 1600s with the Henriad, As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare focused upon the business of theater. His foray into classical drama as advocated by Ben Jonson, Troilus and Cressida (1602, published in “bad” quarto in 1609) actively thematizes this business in its focus upon the buying and selling of Cressida and Helen, Hector and Achilles.78 Never far from its surface is the risk that Shakespeare’s company—with the author as a major investor—assumes in staging the play.79 As though to question its dramatic action, the scoffer Thersites invokes Mercury and measures the “little, little—less than little—wit” of the Greek and Trojan stalwarts against “all the serpentine craft of thy caduceus” (2.3.11–12). In two “broken” sonnets, the lovers’ professions of faith “As true as Troilus” and denial “As false as Cressid” (3.2.158–83) parody the shared sonnet of Shakespeare’s earlier Romeo and Juliet. After Cressida’s departure, Troilus responds to her decampment as a transaction cost affecting two people who “Did buy each other, [and] must poorly sell ourselves” (4.4.39), while she in her gamesmanship with Diomedes demeans her former lover as a benighted Petrarchan adept who “now lies thinking in his bed / Of thee and me, and sighs, and takes my glove, / And gives memorial dainty kisses to it” (5.2.77–79).80 Shakespeare’s metatheatrical reflections upon his authorial career crisscross later plays. All’s Well That Ends Well (1606–7), for example, registers one of the earliest English uses of the word profession in its modern sense.81 The play represents Helena as not just the daughter of a physician (“He was famous in his profession,” 1.1.23; “the greatest / Of his profession,” 1.3.228–29), but as herself a “Doctor She” (2.1.77–83). Her antitype, the embodiment of a false “professional,” is the errant and erratic Parolles, whom Bertram disparages as a “counterfeit model” (4.3.97) and “manifold

78.  For the play’s demystification of a market economy, see Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 147–64, and Harris, Sick Economies, 95–107. For its “bad quarto” of 1609 (the publication year of Sonnets) as an effort to exploit Chapman’s translation of Homer, see Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, 54–60, and Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 263–67. 79.  See David J. Baker, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 62–92. 80.  For the play’s parallels with Sonnets, see Catherine Nicholson, “Commonplace Shakespeare: Value, Vulgarity, and the Poetics of Increase in Sonnets and Troilus and Cressida,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 185–203; and Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, 252–56. 81.  Shakespeare’s use of the word antedates the OED citation in note 13 above. For the play’s relationship to those by rival professional playwrights, see Van Ess, Shakespeare in Company, 218–31.

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linguist” (4.3.228).82 Helena diminishes her own worth in terms that echo Sonnets: she appraises Bertram as “a bright particular star . . . / In our heart’s table” (1.1.82–91; cf. Sonnets 24 and 26); in valuing him, she “cannot choose / But lend and give” (1.3.199–200; cf. Sonnets 57–58); and in rescuing him, she avers “Better ’twere / I met the ravin lion” (3.2.112–13; cf. Sonnets 88). In a revisionist gesture, she uses the sonnet form to concoct a lie that will exonerate Bertram: “I am Saint Jaques’s pilgrim, thither gone” (3.4.4–17). Parolles for his part crafts a botched sonnet (4.3.215–23) to inculpate his master. Winter’s Tale (1610? some of it drafted perhaps as early as 1609?) reverberates with its author’s metacritical reflection upon drama and revision.83 Not too distant from the publication date of Sonnets, this play attributes to Leontes’s character the jealousy of Othello, the remorse of Macbeth, and the tyranny dramatized in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Coriolanus. Hermione’s survival replays Hero’s in Much Ado about Nothing, Helena’s in All’s Well That Ends Well, Marina’s in Pericles, and Imogen’s in Cymbeline. Leontes experiences a nearly instantaneous recognition of his mistake (“The heavens themselves / Do strike at my injustice,” 3.2.143–44) and repentance for his wrongdoing (“I have too much believed mine own suspicion,” 3.2.148), but the process of redemption requires time as well as effort and is not complete until the play ends.84 A series of unintended consequences prepares for this conclusion. Autolycus (“littered under Mercury,” 4.3.25) becomes an agent of change as he boasts of acting only in his self-interest (“I hold it the more knavery . . . and therein am I constant to my profession,” 4.4.66–67) while he unwittingly abets the outcome of events. As a play that explores the effects of unintended consequences in malo (Leontes’s jealousy) and in bono (the reunion of Perdita and Hermione with Leontes), Winter’s Tale puts to a test the logic of rational decision-making associated with economic enterprise. It would be a mistake, however, to press this association too far. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, England stood poised on the cusp 82.  For relationships of authority and submission in the play, see David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 198–237. 83.  Grace Ioppolo suggests a long gestation for this play in “Shakespeare from Author to Audience to Print, 1608–1613” in Late Shakespeare, ed. Andrew J. Power and Rory Loughnane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 139–57, especially 152–53. 84.  For the play’s focus upon repentance, see Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 127–46; for its focus upon tyranny and repression, see Philip Lorenz, The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 204–37; for its attention to commercial contexts, see Barbara Correll, “Scene Stealers: Autolycus, the Winter’s Tale, and Economic Criticism,” in Money and the Age of Shakespeare, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 53–66.

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of a mercantilist economy, but its agents, promoters, and participants had only a vague idea of where it could go. We can counter the tendency to assume confidence in their progress by noting the competing claims of uncertainty, confusion, and an absence of clarity in the undertaking. The publication of Sonnets in 1609 registers some of these claims. Part 3 examines these conditions as they inform Shakespeare’s Sonnets whose speaker—fairly late in the game—argues against publishing his poems because “That love is merchandized whose rich esteeming / The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere” (sonnet 102).85 We have no direct evidence for dating individual poems (except perhaps for sonnet 107 that may interpolate Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603). But we do have some speculative evidence from their stylistic properties, which allow us to postulate some general contours about their development. In the poet’s self-construction and in his probable reworking of individual poems, he paints many layers over the depiction of his speaker’s persona as a writer, lover, and outlier straining to fashion a marketable self. To express different facets of his personality in the contending worlds of the Young Man and Dark Lady, Shakespeare engrafts his literary alter ego onto the affairs of a perhaps composite Young Man and invented Dark Lady, with all the feints and turns of an implied narrative that charts a career in the process of formation. In so doing, the poet becomes an impresario of his own image. This overlap of professional image and alter ego bears a special purchase on the property rights of ownership and possession in relation to economic practice. In a legal sense, property is defined as the aggregate of rights and obligations that include “not only ownership and possession, but also the right of use and enjoyment for lawful purposes.”86 Ownership asserts an absolute relationship between people and their property, while possession (from Latin potest sedere ‘one can sit’) evokes the temporary right of some people to use others’ property, as when a renter enjoys occupancy of an owner’s property. Shakespeare’s speaker in Sonnets is acutely aware of the line that blurs between ownership—a master’s or mistress’s right—and possession—a client’s or user’s right—and of the bargaining chips in negotiations between them. On the one hand as a poet-playwright he’s an independent craftsman, and on the other as a shareholding man of the theater he’s a commercial entrepreneur, but he risks losing all sense of these identities in his emotional relationship with an adulterous Dark Lady—his mistress—and a narcissistic 85.  Except where noted, all references to Shakespeare’s sonnets are to Shake-speare’s Sonnets, ed. with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). 86. See Black’s Law Dictionary, 5th ed., ed. Bryan A. Garner (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1999), 79.

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Young Man—his master. Through mishaps and betrayals the speaker discovers that, although he may possess the affections of each, he can never truly own those of either. Coloring his cynicism with bemusement, he projects a tender but helpless, wry, and piquant air. The sequence titled Shake-speare’s Sonnets upsets every Petrarchan premise, getting under the skin, the nerves, and the usually safe thinking of conventional Petrarchism. In so doing, it interrogates the contextual economies of every sonnet sequence that preceded it, from Petrarch’s Rime sparse onward.

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Pa rt O n e

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Petrarch and Italian Poetry

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Ch ap ter 1

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Petrarch as Homo Economicus

Petrarch’s role at the intersection of Renaissance aesthetics and economics can be glimpsed in a notable sixteenth-century commentary on sonnets 77 and 78 of his Rime sparse. Among the earliest poems in his collection, they date from 1336–37 in the manuscript of his working papers known as Vaticano Latino 3196 in the Vatican Library, where they appear on folio 7r. In 1548 Giovan Battista Gelli lectured on them at the Florentine Academy, arguing that they respectively express a Platonic and an Aristotelian aesthetics.1 Both poems concern a now-lost miniature portrait of Laura illuminated on parchment by the fourteenth-century artist Simone Martini. The first argues that Simone must have been transported to heaven when he began Laura’s portrait: Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso con gli altri ch’ ebber fama di quell’arte mill’anni, non vedrian la minor parte de la beltà che m’ave il cor conquiso.

1.  For Gelli’s career, see Armand De Gaetano, Giovan Battista Gelli and the Florentine Academy: The Rebellion against Latin (Florence: Olschki, 1976). For Petrarch’s context, see Johannes Bartuschat, “Il ritratto di Laura,” in Il Canzoniere: Lettura micro e macrotestuale, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 2007), 207–24. 35

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Ma certo il mio Simon fu in paradiso onde questa gentil donna si parte: ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte per far fede qua giù del suo bel viso. L’opra fu ben di quelle che nel cielo si ponno imaginar, non qui tra noi, ove le membra fanno a l’alma velo. Cortesia fe’; né la potea far poi che fu disceso a provar caldo et gielo, et del mortal sentiron gli occhi suoi.2 Even if Polyclitus should gaze [upon her] while fixed in competition with the others who achieved fame in that art, never in a thousand years would they see the smallest part of the beauty that had conquered my heart [trans. mod.]. But certainly my Simon was in paradise, whence this noble lady descends; there he saw her face and portrayed her on paper, to attest down here to her lovely face.

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The work was one of those that can be imagined in heaven, not here among us, where the body constitutes a veil for the soul; it was a gracious act, nor could he have done it after he came down to test heat and cold and his eyes experienced something of mortal life. According to Gelli, this poem articulates a Platonic aesthetics in its claim about the artist’s recovery of Laura’s beauty. Platonism teaches that all creatural things exist in two forms, both in themselves as corporeal matter and in the mind of God as pure ideas. Terrestrial images counterfeit the form of beauty that exists in God’s mind, “il proprio a il vero loro essere” ‘their proper and true being’.3 If the greatest of Greek sculptors had viewed Laura as a model for his statues, he would have seen only her earthly image. But Simone drew her likeness from its divine original that holds no imperfections, as Petrarch iterates in sonnet 159: “In qual parte del ciel, in quale ydea / era l’exempio” ‘In what part of Heaven, in what Idea was the pattern’. The agent for incorporating Simone’s perception into art is fantasia, defined by Gelli as a concrete, particular intuition of truth, goodness, and beauty in their abstract, universal forms. Fantasy takes images from the sensate, mate2.  Quotations of Petrarch’s Rime sparse are from Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata, 3rd ed. (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2008). 3.  Quotations are from Lettioni fatte da Giovan Battista Gelli, nella Accademia fiorentina, sopre varij luoghi di Dante et del Petrarca (Florence: L. Torrentino, 1555), here 256.

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rial world and directs them to the intellect, “onde non suggetto nè a luogo nè a tempo” ‘whence the image is no longer subject to place or time’ (249). This transaction occurs in a moment of furor or inspired madness (signaled retrospectively in the sestet when the artist becomes a medium for divine illumination). In aesthetic terms, this experience of rapture and absorption heightens Simone’s perception and jump-starts his imagination. In economic terms, it privileges his artistry as something exceptional, to be valued qualitatively above that of his peers. An opposed emphasis on the material form and function of art, and specifically on the mastery of craft, skill, and specialized technique, alternatively announces an Aristotelian aesthetics with an economic emphasis on the artist’s abstracted labor power and the utility value of the work. Petrarch’s sonnet 78 presages this emphasis as it elaborates what happened after Simone took his stile ‘pen, stylus’ in hand: Quando giunse a Simon l’alto concetto ch’a mio nome gli pose in man lo stile, s’avesse dato a 1’opera gentile colla figura voce ed intellecto,

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di sospir’ molti mi sgombrava il petto che ciò ch’altri à più caro, a me fan vile: però che ’n vista ella si mostra humile promettendomi pace ne 1’aspetto. Ma poi ch’ i’ vengo a ragionar collei, benignamente assai par che m’ascolte, se risponder savesse a’ detti miei. Pigmalïon, quanto lodar ti dêi de 1’imagine tua, se mille volte n’avesti quel ch’i’ sol una vorrei. When Simon received the high idea which, for my sake, put the stylus in his hand, if he had given to his noble work voice and intellect along with form, he would have lightened my breast of many sighs that make humiliating to me what others prize most. For in appearance she seems humble, in her face promising me peace. But when I come to speak with her, kindly enough she seems to listen: if she only knew how to reply to my words! Pygmalion, how much

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you should be proud of your own statue, if you received from it a thousand times what I would like to have just once. Gelli’s argument traces Aristotle’s schema of the four causes that transform one sort of matter into another. Matter seeks form as “il principio di tutte quelle operazioni che hanno le cose” ‘the principle of all those operations that things have’ (266) that, with agency and finality, operates upon matter to produce change. The material cause of Simone’s picture is the pen (lo stile), ink, and paper that provide its physical substance, just as in Petrarch’s poetry, it is the acoustic stratum of words with pitch, stress, juncture, rhythm, rhyme, heightened sound patterns, and semantic exchanges of meaning. The formal cause is the principle of beauty (l’alto concetto) inherent in its structure, shape, design, and stylistic properties and achieved through techniques of composition and craftsmanship. The efficient cause is the agent-artist or poet who works upon its component matter. The final cause is the purpose or goal toward which the agent works: for both Simone and Petrarch, it is to embody Laura’s beauty by way of copy or imitation. Petrarch’s late medieval understanding of Plato and Aristotle necessarily differs from that of Gelli, who enjoyed access to Marsilio Ficino’s complete Latin translations of Plato, and to Alessandro de’ Pazzi’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (1536) and perhaps Francesco Robortello’s Italian translation and commentary on it (1548, the year of Gelli’s lectures).4 Petrarch derived a sense of classical theory from Horace’s Epistle 2.3. Horace emphasizes currency of diction, a skillful arrangement of topics and words, and the value of brevity and polish. He iterates their complications when he notes the effort that it takes to achieve these effects through “limae labor et mora” ‘the toil and tedium of using a file’ (Horace, Epistle 2.3.291). In Familiares 1.8, 12.3, 13.7, 16.14, and 23.19, Petrarch refers pointedly to these precepts. Yet the first verse of sonnet 77 presents a knotted syntax, where “per mirar” as a concessive infinitive =  “anche se dovrebbe mirar” ‘even if he should gaze’, so that its logical word order would be “Policleto per mirar, fiso a prova” ‘even if Polyclitus should gaze [upon her] while fixed in competition’. An identical rhyme of parte (as a noun) / parte (as a verb) enclosed within the key rhyme of arte/carte marks the poem’s octave. A cancellation of elision in “ponno | imaginar” in line 10 and an enjambment of “poi / che” in lines 12–13 marks its sestet. All these features generate an unusually tortuous style contrary to Horatian principles. Even the doctrine of furor that Petrarch’s 4.  See James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (New York: E. J. Brill, 1990), with attention to Bruni in 1:29–81 and Ficino in 1:267–359.

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poem celebrates repudiates Horace, who mocks the notion when he depicts a self-enchanted poetaster rapt in “fanaticus error” ‘a fit of frenzy’ (454). “Certe furit,” Horace quips: ‘for sure, he’s just plain mad’ (472). Petrarch’s focus upon pictorial artistry suggests a distant homage to Horace’s “ut pictura poesis”‘a poem is like a painting’ (361).5 Not coincidently, however, Simone’s ancient predecessors—Polyclitus in sonnet 77 and Pygmalion in sonnet 78—were sculptors rather than painters, and they shaped their masterpieces out of stone. In Petrarch’s case, Laura is a work of art, shaped out of ideas and emotions supplied by his imagination. For this reason the poem’s acoustic phenomena—the sonorities that embody this imagination in material sound effects—prove crucial to its artistry.6 Their assonantal and consonantal variations, however, along with duplications, inversions, and elisions arouse the poet’s misgiving about the labile instability of his verse, its ungrounding of direct reference, its flirtation with punning allusions, figurative transference, and cryptic formulation. The final lines of sonnet 78 convey an unsettling effect: Pygmalion gains access to his beloved’s living speech, but Laura’s silent picture denies this access to Petrarch. In the absence of its utility value, Petrarch’s poem becomes just another standardized commodity, worth no more than the flatus vocis that constitutes it and the fleeting time spent in writing it. How then might we assess the worth of poetry in an economic framework? In the economic upheaval of the fourteenth century, and especially after the devastation of the Black Death from 1348 onward, questions about exchange value, labor value, and use and utility values commanded unprecedented attention.7 The Black Death killed off more than a third of the European population, disrupting demographic and occupational patterns across the continent. Widespread migration from depleted rural areas to the safety of towns and cities, seismic shifts of property and ownership from families that died out to those that survived, and a sharp rise of entrepreneurial opportunities to accumulate, maintain, and increase wealth had altered

5.  See Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 14–32. For the dynamics of Horace’s relations with his patron Maecenas, see Phebe Lowell Bowditch, Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 31–63. 6.  For the invention of the sonnet form as designed to be read privately rather than sung or recited, see Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Songs to Italian Poetry Books (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1–24; Christopher Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220 –1321) (Lecce: Milella, 1986), 7–76; and Aurelio Roncaglia, Le origini della lingua e della letteratura italiana, ed. Anna Ferrari (Turin: UTET, 2006); for the transition from sung performance to literary reading, see Marisa Galvez, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 7.  Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 163–99.

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economic practices.8 These changes expedited a process of monetization that had already begun in the previous century, leading to the establishment of interlocking, long-distance banking systems and to the rationalization of principles for speculation and investment. Both the landed nobility and the commercial class of Petrarch’s era were concerned about the pricing and circulation of money as a liquid medium of exchange with fiat value. Early medieval monetary systems had assumed the constant worth of silver, gold, or bimetallic coin as equivalent to the weight of metal used in it. To meet its expenses during the Hundred Years War with England, the French monarchy periodically debased coins by royal decree, with consequent waves of inflation or deflation that were manipulated to the crown’s profit.9 Two years after Petrarch had left Vaucluse for permanent residence in Italy, the French nobility demanded a voice in the process of debasement. Their request found rationale in a treatise by Nicholas Oresme (ca. 1320–82), written in French in 1355 and expanded and translated into Latin as De moneta in 1358. While conceding the practicality and legitimacy of devaluation, Oresme argued that authority for enacting it belonged not to the king alone but to a council of noblemen advising him with the agreement of a larger community: “Money is a balancing instrument for the exchange of natural wealth [instrumentum equiualens permutandi diuicias naturales] . . . [and] is therefore the property of those who possess such wealth.” Coinage is to be managed as “property of the community . . . [which] can dispose of it as it pleases.”10 As money flows along a continuum of shifting numerical equivalents, it represents properties of worth beyond itself. Amid fluctuating denominators of value, even intrinsically worthless tokens (such as paper) might serve to represent it. In his prose letters and various treatises as well as in individual poems, Petrarch expressed specific concerns about the economics of labor, just price, and utility. In arguments about fair remuneration and just price, the dominant mode of thought descended from book 5 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics through Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), who linked the assessment of goods not to any absolute value but rather to a relative estimate of market

  8.  See Peter Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 12–59, and Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 187–263.   9.  Philip IV declared major debasements in 1295 and 1311, with a series of minor revaluations through 1337; Philip VI resumed them on a major scale in 1342, and 1358. See Spufford, Money and Its Use, 289–318. 10.  Nicholas Oresme, De moneta, trans. Charles Johnson (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1956), 10 and 35.

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value (secundum aestimationem fori).11 Thomas Aquinas (1226–74) defined the latter as a price that prevails (pretium quod invenit), which varies according to supply and demand as well as to competition, consensus, and knowledge of current prices.12 Two examples illustrate his thinking about use value, utility value, and a labor theory of value. For Aquinas, the prevailing price of a horse draws more than that of a slave even though in nature’s order human beings rank higher than brute animals. The reason is that a horse can carry heavier loads and move faster than a slave. The horse better satisfies the buyer’s need for transport and speed, and so—in transactions based upon a labor theory of value—it has a marginal value greater than that of the slave.13 In a second example, a mouse serves no plausible need for any buyer and so has no use value at all. On the other hand, a pearl—which in natural dignity ranks lower than living creatures, even mice—may retain a psychological utility value for a buyer who treasures it as an object of beauty and allure.14 In transactions based upon utility value, aesthetic choices mediate the outcome. Building upon the fluidity of these concepts, St. Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) and St. Antoninus of Florence (1389–1459) came to articulate a labor theory of value based upon a demand for skillfully produced goods, and a utility theory of value based upon the subjective desire for a particular good (complacibilitas), its capacity to satisfy this desire (virtuositas), and the comparative scarcity of such a good (raritas).15 Born thirty years after Aquinas’s death. Petrarch grew up as the son of a notary in papal Avignon. Unlike Dante and Boccaccio, who matured in the banking and commercial environment of Florence, Petrarch prepared for professional life by studying civil law at Montpellier between 1316 and

11.  Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (London: Allyn & Unwin, 1954; reprint London: Routledge, 1994), 73–107, and Raymond de Roover, “The Concept of Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy,” Journal of Economic History 18, no. 4 (1958): 418–34. 12.  John W. Baldwin, “The Medieval Theories of Just Price,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 49, no. 4 (1959): 1–91, especially 63–65 and 71–80. Albertus’s discussion occurs in his commentary on Peter Lombard, Commentarii in IV sententiarum Petri Lombardi, Lib. 4, Dist. 16, art. 46, in Opera omnia, vol. 29 (Paris, 1894), 638. Aquinas’s discussion occurs in his Summa theologica, 2.2. qu. 77, art. 1, ad. 1, with translation by Arthur Eli Monroe, ed., Early Economic Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 52–77. 13.  Summa theologica 2.2, qu. 77, art. 2, ad. 3, translated in Monroe, Early Economic Thought, 59. 14.  Commentaria in X libros ethicorum ad Nicomachum, lib. 5, lect. 9, recounted in Raymond de Roover, “Joseph A. Schumpeter and Scholastic Economics,” Kyklos 10 (1957): 115–46, especially 124–30. 15.  See Raymond de Roover, San Bernardino of Siena and San’ Antonio of Florence: The Two Great Economic Thinkers of the Middle Ages, Kress Library of Business and Economics 19 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1967), especially 18–23 and 40–42.

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1320 and at Bologna on and off between autumn 1320 and spring 1326.16 It was likely at Bologna that he began to experiment with forms of vernacular verse at a time when the Bolognese commune proved particularly hospitable to the Stilnovist and other poetry of Florence and Tuscany.17 The Stilnovist poets favored there came from merchant and banking families with predominantly Guelph backgrounds in municipalities whose upwardly mobile popolani rejected the sanctimonious—and often hypocritical—culture of the old Ghibelline nobility. The targets of their criticism were usually other Guelph poets who regressively emulated or played up to the cynicism of the Ghibelline elite. Among them, Guittone d’Arezzo (1235–94), an exile from his native city, became an ideologue for rising magnates associated with the lay order of Jovial Friars in some municipalities of northern Italy. Upon his religious reclamation, Guittone recanted the courtly erotic sonnets of his youth and directed his poetic skills to produce moralizing verse in various sententious forms.18 Another object of Stilnovist scorn was Monte Andrea (fl. 1267–74), a Florentine banker who participated in scores of tenzoni with his contemporaries as a self-indulgent spokesperson for worldly pleasure and material success. His frank treatment of sexual love and his callous emphasis on the enjoyment of material wealth articulate an unrepentant, anti-idealizing sentiment.19 A third was Chiaro Davanzati (d. 1304), a Florentine Guelph who depicted his sexual adventures as both an unregenerate seducer and often-requited lover.20 Their poetry dominates an anthology of verse circulating early in the century, now preserved in the Vatican Library as Codex

16.  For relevant ethical questions posed by Boccaccio, see Marilyn Migiel, The Ethical Dimension of the “Decameron” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 17.  See Justin Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 17–60, and H. Wayne Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (New York: Garland, 1993), 133–58. For dating of these poems and their placement in the Vita Nuova, see Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the Vita Nuova, ed. with introduction and introductory essays by Teodolinda Barolini, with verse trans. by Richard Lansing and commentary trans. by Andrew Frisardi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). 18.  Fifty canzoni and 250 sonnets by Guittone survive in a late thirteenth-century codex now in the Laurentian Library; see Il canzoniere Laurenziano Rediano 9, ed. Tommaso Casini (Bologna: Romagnoli dall’Acqua, 1900), with a modern edition in Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini, ed. D’Arco Silvio Avalle (Milan: Ricciardi, 1992), 99–221. 19.  See modern edition with commentary in Monte Andrea da Fiorenza, Le rime, ed. Francesco Minetti (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1979); for his association with Guittone, see Marco Santagata, Per modern carte: La biblioteca volgare di Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 128–56, and Stefano Carrai, La lirica Toscana del duecento (Rome: Laterza, 1992), 9–18 and 25–53. 20.  See modern edition with commentary in Chiaro Davanzati, Rime: Canzoni e sonetti, ed. Aldo Menichetti (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2004; Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1965); for his association with Guittone, see Santagata, Per moderne carte, 128–56.

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Vaticana 3793.21 The codex presents these poets with their anti-Stilnovist tendencies as direct, legitimate heirs of Giacomo da Lentini (fl. 1220–40, whom they credited with inventing the Sicilian sonnet) and Bonagiunta da Lucca (fl. 1242–67, whom they credited with introducing the form to northern Italy). I’ve mentioned in the Introduction that Petrarch’s datable autograph worksheets represent various stages of composition, several as fragments or sketches that he left incomplete, others as drafts that he cancelled, added to, or otherwise changed over his long career.22 These worksheets, preserved in the codex Vaticano Latino 3196, are complimented by another manuscript in the Vatican Library, datable from 1359–62/63 and known as Chigiano L. V. 176 (or “Chigi manuscript”), which consists of 215 poems in a discernible order, giving evidence of careful redaction and implementing a structure like that of the definitive Rime sparse. It includes one ballata subsequently left out of the final sequence.23 This Chigi exemplar itself generated copies, of which seven have survived in testimony to the early circulation of Petrarch’s poems.24 Finally there is the Vatican manuscript known as Vaticano Latino 3195, dated from 1366–74, and consisting of all 366 poems of the Rime sparse in redactions that posterity accepts as their final form.25 21.  Il libro de varie romanze volgare, cod.Vat. 3793, ed. Francesco Egidi, Salvatore Satta, G. B. Festa, and Giorgio Ciccone (Rome: La Società, 1908). 22.  Ernest Hatch Wilkins, The Making of the “Canzoniere” and Other Petrarchan Essays (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951), whose conclusions have been modified by contributors to Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (Leiden: Brill, 2007), especially Barolini, “Petrarch at the Crossroads of Hermeneutics and Philology,” 21–44, and Storey, “Doubting Petrarch’s Last Words: Erasures in MS Vaticano Latino,” 67–92. 23. See Justin Steinberg, “Dante Estravagante, Petrarca Disperso, and the Spectre of the Other Woman,” in Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition, ed. Zygmunt G. Baránski and Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 263–89. Manuscript materials named above include several fragments (four of them in Vat. Lat. 3196) and complete poems (seven of them in Vat. Lat. 3196 and one in the Chigi manuscript, all excluded from Vat. Lat. 3195) that are either authenticated or accepted as Petrarch’s own. See Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 253–67. 24.  In addition, a hypothetical pre-Chigi structure has been deduced in a supposed collection of 170 poems transcribed around 1356–58 for Azzo da Correggio. This collection is not materially extant; see Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 143–90. Wilkins, Making of the “Canzoniere,” 92–106, deduced its form from the Chigi manuscript where the sequence of poems 145–78 disregards the ordering principles of poems 1–142, implying that the latter constituted a sequence transcribed for Azzo da Correggio. See Teodolinda Barolini, “The Making of a Lyric Sequence,” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 193–223, and Barolini, “Petrarch at the Crossroads,” 33–39. 25.  For the format of Vat. Lat. 3195, see Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics, 225–315 and 341–99, and Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima: Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere del Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 293–343. For an online “rich text” interactive edition of Vat. Lat. 3195, see H. Wayne Storey and John A. Walsh, Petrarchive, dcl.slis.indiana.edu/petrarchive/. During its late stages,

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Various fragments and complete poems in Vat. Lat. 3196 later excluded from Vat. Lat. 3195, aggregated with other poems attributed to Petrarch, are known alternately as Rime estravaganti ‘Extraneous poems’ or as Rime disperse ‘Uncollected poems’.26 Many of them figure as early compositions, deemed inappropriate for the final collection. RE 1 and 9, for example, imply a rival beloved who deflects Petrarch’s attentions from Laura—challenging the idea that she was his only beloved.27 RE 20 and 21 seem to commemorate some recent military victory—challenging the idea that Petrarch rose above the fray in public politics.28 But other poems appear as incursions into topics that the poet would rework either earlier or later in his Rime sparse. One early example occurs in “Quando talor, da giusta ira commosso” ‘When from time to time, moved with a just anger’ (RE 4), a poem datable from 1336–38 by its placement as poem 57 on folio 10v in Vat. Lat. 3196, but excluded from the sequence’s final form in Vat. Lat. 3195. Here the speaker recounts that on occasion, in order to rebuke Laura for her cruelty, “de l’usata humiltà pur mi disarmo” ‘I put aside my accustomed humility’. She responds with a Medusan stare:

Vat. Lat. 3195 generated two other collections of Petrarch’s poems: one, known as the Malatesta form, prepared for Pandolfo Malatesta between 1371 and January 1373 and surviving in thirty-six copies; and another known as the Queriniana form, at Brescia’s Biblioteca Queriniana, prepared sometime in 1373 and surviving in ten copies. See Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 279–94. 26.  I adopt the title Rime Estravaganti and abbreviate it as RE in the following pages, with numeration and quotation from Francesco Petrarch, Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi, ed. Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino, 2nd ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 2000). See Justin Steinberg, “Petrarch’s Damned Poetry and the Poetics of Exclusion,” in Kirkham and Maggi, Petrarch: A Critical Guide, 84–100. Estimates about the total number of fragments and uncollected poems vary. Angelo Solerti included 214 poems in his Rime disperse di Francesco Petrarca o a lui attribute (Florence: Sansoni, 1909). For a sample of sixty-one poems and nine fragments, see Petrarch, Rime Disperse, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Barber (New York: Garland, 1991). Pacca and Paolino limit their selection to twenty-one poems. The consensus of modern scholarship is that seventeen of these poems are authentically Petrarch’s and that another sixteen poems may be attributable to Petrarch; see Paola Vechchi Galli, “Voci della dispersion,” in Estravaganti, disperse, apocrifi petrarcheschi, ed. Galli and Claudia Berra (Milan: Cisalpino, 2007), 1–24; Galli, “Per una stilistica delle ‘disperse,’ ” in Le lingue del Petrarca, ed. Antonio Daniele (Udine: Forum, 2005), 109–27. 27.  The motif appears in Dante’s Vita Nuova both with the Screen Ladies (Vita Nuova 5.3 and 9.5) and in Another Beloved after Beatrice’s death (Vita Nuova 35.12–38). Petrarch acknowledges in sonnet 271 that after Laura’s death Love had tempted him with “un altro lacciuol . . . un altro foco”  ‘another snare . . . another fire’ (but firmly rejected in canzone 270.44–45). See Olivia Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics and Erotics in the “Divine Comedy” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), especially 68–98. 28. Santagata suggests the liberation of Parma by Azzo da Correggio in 1342; see Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Santagata, 742–43.

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per far di me, volgendo gli occhi, un marmo, simile a que’ per cui le spalle et l’armo Hercole pose a la gran soma e ’l dosso. To turn me with a glance into a piece of marble similar to the one for whom Hercules put his shoulders and arms and back to the great weight.

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Stunned, his “sparsa vertù” ‘scattered strength’ retreats to his heart. His resulting pallor, however, stimulates Laura’s vergogna ‘shame’, whence she retreats “di provar poi sua forza in un che more” ‘from demonstrating her utmost force on one who is dying’. The poem reprises features found earlier, for example in sonnet 7 of Guido Cavalcanti’s Rime and in sonnet 15 of Dante’s Vita nuova.29 Petrarch adds to his poem the action of Laura’s withdrawal. As soon as the speaker displays his customary humility (“ritorna al volto il suo primo colore” ‘my face regains its former pallor’), then Laura shows mercy and retreats from her attack. Laura’s demurral rehabilitates the speaker and empowers him to write the poem. Laura makes him a poet. In Vat. Lat. 3195, the definitive version of his Rime sparse, another poem narrates a similar action. This poem, addressed to Geri Gianfigliazzi, is sonnet 179, “Geri, quando talor meco s’adira” ‘Geri, when from time to time she becomes angry with me’, and it bears an earlier pedigree than RE 4. A draft of it, datable from before 1335, appears as poem 48 on folio 8v in Vat. Lat. 3196. With some orthographical changes and minor adjustments in diction and syntax, Petrarch transcribes it after May 1368 into Vat. Lat. 3195 in an empty space between sonnets 178 and 180.30 It might appear, then, that Petrarch had been holding both RE 4 and sonnet 179 in abeyance while try-

29.  Cavalcanti used the figure of Medusa to describe the beloved’s effect upon his speaker “L’anima mia vilment’ è sbigottita / da la battaglia che’e[l] l’ave del core” ‘My soul is already stunned by the battering it had from the heart’ (sonnet 7). Here the soul “Sta come quella che non ha valore” ‘stands as one that has no power’. See The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, ed. and trans. Lowry Nelson Jr. (New York: Garland, 1986). Dante repeats the trope in sonnet 15 of Vita Nuova and adds “Peccato face chi allora mi vide, / se l’alma sbigottita non conforta” ‘One sins who then sees me and does not comfort my stunned soul’. For Petrarch’s revisionary treatment of the figure, see Aileen A. Feng, “ ‘Il Volto di Medusa’: Monumentalizing the Self in Petrarch’s RVF,” Forum Italicum 47 (2013): 497–521. 30.  The space separating sonnets 178 and 180 suggests that Petrarch had left it vacant until he decided which poem to use. From its placement in Vat. Lat. 3196, Santagata speculates that Petrarch composed sonnet 179 before RE 4 and earlier than 1336. From its distinctive ink in Vat. Lat. 3195, Wilkins speculates that Petrarch inserted it there after May 1368. For the poem’s relation to the macrotextual sequence, see Theodre J. Cachey Jr., “Per una mappa del Canzoniere,” in Picone, Il Canzoniere, 395–414.

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ing to decide which one might better fit into his sequence. His choice to use sonnet 179 for this purpose seems governed by its address to Geri. As one of Petrarch’s earliest sonnets, sonnet 179 transports readers back to the competitive environment of tenzoni in which male speakers brag about their exploits of seduction.31 Labeled “Riposta” ‘Reply’ in Vat. Lat. 3196, the poem follows a transcription of Geri’s sonnet “Messer Francesco, chi d’amor sospira” ‘Messer Francesco, he who sighs in love’, whose rhyme sounds its octave repeats. Both poets observe the conventions of tenzoni as practiced by such forerunners as Monte Andrea and Chiaro Davanzati. In fact, Petrarch’s third verse (“un conforto m’è dato ch’i’ non pèra” ‘one comfort is given me that I may not perish’) conspicuously echoes verses by each of these thirteenth-century poets. The first is by Monte, “Merzede, Amore, in tanto penando, ch’io nom pèra ämando” ‘Have mercy, Love, amid so much suffering, that I may not perish from loving’ (lines 45–46 from his initial canzone, “Ai, Deo merzé, che fia di me, Amore” ‘Ah, God have mercy, what are you doing with me, Love’, poem 278 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 87a). The second is Davanzati’s “A ciò ch’io non perisca in voi amando”‘So that I might not perish while loving you’ (line 26 from his canzone 40, “Madonna lungiamente aggio portato” ‘My lady, at great length I have borne’, poem 239 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 75b–76a).32 Petrarch’s homage to Monte and Davanzati seems remarkable for its carefully considered insertion into his definitive sequence of Rime sparse. It is as though the speaker of sonnet 179 is displaying a set of acquired skills as an attainment not lightly to be devalued. He is a craftsman who, taking pride in his work, relies not upon inspiration or intuition but upon deliberation, technique, and refinement of detail. In this context, the gender-charged energies of his Medusa trope prompt him to exult in his own rhetorical skill. Geri has approached him in amorous dejection to ask “che deggia far colui che ’n tal maniera / trattar si vede” ‘what he should do who sees himself treated thus’, and Petrarch responds with the gift of a poem that offers counsel about mitigating a woman’s disdain. On the one hand, the poem positions him with Geri on the side of fashioning an effective amatory strategy. On the other, it positions him against Geri as he turns his declaration into a swaggering display of compositional skill. The speaker boasts that he can control Laura’s disdain with a demeanor “pien’ d’umiltà sì vera”: 31.  Santagata speculates that the date of composition is pre-1335. 32. Quoted in modern texts with commentary in Monte Andrea da Fiorenza, Le rime, ed. Minetti, 39, and Davanzati, Rime, ed. Menichetti, 141.

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Ovunque ella sdegnando li occhi gira, (che di luce privar mia vita spera?) le mostro i miei pien’ d’umiltà sì vera, ch’a forza ogni suo sdegno indietro tira. Whenever she angrily turns her eyes (who hopes to deprive my life of light?) I show her mine full of such true humility that she necessarily draws back all her anger. Here the adjective vera modifies umiltà with calculated irony. The word implies a direct correlation between the affect of humility and its display, but the speaker’s boast suggests that his “truthfulness” is only a feigned contrivance, the very opposite of a “true” equivalence: Et ciò non fusse, andrei non altramente a veder lei, che’l volto di Medusa, che facea marmo diventar la gente.

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And if that were not so, I would not go to see her any more than to see the face of Medusa, which made people become marble. The speaker’s restraint conveys his tactical control and mastery of the situation. Addressing a talented friend, he emphasizes his own talent as a counter to Geri’s. Though he situates himself as a potential victim of Laura’s Medusan terror, and though he records his apparent submission to her, he actually represents himself as the winner in a contest of wills. Rhetorically, he challenges Geri to match his own success with a presumptive reply, daring him to rise to the poetic ground that he already occupies. In this exchange his “umiltà sì vera” works as much to challenge, even humiliate Geri’s poetic talent as it does to defeat Laura’s Medusan stare. The difference between RE 4 and sonnet 179 accentuates, on the one hand, the rejection of an economy of divinely endowed attributes as envisioned by St. Augustine and, on the other, the movement toward an economy of rational and competitive strategizing as defined in secular terms. Still within the orbit of Augustinian thought about the unequal distribution of talent among human beings, the speaker’s assessment of his superior skill exalts him in his own eyes. In this rivalrous turn, sonnet 179 serves as a display of poetic competition in an androcentric environment, valorizing the speaker’s energies as signs of acquired technique and skill, studied

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competence and calculation in an aggressive public and professional environment.33 Thirteen out of the twenty-one Rime estravaganti in Santagata’s edition share this androcentric economy through their addresses to male friends.34 An example is RE 11, “Sì mi fan risentire a l’aura sparsi / i mille e dolci nodi in fin a l’arco” ‘The thousand sweet knots scattered in the breeze at the end of the bow so arouse me’. Composed around 1341 and addressed to Sennuccio del Bene, it anticipates sonnet 144 “Né così bello il sol già mai levarsi” ‘I never saw the sun rise so fair’, which is likewise addressed to Sennuccio. Both poems share similar end-rhymes (-arsi, -arco, -ea, -ura, -ere) and both avow the speaker’s love for Laura. The “fin a l’arco” in the second line of RE 11 carries an echo of Chiaro Davanzati’s unabashed sensualism, evoking “E li cilgli neretti / e vòlti com’ archetti” ‘slender black eyebrows rounded like little bows’ (lines 26–27 of Davanzati’s canzone 38, “La gioia e l’alegranza” ‘Joy and happiness’, appearing as poem 237 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 75a–b). RE 11 refers to the sheer extent of the speaker’s longing and the toll that it takes upon his imagination: “Dormendo e vegghiando ora non varco / che la mia fantasia possa acquetarsi” ‘Sleeping and awakening I do not pass an hour that my fantasy can be appeased’. And yet by the octave’s conclusion, he compromises the sense of his burden by describing it as dolce: “’l dolce peso non porria stimarsi” ‘its sweet weight cannot be reckoned’. At the end of the poem, the impact amounts to a vaguely defined forza: “Quasi smarrir per forza di piacere” ‘As if becoming lost through an intensity of pleasure’. Laura’s exceptionality outweighs precise terms of measurement and verification. Petrarch’s movement toward ever more precise figures of measurement and verification becomes apparent in still other revisions of his early texts. RE 12, “Quella ghirlanda che la bella fronte / cingeva” ‘That garland that surrounds her beautiful forehead’, addressed like the preceding poem to Sennuccio around 1341, introduces motifs about Laura’s “angeliche forme” ‘angelic shapes’ that would also recur in sonnet 90, “Erano i capei d’oro a 33.  Thirty-three androcentric poems appear in the Rime sparse. Besides those addressed to or associated with Sennuccio and Antonio Beccari, marginal notations in Vat. Lat. 3196 indicate that drafts of sonnets 145, 146, 159, 298, 300, and 303 were sent to specific male friends. See Ernest Hatch Wilkins, “The Circulation of Petrarch’s Rime during His Lifetime,” in his Making of the “Canzoniere,” 286–93. 34.  They include RE 1 to Jacopo da Imola; RE 3a to Pietro Dietisalvi; RE 10, 11, and 12 to Sennuccio (complementing Rime sparse 108, 112, 113, 143, 144, 266, 268, and 287, which are addressed to or associated with the same recipient); RE 13a, 14a, 15, and 16a to Antonio Beccari (complementing sonnet 120 in the Rime sparse addressed to him); and RE 17a to Ricciardo da Battifolla. Several appear as first drafts of poems later included in the Rime sparse.

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l’aura sparsi” ‘Her golden hair was loosed to the breeze’. While the early poem expands the argument vaguely in terms of geographical separation (“vedestù quel piacer che m’allontana / d’ogni vile pensier . . . / dietro a chi ò disviati i pensier’ miei” ‘did you see that pleasure that distances me from every base thought . . . against which I have waylaid my thoughts’, where allontana and disviati imply a spatial division), sonnet 90 pursues its argument in temporal and perceptual terms. These range from an obtrusive past tense of the verb in the poem’s first line (“Erano . . . sparsi”) to blunt calibrations of magnitude and certainty about what follows (“lume oltra misura,” “non so se vero o falso”). In RE 12, the figure of Peleus’s lance that both wounds and heals (“che spesso il cor mi morde e mi risana”  ‘which often wounds and heals my heart’) echoes “Se quei che m’ha feruto / non mi sana com’ Pelëùs sua lanza” ‘If he who has wounded me does not heal me as Peleus with his lance’ from Chiaro Davanzati’s canzone 23 (“Allegrosi cantari” ‘Joyful singers’, poem 222 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 70b, lines 45–46). When variants of this figure recur in later poems (notably in 159.12, 164.11, 221.12, and 363.9), they shed the self-canceling quality registered in RE 12.35 Sonnet 197, “L’aura celeste che ’n quel verde lauro” ‘The heavenly breeze which in that green laurel’, provides a dynamic example of this process in which revisions invest the trope of Laura as Medusa with greater prominence and specificity.36 Composed perhaps as late as 1368, it complements sonnet 179. Additions and deletions in Vat. Lat. 3196 (where it appears as “L’aura amorosa in quel bel verde lauro” ‘The loving air in that pretty green laurel’, sonnet 13) suggest that Petrarch wrote and revised its first draft in a concentrated period of time, as though working with great intensity and deliberation.37 The poem’s major redactions, based largely on an effort to retain its original rhyme words despite changes in content, represent a tour de force of technical skill. With cancellations in nearly every line (only lines 4, 9, and 14 remain untouched) and with radical rewriting in the second quatrain and most of the sestet, its revisions display Petrarch’s professional competence and skill. As the poem unfolds, the speaker’s submission to Laura is expressed

35.  For example, in sonnet 164, Laura is the singular cause of joy and suffering: “Una man sola mi risana et punge” ‘One hand alone heals me and pierces me’. In sonnet 363 where Amor “punge et molce” ‘pierces and heals’, the speaker counts his advantages (“io veggio ’l mio ben” ‘I see my gain’), and tallies them against the price he has already paid (“stanco di viver, non che sazio” ‘weary of life, not merely satiated’). 36.  See Stefano Carrai, “I primi testi autografi del Vaticano 3195” in Picone, Il Canzoniere, 433–48. 37.  See notes in Petrarch, Rime estravaganti, ed. Pacca and Paolino, 701–5, and in Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Santagata, 855–58.

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through an economic trope that shifts in the rewriting. Here is the original version of its second quatrain: Et fu in me tal qual in quel vecchio mauro Medusa quando in petra transformollo: gli occhi et le chiome diermi horribil crollo, dove ’l sol perde, non pur l’ambra et l’auro. And she was to me as Medusa was to that old Moor when she turned him into stone: her eyes and hair dealt me a horrible blow, where the sun is surpassed, not to say amber and gold. As part of the phrase “diermi horribil crollo,” the noun crollo literally means “fall, collapse.” In commercial economic usage, it also means “monetary slump, financial crash,” a signification that resonates with “dove ’l sol perde” ‘where the sun is surpassed’ in the quatrain’s final line. The speaker tries to but cannot diminish Laura’s worth. Subsequent revisions underscore the precarious balance of this assessment. In the poem’s first rewriting, the speaker willingly submits to Laura’s allure: Quel fa di me, che del gran vecchio mauro Medusa quando in petra transformollo, non posso dal bel laccio omai dar crollo, là ’ve ’l sol perde, non pur l’ambra [el] l’auro.

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She makes of me what Medusa made of the old Moorish giant when she turned him into stone: I could not budge an inch from that lovely snare where the sun is surpassed, not to say amber and gold. The connective “et fu in me” becomes the predicative “quel fa di me,” intensifying Laura’s power to turn Petrarch into something else, while the speaker’s own negative agency in “non posso . . . dar crollo” yields to her positive agency, “quando in petra transformollo.” The noun petra, resonating with its play upon the etymology of the author’s name Petra-arca ‘stone coffer’, repeats from the quatrain’s original draft a sense of recognition.38 Through Laura’s overwhelming impact upon him, he has at last become himself, definitively Petrarch. By serving as the object of his desire as well as of his verse, she has

38.  See Remo Cesarani, “ ‘Petrarca’: Il nome come auto-reinvenzione poetica,” Quaderni petrarcheschi 4 (1987): 121–37, and Franco Suitner, Dante, Petrarca, e altra poesia antica (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005), 99–105.

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nudged him to write as a vernacular poet. But he’s still not comfortable with this formulation, and so he submits these lines to yet further revision. Replacing “quel fa di me” with “pò quello in me” in the quatrain’s final version, the modal verb pò acquires a transitive force that strengthens Laura’s dominance over the speaker: Pò quello in me, che nel gran vecchio mauro Medusa quando in selce transformollo; né posso dal bel nodo omai dar crollo, là ’ve il sol perde, non pur l’ambra o l’auro.

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She has the power over me that Medusa had over the old Moorish giant when she turned him into rock; nor can I budge an inch from that lovely knot where the sun is surpassed, not to say amber or gold. The poet now infuses his verse with a literary allusiveness that affirms his talent. When he transforms petra into selce, he drops the first two syllables of his name Petrarca from the quatrain while introducing a reference to Ovid’s account of Medusa, the gorgon whose victims had been “in silicem ex ipsis visa conversa Medusa” ‘changed from their true selves into rock by the sight of Medusa’ (Metamorphoses 4.781). In the context of this classical echo about transformation, the phrase “dar crollo” now evokes Dante’s Inferno 25.9 where its meaning suggests “to make a move” when the condemned thieves, changed into snakes, so entrap their fellow thief Vanni Fucci that “non potea con esse dare un crollo”   ‘he could not budge an inch with them’. The revision shifts to a literary economy in which Petrarch multiplies his debt to Ovid and Dante. Petrarch’s revisions in the poem’s sestet extend to lines 9 and 10, where the verb destringe ‘loosen’ yields willingly to its opposite stringe ‘tighten’, and where the noun armo ‘arm’ becomes the verb armo ‘I arm’, radically altering its substantive meaning while retaining the formal rhyme. In the original tercet: dico le chiome bionde, e ’l crespo laccio, di ch’un soave spirto mi destringe, spargendole or su questo or su quel’armo. I mean the blond locks and the curling snare from which a soft breath loosens me, scattering her hair now on this, now on that arm.39

39.  A cancelled revision of these lines reinforces the motion of Laura’s hair strewn in the breeze, “vel sul manco or sul dextro armo” ‘whether on her left or right arm’.

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In its final revised form, the binding and unbinding of Laura’s hair give way to contraction and compression, while the active emphasis on the verb armo invests the speaker with an energy that mitigates Laura’s power over him: dico le chiome bionde e ’l crespo laccio, che sì soavemente lega et stringe l’alma, che d’umiltate et non d’altr’armo I mean the blond locks and the curling snare that so softly binds and tightens my soul, which I arm with humbleness and nothing else. An intermediate draft of line 11 as “contra ’l qual d’umiltà non d’altro m’armo” ‘against which I arm with humility and nothing else’ recalls “pien d’umiltà sì vera” from the earlier Medusa poem, sonnet 179. But in the final version with its conversion of a colloquial umiltà into the Latinate umiltate, the speaker surrenders any pretense of impetuosity. The noun unapologetically advertises the poet’s classical learning, philological expertise, and professional competence, converting his strategically passive stance into an implicitly active one. The revised poem’s single instance of a changed rhyme-word occurs in the replacement of depinge with tinge in line 13, and significantly this replacement affects the poem’s articulation of its implied aesthetic theory. In the original draft, fear turns the speaker’s heart to ice and discolors his face:

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Pur a l’ombra dallunge il cor fa un ghiaccio paura extrema, e ’l volto mi depinge, ma gli occhi ànno vertù di farlo un marmo. Yet in her shadow from afar, extreme fear makes my heart a piece of ice, and it discolors my face, but her eyes have the power to make it marble. Here Petrarch uses depinge in its precise etymological sense. The Latin root of the verb is pingere, pictum, which originally means “to weave together colored threads to form a pattern”; in its transferred sense, it means “to shape a likeness, to make a picture.”40 With the prefix de, however, Petrarch’s verb depinge means “to unweave the threads, to undo the image, to drain it of color.”

40.  Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine (Paris: Klinck­ sieck, 1932), 732–33.

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In this antirepresentational sense, depinge suggests that Laura has challenged Petrarch’s mimetic ambitions, prompting him to forge a new aesthetic goal. In the poem’s final form, the revised verb tinge now effects this goal: L’ombra sua sola fa ’l mio cor un ghiaccio et di bianca paura il viso tinge; ma gli occhi ànno vertù di farne un marmo.

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Her very shadow turns my heart to ice, and tinges my face with white fear, but her eyes have the power to make marble of them. Here Laura’s shadow imbues the speaker’s face with fear. Derived from Latin tingere, the verb originally means “to plunge a hot solid into a cold liquid, to temper a substance and as a result to change its color.”41 Tinge implies that Laura has annealed Petrarch’s ardor, has made of it something that it was not, has toughened it and turned it into the matter of his poetry. The fusion of color, light, and shadow on the poem’s surface, the modulation of its intensity and tone, and the tempering of its oral-aural sound effects bear a new relationship to mimetic art as an expression of changing moods and attitudes. In canto 9 of Inferno, Dante views his encounter with Medusa as a kind of paralysis, an enslavement to the fixity of the letter over the transformative power of the spirit, perhaps an enthrallment to the “velame de li versi strani” ‘veil of the strange verses’ (9.63) that associates her with ancient classical literature.42 For Petrarch, however, the reverse is true. His encounter with Medusa is what makes him Petrarch, not just in terms of his name Petra-arca, but in terms of his embodiment in language, sensual and verbal, material and dynamic. An impression of intense dedication to craftsmanship and change issues from studying these redactions. Petrarch’s practice moves steadily away from identifying art with Platonic inspiration to associating it with craftsmanship, technique, skill, and hard work. Yet we cannot link it explicitly with an Aristotelian poetics, which was barely available to the fourteenth century in William of Moerbecke’s Latin paraphrase. Throughout his writing, the poet expresses deep disdain for Aristotelian terminology, and especially for its impact on late Scholastic dialectic and logic. Still, he grounds his preference for Platonic philosophy on little direct contact with original texts. In De sui

41.  Ibid., 998. 42.  See John Freccero, “Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 119–35.

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ipsius et multorum ignorantia, drafted in May 1367 just before revising many of his Italian poems (November 1367–March 1368, at the end of his intermittent six-year residence in Venice), he confesses that—despite possessing “at least sixteen of Plato’s books”—he knows too little Greek to read them.43 De ignorantia itself provides material evidence of careful revision and deliberate incorporation of economic figuration.44 “I have become a poor peddler of learning [mercator inops literarum]” (284–85), Petrarch complains, inveighing against those who would rob him of fame, whose “poverty [inops] of intelligence or of language [vel intellectus vel sermonis]” (312–13) limits their understanding. The dramatic context—a betrayal of the author’s reputation by those whom he had earlier trusted—speaks precisely to the rational and irrational faith upon which social and economic orders depend. Petrarch emerges as a “man in the middle,” not part of any institution such as a university, school, or (at a later historical date) learned academy that might proclaim his scholarly and intellectual competence.45 Nor was he part of a commercial order that might reward him with material wealth. He is not even sure of his place within a small circle of friends who have maligned him in public. In this respect Petrarch enters an unfamiliar environment where bonds of faith, trust, and loyalty impel new divisions of labor in the world of arts and letters, just as they do in the world of politics, trade, and public commerce. Such an environment would define the poet as a man in the middle with no conventionally defined professional affiliation, no stable form of economic protection, no established network of cultural support. In his solitary career, Petrarch sees himself afloat in the evolutionary sea-change of late fourteenth-century economic relations. 43.  Quotations are from Francesco Petrarca, Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), here 328–29. For analysis, see William J. Kennedy, “The Economy of Invective and a Man in the Middle,” in Kirkham and Maggi, Petrarch: A Critical Guide, 263–76. 44.  Petrarch posits that its blots and insertions constitute a material sign of friendship, as long as the receiver accepts them with grace and trusts the giver’s good intentions. 45.  For the humanist movement defining itself outside of conventional institutions, see Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization from Petrarch to Valla, trans. Martha King (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 43–65; for its spiritual anxiety, see Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 267–76. For the collegium as a fourteenth-century institutional development, see Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Boston: Brill, 2000). For Petrarch’s complex relationship to the public and private world, see Albert Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Privare Politics: Rerum Familiarum Libri 19,” in his A Local Habitation and a Name (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 118–58; for his self-making as a form of worldliness, see Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 146–49.

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Ch ap ter 2

Making Petrarch Matter

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The Parts and Labor of Textual Revision

In canzone 23, the “song of metamorphoses,” the speaker explicitly proclaims himself a “man in the middle” at an important juncture in the poem’s narrative action and compositional development: “Mezzo tutto quel dì tra vivo et morto” ‘A mean all that day between living and dead’ (line 89). Petrarch first drafted the poem in his mid-twenties (around 1330; an annotation in the Parmense MS 1636 identifies the poem as “de primis inventionibus nostris”  ‘one of my first compositions’). Well into maturity he continued to revise it in Vaticano Latino 3196, dating its apparent transcription in the pre-Chigi manuscript at Milan on 10 November 1356, “post multos et multos annos, quibusdam mutatio” ‘after a good many years during which I revised it’.1 The working copy in Vat. Lat. 3196 seems to have been transcribed in two major stages, the first comprised of lines 1–89 on folio 11r (evincing two possible periods of transcription between 1336 and 1337 and ending with the verse just quoted) and the second comprised of lines 90–169 on folio 11v (evincing two definite periods of transcription dated 3 April 1350 and 28 April 1351). The important shift occurs in stanza 5 where the speaker represents himself as mezzo between life and death when he laments his Battus-like transformation into stone.

1.  See Bortolo Martinelli, Petrarca e il Ventoso (Bergamo: Minerva Italica, 1977), 50–79.

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The working copy’s divisions reinforce the poem’s bipartite structure. The poem’s earlier half narrates three Ovidian transformations, each figuring some aspect of the speaker’s maturation into a serious vernacular poet. In stanza 2 he’s turned into a Daphne-like laurel by a vengeful Cupid and his resistant Laura—“E i duo mi trasformaro in quel ch’ i’ sono”  ‘Those two transformed me into what I am’ (line 39)—and its leaves appear emblematic of the poet’s coronation wreath, his literary activity, “di che sperato avea già lor corona” ‘which I had formerly hoped would be my crown’ (line 44). In stanza 3 he becomes a Cygnus-like swan lamenting his downfall: “Et già mai poi la mia lingua non taque” ‘And from then on my tongue was never silent’ (line 58). In stanza 4 he becomes a Battus-like stone because he betrayed Laura’s confidence by circulating his Rime sparse. The poem’s later half narrates three other transformations, each deepening the speaker’s imprisonment in matter. Here he becomes a Byblis-like fountain that sheds tears (stanza 6), an Echo-like voice imprisoned in flint while praying for mercy (stanza 7), and an Acteon-like stag that renews his pursuit of the angry lady (stanza 8), projecting a degeneration or falling off (a “cader maligno” ‘malignant fall’, line 59) from his high poetic calling. His transformation into the female figures of Daphne, Byblis, and Echo in three of these six figures marks a disengagement from his own sexual body and his absorption into a corporeally gendered physical otherness. His alienation and his loss of wholeness signal a frightening turn, suggesting that disordered materiality has overwhelmed the poet. Amid the poem’s many cancellations and revisions, Petrarch refuses to erase its references to earlier poetic models whose speakers exult in their own material worlds. Side-by-side with references to Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and Giovanni Boccaccio (as well as to Ovid, Vergil, Horace, and others), there are evocations of Guittone d’Arezzo, Monte Andrea, and Chiaro Davanzati that reintegrate these less prominent, often disparaged poets into an enlarged canon.2 In stanza 1, the speaker complains that his harsh scempio ‘undoing’ is written everywhere, so that “mille penne / ne son già stanche” ‘a thousand pens are already tired by it’ (lines 11–12). The literary topos from Monte’s tenzone with a certain Tomaso (“Ahi doloroso lasso, più non posso”) echoes the complaint that “in tutte parti già il suon ne rimbomba” ‘everywhere the sound already reverberates’ (line 64,

2.  For the poem as a site where Petrarch confronts Dante and Cavalcanti, see Marco Santagata, Per moderne carte: La biblioteca volgare di Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 273–325.

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canzone 281 in Codex Vaticana 3793, c. 88a).3 In stanza 4 Petrarch’s speaker reports that his swan song is “mercé chiamando con estrania voce” ‘calling for mercy with wonderous voice’ (line 63), summoning Davanzati’s ­canzone “Madonna lungiamente aggio portato” ‘My lady, at great length I have borne’, where “mercé chiamando, / istato son cherente” ‘begging for mercy, I have been asking’ (lines 13–14, poem 239 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 75b).4 Most striking are two references to Guittone. The first appears in Petrarch’s final version of canzone 23 as an addition to the text. Like Ovid’s Byblis, the speaker in stanza 5 transmutes his cry into written words: “Non sono mio, no. S’io moro, il danno è vostro” ‘I am not my own, no; if I die, yours is the loss’ (line 100). The line echoes from Guittone’s canzone “Se de voi donna” ‘If from you, my lady’ the cry that “Meo non son già, ch’a far vostro piacere” ‘I, who devote myself to pleasing you, am already not my own’ (line 53, poem 140 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 42b).5 Petrarch’s self-revision cancels the plea “dissi: Accorrete donna, al fedel vostro!” ‘I said, lady, send help to your faithful one!’ (Vat. Lat. 3196, poem 58, line 100) and replaces it with a now heated admission of guilt and blame. The verse that follows, “ma talora umiltà spegne disdegno” ‘sometimes humility quenches disdain’ (104), foregrounds the androcentric trope of humility as a hedge against disdain, drawn from Guittone’s sonnet “Ellei che e si pari comegio detto” ‘And she who is so seems so’, where “Ch’umetà fa core umele fare”  ‘Humility works to make the heart humble’ (line 6, poem 418 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 120a). In canzone 23, these palimpsestic traces of Guittone’s, Monte’s, and Davanzati’s poems broaden the speaker’s mimetic horizons. Rather than settle for a pallid account of enticement and resistance, they posit his sensual involvement in a complex narrative. The poem’s Ovidian archetypes compel this sensual effect, and its ancillary echoes from pre-Stilnovist poets who blazoned their own hedonism reinforce it. Characterized by a lack of defining stasis and capable of being remade over and again, the speaker’s depiction of mutability registers a spectacle of continuous coming and becoming, the

3.  Quotations are from Monte Andrea da Fiorenza, Le rime, ed. Francesco Minetti (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1979). For commentary, see Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Songs to Italian Poetry Books (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 82–84. 4.  Quotations are from Chiaro Davanzati, Rime: Canzoni e sonetti, ed. Aldo Menichetti (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2004; Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1965). 5.  Guittone d’Arezzo, Rime, ed. Francesco Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940). For the careful arrangement of these poems in Codex Laurenziano Rediano 9, see Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self, 49–69.

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shadow of matter migrating from one state of being to another.6 In doing so, the poem leaves open a possibility that transformation itself may produce effects that are positive and productive, integrating what had been with what now is and revealing change to be something that confers actuality upon receptive matter.7 In general, Petrarch’s manuscripts during the 1350s and 1360s abound in tropes associated with time, change, and shifting identity, and his revisions in these manuscripts often concern the relationship of change to physical matter. Among the most heavily redacted poems from this period are sonnets 152, 159, and 188, with revisions that accentuate the materiality of poetry. The early version of sonnet 152 begins with a juxtaposition of qualities that represent Laura as both “humil fera” and “forma d’angel”: “Più che tygre aspra e più selvaggia ch’orsa, / questa humil fera in forma d’angel vène” ‘Fiercer than a tiger and wilder than a bear, this humble wild creature comes in the form of an angel’ (Vat. Lat. 3196, sonnet 24). Its first revision, recorded in Vat. Lat. 3196, links “vista umana” to “forma d’angel” with a conjunctive e ‘and’ that blurs their distinctions: “Questa humil fera un cor di tigre o d’orsa / che ’n vista umana e ’n forma d’angel vène” ‘This humble wild creature, this tiger’s or she-bear’s heart that comes in human appearance and in the shape of an angel’. The problem is at once perceptual (vista) and conceptual ( forma). At this point, the poem evokes ambiguous states of physical appearance (“humil fera”), chiefly on Laura’s part, and ambiguous states of mind (“forma d’angel”), chiefly on the speaker’s part, and both disturb the sum of trust accorded to either of them. In its final form, this disturbance shatters the economy of their relationship. In each version, the speaker feels that Laura “in riso e ’n pianto, fra paura et spene / mi rota” ‘wheels me about in laughter and tears between fear and hope’, and with a startling neologism that converts the adverb forse ‘perhaps’ into a verb inforsa ‘turns into a perhaps’, he expresses confusion: “sì ch’ogni mio stato inforsa” ‘So that she makes uncertain my every state’. A further neologism in the rhyme word smorsa underscores the tension. Derived from mordere ‘bite, grip’ with the privative s, ‘release the bite or grip’, the word 6. For thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century interest in these issues, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001) and Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late-Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011). 7.  In this regard the poem unexpectedly evokes late medieval theological doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation that deepen the bond between corporeal matter and divine spirit. The word transsubstantatio was coined by Hildebert of Tours (d. 1134), defined by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and elaborated over the next half century by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 3, The Growth of Medieval Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 184–204.

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implies a negation of “mordere il freno” ‘champ at the bit’: “Se ’n breve non m’accoglie o non mi smorsa” ‘If she does not soon either accept me or free me from the bit and bridle’. Laura holds the speaker “tra due” (“ma pur come suol far tra due mi tene” ‘but still, as she is wont, keeps me between the two’) until he can no longer bear “tante varïetati” ‘so many changes’: “Che ’n un punto arde, agghiaccia, arrossa e ’nbianca” ‘For in the same moment it burns, freezes, blushes, and turns pale’. The words “tra due” and “varïetati” come to figure the work of revision itself, as each revision suspends the poem’s action and transposes its verbal materials into new forms.8 In the poem’s final redaction, Laura is not simply a “humil fera in forma d’angel” as the original formulation would have it, but rather the reluctant participant in a complex exchange between herself and the speaker. She inflicts pain on him, true, but he invites it willfully upon himself as it sharpens and intensifies his own feeling. His heightened response deepens in emotion, acknowledging Laura’s input as a stimulus. The poem’s competing claims about spirit and matter, inspiration and execution, mobilize the speaker’s attention as he submits his verse to alteration, amendment, and reconsideration. The revisions in sonnet 159 likewise focus upon a relationship between change and physical matter. The poem’s opening quatrain prevails in both versions, as the speaker questions the Platonic origin of Laura’s beauty: “In qual parte del ciel, in quale ydea / era l’esempio, onde Natura tolse / quel bel viso leggiadro” ‘In what part of Heaven, in what Idea was the pattern from which Nature copied that charming lovely face’. The revised second quatrain concretizes this beauty figured as golden hair, “chiome d’oro sì fino a l’aura sciolse” ‘locks of such fine gold loosed to the breeze’, displacing the earlier metonymy of unspecified gold: “sì fino oro et sì vago a l’aura sciolse” ‘such fine and alluring gold loosed to the breeze’ (Vat. Lat. 3196, sonnet 33). Strikingly, however, the octave’s final line remains unchanged: “benché la somma è di mia morte rea” ‘although the sum of them is guilty of my death’. In point of fact, this line echoes a verse by one of Petrarch’s least idealistic predecessors, Guittone d’Arezzo. The latter’s canzone 11 “Tvtora sio uelglio o dormo” ‘Whether I am awake or asleep’ (appearing as poem 141 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 43a) quantifies the beloved’s value as the arithmetic sum of its parts, “perch’è di valor somma” ‘because it is the height of valor’ (line 16). Petrarch reverts to Guittone’s cost-benefit analysis to express a similar quantitative sentiment.

8.  See Martin McLaughlin, “Struttura e ‘sonoritas’ in Petrarca” in Il Canzoniere: Lettura micro e macrotestuale, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 2007), 361–82.

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The poem’s sestet moves in the same direction. Its original version calls upon “chi questa donna e gli occhi suoi non vide / come angelicamente ella gli gira” ‘whoever did not see this lady and her eyes, how like an angel she turns them’, and it claims that such a person will look in vain for “divina bellezza” ‘divine beauty’. In its revised version, Laura’s physical occhi replaces the abstract donna, while the sense-bound adverb soavemente replaces the ethereal angelicamente. The person who looks in vain is now someone “chi gli occhi di costei già mai non vide / come soavemente ella gli gira” ‘who never saw her eyes, how sweetly she turns them’. The poem’s conclusion gestures toward a remote and potentially far-flung readership, claiming that whoever does not know Laura “non sa come Amor sana, et come ancide” ‘does not know how Love heals and how he kills’. The line, unchanged from its first version, echoes from Guittone’s canzone 15, “Gente noiosa e uillana e maluagia e uili sengnoria” ‘Boorish and dull people, and evil, wicked lordship’ (appearing as poem 149 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 46a), which ends with a polite address to a beloved in Arezzo “ch’auzide e sana / lo meo core sovente”  ‘who continually wounds and heals my heart’ (lines 128–29).9 Guittone’s mixture of courtly and political, ideal and real, intensifies the speaker’s pain of exile from his native city by exalting the merits of a lady who stays behind. The final version of Petrarch’s poem likewise records its speaker’s effort to find his comfort zone among shifting values and altered circumstances, prodding him toward a tolerance for risk in a world of change and motion.10 Sonnet 188, “Almo Sol, quella fronde ch’io sola amo” ‘Life-giving sun, that branch which is all I love’, another carefully revised poem, offers a striking example of this focus upon change and materiality. In line 3, the neologistic verb verdeggia ‘flourishes’ (replacing vivesi ‘lives’) strengthens the implied figuration of Laura as organic growth, deepening and expanding her roots in the poet’s imagination. Attempting to measure her impact on him, the speaker declares that she is peerless: “verdeggia, et senza par poi che l’addorno / suo male et nostro vide in prima Adamo” ‘She flourishes, without an equal since Adam first saw his and our lovely bane’. The poem’s push to steady its momentum yields a structure of inverted echoes. In line 1, for example, “almo sol” and “sola amo” transpose each other’s sound patterns, just as at   9.  See Vincent Moleta, The Early Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1976), 109–13. 10.  On Petrarch’s self-representation as a risk taker modeling his career on romance errancy, see Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Profession in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 35–37. For contemporaneous efforts to calculate risk, see James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture before Pascal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 274–77.

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the end of the octave and beginning of the sestet the vowels (a, o; o, a) and consonants (brm, mbr) of bramo and ombra approximate a similar transposition: “quel ch’i’ più bramo. / L’ombra che cade” ‘what I most desire. The shadow that falls’. The octave’s rhyme (amo, Adamo, chiamo, bramo) resonates with the syllables of amo ‘I love’. The threefold repetition of ove in the sestet (“ove favilla il mio soave foco, / ove ’l gran lauro . . . / ove ’l mio cor” ‘where my gentle fire is sparkling, where the great laurel, . . . where my heart’) secures the topos of physical space governing the poem. Sonnet 188 extends this space into successive poems, creating a mini-sequence devoted to Laura’s ambient location.11 For example, its fifth line, “Stiamo a mirarla: i’ ti pur prego et chiamo” ‘Let us stay to gaze on her, I beg and call on you’ (revised from the grammatically defective “Stiamo a vederla: al suo amor [t]i chiamo” ‘Let us stay to see her: I call [you] to her love’), anticipates the first line of sonnet 192: “Stiamo, Amor, a veder la gloria nostra” ‘Let us stay, Love, to see our glory’. Here the concrete verb veder, revised from the originally figurative mirar (Vat. Lat. 3196, sonnet 8), announces the speaker’s tangible perception of Laura as incarnate beauty, yielding to a threefold repetition of vedi. The second tercet brings a revision of angeliche into lucide that replaces the materiality of light in Laura’s eyes with its own effulgence: “E ’l ciel di vaghe et lucide faville / s’accende intorno” ‘And the sky takes fire with bright and shining sparks’. The sonnet’s physical immediacy belies its craft and technique. The poems that follow expand upon this immediacy. Sonnet 193, “Pasco la mente d’un sì nobil cibo” ‘I nourish my mind with a food so noble’, for example, reifies the bond between form and matter, labor and skill, with a nod to Dante in its second quatrain: Talor ch’ odo dir cose, e ’n cor describo perché da sospirar sempre ritrove, rapto per man d’Amor, né so ben dove, doppia dolcezza in un volto delibo. When I hear things said and I write them down in my heart, so that I will always find them to sigh about, rapt by Love’s hand I know not where, from one countenance I drink in a double sweetness.

11.  See Stefano Carrai, “I primi testi autografi del Vaticano 3195,” in Picone, Il Canzoniere, 433–48, and Adelia Noferi, Frammenti per I fragmenta di Petrarca, ed. Luigi Tassoni (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001), 131–53.

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The first verse rewrites the celebrated tercet about poetic invention in Purgatorio 24.51–53: I’ mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo ch’ e’ ditta dentro vo significando.

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I am one who, when love breathes in me, takes note, and in the manner which he dictates within, I proceed forming it into words. But instead of assuming, as Dante does, a direct connection between inspiration (“quando / Amor mi spira”) and the process of writing poetry (“vo significando,” with emphasis upon the present-progressive participle as an ongoing act of ‘making signs’), Petrarch introduces a disjunction between what his speaker hears (“Talor ch’odo dir cose”) and what he writes (“e ’n cor describo”). After an initial rupture (rapto, from rapire ‘ravish’) transports him “per man d’Amor” into a state of visionary ecstasy, he deploys his technical skill to recover (ri-trove) the intuition that is already beginning to fade. The result is a “doppia dolcezza” that combines a vision of Laura with the sound of her voice.12 Recalling from sonnets 77 and 78 the results of Simone Martini’s intuition and artistic craftsmanship, this doppia dolcezza embodies both the expressive material and figurative meaning of Petrarch’s verse, the fused sound and sense of his poetic labor. From the process of composition and revision emerges a finished product whose concluding lines measure “quanto in questa vita / arte, ingegno, et Natura e ’l Ciel pò fare” ‘as much as Art, Wit, and Nature and Heaven can do in this life’. Working with matter and spirit, articulation and idea, syntax and semantics, the poet combines the materials of art and the work of nature (arte and Natura) with intuition and inspiration (ingegno and Ciel) to bring forth the poem (nancisci, natus ‘come into existence, be born as matter’). In its preoccupation with measuring (quanto) the material component of parts and labor, sonnet 193 moves beyond the metaphysical claims of sonnets 154 (line 5: “L’opra è sì altera, sì leggiadra et nova” ‘The work is so high, so lovely and new’) and 159 (“In qual parte del Ciel, in quale ydea”) and proceeds toward the crisis of sonnet 248 (“Chi vuol veder

12.  In Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo’s gloss, it combines “due dolcezze . . . in un medesimo uolto di M. L. Il quale miraua, & udiua parlare” ‘two sweetnesses [viz. of sight and of sound] in one and the same countenance of Madonna Laura, whom he saw and heard speak’ (sig. ccxivr).

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q­ uantunque pò Natura / e ’l Ciel tra noi”) where mortality becomes an affront to imagination and skill. The next five sonnets shelter an astonishing display of skill in vocalic repetition and revision.13 Four of them begin with a noun phrase celebrating “L’aura”: “L’aura gentil, che rasserena” ‘The gentle breeze that makes the hills clear again’, sonnet 194; “L’aura serena che fra verdi fronde” ‘The calm breeze that through the green leaves’, sonnet 196; “L’aura celeste che ‘n quel verde lauro” ‘The heavenly breeze that in the green laurel’, sonnet 197; and “L’aura soave al sole spiega et vibra” ‘The soft breeze spreads and waves in the sun’, sonnet 198. Four of them (sonnets 194, 195, 197, 198) appear to have been written in 1368.14 The fifth (sonnet 196) probably originated in 1342. In 1368 Petrarch introduced some lexical changes, reassigned its sestet to sonnet 194, and added a new sestet.15 Sonnet 195, seemingly out of order, nonetheless dates from the same period as most of the poems in this cluster. Though like sonnet 198 it lacks a draft version in Vat. Lat. 3196 (where sonnets 194, 196, and 197 appear respectively as sonnets 12, 11, and 13), sonnet 195 nonetheless calls attention to itself as a conspicuous insertion into the revised sequence of Vaticano Latino 3195. Together with sonnet 198, it confers an outsider’s perspective on this set of poems. Sonnet 194 opens with a much-emended quatrain in which lines 3 and 4 undergo extreme lexical revision. Curiously, the final redaction does not much change the poem’s figural meaning. The original version of line 2 complements the thought of line 1 by affirming that the gentle breeze “reschiara il meo cor” ‘brightens my dark heart’. A subsequent revision accentuates the breeze’s effect on nearby flowers: “che move i fiori” ‘which moves the flowers’. The final version preserves this emphasis while changing the verb move to the participle destando ‘awakening’: “destando i fior’ per questo ombroso bosco” ‘Awakening the flowers through this shady wood’. The effect justifies the speaker’s claim about craftsmanship and skill in line 4, which remains stable throughout all the revisions: “per cui conven che ’n pena e ’n fama poggi”  ‘On whose account I take shelter in labor and in fame’. No matter how much torment it causes him, he finds refuge in his poetic work, thematizing the act of writing and revision as a product of poetic labor. The elaborate recasting of both poems demonstrates that inspiration in furore

13.  See Noferi, Frammenti per I fragmenta di Petrarca, 155–62. 14.  See Marco Santagata’s dating in notes to his edition of Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, 3rd ed. (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2008), 845–61. 15.  For complex interactions among poems in the revision of these sonnets, see Domenico De Robertis, Memoriale petrarchesco (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 65–87.

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counts for very little in Petrarchan aesthetics. Furor provides a start, but the real work of composition demands rewriting and adjustment, a tailoring of materials into a final product that bears only a tenuous relationship to its beginnings. The poem’s acquisition of its sestet from an earlier draft of sonnet 196 further heightens a sense of its poetic labor as the work of active agency and a determinant of aesthetic value. Here the speaker acknowledges that in Laura (and by association in the laurel-worthy poem that he produces) “provo dolcezze tante et tali” ‘I find such and so many sweetnesses’. In sonnet 196, this acknowledgment reinforces a passage of time in its original octave from the present when Laura wears her hair in a matronly bind (line 7) to the past when she had worn it more loosely (line 8). The sestet’s transposition to sonnet 194 requires a new conclusion for sonnet 196, and the speaker produces one that emphasizes his mental activity: “che ripensando anchor trema la mente” ‘That as I think back on it my mind still trembles’. This focus on interior action proves important, because the new poem—sonnet 195, “Di dì in dì vo cangiando il viso e ’l pelo” ‘From day to day my face and hair are changing’, now inserted between sonnets 194 and 196—also emphasizes the speaker’s mental activity during the passage of time. With a series of privative suffixes (“mi disosso et snervo et spolpo” ‘I am disboned and dismuscled and disfleshed’) that strip the speaker of bodily substance, a renewed focus upon his emotional apprehension closes the poem: “Non spero del mio affanno aver mai posa” ‘I do not hope ever to have rest from my labors’. In an instant its second tercet returns to the pre-Stilnovist world of Guittone d’Arezzo where anxiety is a by-product of carnal desire and where the specter of another woman (ella) who rivals the beloved calls attention to the speaker’s licentious proclivities. Its material concerns emerge in a submerged allusion to Peleus’s lance that “wounds and heals,” derived as we’ve seen from Guittone’s canzone 15, “lei ch’ancide e sana / lo meo core sovente.” Petrarch’s poem concludes: Esser pò in prima ogni impossibil cosa ch’altri che Morte, od ella, sani ’l colpo ch’Amor co’ suoi belli occhi al cor m’impresse. Every impossible thing will happen before another than she or Death heals the wound that Love made in my heart with her lovely eyes. The phrase “sani ’l colpo” conveys yet another palimpsestic sign of Petrarch’s aesthetic predilections layered beneath the work of his constant revision.

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Sonnet 198 then secures this cluster of poems in which blood and bone respond physiologically to the speaker’s anxiety: “Non ò medolla in osso o sangue in fibra, / ch’i’ non senta tremar” ‘I have no marrow in my bones or blood in my tissue that I do not feel trembling’. The deeply revisionary nature of these poems shapes Petrarch’s vernacular poetics, and its influence dominates sixteenth-century Petrarchism. In his Prose della volgar lingua (1525), Pietro Bembo appealed to the phonic structure of the Rime sparse as a basis for canonizing Petrarch’s style as the supreme model for Italian lyric verse. After submitting Petrarch’s verbal skills to close analysis, he concludes that “Fuggì non solamente la troppa piacevolezza o la troppa gravità, ma ancora la troppa diligenza del fuggirle” ‘[Petrarch] not only avoided too much charm and too much gravity, but he also avoided the appearance of trying too hard to avoid them’.16 His careful focus on the poet’s efforts to work with and upon the somatic properties of language canonized the Rime sparse for sixteenth-century readers, writers, and musicians.17 The poem that Bembo selects for his lengthiest analysis is sonnet 304, a poem after Laura’s death in which the speaker recalls happier times when Love inspired him beside the river Sorgue in Vaucluse: “Mentre che ’l cor dagli amorosi vermi / fu consumato, e ’n fiamma amorosa arse” ‘While my heart was consumed by the worms of love and burned in an amorous flame’. In Bembo’s view, this poem—and by extension Petrarch’s composite aesthetics—succeeds because of a tension between its alluring piacevolezza ‘charm’ and its countervailing gravità ‘seriousness’. The commentator goes on to describe how piacevolezza derives from artfully constructed vocalic harmonies while gravità accentuates it with gravely consonantal measures. Bembo then quotes sonnet 304 to exemplify Petrarch’s “stil canuto” ‘mature style’. Later from sonnet 291, “Quand’io veggio dal ciel scender l’Aurora” ‘When I see the dawn coming down from the sky’, he cites other verses (in particular, “I vostri dipartir’’ non son sì duri” ‘Your partings are not so hard’, 250) to reinforce his critical claims. As it happens, both of these poems garnered Petrarch’s recurrent attention in the late 1350s and early 1360s when he began to sketch possible endings for his enlarged sequence. The hypothetical Correggio manuscript of 1356–58, for example, would end with sonnets 291 and 292, while the Chigi 16.  Pietro Bembo, Prose e rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti, 2nd ed. (Turin: UTET, 1966), 272. 17.  See Claude Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 355–60; Carol Kidwell, Pietro Bembo: Lover, Linguist, Cardinal (Montreal: McGillQueens University Press, 2004), 218–37; and Giuseppe Gerbino, “Florentine Petrarchismo and the Early Madrigal,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 607–28.

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­ anuscript of 1359–63 ends with sonnets 303 and 304.18 Sonnet 292, “Gli m occhi di ch’io parlai sì caldamente” ‘The eyes of which I spoke so warmly’, composed ca. 1357–58, catalogs various beauties attributed to Laura, “Gli occhi . . . et le braccia et le mani e i piedi e ’l viso” ‘The eyes and the arms and the hands and the feet and the face’. Registered in a profusion of liquid l n r consonants and closed a e o vowels (“che solean fare in terra un paradiso” ‘that used to make a paradise on earth’), Laura’s bodily parts decompose with alliterated “p” and “s” sounds across the octave’s final line: “poca polvere son, che nulla sente” ‘They all are a bit of dust that feels nothing’. The sestet turns to the speaker’s desolation, “Et io pur vivo,” and concludes with his writer’s block: “secca è la vena de l’usato ingegno, / et la cetera mia rivolta in pianto” ‘Dry is the vein of my accustomed wit, and my lyre is turned to weeping’. It’s significant that the term ingegno restates the principle of intuition that animates Simone Martini’s portrait of Laura in sonnet 77, while “cetera mia” figures the principle of poetic labor that shapes his final product in sonnet 78.19 But neither furor on the one hand nor craftsmanship and skill on the other sustain the poet’s art. More to the point, the sestet begins and ends with evocations of Monte and Guittone. “Et io pur vivo” echoes line 7 (“I’ pur ò vita, lasso me dolente”‘I am still alive, alas, grieving’) from Monte’s lugubrious sonnet “S’eo portai mai dolore”‘if I ever bore sorrow’ (poem 534 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 131b), while “secca è la vena” echoes line 46 (“secca auete la vena” ‘your vein is dry’) from Guittone’s patriotic canzone “Ai dolce e gaia terra aretina” ‘O sweet, happy Arezzo’ (poem 159 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 49b). It is as though Petrarch were reverting to words of earlier poets that Bembo describes as “piene di materiali e grosse voci” ‘full of crude, coarse sounds’ (116). Sonnet 293, composed in 1359, accordingly reopens the sequence in the Chigi manuscript (1359–63) and directs it toward a new conclusion reached in sonnets 300–304. Its first quatrain thematizes the poet’s principle of c­ omposition: S’ io avesse pensato che sì care fossin le voci de’ sospir’ miei in rima, fatte l’avrei, dal sospirar mio prima, in numero più spesse, in stil più rare. 18.  See Luciano Rossi, “ ‘Secca è la vena’ e la poesia dissacrata,” in Picone, Il Canzoniere, 641–56, and in the same volume Paolo Squillacioti, “Variazioni su tema: natura e poesia tra forma Chigi e giunta di Giovanni,” 657–76. 19.  A marginal note in Vat. Lat. 3196 claims “dum volo his omnino finem dare” ‘I now want to finish these verses completely’, implying the date of 1357–58; quoted from Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Santagata, 1158.

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If I had thought that the sound of my sighs in rhyme would be so dear, from the time of my first sighs I would have made them more frequent in number, more unusual in style. Here an emphasis on the poet’s rima ‘rhyme’ inflects his “voci . . . in numero più spesse” (in the quantitative sense of new poems added to the collection) with a qualitative sense of thickened metrical patterns (numero). The sounds “in stil più rare,” rhyming with “sì care” in the sense of ‘so costly, expensive’, and hence as an estimate of their “rare” value, anticipates the “stil canuto” announced in sonnet 304. The speaker’s insistence upon style and technique, and especially upon the work of revision, comes into focus with the metonymic figure of the “dolce lima” drawn from lines 289–94 of Horace’s Epistle 2.3: “non posso, et non ò più sì dolce lima, / rime aspre et fosche far soavi et chiare” ‘I cannot—and I no longer have so sweet a file—make harsh, dark rhymes into sweet, bright ones’. The poet’s labor, “ogni mio studio,” aims at an act of parlare and of “sfogare il doloroso core” ‘giving vent to my sorrowing heart’, and does not—the speaker is keen to assert—limit itself to the goal of “acquistar fama” ‘gaining fame’. It appears that labor itself, “ogni mio studio,” has all along been an important goal. The material process of composition, revision, and rearticulation acquires a value in its own right, displacing the empty shell of fame ascribed to some innate talent or quality. The Chigi manuscript (compiled in 1359–63) ends with sonnets 300–304, each composed at Vaucluse in the early 1350s. All five poems include tropes of material labor and skill. In sonnet 300 the speaker imagines heaven as a place “che chiude et serra / et sì cupidamente à in sé raccolto / lo spirto da le belle membra sciolto” ‘that encloses and locks in and has so eagerly gathered to itself the spirit freed from her beautiful members’. In sonnet 301 he assesses Vaucluse as a valley “de’ lamenti miei . . . piena” ‘full of my laments’. In sonnet 302 he locates Laura’s body as an aggregate “che tanto amasti” ‘that you loved so much’. In sonnet 304 he confesses that “l’ingegno et le rime erano scarse” ‘wit and rhymes came scantily’. The Chigi manuscript concludes indecisively. On the one hand, its aborted “stil canuto” calls up the defeated “stil più rare” of sonnet 293. On the other, it displays the poet’s skill at its admirable best, in affirmation of his disciplined artistry. In this vein, sonnet 300 concludes with a distant recall from Chiaro Davanzati’s canzone “Lonamorato core . . . / non è da blasimare” ‘A heart that has fallen in love is not to blame’ (poem 253 in Cod. Vat. 3793, c. 80a). There Petrarch’s “Quant’a la dispietata et dura Morte” ‘How [I should envy] pitiless hard Death’ (line 12) echoes Davanzati’s “la mia morte dura”‘my hard

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death’ (line 48).20 The evocation itself is less surprising than its placement so close to the end of the Chigi manuscript in a sonnet composed at Vaucluse around 1351 and sent, along with sonnets 159 and 303, to the musician Tommaso Bombasi da Ferrara for a possible vocal setting eight years later. It is as though Petrarch were evoking among the Chigi collection’s final poems some terminal memory of an oral-aural poetics. A similar evocation occurs near the end of Vat. Lat. 3195 in canzone 360, “Quel’antiquo mio dolce empio signore” ‘My old sweet cruel lord’.21 This penultimate canzone offers a last glimpse into the poet’s earlier career. In a trial before Queen Reason the speaker represents himself (line 6: “mi rappresento,” in both a legal and a mimetic sense) against Love’s demand for his allegiance. Love bases his closing argument upon an economy of feudal patronage (“poi che fatto era huom ligio” ‘once he had become a vassal’, line 126) and upon an aesthetics of divine inspiration (“da volar sopra ’l ciel li avea dat’ali” ‘I gave [Petrarch] wings to fly above the heavens’, line 137). Earlier the speaker claims that “ingegno altero, / et l’altre doti”  ‘high intellect and these other gifts’ (lines 39–40) have incurred opportunity costs (“ogni error che’ pellegrini intrica” ‘every wandering that entangles travelers’, line 49) that cancel their value. Love retorts that the poet’s competing economy of marketplace transaction—“l’arte / da vender parolette, anzi menzogne” ‘the art of selling little words or rather lies’ (lines 80–81)—and his aesthetics of craftsmanship and skill (negatively discharged as “quella noia” ‘such tedium’, line 83) have little or no value. But though Love boasts about bringing Petrarch to an elite audience (“ch’a donne et cavalier’ piacea il suo dire” ‘so that his speech pleased ladies and knights’, line 111), he leaves unexamined the possibility that a carefully monitored dissemination of manuscripts operates within a different economy, one based on long-term strategy and self-promotion through the circulation of manuscripts rather than direct patronage or clientage: “De’ suoi detti conserve / si fanno con diletto in alcun loco”‘In some places collections are made of his poems’ (lines 114–15). This evocation of a formal collection of verse places new burdens upon the poet’s skill. The penultimate poem of the Chigi manuscript, sonnet 303, “Amor che meco al buon tempo ti stavi”‘Love, who in happy time stayed with me’, is—like sonnet 300—another poem that Petrarch had sent to Tommaso 20.  Also line 9 of Filippi’s “Amore, poi che del mio mal” ‘Love, since from my misfortune’, and line 48 of Davanzati’s “Lonamorato core”; Petrarch would repeat the phrase in line 57 of his canzone 360. 21.  Incorporated into Vat. Lat. 3195 in 1373, this canzone occurs as number 356, with a marginal note to reposition it as number 360. Its dating proves vexing because associations with the Secretum and canzone 264 suggest its drafting and revision as early as 1342–43 or 1349–53 and as late as 1363.

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Bombasi for a possible musical setting. This poem includes the touchstone verse that Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua selected to exemplify Petrarch’s artistry: “fior’, frondi, herbe, ombre, antri, onde, aure soavi” ‘Flowers, leaves, grass, shadows, caves, waves, gentle breezes’ (168). Here Bembo argues that jagged sounds such as fr, nd, rb, mb, and nt lend sharp definition to irriguous vowels and diphthongs such as io, o, e, a, au, oa, and i. In each case, a heavy clustering of “masculine” consonants orders and regulates cavernous and diffuse “feminine” vowels. Masculine elision and ellipsis check a feminine dilation of vowels, so that the line’s full complement of sixteen syllables contracts into a perfectly controlled hendecasyllabic verse: fior[i], frondi^herbe^ombre^antri^onde ^ aure soavi. Sonnet 303 consequently appears doubly important, first because of its penultimate position in the earliest extant sequence of Petrarch’s poems, and then because of its furnishing the touchstone verse that Bembo would cite to define Petrarchan style for the later Renaissance. Composed likely at Vaucluse as early as 1351, Petrarch’s sonnet 303 represents Love as the speaker’s partner in a business transaction, initiating what will become a series of vocatives in the octave and first tercet: Amor che meco al buon tempo ti stavi fra queste rive, a’ pensier’ nostri amiche, et per saldar le ragion’ nostre antiche meco et col fiume ragionando andavi.

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Love, who in the happy time stayed with me along these banks so friendly to our thoughts, and used to go reckoning with me and with the river, to settle our old accounts. The memory of Petrarch’s speaker appears compromised, because in earlier accounts of his interaction with Love (as in sonnet 35, echoing Stilnovisti usage when Love “venga sempre / ragionando con meco, et io co llui”  ‘always comes along discoursing with me and I with him’) both parties hold equal ground in their reciprocal dealings.22 Here, however, one party—Love—has gained the upper hand as a creditor to whom the other—the speaker—defers as a debtor. Their new relationship emerges in “per saldar le ragion’,” a mercantile idiom in which the verb saldar (originally, “to solder, weld together”) 22.  The verses also echo Dante’s Purgatorio 24.52–54. For Dante’s dependence upon classical models despite his claims about inspiration, see Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 188–202. For Dante’s “prophetic” rhetoric, see Joel Pastor, “Sodomites Are from Mars: Deconstructing Rhetoric in the Commedia,” Mediaevalia 35 (2014): 117–50.

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means “to settle or balance [an account]” while the plural noun ragion (from the Latin ratio ‘reason, proportion, mathematical ratio’) refers to ‘account entries’. But in the line that follows, “ragionando andavi,” the verb ragionare ‘reckon, reason, calculate’ takes a participial form ragionando, which usually refers in the Rime sparse (as it does in sonnet 35) to the act of composing poetry, fashioning it as a ratio between words and the things that they refer to. It consequently appears that Love has now shrunk into a miserly economic agent who minimizes his altruistic impulses in order to maximize his own profits. Ragionando lapses into a haggling match, a tallying of accounts in which each party measures the other’s debts and then credits them to his own advantage. The speaker extends his address to the landscape of Vaucluse in the poem’s second quatrain: Fior’, frondi, herbe, ombre, antri, onde, aure soavi, valli chiuse, alti colli et piagge apriche, porto de l’amorose mie fatiche, de le fortune mie tante, et sì gravi.

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flowers, leaves, grass, shadows, caves, waves, gentle breezes, closed valleys, high hills, and open slopes, the harbor of my amorous labors, of my so frequent and so heavy storms. Here the abundance of nature, actualized by the teeming plural nouns of the first two lines, contracts to a designation of this particular place as a porto ‘refuge’ from the fatiche ‘labors’ of love. The figure suggests a harbor facing an open sea, but its geographical location refers to the mountains of Vaucluse, and this site shelters the speaker from “le fortune . . . sì gravi” that he had confronted earlier. In its nautical usage, fortuna refers to ‘storms, tempests’, but in the fiduciary sense of ‘riches, prosperity’ that the plural fortunae conveyed in late classical Latin, it also refers to the rewards (or lack of them) that await a risk-taking merchant at the end of a business venture. Here the word would imply an illusory chance or a fortuitous gamble, the very opposite of the quantifiable ragion in the first quatrain. The poem’s dramatic force pivots on this detour, that in former times (“al buon tempo”) the speaker had enjoyed a prosperous relationship with Love, both as lover and as poet, whereas now this relationship has turned sour, exposing him to Love’s self-interested calibration and bringing him to ruin. The poetic enterprise confronts further hazard in the sestet. Here the speaker addresses birds (“vaghi habitator”) to whose singing he elsewhere

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compares his poetry (whether in joy, as in sonnet 219, or in sorrow, as in sonnets 279 and 310). The adjective vaghi typifies the erasure of boundaries attempted in these lines. Derived from the Latin verb vagor ‘wander, roam’, its semantics fray off into conflicting directions: from the awe-inspiring drift of heaven’s stars to the uncontrolled swerve of human passions; from an intense and morally charged active desire to a capricious and dispersive charm that attracts by virtue of its casual air.23 In this equivocal company, the speaker includes the blithesome nymphs and serene swans that glide over the river Sorgue (possibly alluding to Vergil’s “pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos” ‘feeding white swans upon its reedy river’ in Georgics 2.199): o vaghi habitator’ de’ verdi boschi, o nimphe, et voi che ’l fresco herboso fondo del liquido cristallo alberga et pasce. O wandering inhabitants of the green woods, O nymphs, and you whom the fresh grassy floor of the liquid crystal shelters and feeds. Among these remnants of his earlier happiness, the speaker recounts his gloomy assessment of human mortality: i dì miei fur sì chiari, or son sì foschi, come Morte che ’l fa; così nel mondo sua ventura à ciascun dal dì che nasce.

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My days were so bright, now they are as dark as Death who causes it! Thus in the world each has his destiny from the day he is born. The contrast between chiari and foschi establishes a clear distinction between his earlier and later states of mind, between the prosperity of the former and the poverty of the latter. The poem’s verdict on these states comes in the word ventura with the projective sense of  ‘chance, happenstance’, derived from Latin avventurare, literally “to fling to the wind (ventus),” whence “to venture forth, to encounter risk”; but also in the commercial sense of “venture, risk,” upon which economic endeavors prosper or fail. With this term the speaker’s argument comes full circle to its representation of Love as a mercantile agent.

23.  See Ashleigh Imus, “The Gendering of vago in the Commedia, the Decameron and the Canzoniere,” Forum Italicum 40 (2006): 213–33.

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As the speaker assesses his relationship with Love, he decides that love and poetry have—in the last analysis—amounted to hazardous investments. The subsequent reception of the Rime sparse, especially in the sixteenth century, would belie this sense of failure that Petrarch had articulated at the end of the Chigi manuscript. As we’ve seen, the poem’s exquisite balance, its finely calibrated sentiment, and its superb musicality drew justifiable praise from Bembo. In these qualities Petrarch comes most to matter through his attention to craftsmanship and skill, which themselves have no logical basis in any doctrine of poetic furor. It comes as a surprise, then, that after analyzing Petrarch’s style in such exquisite detail, Bembo loses the courage of his convictions and attributes Petrarch’s greatness to an occulta virtù ‘hidden power’ as a quality that, in Platonic terms, defies critical analysis: “Ma dico quella occulta virtù, che, in ogni voce dimorando, commuove altrui ad assentire a ciò che egli legge, procacciata più tosto dal giudicio dello scrittore che dall’artificio de’ maestri” ‘I call it a hidden power that, lingering in each word, moves one to assent to what he reads, procured more by the writer’s judgment than by workmanlike artifice’ (174).24 Yet the material truth is that Petrarch achieved his most powerful poetic effects by reanimating an archaic, wholly artificial, self-consciously constructed Tuscan, overlaid with Sicilian and Provençal influences and more than a few Latinate neologisms. He achieved it, that is, by exercising craftsmanship and skill. In Bembo we see a conflict between the commitment to a Platonic aesthetics based on furor with its ethos of privilege and bestowal, and the pull toward a different aesthetics—call it “Aristotelian” before its time—based upon technique with its ethos of competence and revision.25 This conflict would continue to surface in sixteenth-century commentaries upon Petrarch, perhaps most vividly in those by Lodovico Castelvetro. Born at Modena in 1507, Castelvetro pursued studies in law, rhetoric, and literature in his native city and wrote on a variety of humanist topics until, hounded by the Roman Inquisition, he fled from Italy in 1560. His annotations on the Rime sparse, composed before he left Italy and published posthumously at Basel in 1582, clearly profit from Bembo’s analysis of Petrarch’s lexicon and

24.  The phrase echoes the idea of an audience’s magnetic attraction to the poet through ecstatic language in Plato’s Ion 236.a–b and the notion of an imitative bond between sound and sense in Cratylus 397–410. 25.  For the sixteenth-century tendency to focus on a Platonic context, see Luca Marcozzi, Petrarca platonico (Rome: Aracne, 2011), 173–236. For Bembo’s 1512–13 epistolary exchange with Gianfrancesco Pico on the topic of Latin literary imitation, where Bembo advocates for limited models of excellence and Pico for eclecticism, see Ciceronian Controversies, ed. JoAnn DellaNeva, trans. Brian Duvik, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 16–125.

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prosody, but Castelvetro attributes the poet’s exquisite effects to his hands-on artistic skill rather than to any “occulta virtù” of inspiration or character. Though he does not directly evoke Aristotelian theory, he expresses ideas compatible with those that he later developed in his Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta ‘Translation and Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics’, published at Basel in 1570. As I’ve indicated in the Introduction, Castelvetro’s treatise insists upon pleasure as the principal goal of poetry. In accentuating this goal, Aristotle “means to condemn . . . the opinion which some attribute to Plato, that poetry is infused in men through divine madness.”26 Instead, poetry originates with “the common people” (1:46/19), and “only the ignorant came to believe that . . . poets were imbued with the divine spirit” (1:92/37). Poets are technicians of verse, experts in the arts of language who develop their craftsmanship through careful practice and reference to the work of earlier poets, without relying upon their own feelings or emotion: “The poet does not find the appropriate model of the emotion he seeks in what he is able to observe within himself ” (1:483/39). Poets labor within the constraints of literary convention, and some, like Petrarch, emerge as superior because of their technical competence and mastery of verbal skills. In Castelvetro’s analysis, they’re professionals whose labor depends for support from robust patronage secured and strengthened by self-help. Castelvetro’s commentaries on Petrarch and Aristotle augur the emergence of a new poetics in response to new economic imperatives in the sixteenth-century book trade. Venice more than any other city, commune, or principality in northern Italy became a center of precocious innovation, not just in developing its publishing industry but in challenging the norms of an elite patronage system. Symptomatic of this cultural shift earlier in the century is a poetic exchange between Bembo and Giovanni Della Casa (1503–56). Visiting Rome a few months before his death in 1546, Bembo sent a commendatory sonnet to Della Casa who had been appointed papal nuntio to Venice some weeks earlier. Playing upon his name in the first quatrain—“Casa, in cui le virtuti han chiaro albergo” ‘Home in which virtues enjoy a bright residence’—Bembo attributes to his friend a Ciceronian style that ennobles his writing: “E lo stil, che d’Arpin sì dolce uscia, / risorge” ‘And the style that issued so sweet from Arpinio [Cicero’s birthplace] rises

26.  References are to Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1979), here 1:91, and to Andrew Bongiorno, trans., Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984), here p. 37. Subsequent references to both works appear in parentheses as (1:91/37).

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once again’.27 In replying to Bembo, Della Casa refuses to take this bait and professes little confidence that a classical revival will be easy. Meanwhile, he appreciates the respite that his arrival in Venice affords: L’altero nido, ov’io sì lieto albergo fuor d’ira e di discordia acerba e ria, che la mia dolce terra alma natia e Roma dal penser parto e dispergo.28

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The lofty nest where I reside so happy, away from wrath and harsh, bitter discord, so that both the sweet nourishing land of my birth [Florence], as well as Rome, I sever and disperse from my thoughts. The poem’s halting periods, its stark enjambments, and its casual disruptions of orderly syntax call attention to disturbances that had polluted sixteenth-century Italian history. Against such forces, poetic expression serves as a marker of human effort, crafted with skill and resistant to anything so aleatory as heavenly inspiration. Della Casa registers this conviction in using the verb sollevo to convey the burden of poetic labor: “E con lo stil ch’a i buon tempi fioria / poco da terra mi sollevo” ‘And with the style that once flourished in good times, I raise myself up a bit from the ground’. The poet had already felt the sting of disappointed ambition a decade earlier. As a young man in Padua he received Bembo’s praise for amatory and satiric verse that he had circulated in manuscript. When his poetic career foundered for lack of patronage, he entered papal service in Rome. Careful to avoid scandal that might damage his position in the church, he refrained from publishing his verse, though in the late 1540s several of his poems appeared in Gabriel Giolito’s anthologies. Henceforth he adopts Petrarchan features championed by Bembo, the “sacro cigno sublime” ‘sublime sacred swan’. But he couches them among syntactic distortions and semantic strains (registered in the classical but wholly un-Petrarchan word sublime) that recall the styles of Latin authors rather than Petrarch, and he deploys these qualities in the service of gravitas and interior

27.  Quoted from Bembo, Prose e rime, ed. Dionisotti, 621–22. 28.  Giovanni Della Casa, Le Rime, ed. Roberto Fedi, 2 vols. (Rome: Salerno, 1978). For Della Casa’s sixteenth-century stature, see Stefano Carrai, L’usignolo di Bembo: Un’idea della lirica italiana del “Rinascimento” (Rome: Carocci, 2006), 111–22. For his self-image as a debased patrician and ambitious prelate among filthy scoundrels, see Douglas Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 17–29.

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depth.29 In 1552 Della Casa would retire for three years to a monastery near Treviso where he devoted himself to revising his Rime, Galateo, and other prose writings. After his death in 1556, his various works reached print, cementing his posthumous reputation as the era’s consummate Italian stylist. With Della Casa we see an extreme form of artistic compartmentalization that would challenge the sixteenth-century poets studied in this book. At the end of his life he turned to a meticulous revision of earlier work, producing a thin volume of fifty-nine sonnets, four canzoni, and one sestina in his published Rime (1558); in addition, he left twenty-four other sonnets and one madrigal in manuscript. But new tides of poetic activity were already flooding over Italy with different outcomes, many of them derived from strains evident in Petrarch’s poetry. Petrarch seems to have thought of his writing as a species of intellectual property that entitled him to a professional status. We witness in his poems not the presentation of a completed and unchanging self, but the palimpsest of a past self under revision as he evolves a new and still changing self. Many of his contemporaries seemed able to juggle public responsibilities by day and poetic pursuits at night. For Della Casa, this division of labor proved strenuous. Poetry—not amateur versifying—requires undivided attention. And redaction and revision alone are not qualities sufficient to certify a writer’s worth. Innovation, focus, and a measure of metapoetic reflection are necessary as well.

29.  See Andrea Afribo, Teoria e prassi della “Gravitas” nel cinquecento (Florence: Cesati, 2001). For the influence upon later generations of Petrarch’s attention to language as a form of social and cultural critique, see Christopher Celenza, “Petrarch, Latin, and Italian Renaissance Latinity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 509–36.

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Ch ap ter 3

Jeweler’s Daughter Sings for Doge

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Gaspara Stampa’s Entrepreneurial Poetics

In 1553 the polymathic editor Girolamo Ruscelli included three sonnets by the Venetian poet Gaspara Stampa (b. 1522–25? at Padua) in a lyric anthology, Il sesto libro delle Rime di diversi eccelenti autori, published by Gabriel Giolito.1 In April of the following year, the poet died of fever. Six months later, the publisher Plinio Pietrasante brought out her collected Rime (October 1554), curated by her sister Cassandra and dedicated to Giovanni Della Casa. Evidence of possible redactions in Stampa’s poetry is scant, consisting of only eleven textual variants in the three poems chosen by Ruscelli and repeated in her Rime. Nine of them correct misprints or grammatical irregularities, or else introduce surface refinements that accord with Pietro Bembo’s prescriptions for style, signaling Stampa’s commitment to

1.  Diana Robin concurs with the general attribution of Ruscelli’s volume (printed by Giovan Maria Bonelli) to the series of lyric anthologies initiated by Gabriel Giolito at his press in 1545, in Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 205–42. For Giolito’s initiative, see JoAnn DellaNeva, Unlikely Exemplars: Reading and Imitating beyond the Italian Canon (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 92–99 and passim; and Louise George Clubb and William G. Clubb, “Building a Lyric Canon: Gabriel Giolito and the Rival Anthologists,” Italica 68 (1991): 332–44. Sixteenth-century volumes in Giolito’s series, from which I quote in the following pages, are available online through ALI RASTA (Antologie della Lirica Italiana: Raccolte a stampa, Università di Pavia) at http://rasta. unipv.it/. 76

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Bemboism.2 The remaining two bear thematic consequences. Both occur in sonnet 51, “Vieni Amor’ a veder la gloria mia”  ‘Come, Love, to see my glory’, based on Petrarch’s sonnet 192, “Stiamo, Amor, a veder la gloria nostra” ‘Let us stay, Love, to see our glory’, and they work to diminish the speaker’s personal hold upon her beloved. In the second tercet, “’l mio Sole” ‘my Sun’ becomes “quel Sole”  ‘that Sun’ and “le mie luci”  ‘my lights’ becomes “queste luci” ‘these lights’, in effect retracting the speaker’s ownership over the man she loves and accentuating the distance between them. In the course of Stampa’s 1554 Rime, this distance widens until the lovers finally separate, as her speaker always knew they would.3 The real-life poet was a daughter of Bartolomeo Stampa (d. 1531), a merchant-jeweler living in Padua but with possible ties to the lesser Milanese aristocracy.4 To the extent that her speaker overlaps with the author, she is an upper-middle-class commoner with no legitimate claims upon the terrafirma nobleman, Collaltino di Collalto, whom she professes to love.5 In the end, their consensual affair dissolves as restrictions of class and title dictate, leaving the poet with a dispassionate opportunity to assess their relationship in a Petrarchan format whose contours she navigates with supreme skill.6 Here Stampa offers a critique not only of Petrarchism, but of the Venetian mores that her poetry mirrors and reflects upon.

2.  The three poems are sonnet 51, “Vieni Amor’ a veder la gloria mia” ‘Come, Love, to see my glory’; sonnet 70, “O hora, ò stella dispietata e cruda” ‘O hour and star pitiless and cruel’; and sonnet 75, “Fa ch’io rivegga Amor’ anzi ch’io moia” ‘Love, allow me to see once more before I die’. Quotations are from Gaspara Stampa, The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime,” a Bilingual Edition, ed. Troy Tower and Jane Tylus, trans. Jane Tylus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Translations are my own. In sonnet 51, grammatical corrections in the 1554 edition transform “fatti ambidui” into “fatto ambeduo” and “m’hai data” into “m’hai dato.” Optional refinements transform “Sì piange” into “Si piagne” and “li” into “le” in sonnet 70; and “prima ch’io” into “anzi ch’io,” “da lontan” into “di lontan,” “ò ciò” into “e ciò,” and “affina” into “affine” in sonnet 75. The elimination of the word “ben” from line 11 of sonnet 75 restores its hendecasyllabic regularity: “Sento ben, che’l mi’incendio” becomes “Sento che’l mio incendio.” 3.  The implied narrative occupies sonnets 1–192, after which Abdelkader Salza diverges from the order of the 1554 Rime in his influential edition of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco, Rime (Bari: Laterza, 1913). I use Tylus and Tower’s numbering from the 1554 edition; when it differs from Salza’s, I include the latter’s number in parentheses. 4.  Fiora Basanese, Gaspara Stampa (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 1–2. 5.  The earliest account is by Antonio Rambaldo di Collalto, a family descendant, to accompany an edition of Stampa’s poetry with poems by Collaltino, his brother Vinceguerra, and her brother Baldassare, Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa con altre, ed. Lucia Bergalli and Apostolo Zeno (Venice: Piacentini, 1738). 6.  See Ann R. Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540 –1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 118–41, and chapters by various contributors in Unn Falkeid and Aileen Feng, eds., Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015).

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In the absence of documents about the poet’s personal life, history has mythologized Stampa as a courtesan who sold herself along with poetry and music to clients whom she entertained with sonnets, songs, and sexual favors. One particularly scurrilous set of verses, rendered anonymously, crystalizes this myth by insinuating her concubinage with the octogenarian doge Andrea Gritti: “M’ebbe vergine il Gritti, ed ho da poi / Fatto di mille e piú c. . . [conti?] ruina” ‘Gritti had his way with me when I was a virgin, and since then I’ve become the ruin of a thousand or more [noblemen?]’.7 Circumstantial evidence points to something quite different. I’m going to argue that Stampa belongs to an elite upper-middle-class literary culture, yet she palpably refuses to promote herself within it. Stampa’s emphasis upon her speaker’s personal life proved sensational in a society that valued discretion, less because of its frankly sexual content than because of its challenge to propriety.8 The poet’s open avoidance of self-promotion complements the aims of a social, cultural, moral, and economic revival underway since the 1540s. The defeat of the Republic by the League of Cambrai in 1509 and its loss of territories in Romagna turned attention to inward reform. One option was to capitalize upon the European book trade by expanding the number of printing presses on the Rialto already in business since 1470 and exporting their output ever further northward and westward. Another was to bolster its indigenous artisan production, noted for luxury glass, silks, art objects, and fine jewelry—the last exemplified by Bartolomeo Stampa’s commercial ventures on the Venetian terraferma. A third was to promote contacts with northern Europe, especially Flanders, through exchanges that brought to Venice new commercial techniques of distribution and risk sharing along with new artistic techniques in oil painting and polyphonic music.

7.  The poem, cast in Stampa’s own voice as a funeral epitaph (“Férmati, viator, se saper vuoi” ‘Stop, traveller, if you wish to know’), appears in Abdelkader Salza, “Madonna Gasparina Stampa secondo nuove indagini,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 62 (1913): 1–101, quoted from p. 73. Its scurrilous tone (“Inestiami [Innestami] col m. . . tuo virile, / Che sol quel, mentre vissi, mi piace” ‘Plug me with your virile member, because that alone pleased me while I was alive’) suggests satiric anti-Petrarchism as practiced in Venice by Pietro Aretino (1492–1556). Because of Aretino’s friendship with Collaltino, it’s improbable that he would have defamed Stampa. For Stampa’s Paduan marriage, see Bianchi, La scrittura poetica femminile, 35–36. Further documentary materials appear in Salza, “Madonna Gasparina Stampa e la società veneziana del suo tempo,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 70 (1917): 220–306, and 71 (1918): 1–60. For analysis of these and other contemporaneous references to Stampa, see Courtney Quaintance, Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 142–53. 8.  For this aristocratic emphasis upon discretion and privacy in personal conduct, see James S. Grubb, “Memory and Identity: Why Venetians Didn’t Keep Ricordanze,” Renaissance Studies 8 (1994): 375–87, and Grubb, ed., Family Memoires from Venice (Rome: Viella, 2009), i–li.

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Stampa’s career as a poet and musician unfolded in this milieu. As one component of her artistry, Petrarchism may have seemed extraneous. On the face of it, Venetian interest in Petrarchism had already peaked in the late fifteenth-century lyrics of Antonio Grifo and Niccolo Lelio Cosmico.9 Despite Bembo’s endorsement of Petrarch’s style at the turn of the century, its Tuscan idiom, Stilnovist refinements, and Latinate neologisms appeared out of step with the Venetian dialect and its homegrown poetic materials. By the 1530s, poets such as Francesco Berni, Pietro Aretino, and Niccolò Franco were subjecting Petrarchan figures and tropes to satiric and parodic uses.10 Under humanist influences, Trifone Gabriel, Andrea Navagero, and Antonio Brocardo promoted attention to classical models at the expense of Petrarchan ones. Against these crosscurrents, Stampa’s reversion to Petrarch’s archaic language and rhetorical patterns seems a rebuff to the pallid conventions of amateur poets in an emergent salon society at midcentury. Just as Stampa questions their tastes and assumptions, so she questions their ethos of reticence and reserve, propped up by the Republic’s collectivist emphasis upon unanimitas and dismissive of all drives toward personal ambition, individual achievement, and distinctive self-identity.11 This conflict between individual and corporate values sheds light on the downside of Venetian reform. In the process Stampa displays an almost anomalous social awareness. Class structure in the patrician Republic, set into place by the Serrata (‘Closure’) Reform of 1297 and refined through early sixteenth-century adjustments to it, divided the population into three legally defined high-status groups.12 Ruling power in the Great Council, Senate, and the doge’s Signoria belonged to adult males from some two hundred families of its hereditary nobili. Representing about 4–5 percent of the population,

  9.  See Armando Balduino, “Il petrarchismo nella lirica veneta del Quattrocento,” in Petrarca e il suo tempo (Milan: Skira, 2006), 155–81. 10.  See Francesco Berni, Poesie e prose, ed. Ezio Chiòrboli (Florence: Olschki, 1934); Pietro Aretino, Tutte le opere, ed. Francesco Flora, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1960–71); and Niccolò Franco, Il petrarchista, ed. Roberto L. Bruni (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1979). 11.  For this emphasis upon collectivity and unanimity, see Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 183–228. 12.  See Dennis Romano, Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 12–38 and 141–58. For intermarriage among the upper classes, see James Grubb, “Elite Citizens,” in Venice Reconsidered, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 339–64. For gender roles defined by marriage, see Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 27–52 and 153–68. For later relations with ethnic outsiders, see E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 211–47.

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these families were named and inscribed without differentiated rank in the Libro d’oro ‘Book of Gold’ (compiled in 1526). The Republic’s wealth, however, was at least equally—and often extravagantly—distributed among the nonnoble cittadini originarii who claimed long-standing Venetian ancestry and possessed significant assets earned through commercial activities. Representing 5–8 percent of the population, these families were inscribed in a corresponding Libro d’argento ‘Book of Silver’ (likewise compiled in 1526), and their adult males became eligible for professional administrative office in the ducal chancellery. Below that rank came the popolani, whose elite echelon included successful merchants, medical and legal professionals, prominent clergy and educators, and highly skilled artisans. It also included a large number of transnational residents, many of them very prosperous, but without formal rights of citizenship. Poets, artists, and musicians in this milieu drew patronage from the nobili, cittadini, wealthy popolani, and foreigners as well as from the church and affluent parish confraternities. The tastes and preferences of their patrons diverged widely. The nobili, church leaders, and major confraternities, generous supporters of ecclesiastical music and art, tended to favor a conservative, even austere aesthetic, rooted in piety and devotional practices influenced by Franciscan spirituality.13 Contrariwise, the cittadini, popolani, and noteworthy foreigners, lured by a secular and often flamboyant opulence found in northern Italian court cultures, nurtured a salon society with an experimental aesthetic that recruited stylish talent within Venice and from abroad.14 One influential salon presided over by a hereditary nobleman—Domenico Venier (1517–82), praised in Stampa’s sonnet 227 (253) for his “sì gran stile, rime sì pronte” ‘such high style, rhymes so ready’—promoted an eclectic agenda exemplified by a broad range of popular, classical, Petrarchan, and anti-Petrarchan styles in his own poetry.15 Likely assembled when Venier retired from the Senate in 1546, this salon hosted such writers as Aretino, the classical scholar Sperone Speroni

13.  See Rona Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian, and the Franciscans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). For women’s contributions to this aesthetic, see Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400 –1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 14.  For the role of immigrant cittadini in supporting Venetian arts, see Blake De Maria, Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). See also Monika Schmitters, “ ‘Virtuous Riches’: The Bricolage of Cittadini Identities in Early-SixteenthCentury Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 908–69, and Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 123–50. 15. Venier’s verse, comprising ninety-eight sonnets and eight canzoni culled from Giolito’s anthologies, along with a translation in ottava rima from book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was republished by his descendants in Rime di Domenico Veniero, ed. Pierantonio Serassi (Bergamo: Lancellotto, 1751).

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(commended in Stampa’s sonnet 228 [253] and possibly in sonnets 239 [259] and 269 [291]), the patrician poet Girolamo Molino, and the innovative musician Girolamo Parabosco.16 Other salons included one convened by Collaltino’s friend Antonio Zantani and the latter’s wife Elena Barozzi (honored in Stampa’s sonnet 255 [278]), which featured musical performances by Parabosco and Perissone Cambio, and another convened by the patrician Leonardo Emo, whose support Stampa acknowledges in sonnets 253–54 (275–76) and 257 (277). Yet another, convened independently of any single sponsor, was the Accademia degli Dubbioso in 1551, initially directed by the polygraph Girolamo Ruscelli.17 Despite Stampa’s reference to many of these poets and musicians, there’s no hard evidence that she performed with any of them in any particular salon. Yet, even as her Rime responds to the tastes of some nobili and many cittadini patrons to emulate court entertainments outside of Venice, it examines the pretenses of these efforts and finds them wanting. The often frank eroticism of Stampa’s putatively confessional narrative projects a critical edge as it dramatizes a sexual liaison between a jeweler’s daughter from Padua and her noble-pedigreed terraferma lover. I use the term “putatively confessional” because we can’t confirm where autobiography (if any) ends and fiction begins. More important for Stampa is that her poetry opens a window to private life among nobili, cittadini, and elite popolani as her speaker’s life proceeds in economic concert with other lives in sixteenth-century Venice. Stampa’s sense of this context informs sonnet 1, “Voi ch’ascoltate in queste meste rime” ‘You who hear in these sad rhymes’. Patterned on sonnet 1 of Petrarch’s Rime sparse, the poem identifies its speaker as a lover, but even more as a poet who seeks literary acclaim. Its second quatrain displaces Petrarch’s emphasis on the moral implications of amatory obsession (“spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono” ‘I hope to find pity, not only pardon’) with a different emphasis upon social recognition: Ove fia chi valor’ apprezzi, e stime,   Gloria, non che perdon, de’ miei lamenti   Spero trovar fra le ben nate genti;   Poi che la lor cagione è sì sublime.

16.  See Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 54–62 and 83–119. Stampa’s mother may have conducted a salon in her home upon returning to Venice as a widow; see Fiora Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 1–6. 17.  See Michele Maylender, Storie delle accademie d’Italia, 5 vols. (Bologna: Capelli, 1926–30), 3:224–26.

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Wherever there will be someone who may treasure and esteem valor, I hope to find glory for my laments, not just pardon, among well-born readers, since the cause for these laments is so sublime. The gloria that Stampa’s speaker seeks tracks the fama that Petrarch had sought for his Latin verse, though here Stampa seizes it for vernacular rhyme. Ambivalently, it could pertain more to her poetic aspirations than to any personal wish to flatter her beloved. The archaic fia (for the future sarà) directly acknowledges Petrarch’s composite language as a source of her style, boldly embedded in an earlier literary history. A valor treasured and esteemed by readers may summon the poet’s worth as much as, and perhaps more than, Collaltino’s martial prowess and manly ability. The same can be said of the sublime cagione for her writings, which may refer less to her emotion than it does to her poetic attempt to convey its depth and extent. Each possibility jostles with the other so that even the characterization of her readership as “ben nate genti” proves ambivalent in evoking the privileged but untitled cittadini as much as the pedigreed nobili. With degrees of circumspection and qualification, Stampa enacts a paradigmatic archetype in Venetian civic ideology, one based upon a social commitment to consensus implied in the state’s sobriquet, La Repubblica serenissima. From the perspective of her art, she also enacts an aesthetic commitment nourished by the salon culture that has welcomed her poetry. This culture energetically promoted a cosmopolitan sense of experiment, innovation, and collaboration in the arts, especially in poetry and music. Between 1538 and 1558 salon patrons such as the Florentine exiles Neri Capponi and Ruberto Strozzi provided crucial support for the Flemish composers Adrian Willaert (1490–1562) and (briefly) Cipriano de Rore (1515–65). Willaert, who came to Venice in 1527 as the chapelmaster of San Marco, had imported from the north a polyphonic mode of music deploying four to six voices in counterpoint with overlapping cadences and rich chromatic harmonies. By the late 1530s, he was applying the principles of his church music to secular art songs, chiefly in his Musica nova (published in 1559, but composed two decades earlier), which included twenty-five madrigals based on texts by Petrarch.18 Rore came to Italy in 1541 and published at Venice the following year his Madrigali a cinque voci, setting to five-part vocal polyphony various sonnets by Petrarch and

18.  See Feldman, City Culture, for accounts of contributions by Willaert, 197–259; Rore, 260– 310; and Parabosco, 313–40.

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other Italian poets.19 His Italian popularizer Girolamo Parabosco capitalized upon their success and proved to be a welcome regular at the salons of Domenico Venier, Leonardo Emo, and the Spanish émigré Gottardo Occagna.20 Willaert, Rore, and Parabosco facilitated a class of well-trained vocal artists who adapted and advanced their polyphonic techniques for a cappella performance and for combinations of choral or solo voice in counterpoint with one or more instruments.21 There’s no direct evidence that Stampa performed in these new styles of music, nor that she even had the specialized skills to do so. But it’s likely that she was to at least some extent implicated in this burgeoning musical culture of the 1540s and 1550s, and that her virtuosa commitment to it bolstered her status.22 With the accompaniment of a lute, or perhaps of a lira da braccio, a seven-stringed instrument designed to produce complex chords, her performance of sung verse and instrumental music could experiment with arpeggios and treble-dominated rhythms as foils against each other, activating in her presentations something of the new polyphonic style.23 In Stampa’s Rime, this kind of performance bridges the social, economic, and gendered distance between the poet’s world and Collaltino’s, and it inscribes something half dishonest about both these worlds. He is a landed nobleman from Collalto near Treviso, but not a member of the Venetian nobili. She is the unmarried daughter of an artisan-merchant, to all appearances sponsored by cittadini or wealthy popolani patrons and moving in fluid relationships between them and various nobili supporters. Stampa’s speaker seems hungry for Collaltino’s recognition and approval, but what she gets is his indifference. Against this predicament, Stampa defines herself and her

19.  See Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition, 1450 –1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 244–57 and passim. 20.  See Feldman, City Culture, 47–119. 21.  See Dawn De Rycke, “On Hearing the Courtesan in a Gift of Song: The Venetian Case of Gaspara Stampa,” in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 124–32, and Justin Flosi, “On Locating the Courtesan in Italian Lyric,” in Feldman and Gordon, The Courtesan’s Arts, 133–43. 22.  Contemporary attestations to her musical abilities include Cambio’s commendation of her as a “divina sirena” in the dedication to her of his Libro di madrigali a quattro voci in 1547; Parabosco’s reference to her as a “sirena” in his Primo libro delle lettere amorose (1546); and Molino’s “nova sirena” in his commendatory poem to her Rime. For women’s training as musicians, see Jane L. Baldauf-Berdes, Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525–1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 30–42. 23.  See Feldman, City Culture, 104–8. For speculation about solo singing styles extrapolated from Parabosco’s polyphonic principles affecting Stampa’s musical settings, see Martha Feldman, “The Courtesan’s Voice: Petrarchan Lovers, Pop Philosophy, and Oral Traditions,” in Feldman and Gordon, The Courtesan’s Arts, 105–23.

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commitment to a self-expressive art. Her acquisition of fame, her concentration on technique, and her embrace of a revisionary poetics represent a powerful transaction, a matter partly of negotiating strength upon disappointment, partly of squaring her talent with a Petrarchan style initially alien to her. Instead of bending to members of the nobili and cittadini who may cluck their tongues at her, and to patrons and supporters of the literary community who choose to exclude her, she puts one foot in front of the other, sets up shop, and starts production. Collaltino, as it turns out, is himself an amateur poet. When he was twenty-two years old, three of his sonnets appeared in the first of Giolito’s several anthologies of lyric poetry (1545) and a year later eight more appeared in the volume’s second edition.24 One of these sonnets praises Elena Barozzi, whom Stampa evokes in sonnet 255 (278).25 Collaltino addressed two other poems about Elena to Girolamo Muzio (a partner in poetic exchanges with Tullia d’Aragona and the author of fifty-four poems in Giolito’s series) and to Lodovico Domenichi (the author of 126 poems in Giolito’s series and in 1559 the editor of a celebrated anthology of women poets). In “Muzio, se di saper pur hai desio” ‘Muzio, if you still have a wish to know’, his flat-footed style pro­ poses to immortalize Elena’s beauty, so that “altèra non vada ’l empia morte, / ch’ella qui resti in sempiterna vita”  ‘pitiless death might not grow proud, since she would remain here among us in eternal life’. Collaltino hardly achieved his aim. He published no other poetry after 1546 and left no manuscripts specifically addressed to Stampa. Yet, for all the banality of his verse, Stampa defines her own accomplishments in relation to it. With mediated echoes of Petrarch’s sonnet 248 in sonnet 31, “Chi non sà, come dolce il cor si fura” ‘Whoever does not know how sweetly the heart is stolen’, she urges her reader to hasten “per sua rarissima ventura, / Una sol volta voi Conte ad udire” ‘for the rarest opportunity to hear you, Count, one single time’. In sonnet 47, “Io son da l’aspettar’ omai sì stanca” ‘I am now so weary of waiting’, the speaker gives up hope for Collaltino’s attention. The poem refers to Petrarch’s sonnet 74, “Io son già stanco di pensar” ‘I am already weary of thinking’, which mounts a defense of poetic art and concludes that any failure to impress Laura must be a “colpa d’Amor, non già defecto d’arte” ‘fault of Love, not at all a lack of art’.26 Whether or not Petrarch succeeds as a 24.  Collaltino’s poems, culled from Giolito’s anthologies, were reprinted by his descendant Rambaldo in his 1738 edition of Rime di Madona Gaspara Stampa, and are reprinted in Salza’s edition of Stampa and Franco, Rime, 215–20. 25.  For the Barozzi-Zantani salon, see Feldman, City Culture, 63–81. 26.  According to Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, “Che mancasse il Poeta, il quale essendo ben dotto e sapendo le maniere di laudare, se ’n cio fallava, non era il diffetto che egli non sapesse laudarla, ma

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lover, he is confident of his success as a poet. Stampa’s poem stakes a similarly aggressive claim when it introduces the classical figure of Hecate. Associated with death, Hecate is one “che’l mondo impaladisce e ’mbianca”  ‘Who turns the world pale and white’. Upon Hecate’s refusal to grant her wish—“ella si fà sorda al mio chiamare” ‘she falls deaf to my calling’—Stampa solicits a more receptive audience. As Collaltino distances himself in the high hills (colli alti) of his ancestral estate, she turns elsewhere: “Fò pietose quest’onde e questo mare”  ‘I make these waves and this sea feel compassionate’. The more that she concentrates upon her skills, the less Collaltino’s detachment comes to matter.27 Sonnets 55 and 56 project Stampa’s aspirations in rewriting Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78 to Simone Martini. While Petrarch summons a single artist, Stampa in sonnet 55 summons a broad community of artists who not only depict nature but surpass it: “Voi, che’n marmi, in colori, in bronzo, in cera / Imitate, & vincete la Natura” ‘You who in marble stones, in colors, in bronze, in wax imitate and conquer Nature’. And while Petrarch evaluates Simone’s art through competing claims of Platonic furor set against Aristotelian craft and skill, Stampa evaluates a portrait of Collaltino by referring it to a facing image of herself in sonnet 56: “Ritraggete poi me da l’altra parte, / Come vedete, ch’io sone in effetto” ‘Portray me then on the other side, as you see me, as in effect I am’. Collaltino’s portrait displays him in sonnet 55 as “la più bella creatura / Che facesse giamai la prima cura” ‘the most handsome creature that the first creator ever produced’. Stampa’s portrait displays her in sonnet 56 as “Viva senz’alma, e senza cor nel petto” ‘Living without a soul and without a heart in my breast’. She has surrendered to Collaltino, but its consequences barely concern her. She stands divided between “’l mio sembiante / De la parte sinistra afflitto e mesto” ‘my image on the left side afflicted and sad’ with regard to her unpromising future, and “da la destra allegro, e trionfante” ‘on the right happy and triumphant’. Unlike Simone’s lifelike rendering of Laura, this highly mannered representation of Stampa mixes sorrow with joy. Neither the result of Platonic inspiration nor the product of Aristotelian technique, it embodies the speaker’s psychology. Its motion, better suited to the temporality of literary ­ usician. or musical art than to visual art, suits Stampa’s talents as a poet and m

la colpa era d’Amore” ‘Being learned and knowledgeable about styles of commendatory verse, what the poet lacked if he failed in his task had nothing to do with ignorance about how to praise her, but the fault was that of Cupid’ (sig. 97v). 27.  For analogies with Ovid’s Heroides, see Patricia Berrahou Phillippy, Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Love Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 92–135.

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Together with Collaltino’s portrait, it looks ahead to an engraving of the poet and her beloved as imagined in some future edition of her Rime. In particular it evokes the urn-shaped engravings of Petrarch and Laura facing each other in Gabriel Giolito’s much-reprinted 1544 edition of the Rime sparse with Alessandro Vellutello’s commentary. The significance is double: first, that Stampa is focusing her attention upon publishing her work and, second, that she is thinking of it as a commercial venture with stylized visual embellishments, much in the way that deluxe editions of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto in the 1540s supplemented the printed poems with engravings (many of them rendered anonymously) and commentaries (usually by signed authors and scholars). Stampa is exercising her entrepreneurial imagination about the way her book should present itself. Stampa’s confidence in her verbal skills, and in their power to evoke contrasting moods, informs sonnet 86, “Piangete Donne, e poi che la mia morte / Non move il Signor mio crudo e lontano” ‘Weep, ladies, and since my death does not move my cruel distant lord’. Although the lament focuses nominally upon Collaltino’s refusal to return her love, its model is Petrarch’s sonnet 92, “Piangete, donne, et con voi pianga Amore” ‘Weep, ladies, and let love weep with you’, a poem that mourns the death of the author’s friend and fellow poet Cino da Pistoia (1270–1336).28 Despite the disparity of these topics, Stampa’s poem carries a metapoetic dimension. Its speaker invites one of her female listeners to step forward and recite a poem: “Dica alcuna di voi mesta e pietosa” ‘May one of you who is sad and full of pity speak’. It remains unclear whether it is Stampa or a friend who volunteers what follows. In either case, it provides an epitaph for her persona, now designated as Anassilla from Anaxum (Italian Anasso), the ancient Latin name for the Piave River bordering on Collaltino’s estates:29 Sotto quest’aspra pietra giace ascosa   L’infelice e fidissima Anassilla,   Raro essempio di fede alta amorosa.

28.  Calling attention to Cino’s opposition to “i cittadin perversi” ‘the perverse citizens [of Pistoia]’, Vellutello situates the poem among Petrarch’s political verse in his reorganized Rime sparse. 29.  The poetic cognomen Anassilla recurs in sonnets 65, 135, 138, 139, 174, and 261–62 (284– 85), and in the prefatory epistle to “Mio Signore.” Elisa Innocenzi Greggio, “In difesa di Gaspara Stampa,” L’Ateneo Veneto 38 (1915): 1–158, suggests that Stampa might have adopted this name as a member of Accademia dei Dubbiosi clustered around Venier and Parabosco, alluded to in sonnets 263–64 (269–70).

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Under this harsh stone lies hidden the unhappy, most faithful Anassilla, a rare example of sublime fidelity in love. The echo of Petrarch’s name in “sotto pietra”suggests that Stampa has fashioned her lines with his poetic authority. A companion poem by Stampa—sonnet 151, “Piangete Donne, e con voi pianga Amore” ‘Weep, Ladies, and let Love weep with you’—repeats exactly the opening line of Petrarch’s eulogy to Cino, and it again asks friends to complete her epitaph: “Scrivete la cagion del mio dolore” ‘Write the reason for my sorrow’. The cagion becomes an account book in which they can quantify her unhappiness “per amar molto, et esser poco amata” ‘because of loving much and being loved little’. The contrast between molto/poco puts a price tag on her devotion to Collaltino and correspondingly estimates his response as one that proceeds from “un cor’ crudo, e fugace” ‘a tough and fugitive heart’. Just as Stampa’s sonnet 86 revises Petrarch’s poem by focusing its attention on her own verse, so this sonnet revises her previous poem by directing its metapoetic concern toward a world of presentation and performance that bear social and economic consequences. This larger world occupies Stampa’s sonnet 111, “Pommi ove ’l mar irato geme e frange” ‘Put me where the angry sea groans and crashes’. As a playful example of revision and adjustment, the poem evokes Petrarch’s sonnet 145, “Ponmi ove ’l sole occide i fiori et l’erba”  ‘Place me where the sun kills the flowers and the grass’, which itself evokes and adjusts Horace’s Ode 1.22, “Integer vitae scelerisque purus” ‘A man of integrity and free from wrongdoing’. Horace’s celebrated ode propounds the Epicurean ideal of tranquility—one that is achieved through the virtues of harmony and ­mediocritas prized in sixteenth-century Venice—and then deflates its ­presumptive logic. The argument is addressed to Horace’s friend and ­fellow poet Aristius Fuscus, and with tongue-in-cheek reasoning it arrives at a fatuous conclusion: because the speaker has just escaped from an encounter with a menacing wolf, he thinks himself immune to the vicissitudes of time, change, and reversal: “Pone me pigris ubi nulla campis / arbor aestiva recreatur aura, . . . / dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo” ‘Banish me to a barren field where no tree is renewed by a summer breeze, . . . I’ll still love sweet smiling Lalage’ (1.22.17–24).30 A staggering incongruity between the event and its significance undermines the speaker’s claims and his attempt to express them.

30.  In his editio princeps of Horace’s opera (Florence: Antonio Miscomino, 1482), Cristoforo Landino comments on the dry wit of Ode 1.22, “Hoc autem probat huiusce modi argumento: . . . lupus in quem inermis inciderat statim fugit” ‘But he proves it through a facile argument something like this: a wolf that he came upon while defenseless, immediately took flight’ (sig. xxxxiiiir).

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Petrarch’s version sets out to fortify its speaker’s self-assurance. Sixteenthcentury commentators on the Rime sparse note the poem’s debt to Horace, but they bluntly disagree about its implied audience and rhetorical argument. Vellutello and Sylvano da Venafro assume that the speaker’s addressee is Laura, even though the poem does not personalize her as such. Gesualdo admits “a cui scriva il Son. non so” ‘I do not know to whom he writes this sonnet’ (sig. cciiv), and Antonio Brucioli echoes him: “Non è chiaro à chi scrive il sonetto”  ‘It is not clear to whom he writes this sonnet’ (sig. 111r). Both suggest that the speaker addresses a male friend and perhaps poetic rival to whom he brags about his rhetorical skill as well as his amatory prowess, just as he does with the Medusa figure in sonnets 179 and 197. For Brucioli the poem is a vanto ‘boast’ that promotes the very opposite of harmony and accord figured in Horace’s ode. Laura serves chiefly to define the speaker’s commitment to writing poetry. His object in writing is to outdo others in their writing. The poem’s conclusion makes it clear that, regardless of his success or failure in achieving fame, he will continue to write with passionate intensity: “ponmi con fama oscura, o con ilustre: / sarò qual fui, vivrò com’ io son visso” ‘Place me in obscurity or illustrious fame: still I shall be what I have been, shall live as I have lived’. Stampa’s rewriting of Petrarch’s argument unravels its competitive logic. Like his poem, hers implies a summons to action:

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Pommi ove ’l mar irato geme e frange,   Ov’ha l’acqua più queta e più tranquilla;   Pommi ove ’l sol più arde, e più sfavilla,   O dove il ghiaccio altrui trafige ed ange. Put me where the angry sea groans and crashes, where it has the calmest, most tranquil waters; put me where the sun burns and glares the most, or where the ice pierces and oppresses most. It’s unclear whether the speaker addresses an audience of women, or whether she includes or even primarily addresses men. But against this indeterminacy she offers several pointed and precise details. By comparison with Petrarch’s—and also Horace’s—abstract, unlocalized geography, for example, hers evokes a concrete, situation-specific locale. The poem’s second quatrain names particular sites accessible to Venetian merchants in the days of their Black Sea outposts and overland contacts with Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade: “Pommi al Tanai gelato, al freddo Gange, . . . / Ove per l’aria empio velen scintilla,” ‘Put me by the frozen Don, by the cool Ganges, . . .

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where dangerous poison sparkles in the air’. Its parallel syntactic structures encourage semantic nuance as repetitions ( pommi, ove, o dove) accumulate. The adjectives queta and empio, for example, recur in different contexts that shift their meanings from queta as ‘calm’ when it modifies acqua in line 2 to ‘peace-loving’ when it modifies gente eight lines later, and from empio as passively ‘dangerous’ when it modifies veleno in line 7, to actively ‘savage’ when it modifies fere two lines later: “Pommi ove ’l crudo Scita & empio fere, / O dove è queta gente e riposata” ‘Put me where the wild Scythian and savage beast, or where peace-loving and gentle people dwell’. Even in the parallel qual phrases of the second tercet, “Vivrò qual vissi, e sarò qual son stata” ‘I will live as I once lived and I will be as I have just been’, the verb tenses shift from a definite past remote (“qual vissi”) to a compound or “near” past (“qual son stata”), enacting a sense of motion and revision. Nothing, and perhaps by implication not even the speaker’s own declared love, remains free from the effects of time or change. The conclusion of Stampa’s poem dramatizes these effects as it moves beyond its Petrarchan and Horatian frames. After echoing Petrarch’s self-assured “vivrò com’ io son visso,” the speaker adds a cautionary “Pur che le fide mie due stelle vere / Non rivolgan da me la luce usata” ‘as long as my two true faithful stars do not turn their accustomed light away from me’. In her pursuit of renown—figured earlier as worldly achievements scored by her nobili and cittadini patrons—she has acquired access to fame by recounting the glory of her beloved’s eyes. Venetian noblemen and cittadini merchants have earned fame in exotic locales mentioned in the poem’s octave, but Stampa’s speaker assesses their achievements and finds them a bit hollow.31 For her ambitions, Collaltino’s eyes—figured in the sestet as navigational guides, her “due stelle vere”—provide illusory supports, ones that she works to replace with her literary skills, supplemented by her efforts to reach and impress a sophisticated readership. On the one hand, she adopts a Petrarchan discourse but reconfigures her role in it to advance her professional status. On the other hand, she transacts Petrarch’s internalized, competitive, and often egotistical model of achievement by replacing it with external observation, telling detail, and destabilizing qualification. Other Petrarchan tropes come under Stampa’s revisionary scrutiny, among them ones that link her beloved to the figure of Medusa. We’ve seen how 31.  See Brian Pullan, “The Occupations and Investments of the Venetian Nobility in the Middle and Late Sixteenth Century,” in Renaissance Venice, ed J. R. Hale (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 379–408; and Ugo Tucci, “The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century,” in Hale, Renaissance Venice, 346–78.

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Petrarch’s speaker claimed to disable Laura’s Medusan powers by responding to her with a “umiltà sì vera” (sonnet 179), and how he used this claim to boast of his rhetorical skills in competition with lesser poets. The trope became standard issue for a later generation of poets who embraced Bembo’s Petrarchan precepts. Among them was Stampa’s brother Baldassare, who died in 1544 at the age of nineteen while studying law in Padua. As testimony to his poetic and musical abilities, three of his sonnets appeared in Giolito’s debut anthology of 1545, nine further sonnets plus one madrigal in its 1547 follow-up, and nineteen additional sonnets in its 1550 edition. The steadily increasing number of his poems published posthumously suggests a concerted effort by his survivors to preserve interest in his work. Baldassare’s sonnet “Frena mio bene i lumi tuoi lascivi / ché’l tuo dolce guardar mi cangia in sasso” ‘Restrain, my treasured one, your profligate eyes, because your sweet glance turns me into stone’ deploys the Medusan trope in a thoroughly conventional way. Its initial quatrain importunes the beloved: “Ma non tener, ti prego, il viso basso, / ché mi fanno morir gli occhi tuoi schivi” ‘But, I beg you, do not lower your face, because your retreating eyes make me die’. The speaker moves from exclamation and entreaty to question and statement and then back again before reaching his desperate conclusion: “M’ascondi? Ah non, ma fa’ si ch’io non mora” ‘Should you hide from me? Ah no, but carry on so that I don’t die’. Baldassare omits from this poem Petrarch’s projection of an “umiltà sì vera,” but he keeps it in reserve for a later poem. There the phrase graces a sonnet that addresses the humanist scholar Ermolao Barbaro, whose “Vera umiltà con gravi modi unita / . . . ad amar voi, signor, ciascun invita” ‘True humility joined to dignified manners, beckons everyone to love you, my lord’.32 In this context, umiltà epitomizes the most deeply regarded social virtues of Venice, La Repubblica serenissima that prides itself on comity, political harmony, and unanimitas, embodying the virtues of modesty, civility, and self-restraint. From the outset, Stampa’s revisionary treatment of the Medusan motif and her hyperliterary application of the phrase “vera umiltà” differ as much from Petrarch’s archetype as they do from her brother’s salute to it. Unlike either of their speakers who inhabit a homosocial world, hers inhabits a sexually charged one. In sonnet 109, “Gioia somma, infinito, alto dileto”  ‘Supreme joy, limitless deep delight’, and sonnet 110, “Chi può contar’ il mio felice stato” ‘Who can recount my happy state’, she implicitly—and unblinkingly—shares Collaltino’s bed: “Io mi stò sempre al mio Signor’ à lato” ‘I’m always at the 32.  Its honoree could be Daniele Barbaro (1514–70) or his younger brother Marcantonio Barbaro (1518–95), both Venetian noblemen, and each notable for diplomatic service to the Republic.

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side of my lord’. But she is baffled, repulsed, and ultimately immobilized by social strictures that prevent Collaltino from participating in a fully affective life with her. In sonnet 113, “Deh foss’io almen sicura, che lo stato, / Dov’or mi trovo, non mancasse presto” ‘O if I were only sure that the state in which I now find myself would not come to a sudden end’, she proposes—like Petrarch—to adopt a demeanor of “vera humiltà,” but for precisely the opposite reasons. Mimicking the Venetian commitment to equilibrium and rapport, she neither denies Collaltino’s power over her nor accuses him of rejecting her love, but instead arouses her strength and self-sufficiency to mobilize his compassion. As Stampa’s poem unfolds, its speaker affects a “vera humiltà” to play off the personified god of Love against the personable presence of Collaltino. From the beginning, Love and Collaltino have alternated with each other in confronting and consoling her: “I ho Amore, e ’l mio Signor’ à lato; / E mi consolo hor con quello, or con questo” ‘I have Love and my lord both beside me, and I console myself now with that one, now with this’. When in the first tercet Love approaches her—“S’ Amor m’assale con la gelosia” ‘If Love assails me with jealousy’—she looks upon her beloved’s face, which is now empowered with a virtù to calm her, “Virtù, ch’ogni tormento scaccia via” ‘the power that chases away all torment’ (echoing Laura’s vertù from the final line of Petrarch’s sonnet 197, where her Medusan eyes “ànno vertù di farne un marmo” ‘have the power to turn [my heart and face] to marble’). When in the second tercet Collaltino approaches her like Perseus “con ira” ‘with hostility’, Love girds her with a display of “vera humiltà” that stops the beloved in his tracks: “Viene Amor poi con l’altra compagnia, / Vera humiltà ch’ogni alto sdegno atterra” ‘Then Love comes with its other companion, true humility that topples every vaunting disdain’. Tapping Petrarch’s cynical advice to Geri about feigned submission, but now aligning it with Love’s sympathetic counsel, Stampa’s speaker confronts Collaltino. The result is that, in her revised version of Petrarch’s poem, a show of “vera humiltà” subdues his egotism. With deference, circumspection, and self-abnegation, Stampa mobilizes the ideal of equilibrium. But with its roots in a Petrarchan subterfuge, her “vera humiltà” stages this ethos so as to expose its fault lines as a medium of social control, revealing it to be an instrument for managing people rather than uniting them. From her position as a Paduan jeweler’s daughter in love with a count from Treviso, Stampa mimes all that she could never be in upper-class Venetian society—a foil to Collaltino as his presumptive equal. Her Medusan trope casts him in the role of a Perseus who derives his strength from a surrogate armature related to birth, lineage, and the trappings of aristocratic

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­ asculinity. In the end these trappings only mask his emptiness. The result m seems less an effect of Stampa’s conjectured autobiography than of a carefully staged literary performance, one that emphasizes its fictive quality and its strategic manipulation of emotional truth. The elaborated scenario tests the collective profiles of every lover and beloved etched in Petrarchan poetry. Stampa’s fictional role, at once robustly stated and attentively embellished, conveys her awareness of responsibilities associated with literary art, and of their reconfiguration from a disciplined and thoroughly professional perspective. Sonnet 121 fantasizes a taste of the acclaim that the poet might have hoped for and perhaps even received in mid-sixteenth-century literary salons. This poem reworks Petrarch’s sonnet 248 within a Venetian context as its inflated economy of spendere largamente ‘conspicuous consumption’ with its penchant for material opulence began to replace traditional values of discipline and restraint.33 Earlier commentators had read Petrarch’s sonnets 247 and 248 in tandem as a composite defense of the writer’s art.34 Hieronimo Squarzafico imagines that the poet is explaining to his prospective patron at the Visconti court in Milan why his poetry barely conveys Laura’s perfection and how his style falls short of its aim: “Uedeua messer Francesco non hauere ditto ala sufficienza feece questo atro” ‘Petrarch seemed to think that he has not spoken sufficiently well about Laura’ (sig. K5r). Vellutello likewise restates Petrarch’s admission of his insufficient talent and his efforts to compensate for it: “A pieno et quanto bisognerebbe non n’ha saputo ne potuto dire” ‘He had neither insight nor skill to say fully what he should’ (sig. 112v).35 In Stampa’s version, Collaltino is—like Laura—a work of art-in-progress, an imagin ‘image’ of valor, an albergo ‘repository’ of cortesia ‘courtesy’, a nido ‘incubator’ of bellezza e leggiadria ‘beauty and comeliness’, and a stanza ‘room, chamber’ (but also ‘unit of verse’) that invites fame and glory: Chi vuol veder l’imagin del valore,   L’albergo de la vera cortesia,   Il nido di bellezza e leggiadria,   La stanza de la gloria alta e d’onore.

33.  The term from Paolo Paruta, Perfettione della vita politica (Venice, 1579), is quoted and freely translated as such by Peter Burke, Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth-Century Elites (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 111. 34.  See William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 107–37 and 174–78. 35.  For Brucioli the poet is a harsh critic of his own flawed style: “Et allhora dira che mie rime non dicono cosa alcuna, rispetto à quanto dire sene potrebbe” ‘And then one will say that my rhymes say nothing with respect to how much could be said about her’ (sig. 164v).

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Whoever wishes to see the image of valor, the repository of true courtesy, the incubator of beauty and comeliness, the chamber of high glory and of honor. Stampa’s octave, like Petrarch’s, urges its reader to come and gaze directly upon the beloved: “Venga a veder l’illustre mio signore” ‘Let that person come to see my illustrious lord’. Her sestet, however, qualifies this response if the viewer is a woman: Ma, s’ella è Donna, non s’affissi molto,   Ché resterà subitamente presa   Fra mille meraviglie del bel volto.

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But if she is a woman, let her not fix her attention too closely, because she will find herself suddenly caught amid the thousand wonders of his handsome countenance. Stampa’s gendering of a specifically female response to Collaltino revises Petrarch’s conclusion in which any bystander, male or female, will lament that every “cosa bella mortal passa e non dura” ‘beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure’. For Stampa, women will register a sexualized response to the “mille meraviglie” of Collaltino’s good looks. Warning that Collaltino might invite, confound, and then reject the attention of his onlookers, the speaker notes the volatility of his charms, pooling like liquid mercury and no less capricious. But her attention to what she calls his meraviglie implies her own literary aesthetic grounded in transformation and mobility. In its sixteenth-century context, meraviglie figures as a key term in a poetics of wonder, simultaneously inflecting discourses on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso by Giraldi Cinthio and Giovanni Battista Pigna and later elaborated in treatises on poetry and poetics by Antonio Minturno and Torquato Tasso.36 In Stampa’s poem, the term conveys the sheer force of Collaltino’s sexual attraction, but it also assimilates this force to the speaker’s artistry. The sonnet’s concluding tercet imagines Love as a facilitator who exploits meraviglie in a continuing venture, “Quando vuol far qualche maggior’ impresa” ‘Whenever he wishes to undertake some greater endeavor’. The “maggior’ impresa” amounts to a boast as daring as the one in Petrarch’s sonnet 248.

36.  The term meraviglia figures in Giraldi Cintio’s Discorsi intorno al comporre de i romanzi (1554), Pigna’s I romanzi (1554), Minturno’s De poeta (1559), and Tasso’s Discorsi del poema herico (1575–80, pub. 1594).

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There, the poet aspires to create a Gesammtkunstwerk capable of expressing Laura’s perfections “giunti in un corpo con mirabil’ tempre”  ‘joined together in one body with marvelous tempering’. For Petrarch, the term tempre (from temperare ‘mix, blend’) evokes the painter’s “tempered” technique of mixing finely ground pigments in a thin binder so as to obtain transparent color effects, as well as the musician’s “tempered” technique of tuning instruments in deviant intervals so as to produce tones in varying keys. Stampa assigns to Love a “maggior’ impresa” that will set in motion the coloration and musical effects of Petrarchism to represent the speaker’s emotional conflicts but also her reasoned critique of stratified social differences, poetic opportunities, and professional responsibilities. Three subsequent examples show how the speaker revises Petrarch’s goals. Each begins as a close imitation of a Petrarchan model and then focuses upon a hyperliterary detail or effect that underlines the speaker’s social, economic, and professional placement in sixteenth-century Venice. Sonnet 140, “O rive, ò lidi, che già foste porto” ‘O banks, o shores that once were a port’, for example, rewrites Petrarch’s sonnet 234, “O cameretta che già fosti un porto” ‘O little room that used to be a port’. There Petrarch’s speaker recalls the privacy of his room as an earlier refuge from conflicting desires, and he contrasts it with efforts to find solace in the company of people whom he’d otherwise avoid: “e ’l vulgo a me nemico et odioso” ‘the mob, inimical and hateful to me’. Vellutello observes: “Cerca per suo refugio lo inimico & odioso vulgo quello che in altri luoghi ha detto fuggire, per discacciar da lui gli amorosi pensieri che lo consumano” ‘In order to expel the amorous thoughts that consume him, he seeks refuge among the hostile, hateful mob, which elsewhere he professed to flee’ (sig. 78v). And Brucioli remarks: “In modo che per paura di restare solo cercava il vulgo il quale naturalmente haveva in odio”  ‘So that through fear of remaining alone he sought company that he would normally hold in contempt’ (sig. 253v). Stampa’s poem maps its reversal as part of a geographical exchange that would enable the speaker to live near Collaltino in the Piave valley. Addressing the scene of her earlier love for him on the banks and shores of Venice (perhaps recalling Petrarch’s one-time residence on the Riva degli Schiavoni a few hundred feet east of the Doge’s Palace), she evaluates its emotional significance for her now that he has returned to his country estate: “Quanta mi deste già gioia e conforto, /Tanto mi sete adhor adhor nemiche” ‘As much as you once gave me joy and comfort, so much you now become my enemies’. Then in the sestet, she renounces the urban precincts of Venice for the hills of Collalto: “Io cangerei con voi campagne, e boschi, / E colli, e fiumi là, dove dimora”  ‘I would exchange with you the fields and woods and

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hills and rivers there where he tarries’. The poem is a palinode to the cultural precincts of La Repubblica serenissima, as unanticipated in its way as Petrarch’s fraternization with the “nemico et odioso” rabble in his sonnet 234. But it reaffirms Stampa’s commitment to her literary calling even as it moves her to leave the hustle and flow of Venice. Petrarch registers his surprise in seeking out the throng with a self-regarding “chi ’l pensò mai?” ‘Who ever thought it?’ Stampa registers hers with a parenthetical “lassa, convien che’l diche!” ‘alas that I find myself saying it’, where the verb diche recharges the motor of verbal expression. Elsewhere her speaker remains as unapologetic about her alertness to professional opportunity as she does about her love for Collaltino. Sonnet 155, for example, observes the second anniversary of her speaker’s fall into love: “Due anni, e più ha già voltato il cielo / Ch’ io restai presa à l’ amoroso visco” ‘The heavens have already turned two years and more since I got caught in amorous birdlime’. Its diction recalls the anniversary in Petrarch’s sonnet 122: “Dicesette anni a già rivolto il cielo / poi che ’mprima arsi” ‘The heavens have already revolved seventeen years since I first caught fire’. There Petrarch’s speaker laments his spiritual sloth, an accedia that pares away the bulk of his years to a weary sameness. His human body, figured as a “grave velo,” casts a dark shadow over the mind’s high aspirations, leaving him earthbound: “ciò ne fa l’ombra ria del grave velo” ‘The bitter shadow of the heavy veil does that to us’. For Bernardino Daniello, “Non però una sola favilla del suo incendio si veniva à spegnere” ‘Not a single spark of his amorous fire has come to be extinguished’ (sig. 72r). For Castelvetro, even darker tones convey the speaker’s “paura d’havere offeso Dio” ‘fear of having offended God’ (221). Stampa’s anniversary poem reverses this moral typology. For Petrarch’s “grave velo” her speaker substitutes the “mortal velo” of Collaltino’s aesthetically perfect body, “Simil mai non si vide in mortal velo” ‘Whose like was never seen in mortal veil’. Petrarch’s phrase refers to the weight of his speaker’s body and construes its materiality in terms of life and death, heaven and earth, sinfulness and salvation. Stampa’s “mortal velo” conveys something different. Mortal refers to time in human terms as an experience hedged by contingency, change, and reversal, pointing to its continuity in various keys. The phrase construes life as a process of adaptation and adjustment, modification and response. Her exclamation, “dirlo ardisco”  ‘I burn to say it’, conveys the depth of her passion and her willing assent to it. Rather than hide her love, she confesses it openly: “E non mi pento, anzi glorio, e gioisco”  ‘And I do not repent; instead, I take pride and rejoice in it’. Her joy evaporates in the sestet when she considers the possibility of Collaltino’s abandonment of

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her: “Che da me si disciolga, e leghi altronde” ‘When he may break loose from me and attach himself elsewhere’. Here is the critical moment in her story, the peripety of her narrative. When Collaltino moves on—as inevitably he will when his aristocratic duties supersede the claims of a jeweler’s daughter upon him—Stampa’s speaker will move on as well, assessing her gains and losses in different terms. A third example is sonnet 173, “Cantate meco Progne, e Filomena” ‘Sing with me, Procne and Philomela’. The poem boldly aligns its speaker with Tereus’s betrayed wife and sister-in-law, reworking the perfidy done to them while vindicating the poet’s independence. The poem echoes Petrarch’s sonnet 310, a lament after Laura’s death when the change of seasons intensifies the speaker’s grief: Zefiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena, e i fiori et l’erbe, sua dolce famiglia, e garrir Progne et pianger Philomena.

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Zephyrus returns and leads back the fine weather and the flowers and the grass, his sweet family, and chattering Procne and weeping Philomela, and Spring. Stampa’s recall of this model coincides with an early signal of Collaltino’s departure. From Petrarch’s second tercet, her speaker echoes chiasmic inversions that make the time of renewal seem barren to the lover. In Petrarch’s poem, the singing of birds, flowering of meadows, and above all “’n belle donne honeste atti soavi”  ‘virtuous gentle gestures in beautiful ladies’ become “un deserto, et fere aspre et selvagge” ‘a wilderness and cruel, savage beasts’. In this transposition to a dead landscape, Petrarch moves from the sexual drama of Procne and Philomela to the cosmic tragedy of Proserpina, the daughter of Jupiter and Demeter, whom Jupiter’s brother Pluto carried off to the underworld as Petrarch intimates in line 6. After negotiating her return to earth every spring, “Giove s’allegra di mirar sua figlia” ‘Jupiter is gladdened looking at his daughter’.37 Proserpina’s arrival from Hades recalls

37.  This gesture is burdened with incestuous overtones by commentators who identify “sua filia” with the erotic appeal of Venus. Gesualdo speculates that Jove’s daughter is Venus (sig. cccxxxvir), and so does Vellutello by associating her with April, the month that is sacred to Venus: “Giove si diletta di veder primavera, laquale è del mese d’aprile dedicato a Venere figlia di Giove” ‘Jupiter is pleased to see spring, which is the month of April dedicated to his daughter Venus’ (sig. 131v). Sylvano da Venafro identifies her as Proserpina: “Noi l’intendiamo per Proserpina” ‘We take her to be Proserpina’ (sig. clxxxxv).

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by contrast the impossibility of Laura’s return, whence Petrarch’s despair in the concluding tercet. Stampa’s poem alludes to both myths in ways that aim to shore up her confidence.38 An appearance of social equipoise conditions her treatment of Procne and Philomela’s plight. First, the speaker asserts her parity with the royal princesses based on their shared talents as musicians: “Cantate meco Procne, e Filomena, / Anzi piangete il mio grave martìre” ‘Sing with me, Procne and Philomela, or rather weep my terrible suffering’. Procne and Philomela were daughters of King Pandion, and one of them had married King Tereus to propagate his royal line.39 Collaltino is a nobleman of Treviso ancestry, and he too is expected to marry a woman with social accreditation to secure his family line.40 Stampa’s persona is, well, just a jeweler’s daughter from Padua, with some claims to Venetian status through her mother, but with no obvious rank or wealth to sustain her among the nobili and cittadini of the patrician Republic. She can nurture only an emotional attachment to the Count of Treviso, exclusive of any marital commitment to him and with no social, political, or economic capital to sustain her. She does, however, treat this situation as a theme for her writing. The example of Proserpina figures as it does in Petrarch’s poem. Like Proserpina, Stampa’s speaker finds herself in the custody of a man who attends to her at his pleasure, but his frequent absences inflict upon her a kind of death: “A me l’acerbo, e crudo dipartire / Del mio Signore morte empia rimena” ‘For me the bitter, cruel departure of my lord leads back to a pitiless death’. Inverting Proserpina’s story where the mythological figure periodically joins her husband in a barren underworld, Stampa’s speaker is wholly separated from her beloved in opulent Venice, where the compensations of art, culture, and poetic achievement nonetheless foster her sense of professional identity and self-worth. This analogy casts an oblique shadow: 38.  Georgius Sabinus (Georg Schuler) summarizes an allegorization of Ovid’s episode recounted by Lorenzo Valla in his De voluptate, according to which Procne and Philomela are compensated for the outrage done to them by being turned into birds with the gift of song: “Porro hoc loco observandum est, quod Laurentius Valla de Voluptate lib. 3 refert: has duas intellixisse Oratoriam & Poeticam quae prope sorores sint.” Ovid, Metamorphoses seu fabulae peticcae, with commentary by Georgius Sabinus (Georg Schuler) (Frankfort: J. Wechel, 1589 [1555]; reprint New York: Garland, 1976), 214–15. 39.  Accounts of the story differ. In Apollodorus’s narrative promoted by Roman mythographers and alluded to by Gesualdo, Philomela is the wife, while in Ovid’s version Procne is the wife. In either case, the identity of one victim blurs into that of the other, signaling the loss of agency and identity experienced by both. 40.  For tensions between consensual marriage and parental authority debated at the Council of Trent, see Daniela Hacke, Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 89–118; for patrician marriage as an object of state concern in early sixteenth-century Venice, see Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 53–75.

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just as Proserpina presided over a gloomy underworld for half the year, so Stampa presides in a salon society where some participants admire her poetic talents and others disparage them. These talents are her passport to a privileged milieu, and at the poem’s end the speaker vows to cultivate them “Con quanto stile, & arte potrò farlo” ‘with as much style and art as I can’. Yet another premonition of Collaltino’s departure emerges in sonnet 179, before he vanishes from the sequence at sonnet 200 (199), beyond which 110 poems remain. Four of these poems (sonnets 201–4 [200–203]) bring closure to Collaltino’s departure by recounting the speaker’s mourning for his absence. Sonnets 205–19 (207–21) depict her emerging relationship with a man named Bartolomeo Zen. The speaker’s new affair churns up memories of Collaltino that surface in sonnet 211 (209) on the Christmas morning anniversary of her first love: “Io non veggio giamai giunger quel giorno / ove naque Colui, che carne prese . . . / Che non me risovenga il modo ornato”  ‘I never see that day return when He was born, who took on human flesh, . . . that I do not recall the magnetic attraction’. Experience alerts her to caution. In sonnet 215 (214), she contemplates the possibility of a second rejection, “Sì che l’alma si vive anco in timore, / Ch’esser devrebbe omai sicura, e balda” ‘So that my soul, which ought now to be assured and bold, lives once more in fear’. But Zen is a man of piety and virtue, and in sonnet 219 (221) the speaker’s instincts pulsate with fervent love—“Un foco eguale al primo foco io sento” ‘I feel a flame equal to the first’. We don’t know the extent to which Stampa personally selected and arranged the Rime that her sister published in 1554, but it’s clear that the final third of her collection reaffirms the poet’s commitment to her poetic career, and her care in redacting, revising, and reworking her art. I’ve already pointed to sonnets 221–73 (246–95, in somewhat different order) that address or mention other poets, writers, musicians, patrons, and artists, situating the author in their august company. In forty other poems, Stampa lends her virtuosity to various genres. They include eight terza-rima capitoli about women’s honor and the consolations of religion (286–90 [241–45] and 291, 220, and the perhaps misattributed 298 [296–98]); one canzone and four sonnets about a nun who had died (canzone 229 [299] and sonnets 230–33 [300–303]); and eight sonnets (275–82 [304–11, in slightly different order]) about Jesus’s love for humankind, the speaker’s hope for salvation, and her turn toward penitence. A sequence of nineteen madrigals (292–310 [222–40]) concludes the original volume by reaffirming the power of love. The reentry of Stampa’s speaker into the field of love is anything but casual, and we might understand it as anticipating another yet unheralded amatory involvement. Beyond this vague possibility, one probability remains

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certain. It is that Stampa would continue to negotiate her literary skills with the demands of her craft, embellishing her poetry with song in new musical styles, and experimenting with alternative modes as they continued to emerge. The social practices and cultural traditions of mid-sixteenth-century Venice barred her from experiencing some kinds of romantic attachment while they invited her to participate in other kinds of artistic collaboration and professional fulfillment. Dealing with whole-scale betrayals and half-understood responses to them, her poetry aims to make sense of a world where the choice is to bend or to break. Ultimately Stampa’s willingness to adapt to this reality embodies the ideology of La Repubblica serenissima in as heightened a form as the iconic figure of the doge himself. In the world that Stampa’s Rime sketches, the speaker’s stance on Venetian mores is nonspeculative, free from denial, neither pro nor con, just seeking out the tangible elements and displaying them dispassionately. In this sense, the jeweler’s daughter really did sing for the doge, and better than even she might have thought. Such was the consolation of literary recognition as it emerged from an aesthetics and economics of consummate professionalism.

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Ch ap ter 4

Incommensurate Gifts

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Michelangelo and the Economy of Revision

In spring 1506 after a bitter quarrel with Pope Julius II over payments for the latter’s tomb, Michelangelo left Rome for the Florentine Republic. According to his earliest biographers Giorgio Vasari (1550, rev. 1568) and Ascanio Condivi (1553), he considered going to Constantinople to serve Sultan Beijazid II, who invited him there to design a bridge across the Golden Horn.1 The pope’s niggardliness played upon the artist’s sense of his economic worth, sparked as it was by his sense that (according to Vasari) “the money he possessed . . . came not from rents [as a nobleman] or trade [as a merchant] but was earned by the sweat of his brow as a reward for his studies and labours” (1:424). As a sculptor, painter, and architect, Michelangelo worked with his hands and “by the sweat of his brow.” But he complemented this work with intellectual “studies and theological explorations which he confidently believed no other artist had attained” (1:424). The call to Topkapi surely played upon his sense of competition with other artists, especially since four years earlier Leonardo da’ Vinci had been asked to launch the same project. But his familiarity with 1.  Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 1:346; quotations from this translation. Compare the parallel account in Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 37. For detailed commentary, see Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, 5 vols. (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1962). 100

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both pope and sultan played above all on Michelangelo’s fantasy of patrician ancestry. More than anything, this fantasy shaped the artist’s revisionary sense of his professional worth. Michelangelo’s father, Lodovico, “was said to be related to the most noble and ancient family of the counts of Canossa” (1:326), and the artist embellished this lineage by tracing it to Countess Matilde of Tuscany.2 Lodovico had been the grandson of a successful banker but the son of an unsuccessful one. When the family’s fortunes declined, he derived some revenue from a farm in Settignano and from occasional government posts, but soon “he found himself, as he enjoyed only a modest income, in very difficult circumstances and he had to place his sons in turn with the Wool and Silk Guilds” (1:326).3 The young Michelangelo, preoccupied with his sketch book to the detriment of his formal education, “used to be scolded and sometimes beaten by his father and the older members of the family, who thought it unworthy of their ancient house for him to give his time to an art that meant nothing to them” (1:326)—an art that seemed unlikely to improve either their social or economic standing. When he studied with Ghirlandaio, his father refused to apprentice him in the usual manner because he considered apprenticeships inappropriate for aristocrats.4 Upon maturing, Michelangelo refused to join any artists’ guild for the same reason. Later in his account Vasari contrasts Michelangelo’s public reputation for thrift with his personal habits of discipline and austerity and his aversion to a gift economy: “Although he became very rich he lived like a poor man; . . . nor would he ever accept gifts from anyone, because he feared that this would place him under some kind of permanent obligation” (1:423). Still, Vasari emphasizes his generosity to friends, family, servants, and associates by presenting to them many gift drawings, cartoons, illustrations, pictorial designs, and architectural sketches for which he could otherwise “have obtained thousands of crowns” (1:424). These included mythological drawings and erotic poems sent to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri—a handsome young Roman nobleman thirty-four years his junior—and crucifixion drawings and penitential poems sent to Vittoria Colonna, a learned and talented

2.  Condivi identifies this pious eleventh-century defender of the papacy as a niece of Emperor Henry II. For Michelangelo’s ancestry, see William E. Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 28–39. 3.  For the family’s wealth and Michelangelo’s deployment of it, see Rab Hatfield, The Wealth of Michelangelo (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002), 201–34. 4.  For his study with Ghirlandaio, see Wallace, Michelangelo, 51–52, and Michael Hirst, Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame, 1475–1534 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 7–11. For an assessment of his family’s means at the time, see Hatfield, Wealth of Michelangelo, 145–51.

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Roman noblewoman fifteen years his junior, widow of Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos, Marchese of Pescara.5 Their contents betray an unguarded intersection of social, sexual, economic, and religious forces. Expressing personal intimacy with these recipients, the artist’s presentations suggest that his economic standing, if not exactly on a par with that of his benefactors, at least matches theirs in some reciprocal way and cancels his need for direct support from them. Their bestowal makes him appear independent, godlike, shadowing God’s providential gifts of grace to errant humanity, which themselves assert an incommensurable distance between human and divine. Inscribing this distance through an economy of authorial revision in successive drafts, Michelangelo’s poems to both Cavalieri and Colonna register the artist’s psychological turmoil as well as his self-discipline, and they locate the basis of his art in craftsmanship and technique rather than intuition or inspiration.6 These poems, along with the drawings that accompanied them, trace a pattern of “deferred action” that brings to the surface the artist’s ambivalence about his social inferiority on the one hand and his emotional attachments to the recipients on the other.7 This pattern describes, first, an imperfectly comprehended and spontaneously repressed traumatic event and, second, a revived memory of the event and—through subsequent analysis of it—some insight into its significance. In Cavalieri’s case, the event concerns Michelangelo’s erotic reaction to the young man’s good looks and sexual magnetism, which the artist stifles in the name of self-discipline. In Colonna’s case, it concerns his pious reaction to the marchioness’s interest in theological doctrine and his caution about its implications for devotional reform. In both cases the agents of understanding prove to be poetry and art. As a poet and visual artist he tries to replicate the event in ways that clarify the stages of his repressed attraction and involuntary submission. Petrarchan poetry enables him to understand his reactions, while acts of revising his own verse help him 5.  For Michelangelo’s friendship with Cavalieri, see Hirst, Michelangelo, 260–63, Wallace, Michelangelo, 169–80, and Lisa Regan, “Give and Take: Michelangelo and the Drawings for Tommaso Cavalieri” in Bilder der Liebe, Begehren, und Geschlechterverhältnisse in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Doris Guth and Elisabeth Priedl, (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012), 271–300. For his friendship with Colonna, see Wallace, Michelangelo, 210–21, and Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 67–100; for his written correspondence with both of them, see Deborah Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter-Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 48, 88–90, 116–17, and 130–32. 6.  For Michelangelo’s canon of poems addressed to Cavalieri, see Christopher Ryan, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Introduction (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 94–99; for those addressed to Colonna, see 130–33. 7.  The concept of “deferred action” derives from Sigmund Freud’s History of an Infantile Neurosis (“ Wolf Man”) (1918), in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 17:110.

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to sublimate Cavalieri’s and Colonna’s impact on him in socially acceptable forms. Michelangelo’s gift drawings sent to Cavalieri, some of them accompanied by his poems, exemplify the process. The artist presented Cavalieri with at least three drawings, each rendered in pencil and black chalk on granulated paper, one depicting The Rape of Ganymede (Fogg Museum, Harvard University), another The Fall of Phaeton (Windsor, Royal Library), and a third The Punishment of Tityus (Windsor, Royal Library).8 Executed between January and the summer of 1533, all three evoke thematic concerns about social elevation, contact with divinity, and the contamination of presumption with despair, of sublimity with depravity, and of pleasure with pain. Taken collectively, they depict an overdetermined sequence of rise (the young Ganymede’s elevation by Jupiter), fall (the young Phaeton’s plunge from the sky), and punishment (the giant Tityus disemboweled in Hades for trying to rape Latona), but they also invert references to the age and social status of both the artist and Cavalieri in bono and in malo. Each summons further questions about the signifying power of their principal figures and the identities of the giver and receiver. In the Introduction, I’ve referred to Michelangelo’s earlier drawing of Archers Shooting at a Herm. From the same period his incomplete, unrevised, hastily penciled sonnet 39 invokes the trope of Cupid’s arrow as a welcome shot that wounds and heals the speaker’s heart: “Del fiero colpo e del pungente strale / la medicina era passarmi ’l core” ‘The cure for his fierce blow and piercing arrow was for it to pass through my heart’.9 An echo of Petrarch’s sonnet 164 with its estimation of Laura’s impact as “una man sola mi risana et punge”‘one hand alone heals me and pierces me’ is unmistakable, and Antonio Brucioli’s comment on it is pertinent. Despite the torment that Petrarch suffers, Laura brings him peace: “Onde raccoglie che da lei viene il dolcie e l’amaro, cioè la pena amorosa et il conforto” ‘Whence he recognizes that from her comes both the sweet and the bitter, that is, amorous pain and 8.  See Michael Hirst, Michelangelo’s Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 111–17, and Paul Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle (London: LundHumphries, 1996), 55–57, 64–65, 72–74. The Fall of Phaeton exists in three versions, the second of which (Accademia in Venice) was acknowledged by Cavalieri in a letter of 6 September 1533. Vasari indicates that “Michelangelo did a portrait of Tommaso in a life-size cartoon, but neither before nor afterwards did he do any other portrait from life, because he hated drawing any living subject unless it were of exceptional beauty” (1:420). 9.  Quotations from Michelangelo’s poetry refer to his Rime, ed. Enzo Noè Girardi (Bari: Laterza, 1960). Translations are my own, with a great debt to earlier translations by Joseph Tusiani (New York: Humanities Press, 1969); Creighton Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); James M. Saslow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Anthony Mortimer (London: Penguin, 2007).

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comfort’ (sig. 120r). Michelangelo carries the healing action further when Cupid’s messenger commands the speaker “Ama, anz’ardi; ché mi muore / non ha da gire al ciel nel mondo altr’ale” ‘Love, or rather, burn; because I, who am dying, am one who has no other wings on earth to reach heaven’. Corporeal beauty in bono provides access to the divine, however much in malo it may stimulate the senses to depravity. To reinforce the point, the verso of the poem’s manuscript page presents a sketch of the resurrected Jesus.10 Among Petrarch’s commentators, Brucioli plays a special role in relation to Michelangelo. His commentary on the Rime sparse, published in 1548 and notable for its cross-references to scripture, moral philosophy, and Christian doctrine, would mirror some of Michelangelo’s own convictions about faith and individual conscience, the workings of divine grace, and the merits of prayer and good works, and it would test the poet-artist’s attachments with sometimes disturbing results. Michelangelo knew Brucioli personally, possibly from their days in Florence before he was exiled for an alleged conspiracy against Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the future pope Clement VII.11 After visiting France where he encountered the work of the evangelical humanist Lefevre d’Etaples and other Erasmians supported by Marguerite de Navarre, Brucioli moved to Venice. There he published a series of Dialoghi della morale philosofia (1526, 1538), partial translations of the New Testament (1530) and Old Testament (1532), the entire Psalms (1534), and nine volumes of commentary on scripture (1540–46).12 Because of his association with John Calvin in 1536 at the Ferrarese court of Ercole II d’Este and Renée of France, Brucioli fell under a cloud of suspicion for heresy. While in these years Brucioli was developing a Reformist theology that would inflect his commentary on Petrarch, Michelangelo was evolving attitudes toward his own life and art in partial response to his readings of Petrarch and Dante as reflected in his poetry. Not only had political turbulence in the early 1530s curtailed some of Michelangelo’s productivity, but sheer exhaustion after working on his San Lorenzo project in Florence from 1516 to 1534 had done so as well. Those years represent his maturation from the project’s general manager to an artistic impresario who shed his reputation as a solitary genius to collaborate with 10.  See Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence, 64–65. 11.  For his friendship with Brucioli, see Michelangelo Buonarroti, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), 3:284–85. For comment, see Wallace, Michelangelo, 200–201, and Hirst, Michelangelo, 239. 12.  He also published Italian translations of Cicero’s Rhetoric (1538) and Aristotle’s De anima (1554) and an edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1542); see Giorgio Spini, Tra rinascimento e riforma: Antonio Brucioli (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1940).

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over three hundred skilled workers on a massive work in progress.13 His visit to Rome in 1532 when he met Cavalieri and his permanent move there in 1534 allowed some respite that is signaled by the dramatic increase in his production of poetry. Writing bought time for self-reflection even if the latter incurred some belated self-doubt. After settling permanently in that city two years later, he met Vittoria Colonna in 1536 or 1538, possibly introduced to her by Cavalieri after she moved there as a visitor in the convent of San Silvestro, and around the same time he met Luigi Del Riccio, a Florentine banking agent who worked in Rome and would manage the artist’s business interests. Del Riccio encouraged Michelangelo’s writing and in the 1540s helped him to assemble some poems for a publishing venture cut short by the deaths of Del Riccio and Colonna in 1546–47. The poet-artist’s brigata of Cavalieri, Colonna, and Del Riccio, his entrepreneurial activities in Rome, his revisionary focus on self-definition and self-critique, his many drafts and revisions of his poems, and his evolving reflections on art and the artistic process reach full flower during these years. From the beginning, Michelangelo’s poems to Cavalieri teem with wordplay on his name, much like Petrarch’s wordplay on Laura’s name, with puns abounding on social, cultural, economic, and religious registers. As the noun cavaliere means ‘cavalier, horseman, knight’, it conveys the young man’s ancestral origins in the old Roman nobility. By transference, it evokes Michelangelo’s fantasies about his own ancestral origins and the all-too-real decline of his family’s fortunes. Other resonances link the speaker to his addressee in shifting and inverted relationships. In bono, the speaker imagines Cavalieri as a feudal lord, and himself as a vassal who serves with unstinting loyalty. In malo, the speaker imagines himself as Cavalieri’s social inferior in his professional role as an artist deemed unbefitting by his family and in provoking the young man’s condescension. Cavalieri’s name calls forth the Latin verb cavillari ‘to jeer at, scorn’, or the related legal term cavilla ‘frivolous or sophistical objection’, suggesting insults that the young man may heap upon the artist. The honorific appellation Signor accorded to Cavalieri evokes a sovereign ‘Lord’ who in bono nourishes and sustains those in his charge, or in malo exacts duty, obligation, and even revenge as a tyrannical master. In a religious context, Signor evokes God, the divine Lord who alternately dispenses the gift of grace

13.  See William Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 189–94, and Wallace, “Certain of Death: Michelangelo’s Late Life and Art,” Renaissance Quarterly 68 (2015): 1–32. For the political turbulence alluded to above, see John Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200 –1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 446–68.

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or the punishment of hell.14 An additional resonance comes from Petrarch’s identification of his Signor as Cupid, the Lord of Love who treats the speaker as a nemico ‘enemy’. Against these possibilities—playful, puckish, and teasing, as well as solemn, stern, urgent, and self-revealing—Michelangelo plays on the young man’s given name “Tommaso.” Derived from Aramaic Ta’oma’ ‘twin’, it kindles a doppelgänger effect that points in bono to the speaker’s fantasy of attaining social parity with Cavalieri, and in malo, through its scriptural identification with doubting Thomas, to his dubiety in the presence of a handsome, sophisticated, but sometimes dauntingly aloof nobleman. Sonnet 58, “Se l’immortal desio, c’alza e corregge / gli altrui pensier” ‘If immortal desire, which raises and corrects the thoughts of other people’— possibly his earliest poem to Cavalieri—seals its argument about the speaker’s desio with a conditional verb (farie, an archaic form of farebbe) that expresses a wishful possibility: “Forse c’ancor nella casa d’Amore / farie pietoso chi spietato regge” ‘Perhaps even yet [this desire] would move to pity the one who reigns pitiless in the House of Love’. Sense experience limits human understanding, an idea that the speaker conveys through a trope of writing and reading that problematizes its clarity: “Non può ’l senso suo lode o suo valore / appien descriver quel c’appien non legge” ‘One’s senses cannot fully write [de-scriver ‘describe’] the [soul’s] praise or worth that they do not fully read’. At this point syntactic complications limit Cavalieri’s response:

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Dunche, oilmè! come sarà udita la casta voglia che ’l cor dentro incende da chi sempre se stesso in altrui vede? Hence, alas, how will the chaste wish that burns within my heart be heard by one who always sees himself in others? Strikingly, this tercet incorporates a late revision. Originally the speaker had represented himself as defective in perceiving and reporting upon Cavalieri’s worth: “Ché s’al diuin conciecto non arriua, / megli’è tacere assai che dirne poco” ‘For if one does not attain the divine idea, it is better to fall silent than to say too little’.15 The penultimate line of the revised tercet refers to Cavalieri who too easily credits what other people see. Someone has now spread 14. For religious contexts, see Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 169–87. 15.  For successive drafts, see Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 212–14; for the visible conditions of Michelangelo’s handwriting in his revisions as “pictures” of his mental processes, see Leonard Barkan, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 243–53.

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menzogne ‘lies’ that stigmatize the speaker’s love for him as carnal rather than chaste. The young man becomes “mie signor ch’alle menzogne attende” ‘my lord who listens to falsehoods’. His doubt about the speaker’s intention is no longer a product of faulty expression, but of malicious gossip. This displacement of blame onto a prevaricating third party recasts the speaker’s efforts as truthful and honest, bolstering his confidence to reveal his love. In two poems that follow, the speaker’s submission to his signor elicits his immolation. Sonnet 61 borrows from Petrarch the trope of the beloved as a phoenix whose flame ignites the lover, incinerates him, and then allows him to return to life with a new and heightened vitality:16 S’i’ avessi creduto al primo sguardo di quest’alma fenice al caldo sole rinnovarmi per foco.

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If I had believed that, at the first glimpse of this blessed phoenix, I’d renew myself by fire in his warm sun. Echoing Petrarch’s sonnet 321, “E questo ’l nido in che la mia fenice” ‘Is this the nest where my phoenix’, in which Laura “sotto le sue ali il mio cor tenne” ‘kept my heart beneath her wings’ (here evoking Psalm 17:8, “Hide me under the shadow of thy wings”), Michelangelo’s speaker imagines that the young man raises him to sublime heights “s’or di pari a volo / seco m’impenna a seguir suo virtute” ‘if now, side by side with him in flight, he lends me wings to emulate his virtue’. Curiously, however, the poem’s action dramatizes an apparently casual and even mundane encounter with Cavalieri.17 The latter, his “angel lieto” ‘happy angel’, restores his emotional salute ‘health’ (from Latin salus) simply by greeting him (salutare ‘wish health to someone’) in a friendly manner. Sonnet 62, “Sol pur col foco il fabbro il ferro stende”‘Only with fire does the smith flatten iron’, returns to the trope of the phoenix that immolates itself, this time of its own volition: “Né l’unica fenice sé riprende / se non prim’arsa” ‘Nor does the unique phoenix revive itself unless first it burns’. It appears that Cavalieri has begun to allow the speaker some fellowship 16.  See Petrarch’s sonnets 165 and 321 and canzoni 135.1–15 and 207.27–39. For Petrarch’s figure of the phoenix, see J. Christopher Warner, The Augustinian Epic: Petrarch to Milton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 11–19. 17.  In a similar way, Brucioli secularizes Petrarch’s poem by construing nido as a reference to Laura’s home near Avignon: “Essendo guinto nella casa doue habitaua M. L., doue non la hauendo trovata dolendosi dice” ‘Having arrived at the house where Laura lived, and not finding her there, he laments’ (sig. 204v).

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with him: “Ch’io converso in foco / sie, come fie che seco non mi porti?” ‘That I might be transformed in fire, how should it be unless he carries me up with himself?’ This transformation is Cavalieri’s gift to him, one that implies a measure of reciprocity between giver and receiver.18 Or so it might seem. The speaker’s sudden swerve comes almost as a surprise, as though some recognition had taken hold and prompted him to question whether the menzogne that others are spreading about him may after all carry some grain of truth. In the face of this questioning, he recedes to an act of faith in Cavalieri’s good will toward him. A similar recognition pervades sonnet 72, “Se nel volto per gli occhi il cor si vede” ‘If the heart is seen in the face through the eyes’. Its first quatrain playfully suggests that the young man possesses the power of God, the divine Signor, to read the speaker’s heart through his eyes and grant him mercy: “Basti or questo, / signor mie caro, a domandar mercede” ‘Let this flame suffice, my dear lord, to ask for your mercy’. The poem unfolds as one of the most extensively revised of Michelangelo’s poems, existing in five separate versions (two of which incorporate three further subsets of revisions).19 Most of its revisions pare down repeated phrases (“per gli occhi,” duplicated in lines 1 and 3 of version I), eliminate extended copia (“Miserere di me, pietà, mercede!” version I, line 5), refine the corporeal references (version IIIb refers to “il pecto e ’l collo al mie signiore,” which is dropped in favor of “il desïato mie dolce signore”), and standardizes the tu rather than voi form of address throughout the poem.20 One substantive correction occurs in its final line, sealing the poem’s Pauline theology. Here the speaker’s “pronte e stanche braccia” ‘ready and weak arms’ become his “indegnie e pronte braccia” ‘unworthy and ready arms’ (version IIIc) dependent upon God’s mercy. An equally freighted Pauline phrase, “non già per mie merto” ‘not through my own merit’, enters into the poem’s third redaction (IIIb) where it appears at the beginning of the second tercet and reinforces a line at the end of the octave that remains unchanged in each version. This invariant line evokes Cavalieri’s capacity to take pity on the speaker and compares his mercy to God’s power to confer grace: “Come grazia c’abbonda a chi ben chiede” ‘Like grace that

18.  For Michelangelo’s distrust of obligation, see Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter-Writing, 87–115. 19.  See Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Giraldi, 233–36 and 519–23. The poem’s final version appears in Vaticano Latino 3211, a codex in the Vatican Library comprised of fair copies produced by the artist’s friends along with some of his own drafts. For a careful study of this codex, see Barkan, Michelangelo, 235–86. 20.  For Michelangelo’s modes of revision, see Glauco Cambon, Michelangelo’s Poetry: Fury of Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 128–55.

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abounds for one who truly asks’. Echoing St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 5:20, “Ubi autem abundavit delictum, superabundavit gratia” ‘Nevertheles where sinne abunded, there grace abunded muche more’, this verse situates the poem in a context of Reformation debates about the primacy of faith and God’s grace over humanly attained works and earned merit, for which St. Paul’s epistle serves as a proof text. Grace comes through God’s election, as Martin Luther argued, but in Michelangelo’s redactions God’s will is neither so arbitrary nor so indifferent to human input as Luther had claimed. As implied by the not-socasual phrase in line 8, “a chi ben chiede” ‘for one who truly asks’, human effort counts for something. The economy of grace is no one-way street: it instead operates through a countereconomy of give-and-take, performance and renewal, a gift from God that responds to an individual’s personal effort. At this point, as though to deflect any worldly, much less erotic association conveyed by the poem’s sonnet form, an explicit allusion to one of Petrarch’s Rime in morte di Laura takes over: “O felice quel dì” ‘Oh happy that day’. These words remain unchanged in each redacted version of Michelangelo’s poem, and positioned at the beginning of its sestet, they repeat verbatim Petrarch’s exclamation at precisely the same point in his sonnet 349, where the speaker imagines his reunion with Laura in heaven: O felice quel dì che, del terreno carcere uscendo, lasci rotta e sparta questa mia grave et frale et mortal gonna.

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Oh happy that day when, going forth from my earthly prison, I may leave broken and scattered this heavy, frail, and mortal garment of mine. Petrarch’s speaker expresses his longing with a homophonic wordplay on the beloved’s message or messenger (messo) sent from heaven (“E’ mi par d’hor in ora udire il messo” ‘I seem at every moment to hear the messenger’) and his own sense of moral diminution (dimesso) and banishment (messo) felt on earth (“et sono in non molt’anni sì dimesso . . . tutto ’l viver usato ò messo in bando”  ‘and in just a few years I have been reduced . . . I have banished all my accustomed life’). Tightening this utterance in a tangle of repetition, Petrarch’s poem foretells its speaker’s liberation from demands of the flesh (both a carcere ‘prison’ and a gonna ‘garment’), the latter now as rotta ‘torn’ and sparta ‘scattered’ as the Rime sparse themselves. Commenting on Petrarch’s poem, Brucioli refers to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, as though to iterate Michelangelo’s “grazia c’abbonda.” Paul is exhorting his readers to wake up, for “the night is past; . . . let us therefore cast away the workes of darkenes [opera tenebrarum]” (Romans

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13:12). In Brucioli’s paraphrase, Petrarch welcomes “quel di che si parta da queste tenebre terrene” ‘the day that emerges from these earthly shadows’ (sig. 225v), associating the metaphor of flesh as a prison (“terreno carcere”) with Paul’s proclamation that “when we were in the flesh, the motions of sinnes, which were by the Law, had force in our membres” (7:5). Michelangelo correlates Petrarch’s “felice quel dì” with St. Paul’s “grazia c’abbonda” ‘grace that abounds’ in the poem’s final verse when the speaker—without any merit of his own—fantasizes cradling this signor/Signor forever in his arms: Acciò ch’i’ abbi, e non già per mie merto, il desïato mie dolce signore per sempre nell’indegne e pronte braccia.

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So that I might have, and not even through my own merit, my longed-for sweet lord forever in my unworthy but yet ready arms. This reward appears profane in its verbal expression, transgressive in its erotic import, and challenging in its theological implications. In the late Middle Ages, the figure of ready arms referred primarily to Mary, the mediatrix of grace, a role that was imaged in conventional representations of the Pietà with Jesus reclining in her arms, as in Michelangelo’s own sculptural versions of the Pietà, early and late.21 Sonnet 72 replaces the Madonna’s arms with those of the poet-lover in whose bosom the young signor rests. The speaker becomes a direct recipient of Cavalieri’s grace and an active collaborator in receiving it through his personal relationship with the young man. The situation finds an analogue in Petrarch’s sonnet 241 where the lover receives Cupid’s arrow in a painful but not ungratifying moment of recognition and then collaborates with Love in securing his relationship with the beloved: L’alto signor dinanzi a cui non vale nasconder né fuggir, né difesa, di bel piacer m’avea la mente accesa con un ardente et amoroso strale. That high lord before whom one cannot hide or flee or make any defense had kindled my mind to sweet pleasure with a burning arrow of love. 21. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 143–68 and 202–15.

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When Laura begins to weep, Petrarch is struck by “una saetta di pietate” ‘a dart of pity’, or—in Brucioli’s paraphrase—“per la compassione che haveva del suo dolore” ‘by the compassion that he had for her suffering’ (sig. 161v). At the end, in a deferred action signaled by the adverb anzi, Petrarch recognizes that his desire does not abate but “anzi per la pietà cresce ’l desio” ‘rather my pity increases my desire’. Michelangelo recasts this deferred action in his fragment-sonnet 74, which consists of two quatrains drafted on the sheet with his final revision of sonnet 72: “I’ piango, i’ ardo, i’ mi consumo, e ’l core / di questo si nutrisce. O dolce sorte!” ‘I weep, I burn, I waste away, and yet my heart is nourished by this. O sweet destiny!’ Here Cupid knows when to mitigate the pain of his wounding arrow: “Ahi! crudele arcier, tu sai ben l’ore / da far tranquille l’angosciose e corte / miserie nostre” ‘O cruel archer, you know when to calm our anguished and bitter miseries’. In sonnet 77, “Se ’l foco fusse alla bellezza equale / degli occhi vostri, che da que’ si parte” ‘If the fire that radiates from them were equal to the beauty of your eyes’, the speaker experiences pain and pleasure from Cupid’s “acceso strale” ‘burning arrow’, and he apologizes for the incommensurability between Cavalieri’s good looks and his feeble efforts to represent them in his art: “Non è par dunche il foco alla beltate” ‘So my fire is not equal to your beauty’. In a small but significant revision, the reason that he adduces for his “poca capacità” ‘slight capacity’ is that an artist can express only part “del bel del ciel, ch’è da lui inteso” ‘of heaven’s beauty that he can understand’.22 The word bel ‘beauty’, referring to the effect of heavenly grace, replaces ben ‘beneficence’, referring to the cause of all earthly goodness, virtue, and love. This economy of heavenly grace parallels the economy of Michelangelo’s mundane gift-giving now to Cavalieri and later to Vittoria Colonna. Unconstrained, freely disposed, inviting reciprocation yet also implying the impossibility of any complete reciprocation, Michelangelo’s poems and especially his gift drawings invite their recipients to understand them on competing levels of figurative meaning. The most famous of his gift drawings depicts the young Ganymede’s ascent to Mt. Olympus, borne aloft by Jupiter in the shape of a rapacious eagle. But problems of interpretation set in if we associate Cavalieri specifically with the boy and Michelangelo with Jupiter (implying that the artist is a kind of god). Xenophon had etymologized Gany­ mede’s name in bono as γάνυσθαι ‘to enjoy’ and μήδεα ‘mind, intelligence’, casting the action as a Neoplatonic allegory of the mind’s ascent to a state

22.  See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 236–37.

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of divine furor (Symposium 8.30).23 An alternative etymology for Ganymede’s name in malo derives from γάνυσθαι ‘to enjoy’ and μέθη ‘drunkenness’, interpreting the boy as inebriated and Jupiter as an abusive sodomist.24 Such alternative constructions of meaning could apply to the figures in his other gift drawings. For example, The Fall of Phaeton (Windsor, Royal Library) recounts the tragic consequences of what happened when the young and attractive Phaeton transported the sun across the earth’s sky. His defiance of human limitations amounts to presumption. Specifically, it results from Phaeton’s boast about his divine ancestry, his wish to affirm a privileged status, and his attempt to display his exalted origins by misusing the gift of horses that his father Apollo provided. It seems clear that this arrogant young man could stand for any aristocrat with unseemly pretensions, whether the self-styled patrician artist or the Roman nobleman, befitting its swaggering creator as aptly as its headstrong recipient, each twinned in the other’s conceit. The sequence’s third drawing, The Punishment of Tityus, likewise calls attention to the giant’s arrogance. From the passivity and receptivity of his pose in Michelangelo’s drawing, it appears that Tityus welcomes his torment as one suffused with comfort and satisfaction, contentment and bliss. Again the figure befits its intransigent creator as aptly as its self-assertive recipient. Sonnet 79, a poem that explicitly refers to the sending of these gifts, suggests that Cavalieri has gratefully acknowledged them: “Felice spirto, che con zelo ardente, / . . . me sol saluti fra più nobil gente”  ‘O happy spirit, you who with eager zeal . . . greet me alone in the presence of more noble people!’ Here the speaker recounts an incident in which Cavalieri had singled out the artist by sending him a message in the company of noblemen. An early draft records a milder greeting, “si dolcemente” ‘so sweetly’ instead of “con zelo ardente,” and—omitting nobil as a modifier of the gente who witness this greeting—thanks the recipient for “picciol beni . . . che fien ma’ fra lla gente” ‘the little blessings that you provide for me among these people’.25 The poem construes Cavalieri’s attention as an act of courtly grazia that the artist repays with his own professional grazie. Its first tercet plays upon the words grazia and ringrazia:

23.  See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 212–18. 24.  For Michelangelo’s intense concentration and absorption in his work as a form of ­anti-Platonic attachment to sensual matter, see Douglas Biow, In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 92–129. 25.  See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 246–47.

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Dunche, trovando in te chi per me parla grazia di te per me fra tante cure, tal grazia ne ringrazia chi ti scrive. .

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Therefore, because he who speaks for me finds in you the grace sent from you to me among all your concerns, he who writes to you double thanks you for your grace. The speaker’s thanks is a double thanks (ringrazia) because he relays it in absentia through an intermediary (“chi per me parla”) who earlier brought Cavalieri’s grazia to him. But as the next tercet will establish, the speaker complicates his gratitude by adding to the poem yet other gift drawings, “turpissime pitture” ‘most shameful pictures’, which subvert his best intentions. These pictures participate in an economic cycle that equates the increased value of a product with increased compensation for the producer. Cavalieri’s overture to the artist has seemed a consolation for slighting him on earlier occasions: “Per l’altru’ fiate a consolar mi vieni” ‘You come to console me for other times’. The archaic “per l’altru’ fiate” refers to all the times when Cavalieri had ignored or rebuffed the speaker by withholding his greeting. The phrase first appears in the poem’s third draft where it functions as a reminder of Petrarchan affect associated with unrequited love. The poem’s original line—“doue ’l mie nome, tuo mercé, ritieni” ‘where you accredit my name with your mercy’—evokes Cavalieri’s hitherto scornful behavior (a facet of his own name in malo as Latin cavillari), which he now remedies by pronouncing Michelangelo’s name in generous salutation. The gesture amounts to a mercé ‘payment, reward’ in compensation for previous acts. Like God’s acts of mercy, it is unasked for and unequal to what it repays. All this is implied in the first draft, but the speaker recognizes it fully only when he revises the poem. At that moment he comprehends what has happened with a sense of shame, to which he responds by striking the terms “mie nome” and “tuo mercé” from his verse and replacing them with the Petrarchan “per l’altru’ fiate.” This process of poetic composition has engendered through revision a new idea of his relationship to Cavalieri. In this context, Cavalieri’s grace frees the artist from an uncertainty that has plagued him. But in the context of responding with a set of drawings that represent his recipient through such figures as Ganymede, Phaeton, and Tityus, Cavalieri earns a puny reward. The concluding tercet equates the speaker’s artwork with an act of usury (usur) whose impoverished quality defrauds the recipient:

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Che sconcia e grande usur saria a farla, donandoti turpissime pitture per rïaver persone belle e vive.

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What great, unseemly usury it would be to do that, giving you the most awful pictures for having, in return, beautiful, living people. The pictures prove shameful (turpissime) in a double sense. As humble drawings rather than the master’s more ambitious works of painting, sculpture, or fresco associated with his highest skills, they scarcely repay Cavalieri. The older man has reaped emotional benefits from the young man’s salutation, yet he offers poor recompense with his drawings. (In the tercet’s first draft, the adjective with pitture is “sol debole” ‘simply weak’.) In yet another sense, the pictures are shameful because their indecent, vaguely erotic overtones convey something tawdry lurking in the artist’s imagination. This debasement of value prompts the speaker to reassess the toll levied on his reputation by pictures that others might likewise deem turpissime. In sonnet 82, “Non posso altra figura immaginarmi” ‘I can’t imagine another image’, he estimates little benefit in denying Cavalieri’s gravitational pull. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t retreat from Cavalieri’s beauty: “Pero non val che più sproni mie fuga, / doppiando ’l corso alla beltà nemica” ‘Therefore it’s useless to spur my flight, doubling the pace on the part of my enemy, beauty’. This admission revises a milder effort to resist the young man’s allure: “E se tucto mi preme alla difesa, / uelocie a ppur uelocie non s’appressa” ‘And if everything urges me to the defense, even quicker does it stop pressing itself on’.26 It’s as though this revision had prompted yet another deferred understanding: no other beauty past or present can rival or displace Cavalieri’s beauty. In the poem’s final verse, Cupid assures the speaker that the cost of his labor is worth the price, even if it leads him to question the purity of his motives: “Ché vile esser non può chi tanto costa” ‘For what costs so much can’t be vile’. The speaker’s labors clearly exceed any burst of furor or fleeting intu­ ition that might have initiated his poetry. Sonnet 84, addressed again to “signor mie car[o],” imputes to Cavalieri as much orgoglio ‘pride’ as “ogni atto umile” ‘every act of humility’, and then extracts from these qualities analogous ones in the artist’s work. The poem evidently begins as a rejoinder to the young man’s haste in assigning value to a work of art and then proceeds to ratify the value that the artist assigns to it. The result is a version of 26.  See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 256–57.

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Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78 where claims for Platonic inspiration compete with claims for Aristotelian craft.27 The speaker relates them to an economy of talent or ingegno that allows the artist or poet to discover new form in the matter that sustains it. In sculpture, this form springs from the texture of solid stone, while in painting it springs from the marks of a brushstroke. In poetry it emerges from the flow of ink in writing and revision. The result is a product of ingegno that originates in a physical world where matter activates form rather than vice versa: Sì come nella penna e nell’inchiostro è l’alto e ’l basso e ’l mediocre stile, e ne’ marmi l’immagin ricca e vile, secondo che ’l sa trar l’ingegno nostro.

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Just as within the pen and ink there exists the high and the low and the middle style, and within marbles the noble or ignoble image, depending on what our wit is able to draw from them. The linkage of penna ‘feather, pen’ and inchiostro ‘ink’ to stile ‘stylus, pen’ and ‘style’ reinforces the substantive identity of form and content, style and matter. In poetry, the shape of language determines its form, and meaning follows from it, even as in sculpture form and function ensue from the color, size, and shape of its constituent stone. Here Michelangelo wrests control of value from the observer’s judgment and reinstates it in the artist’s derivation of meaning from matter. This discovery turns out to be contra-Platonic. It comes not from a flash of divine intuition bestowed upon the artist, but from a skill acquired by training and perfected through practice. The challenge is to draw from visual or poetic materials such ideas and sentiments that resonate with nature and decorum. This is what Brucioli in his commentary on Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78 identifies as “fantasia, disegno, nella mente” ‘imagination and drawing in his mind’ (sig. 73v).28 As the speaker acknowledges when he confronts his own practice, his intellectual disposition and subjective attitudes surely limit the outcome: “Ma io sol quel c’a me proprio è e simile / ne traggo” ‘But I draw out of it only what pertains and is similar to me’. But conversely, his extraction of these ideas and sentiments releases from his verbal or visual materials a shape or form to

27.  See Vasari on Martini below. 28.  Michelangelo’s term fantasia approximates but does not equal ‘imagination’. See David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 103–43.

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which he surrenders as it emerges. The process is profoundly regenerative, deriving multiplicity from unity and diversity from singularity: “L’umor dal ciel terreste, schietto e solo, / a vari semi vario si converte” ‘As earthly, pure, uncontaminated rain from heaven is turned into various forms by various seeds’.29 This variety originates in a medium of expression, whether plastic or verbal, whose competing claims emerge in bono and in malo. A conclusion added to the poem’s third draft avers that “chi mira alta beltà con sì gran duolo, / ne ritra’ doglie e pene acerbe e certe” ‘one who marvels at high beauty with such great sadness will draw from it harsh and inevitable suffering and pain’. Working through this response begets a new understanding of emergent and deferred meanings. The artist brings out their consequences in defiance of stasis. The poem sets an aesthetics of intuition bequeathed upon the few against an aesthetics of craftsmanship required of every artist, and it subordinates the former to the latter. Its gendered signifiers mediate between masculine form (ingegno) and feminine matter (imagine), challenging the hierarchy of one over the other by insisting upon the antecedence of matter to form. Its social concerns champion the artist’s labor as a significant component of aesthetic value, ascribing economic worth to human labor. The poem acknowledges among different artists a variety of gifts and talents (“a vari semi”), and then compensates with a commutative justice that mediates aesthetic value. The worth of an artist’s work comes not from the inspiration that launched it, but from wrestling with problems in its execution. The process of revision deepens its meaning and impact, layering it with striations of intensely thought and intensely felt signification. Sonnet 90 assesses this process in terms that pertain as much to the resulting artwork as to the experience of its maker. Its opening lines announce what has happened to its speaker through his contact with Cavalieri: “I’ mi son caro assai più ch’i’ non soglio; / poi ch’i’ t’ebbi nel cor più di me vaglio” ‘I’m much dearer to myself than I used to be; since I’ve held you in my heart, I value myself more’. Immediately his attention shifts to the labor of sculpture and to the value that carving adds to stone, “come pietra c’aggiuntovi l’intaglio / è di più pregio che ’l suo primo scoglio” ‘as a stone with carving added to it is worth more than its original rock’. Just as quickly his attention moves to the act of writing and revision: “O come scritta o pinta carta o foglio / più si riguarda d’ogni straccio o taglio” ‘Or, as a written or a painted 29.  These lines replace a different parenthesis: “pe’ nostri mal uirtute, anche ’l direbbe / ciascun di lor, se come noi parlassi” ‘it derives benefit from our misfortune, as each of them would say if it spoke like us’. See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 258–60.

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page or leaf of paper is more highly regarded than any scrap or shred’. Tracing this process further, the speaker returns—perhaps half-consciously—to his drawing of Archers Shooting at a Herm: “da po’ ch’i’ fu’ berzaglio / segnato dal tuo viso” ‘since I was made a target stamped by your face’. Sense impressions have stamped a mark on him that the work of sculpting, drawing, and composing poetry invests with consequence and worth: “Col segno tuo rallumino ogni cieco” ‘With your stamp I bring back light to all the blind’. With no manuscript traces of revision, the poem may have sprung from a moment of white-hot illumination, or else its fair copy may conceal the labor of writing and revision on some earlier “straccio o taglio” that the speaker alludes to.30 Whatever the conditions of its composition, there’s no mistaking the poem’s emphasis on labor and skill as signs of its value and as the basis for investing it with value in the eyes of its readers. Other poems addressed to Cavalieri challenge conventional estimates of value and evaluation, often verging upon an antic or even comic assessment of the speaker’s relationship with the young man. Sonnet 94, “D’altrui pietoso e sol di sé spietato” ‘Kind to others and only to itself unkind’, offers a dramatic example by shifting the ground between its speaker and Cavalieri so that any pretense of difference or equality lies open to question. The poem evokes Petrarch’s sonnets 199–201 whose speaker recounts a crisis of conscience about stealing one of Laura’s gloves.31 In sonnet 199, “O bella man che mi destringi ’l core” ‘O beautiful hand that grasps my heart’, he envies the glove for its intimacy with the beloved: “Così avess’io del bel velo altrettanto!” ‘Would I had again as much of that lovely veil!’ In sonnet 200 he complains that as the beloved puts the glove back on her hand, “quell’una bella ignuda mano, / che con grave mio danno si riveste” ‘that one naked hand, which clothes itself again to my heavy sorrow’, she obliterates his joy. In sonnet 201 he admits to stealing her glove as a prize, and he describes himself as “pien di vergogna et d’amoroso scorno” ‘full of shame and amorous scorn’ for this theft. In 1548 Brucioli comments that these poems depict an abuse of otherwise good fortune: “Duolsi di . . . non havere saputo usare

30.  The poem appears in Vat. Lat. 3211, fol. 32v, as a fair copy by an unknown hand, ca. 1546; see apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 217–72. 31.  For sixteenth-century commentaries on these poems, see my “Petrarchan Authority and Gender Revisions in Michelangelo’s Rime” in Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English, ed. William E. Wallace, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1995), 5:223–34. For parallels with Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on Dante’s Commedia, see Sarah Rolfe Prodan, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry, and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 59–64. For Michelangelo’s poem in the context of Florentine burlesque verse, see Cambon, Michelangelo’s Poetry, 26–29.

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quel bene” ‘He laments upon not having known how to use this stroke of good luck’ (sig. 137r). Michelangelo’s version of this hyperbolic crisis in sonnet 94 begins with a silkworm generating a piece of fabric that will clothe a human body. Its octave sparks a train of associations leading from the speaker’s social marginality as a servile artist, to his psychic turmoil about experiencing a degenerate pleasure in contact with Cavalieri’s body. In each instance the poem blurs distinctions between the speaker’s agency and the young man’s objectification as well as between their roles in bono and in malo. Not the least problem is its identification of the silkworm, the “baco da seta” denominated in a headnote but left unspecified in the text. The poem’s emotional energy implies that the speaker is imagining himself rather than the young man to be the silkworm. But the opposite may also be true. In the sixteenth century, one colloquial meaning of cavaliere is ‘silkworm’, identifying the worm with Cavalieri as a creature of flesh and blood arrayed in his own self-generated virtue.32 From this perspective the poem, like sonnets 61 and 62, concerns transformations that permit, even encourage, a crossing of boundaries and blurring of identities between artist and young man, lover and beloved. The sonnet’s first quatrain juxtaposes death against life, pain against pleasure, torment against kindness as the worm consumes its own life for another’s use:

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D’altrui pietoso e sol di sé spietato nasce un vil bruto, che con pena e doglia l’altrui man veste e la suo scorza spoglia e sol per morte si puó dir ben nato. Kind to others and unkind only to itself, a vile beast is born that with pain and labor pangs clothes another’s hand, and strips itself of its own skin and only through death can be said to be well-born. Its speaker degrades the silkworm as a vil bruto, drawn from Petrarch’s canzone 129 (“forse, a te stesso vile, altrui se’ caro” ‘perhaps, though vile to yourself, you are dear to someone else’, line 24), and possibly also Psalm 22:6, “But I am a worme, & not a man; a shame of men and the contempt 32.  See William Thomas, Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar (London: H. Wyckes, 1567), sig. Fivr: “cavaliere: a knight, or horseman, or a silke worme”; Salvatore Battaglia et al., Grande Dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1961–2002), 2:905–8, identifies cavaliere as “baco da seta” in a letter by Torquato Tasso to Scipione Gonzaga.

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of the people.” Against this abasement, the worm reaches a higher form of life through death, achieving immortality in the cloth that it leaves behind.33 Significantly, however, the first article of clothing that the worm provides is a glove, evoking the fetishized hand (“l’altrui man veste”) of Petrarch’s sonnets 199–201. This reference summons a Petrarchan authority for this poem, but it’s one that the sestet will challenge by staging the speaker’s erotic impulse with competing and even contradictory possibilities of meaning. Significantly, too, palpable revisions transpose this quatrain.34 In its second line, the oxymoronic “con dolce doglia”  ‘with sweet sorrow’ becomes the harsh “con pena e doglie”  ‘with pain and sorrow’, while the earlier sentiment of “e di tal sorte e ben felice nato” ‘and in such a way is born happily enough’ points to the quatrain’s concluding line. The second quatrain introduces Cavalieri as an object of attention, and it deepens the speaker’s sense of turmoil by simultaneously exalting and degrading his flesh: “Cosí volesse al mie signor mie fato / vestir suo viva di mie morta spoglia” ‘So my fate might have wished to clothe my lord’s living [flesh] with my own dead spoils’. Repeating the rhyme verb spoglia from the first quatrain, the word spoglia—now in its noun form—links the speaker’s skin to the cloth that the worm produces through fatal submission. The next two lines charge this trope with associations of rebirth. As a snake sloughs off its old skin, so the speaker imagines himself to be giving up his skin and taking on a new life: “Che, come serpe al sasso si discoglia, / pur per morte potria cangiar mie stato” ‘That, as a snake sloughs by a rock, so through death could I change my own condition’.35 The location “al sasso” ‘by a rock’ evokes Michelangelo’s craft as a sculptor of stone, and perhaps equally to the point, the verb si discoglia evokes his self-portrait as the flayed St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment, where the shedding of skin signals the martyr’s transformation and renewal. The sestet wrenches the speaker back to reality with a volitive subjunctive, fussi: “O fussi sol la mie l’irsuta pelle” ‘O if that hairy skin were only mine [= belonged to me]’, or alternatively ‘Oh, if I were only my own hairy skin’. The first possibility expresses the speaker’s wish that the young man belong to him. The second expresses his wish that his own hairy skin might furnish two 33.  See above, Introduction, n. 30, for Petrarch’s use of this trope in Familiares 1.8 to designate the labor of self-generating poets and artists, and at the beginning of this chapter for the membership of Michelangelo’s brothers in the Wool and Silk Guild of Florence, pointing to the poet-artist’s troubled social status. 34.  See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 277–78. 35.  For the Dionysian ritual of flaying in Michelangelo’s work, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 177–90.

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sorts of covering for the friend’s body. One is a gonna, a long shirt that extends downward and covers the young man’s midriff “che, del suo pel contesta, fa tal gonna / che con ventura stringe sì bel seno, / ch’i’ l’are’ pure il giorno” ‘that, woven with one’s own skin, makes such a garment that with luck presses against so fair a breast that I would possess him all day long’. The other is a pair of slippers that provide a base and support for the young man, two columns that brace his legs: “O le pianelle / che fanno a quel di lor basa e colonna, / ch’i’ pur ne porterei duo nevi almeno”  ‘Or the slippers that make of themselves for him a base and column so that I would also carry him around for at least two snows [two winters]’. This fantasy exposes the speaker to a terrifying loss of boundary that blurs ordinary distinctions of time, space, and his own body, generating a powerful ambivalence about the precise situation that it dramatizes. Does the speaker project his own desires upon this young man? Or does he accentuate the distance between himself and his addressee in the emptiness of a trope that suggests now one, now the other? Emblematic of their relationship, the silkworm’s qualities belong to both and neither. They facilitate an exchange between both, as commodified labor given in exchange for encouragement, or an economic investment in artistic ventures. From the speaker’s perspective, the situation proves demeaning as the young man wields an upper hand and confirms the artist’s social marginality. The figure of the silkworm, potent as an expression of erotic conflict in the poem’s Petrarchan context, conveys a bundle of self-effacing anxieties riddled with social difference and disparity, sexual anomaly and aberration, psychic asymmetry and contrast. After 1536, Michelangelo’s poems addressed specifically to Cavalieri would diminish in frequency even while his talents as a poet became more widely known and appreciated by friends.36 So too would his revisions become less conspicuous. There is, for example, the enigmatic but unrevised conclusion of madrigal 130, framed in reference to “il tuo volto divino” ‘your godlike face’ with the speaker’s dread about punishment after death for carnal lust: “Ché l’uso di molt’anni un dì non toglie”  ‘For one day doesn’t undo the habit of many years’. There is sonnet 230, “Perché tuo gran bellezze al mondo sièno” ‘So that your great beauty might remain in this world’, with its plea for nature to replicate the addressee’s physical appearance for a new generation. The poem’s revision of a masculine pronoun (“lo moverà” ‘it will move him’) to its feminine form (“la moverà”) suggests that its original addressee was male, possibly Cavalieri.37 And in 1547 there are sonnet 259, “Ben può talor col mie ’rdente desio / salir la speme” ‘Rightly can my hope sometimes 36.  See Wallace, Michelangelo, 217–21. 37.  See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 380–82.

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rise with my burning desire’, addressed in its first three versions to a “signor mio” (possibly Cavalieri), though this phrase is edited out in its fourth and final redaction; and sonnet 260, “Non è sempre di colpa aspra e mortale / d’una immensa bellezza un fero ardore” ‘A fierce ardor for boundless beauty is not always a harsh and deadly fault’, with no surviving traces of revision in its commendation of a chaste, spiritual friendship between two men.38 The years 1538 to 1547 meanwhile circumscribed the poet’s friendship with Vittoria Colonna, enabling him to express his religious beliefs as the Roman church laid plans for its Counter-Reformation. Just as Cavalieri’s aristocratic standing allowed Michelangelo to fantasize about his own social origins, so did Colonna’s noble rank.39 Her father was Fabrizio Colonna, head of the powerful Roman baronial clan of Colonna, now led by her brother Ascanio who proved hostile to successive popes, and her mother was a daughter of Battista Sforza of Milan and Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. In 1509 she married Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos, Marchese of Pescara, in an arrangement that allied her family to the royal house of Naples. Widowed in 1525, she was persuaded by Ascanio to live in Rome where she could mediate between him and the papal courts of Clement VII and Paul III. Her eventual friendship with Michelangelo reinforced the theological ideas that he pondered much earlier while working on the Sistine ceiling. During her years in Naples, Colonna had frequented a circle of evangelical reformers influenced by the Spanish theologian Juan de Valdés. His ideas about justification by faith and the workings of the inner spirit had a strong impact upon one of her spiritual advisors, Bernardino Ochino, the vicar-general of the Capuchin order who in 1542 would defect to Calvin’s Geneva.40 In 1541 Colonna moved for two years to Viterbo in order to take spiritual counsel from Reginald Cardinal Pole, a second cousin of England’s Henry VIII who had settled there to negotiate between the papacy and various Italian reform movements. Committed to scripture-based teachings about the necessity of faith and the efficacy of grace, Colonna integrated them with Rome’s standard teachings about the sacraments, prayer, and good works. 38.  See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 422–25. 39.  Biographical details are from Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics, 19–36. For Colonna’s publication history, see her Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Bari: Laterza, 1982), 223–462. 40.  For Valdés (1500–41), who moved to Naples only in 1535 and may never have met Colonna, see Salvatore Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), 63–94; for Colonna’s involvement with his successors, Ochino, Carnesecchi, and later Pole, see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics, 42–65; for their impact on Michelangelo, see Laura Camille Agoston, “Male/Female, Italy/Flanders, Michelangelo/Vittoria Colonna,” Renaissance Quarterly 58 (2005): 1175–1219.

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Michelangelo’s poems to Colonna record his dialogue with her on these religious views in relation to his aesthetic convictions on the one hand and his social standing on the other. Addressing her as a Petrarchan “donna leggiadra” ‘lovely lady’, sonnet 151 redefines the aesthetics of extraction that Michelangelo began to articulate in sonnet 84.41 Composed sometime between 1536 and 1544 with no surviving evidence of revision, the poem presents the competing claims of Platonic intuition and Aristotelian craft in yet another version of Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78. Its Platonic claims are grounded in the first quatrain’s opening and closing rhyme words, the masculine-gendered concetto and intelletto that convey the artist’s conceptual powers and intellectual grasp. Its Aristotelian claims are grounded in the trope of a sculptor’s hand that chips away at the marble, manifesting the intervention of a feminine-gendered la man that obeys the dictates of a masculine-gendered intelletto in a synergism of craft or skill with mental activity: Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto c’un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva col suo superchio, e solo a quello arriva la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto.

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The best artist hasn’t any concept that a single marble block does not circumscribe inside itself with its own excess, and only the hand that obeys the intellect makes the grade to that concept. Concetto, like Platonic intuition, preexists in the statue’s stony matter. The artist’s intelletto seizes upon it, graced by a mature insight that enables him to do so. The verb circonscriva with its root in scrivere extends this aesthetics of extraction from sculptural art to the art of writing poetry. Its principle applies as well to the art of reading texts such as scripture, inscribed with a density of language. To interpret these texts is to extract from them meanings commensurate with human intellect. With this exalted role assigned to his poetic art, it occurs as a gesture of humility that Michelangelo offers to Colonna, as he did to Cavalieri, several gift drawings. Positioned at the same intersection of professionalism, economics, religion, and class as those to Cavalieri, two of these drawings have been identified as Christ on the Cross (British Museum, London) and Pietà

41.  For Michelangelo’s aesthetic terminology, see Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art; for this terminology in sonnet 84 and other poems, see Cambon, Michelangelo’s Poetry, 76–90.

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(Isabella Gardner Museum, Boston).42 Both penetrate deeply into the religious significance of the crucifixion as it is interpreted through faith in the light of grace, and both appear to have elicited from Colonna her own poetic responses to their meaning. Each represents Jesus’s sacrifice as a gift bestowed upon humanity, an utterly gratuitous offering of his body and blood as a sign of divine love and the transmission of grace. They depict Jesus as more animate than dead (even though the Pietà concerns the entombment) with less emphasis on corporeal suffering than on the spiritually energizing effects of his benefaction.43 Seemingly indifferent to pain but effulgent with an inner glow, Jesus confers the gift of redemption through astonishing, incalculable, inexhaustible grace. In the Pietà, Mary’s eyes guide us to understand this gift. They look toward the head of the cross with its inscription taken from Dante’s Paradiso 29.91, “Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa”‘None of you thinks about how much blood it costs’. The words evoke an economic context that refers to the payment of blood at the crucifixion but also, in a belated and deferred action, to the expenditure of blood afterward by saints, martyrs, and apostles in the face of persecution.44 Mary comprehends her son’s death from a perspective that is both proleptic and revisionary when she reinterprets the event as an expensive gift of divine grace. Here Michelangelo subjects the meaning of his visual images to a corrective understanding through Dante’s words rather than through images, as though images had reached the limits of their expressive power and now yield to verbal discourse. In a deferred reference to Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78, this privileging of poetic language adumbrates Vasari’s comment in his life of Simone Martini about the immortality of verse. Petrarch’s sonnets have invested Simone’s now-lost portrait of Laura with a greater permanence than “all his art-works did or ever will do, for the

42.  Colonna acknowledges them in undated letters: Michelangelo Buonarotti, Il carteggio, ed. Giovanni Poggi, Paolo Barocchi, and Renzo Ristori, 5 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1965) 4:101, 104, 105. Frederick Hartt dates them in 1538–40 in his Michelangelo Drawings (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1970), 289–90 and 323. 43. See Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 169–87, and Una Roman D’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 90–129. 44.  In his commentary in his edition of La commedia (Florence: Nicolaus Laurentii, 1481), Cristoforo Landino associates the sangue both with Jesus’s blood shed on the cross and the blood shed by martyrs through succeeding centuries: “si sparse prima di Christo e poi de’ sancti martiri a constituire questa religion” ‘[this blood] was shed first by Christ and then by the holy martyrs in establishing this religion’ (fol. Ivv). For the prestige of Landino’s commentary in sixteenth-century Italy, see Prodan, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism, 18–36.

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time must come, whenever it may be, when they will disappear, while the writings of such a great man will endure for all time.”45 Around 1540 Colonna sent to the artist a gift manuscript of 103 sonnets both responding to his drawings and motivating him to produce more.46 Pleasing him immensely, two in particular echo the tropes of his gift drawings. Colonna’s sonnet 42 addresses Mary of the Pietà, “Vergine e madre, il tuo figlio sul petto” ‘Virgin and mother, your son upon your breast’.47 Its second quatrain represents Mary’s understanding of Jesus’s death as a dialectic between her grief upon witnessing it and her “nuovo alto diletto” upon apprehending its effect in the deferred action of the imperfect verb portava: “Poi la vittoria grande de l’onor vero / Portava a l’alma nuovo alto diletto” ‘Then the great victory of true honor began bringing to your soul a new elevated delight’. And likewise Colonna’s sonnet 68 addresses Jesus in a deferred understanding as He died on the cross, “Le braccia aprendo in croce e l’alme e pure / Piaghe largo, Signore, apristi il cielo” ‘Opening your arms wide upon the cross and your pure and blessed wounds, Lord, you opened the heavens’. The past remote verbs apristi and (in the second quatrain) illuminasti and riempiesti convey the historical effect of Jesus’s crucifixion when, once and for all, it revealed the meaning of sacred scripture: Illuminasti, e dileguando il gelo Le riempiesti d’un ardente zelo, Ch’aperse poi le sacre tue scritture.

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You enlightened [them], and melting the ice you filled them with an ardent zeal that then disclosed your sacred texts. Here—not just there on the cross—and now—not just then at the crucifixion—this understanding is repeated for all who read it in scripture. Michelangelo’s sonnet 159, “Per esser manco, alta signora, indegno” ‘In order, exalted lady, to be less unworthy’, responds to Colonna’s gift poems by avowing the incommensurability between his gift drawings and the grace of 45.  Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38. 46. Seventeen of these poems had been published earlier and, together with the rest, would be republished as Sonnetti spirituali in her Tutte le rime, ed. Girolamo Ruscelli with a commentary by Rinaldo Corso (Venice: Fratelli Sessa, 1558). For analysis, see Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics, 67–100. 47. Quotations from Colonna’s poetry are from Veronica Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo: Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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such an “alta signora.”48 Echoing the first tercet of Petrarch’s sonnet 1 (“Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto / favola fui gran tempo” ‘But now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of the crowd’), the speaker articulates his deferred understanding of the distance between his art and Colonna’s grazia: E veggio ben com’erra s’alcun crede la grazia, che da voi divina piove, pareggi l’opra mia caduca e frale.

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And I see clearly how anyone would stray if he believes the grace divine that rains down from you could be equaled by my fleeting, frail work. The poem’s final lines seal an identification between his opra (“L’ingegno, l’arte, la memoria cede” ‘Wit, and art, and memory surrender’) and his effort to pagar ‘repay’ her in a worldly economics: “C’un don celeste non con mille pruove / pagar del suo può già chi è mortale” ‘For one who is mortal cannot repay a heavenly gift with a gift of his own, not even with a thousand attempts’. The word celeste wields a double edge, especially in relation to the poem’s final word mortale. Colonna’s gift sonnets have endowed him with spiritual insights. Written with ink on paper, they transcend the material elements that record them. His opra dedicated to her can only accentuate the distance between himself and her. Drawn with pencil on paper, they are bound to their earthly elements, marking him as a craftsman-artist whose lowly status bows to her exalted grace. Couched in the language of courtly compliment, the poem uncovers a tension between dependence and independence in the artist’s relationship to his addressee. Neither an artisan nor a nobleman and never a merchant, he presents himself as a deracinated, self-invented gentleman who redeems his art by investing it with distinction. As Vasari recounts, though Michelangelo complained bitterly about patrons who had shortchanged him, he dissociated himself from business procedures that he regarded as demeaning, and he disparaged the sort of artist who reduces himself to a homo economicus.49 In a poem with no surviving evidence of revision—sonnet 160, “S’alcun legato è 48.  For the effect of Colonna’s freely given gifts upon Michelangelo, see Konrad Eisenbichler, “The Religious Poetry of Michelangelo,” Renaissance and Reformation 23 (1987): 121–34. 49.  Recall his insult to the Duke of Ferrara’s agent for referring to his “trading instincts of the Florentines” (Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 1:373), and his apology to Vasari that “I don’t want to seem like a businessman” (ibid., 1:399). See also his scorn for rival architects of St. Peter’s who had turned the project into a “shop organized for making money” (ibid., 1:386). For his attitudes toward money, see Hatfield, Wealth of Michelangelo, 177–200.

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pur dal piacer molto” ‘If anyone is yet bound by a great favor’—the speaker weighs the costs and benefits of occupying such an indeterminate position on the social and economic scale. Like its predecessor, this poem expresses gratitude for an unbidden gift bestowed by a person of high rank—“Qual cosa è che po’ paghi tanta aita, / che renda il debitor libero e sciolto?” ‘What is there that in a small way could repay such help, and that would leave the debtor free and untrammeled?’—as an incommensurable act registered by the paltriness of payment (“che po’ paghi”) and ties of personal indebtedness (“il debitor”). Its economic trope evokes the idea of a contract that binds the recipient to the giver. Expressed formally by the participants, this verbal contract corresponds structurally to the verbal gift of Colonna’s poems. Their words have brought the speaker to an energizing truth, as though from death to life, but they’ve also bound him to Colonna in an act of fealty. From an economic perspective, release from this debt deprives the recipient of the giver’s further largesse, “il soprastar d’una mercé infinita” ‘the overflow of an infinite recompense’. From a social perspective, it adjusts their relationship: “Ché dove l’un dell’altro al par si sazia / non mi sare’ signor quel che tant’amo” ‘For if one is equally satisfied by the other, the one whom I love so much would not be my lord’. The masculine noun signor assigned to Colonna as addressee levels gender differences between her and Michelangelo, though it doesn’t affect important differences between the gifts that they exchange. Her gifts are poems that move and enlighten the speaker, bringing him closer to salvation. His are images open to multiple interpretations, lacking the precision of the written word, sustaining just one unreproducible life on a single fragile page. The primacy of the word in Colonna’s spiritual teaching accentuates the tenuous value of his visual art in its efforts to instruct others. Vasari alludes to Michelangelo’s diffidence about his verbal skills, but here the artist confesses diffidence about his art.50 According to Vasari, Colonna’s death in 1547 prompted Michelangelo to commit all his energy to designing architectural plans for St. Peter’s Basilica while foregoing his professional fee in the name of “devoting his time to the project for the love of God, and without any other reward” (1:387). In the light of this new assignment, freely undertaken without remuneration but in deference to the gift of talent bestowed upon him by God, each of his earlier projects might seem self-indulgent, works of idolatry that allowed him to place his own interests at the center of the universe. Sonnet 285, “Giunto è già ’l corso della vita mia . . . / al comun porto” ‘The course of my life 50.  “He hesitated [to write about his principles of design] because of his inability to convey his thoughts, for he was not practiced in literary expression” (Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 1:422).

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has already arrived at the common port’, expresses this concern through the metaphor of a storm-tossed ship drawn from Petrarch’s sonnet 189, “Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio / per aspro mare” ‘My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea’.51 Rewriting Petrarch’s “colma d’oblio” as “d’error carca” ‘laden with error’, Michelangelo’s speaker identifies his error with a moral failure to keep his professional identity in proper perspective: Onde l’affettüosa fantasia che l’arte mi fece idol e monarca conosco or ben com’era d’error carca.

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Whence I now recognize how laden with error was the affectionate fantasy that made art my idol and monarch. The terms fantasia and idol evoke disparaging associations in relation to his art, the first (fantasia) as a degenerate version of the concetto and intelletto that have nourished his art, the second (idol) as a material image that overvalues its representational effects, crowning it as his monarca, his ruling passion. Michelangelo evidently wrestled with this poem as his manuscripts show. It exists in six drafts, each with seemingly minor yet stringently executed adjustments in diction and word placement.52 In some cases the author revised a phrase in the second or third draft and then reinstated it in the fourth or fifth draft. In the lines just quoted, the fourth draft introduces two slight changes that the fifth and sixth drafts reject. The active verb fece ‘made’ becomes the less forceful ebbe ‘had’ and the hauntingly qualitative “come e quant’era” ‘how and how much it was’ becomes the bluntly quantitative “quant’era” ‘how much it was’, only to reappropriate the original come and drop the quanto in the final version sent to Vasari, “com’era d’error carca” ‘how laden with error it was’. We may view these revisions as enabling us to read the poem both in bono and in malo: the first three drafts offer a strong positive claim while the fourth draft offers a weaker, less nuanced claim, which the fifth and final drafts then reverse. Just as a reading in bono passes into its opposite other, so a reading in malo returns to its opposite other.53

51. For various transcriptions on different sheets, see Barkan, Michelangelo, 253–58. For the poem’s variants and expressive qualities, see Cambon, Michelangelo’s Poetry, 123–36, and Ryan, Poetry of Michelangelo, 205–9. 52.  See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 449–52. 53.  See Barkan, Michelangelo, 253–58, on the poem’s multiple revisions with fragments “con tanta servitù” ‘with so much servitude’ located beneath the sonnet’s octave and “S’a tuo nome ho concetto alcun immago” ‘If I have conceived any image in your name’ beneath its sestet.

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Sonnet 288 conclusively devalues the economy of this earthly world in favor of a divine countereconomy. Its model is Petrarch’s penultimate sonnet 364 as the lover assesses Laura’s role in his own salvation. In Michelangelo’s poem the earthly economy is generalized as “le favole del mondo,” encompassing not only his painterly and sculptural art, but also his poetic endeavors. They include those that express his affective relationships and erotic drives, along with his willful abuse or denial of the grace that God has bestowed upon him: Le favole del mondo m’hanno tolto il tempo dato a contemplare Iddio, né sol le grazie suo poste in oblio, ma con lor, più che senza, a peccar volto. The fables of the world have taken from me my allotted time to contemplate God, and not only have they shoved his graces from my mind, but they’ve turned me to sin more with them than without them.

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The plural grazie encompass the gift of faith embraced by the speaker and the favor of redemption earned through Jesus, and they likely include talents exercised by the artist in sculpture, painting, drawing, and poetry. The latter have proven seductive competitors opposing the gifts of faith and salvation, again in bono and in malo as beauty shines in all its allure and then fades to distraction. In the concluding tercet, the speaker acknowledges these contrarieties as aspects of his strained multiple identities: Mettimi in odio quante ’l mondo vale e quante suo bellezze onoro e colo, c’anzi morte caparri eterna vita. Let me hate whatever much the world values and however many of its beauties I honor and adore, so that before death I might make a down payment on eternal life. In an aggressively repentant mode (“mettimi in odio”) he now echoes the remorse that Petrarch’s speaker expressed in sonnet 364 (“ch’i’ conosco ’l mio fallo at non lo scuso” ‘for I recognize my fault and I do not excuse it’). Michelangelo registers his remorse in a strikingly economic term caparri, here rendered as a present subjunctive verb through a back-formation derived from the noun caparra ‘deposit, down-payment’.

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Salvation proves to be hard-earned when it eclipses every worldly economy. The economy of heaven compels a total revaluation of all that is earthly and divine, even and especially of art and beauty, poetry and human love. An effort to tally this account emerges from revisions of lines 7 and 8, “manca la speme, e pur cresce il desio / che da te sia dal proprio amor disciolto” ‘hope is lacking, and yet my desire increases to be unbound by you from my self-love’. Here a stronger, more insistent verb manca ‘lacks’ replaces a weaker, less convincing verb scema ‘diminishes’ while a stronger, more decisive prepositional phrase “dal proprio amor” ‘[unbound] from my self-love’ replaces a weaker, more ameliorative “pel proprio amor”‘[unbound] through my self love’.54 These revisions secure for the speaker a belated appraisal and disparagement of worldly values. Juxtaposing them against divine grace and spiritual redemption, the writer discovers this new sacred economy in acts of poetic revision. In the end, then, Michelangelo returns to his Florentine origins by figuring his art as a form of economic exchange, a business transaction that he now deems as precious. Over time, Michelangelo had accumulated several small properties in and around Florence that he either rented or gave to his family, a large house in the Macello de’ Corvi where he lived at Rome (on the present site of the National Monument to Victor Emanuel II), and a sizable income property at La Razza in the Chianti hills, from which he derived substantial wealth. At the time of his death, his net worth reflected a lifetime income of 44,646 florins (= $22.5 million) after taxes and expenses, and an estate valued at 24,064 florins (= $12.5 million).55 Despite all his contempt for the shop-keeping mentality of Florentine merchants, and his frequent impatience with tight-fisted patrons and shoddy business practices, it was merchants who transported him to his burial at the end. Vasari closes his account of the artist’s life with an extended description of his funeral, lavish in every respect, staged by Cosimo de’ Medici to reclaim him for Florence even as church authorities conspired to claim him for Rome. To pirate his body out of the Macello de’ Corvi, Michelangelo’s nephew resorted to a ruse. As Vasari describes it, “Michelangelo’s corpse was smuggled out of Rome by some merchants, concealed in a round bundle of merchandise so that there should be no tumult to frustrate the plan” (1:432). In a manner befitting his mercantile roots, his survivors repackaged the artist and brought him home as a vendible ware. 54.  See apparatus in Michelangelo, Rime, ed. Girardi, 253–55. 55.  See Hatfield, Wealth of Michelangelo, 167–76.

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Pa rt Two

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Pierre de Ronsard and Pléiade Aesthetics

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Ch ap ter 1

Polished to Perfection

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Ronsard’s Investment in Les Amours

Less than three years after publishing his first major volume of poetry, Les Quatre Premiers Livres des Odes ( January 1550), the young Pierre de Ronsard (1527–85) would reverse or postpone nearly every goal that he had set for his career, including work on his ambitious epic Franciade that he announced in his separately published “Ode de la paix, au Roi” (March 1550).1 After stinging criticism of his Odes by Mellin de Saint-Gelais and others at court, he retreated for two years to his family estate at La Possonnière in the Vendômois to ponder his options. There in 185 poems expressing his love for a married woman named Cassandre, he experimented with currently fashionable Petrarchan forms, chiefly sonnets, which in his “Avis au lecteur” in Les Odes he had derided as “ce qui n’est 1.  His first published poem (“Ode des beautez qu’il uoudroit en s’Amie,” beginning “Quand ie seroy si heureux de choisir”) appeared in Jacques Peletier du Mans’s Oeuvres poétiques (1547); in 1549 he published three poems in brochure formats: an epithalamion for Antoine Bourbon and Jeanne Albret; an entrée for Henri II in Paris; and a “Hymne de France.” The “Ode de la paix” subsequently entered Le Premier Livre des Odes in 1560 and later editions as Ode 1.1. All quotations and numbering of texts refer to Pierre de Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), here 1:996. I’ve also consulted Paul Laumonier’s magisterial edition of Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 20 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1914– 75) and, for the sonnet collections, Ronsard, Les Amours, ed. Henri Weber and Catherine Weber (Paris: Garnier, 1963). Because the latter’s ordering differs from Céard, Ménager, and Simonin’s, I include in parentheses references to Laumonier’s page numbers and Weber’s sonnet numbers. 133

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rien” ‘flatly nothing’.2 After returning to Paris, he published these poems in an octavo volume as Les Amours (30 September 1552). The following March he reissued his Odes with several deletions and minor revisions, and two months later Les Amours (24 May 1553) with thirty-nine new sonnets and a commentary by Marc Antoine Muret, who in a Latin ode had earlier addressed him as “Gallicorum poetarum facile principem” ‘indisputably the prince of French poets’.3 Submitting his published texts to further revision over decades, sometimes rewriting them so completely as to generate wholly new poems, the formerly self-styled poet of sublime aspiration and divine fureur became a technician of style, a painstaking maker—and master—of polished artifacts. The epithet “prince of poets” would survive despite scarring self-criticism, or perhaps because of it.4 By investing in Les Amours, Ronsard repeatedly proved himself the finest French poet of his generation, his century, his epoch. To this investment Ronsard attached an economic valuation. Les Odes ends with “A sa muse” (ode 4.18 in the first edition, 5.32 in 1560, 5.36 in 1584 and later editions). Modeled on Horace’s “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” ‘I have made a monument more durable than bronze’ (Ode 3.30) with echoes from the “eternizing” conclusion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, its argument questions the value of poetry. In its opening line, “Plus dur que fer j’ay finy cest ouvrage” ‘I have finished this work, more durable than iron’, the word ouvrage fuses oeuvre (validating the poet’s labor and skill) and rage (acknowledging his divinely inspired fueur).5 Yet in line 3 the rhyme word rage refers not to Platonic furor but to violent storms “qui rompent tous” ‘that destroy everything’. The poem’s deliquescent form seems to challenge its own durability. Its rhyme scheme suggests a movement of five linked quatrains (abab bcbc cdcd dede efef), but its syntactic structure works against 2.  “Au lecteur” in his first volume of odes chides courtly rhymesters “qui n’admireent qu’un petit sonnet petrarquizé” ‘who admire nothing but a slender Petrarchan sonnet’, though it pointedly absolves Antoine Héroët, Scève, and Saint-Gelais; quoted from Céard 1.996. 3.  Published in Muret’s Juvenilia (December 1552) before he had met Ronsard, the poem petitions him on behalf of “veterum turba sodalius” ‘the brigade of your old friends’ to return to Paris from La Possionnière. See Marc Antoine Muret, Opera omnia, ed. David Ruhnken, 4 vols. (Leiden: Samuel and Jan Luchtman, 1789), 1:730. 4.  Claude Binet reaffirmed the title of “prince et pere de nos Poëtes” ‘prince and father of our poets’ in the third edition (1597; originally published in 1586) of his Discours de la vie de Pierre de Ronsard, ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris: Hachette, 1901), 1. 5.  For the conflict between prophecy and craftsmanship, see James Hutton, Essays on Renaissance Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 291–310, and Donald Gilman, “Ronsard, Horace, and the Dynamics of Poetic Creativity,” Philological Quarterly 88 (2009): 25–48. For the tension between philosophy and psychology in Ronsard’s concept of fureur, see Olivier Pot, Inspiration et mélancolie: l’épistemologie poétique dans les Amours de Ronsard (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 17–42.

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the stanzaic form as its sentences decrease from four lines (1–4, 5–8, 9–12) to three (13–15, 16–18) to two (19–20). Lines 16–17 exalt “la gloire / Que j’ay gaignée” ‘the glory that I’ve earned’, presumably from his verse. But just two lines earlier the speaker belittles his verse as the “doux babil de mon lyre”  ‘soft babble of my lyre’ by comparison with that of Pindar and Horace, “deux Harpeurs divers”  ‘two quite different harpists’. At the end, its lapidary polish bows to supplication: “Et de Ronsard consacre la memoire” ‘And consecrate the memory of Ronsard’. In retrospect Ronsard’s “Ode de la paix” might seem an effort to regain ground. This poem amounts to a sketch for his epic Franciade (published incomplete in 1572). It outlines the exploits of Henri II’s mythic Trojan ancestor, Francus, as recounted by the prophetess Cassandra amid “une aspre fureur d’esprit”  ‘a harsh excitation of mind’ (line 95), where fureur conveys her disturbed inspiration.6 It ends with a plea to the king for financial support so that the poet might begin “mes vers à la mode / Que le marchant baille son bien” ‘my verse in the way that a merchant offers his wares’ (lines 370–71). Seeing himself very much as a marchant of rhyme and hardly as a prince of poets, much less a prophet inspired by fureur, Ronsard disables the doctrine of inspiration. It’s as though at this early stage he had begun to question the value of fureur. True, Saint-Gelais and others had mocked his forced archaisms, Hellenic neologisms, compound words, and use of Vendômais dialect as an analogue of Greek dialects in Les Odes. Their mockery—recorded by the poet’s biographer Claude Binet—drove him to reevaluate his compositional technique and accommodate a user-friendly poetic style in Les Amours.7 But not until one more endorsement of Neoplatonic doctrine. This endorsement came with qualifications. Ronsard harbored the doctrine of divine inspiration as befitting his lofty ambitions. But he also sensed that human labor, acquired skill, and perfected technique have great value. With undisguised economic implications, a tension between fureur and craftsmanship dominates his “Ode à Michel de L’Hospital,” written in June 1550 to thank his protector for defending him against earlier criticism.8 This poem, published in the first edition of Les Amours, was republished 6.  Written to celebrate the Peace of Boulogne with England in March 1550, it was published in Le cinquieme livre des odes (1552). In Ronsard’s collected works of 1560 and later, it is ode 1.1. 7. Binet, Discours de la vie, ed. Laumonier, 17–19; but see Laumonier’s commentary on Binet’s inaccuracies, 123–29. 8.  Son of an aristocratic physician who was exiled on charges of treason, L’Hospital grew up in Italy and completed his legal studies at Padua and Rome. He returned to Paris as chancellor to the king’s sister, Marguerite de France. In 1560 Charles IX appointed him chancellor of France to mediate between Catholic and Protestant factions at court. Later editions of the ode refer to him by this formal title.

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as the longest entry (ode 1.10) in the third and later editions of Les Quatre Premiers Livres des Odes (1555). Its argument—like that of Petrarch’s sonnet 77 about Simone Martini’s art—defines the true poet as an inspired visionary who wins out over the technical skills of his critics. Jupiter, the poet’s advocate, vows that the profession of poetry “les autres mestiers passera, / D’autant qu’esclave il ne sera / De l’art aux Muses inutile”  ‘will outrank other professions, more especially since it will not be the slave of any skill that’s of no use to the Muses’ (lines 396–98). The noun mestiers (derived, as we’ve seen, from μυστήριον ‘mystery, secret rite, sacrament’) conveys the high calling associated with true poetry rather than mere versification. By contrast, the noun l’art refers to mechanical skill. With respect to poetry, it evokes a precision of meter and rhyme unrelated to any higher philosophical, theological, or ideological substance. The antinomies of fureur and craftsmanship match those that Giovan Battista Gelli evokes when he compares Platonic and Aristotelian poetics in his lecture on Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78 about Simone Martini’s art. Jupiter dismisses technical skill as the work of ordinary ouvriers (“Par art se font les ouvriers” ‘By practicing their art, craftsmen are licensed’, line 404). Instead, he proposes to endow his daughter Calliope, her sister muses, and the poets whom they favor with “ma sainte fureur” ‘my divine fury’ that will “polira vostre science” ‘burnish your acquired erudition’ (line 407–8). Mellin de Saint-Gelais and Clément Marot’s followers waste their talent on trivial topics and perfunctory surface effects. But far from disparaging their art as Jupiter does when he sends divine inspiration—“En vous les accomplira / Sans art, sans sueur ne sans paine” ‘In you it will accomplish [its goals] without any forced technique, without sweat and without struggle’ (lines 453–54)— the author of Les Amours embraces a stringent program of hard work and revision. Between 1534 and 1549 predecessors such as Saint-Gelais, Marot, Maurice Scève, Jacques Peletier du Mans, Joachim Du Bellay, and Pontus de Tyard had already experimented with Petrarchan forms. Against their ventures, he will make a serious and sustained investment in those forms. No poet of his generation would prove more fastidious about polishing his technique and revising his art than Ronsard, and none in his epoch would expend more sueur and paine than he did to enhance his professional reputation. The manifesto’s publication as an appendage to Les Amours accentuates Ronsard’s transition from elevated odes to stylish sonnets. Despite his scorn for “rimeurs courtizans” ‘courtier-rhymesters’ in the “Avis au Lecteur” of Les Odes, the grandiloquent poet has defected to the Petrarchan camp. He is willing to play the fool in love if this tactic might expand his elite readership and secure future patronage. His scramble to publish Les Amours in 1552 and,

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more importantly, his persistence in offering extensively revised editions of it over the next thirty-two years carry professional consequences. They spur his self-promotional push toward capturing a share of the courtly readership that his predecessors had cultivated.9 But Ronsard proceeds further than they did when he represents himself less as a poet indebted to Petrarchan forms than as one to whom these forms are in debt. In economic terms, he implies that since he has given up his time and talent to write Petrarchan poems, he has become Petrarchism’s creditor and is owed a return upon his investment.10 Ronsard reclaims this debt in sonnet 1 (L 4:5, W 1) of Les Amours, whose opening line and argument draw upon Petrarch’s sonnet 248, “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura” ‘Whoever wishes to see how much Nature’. This argument calls attention not to the beloved, as the Italian poet and his French imitators had done.11 Instead, it refers simply and unapologetically to the author himself, who is lending his talent to a fashionable Petrarchism at a time when he might more profitably invest it in other projects that could earn a greater reward, such as his epic Franciade. Ronsard’s early ambitions to write an epic now give way to his modest debut as a writer of sonnets: Qui voudra voyr comme un Dieu me surmonte, Comme il m’assault, comme il se fait vainqueur, Comme il r’enflame et r’englace mon coeur, Comme il reçoit un honneur de ma honte:

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Qui voudra voir une jeunesse pronte A suivre en vain l’objet de son malheur, Me vienne voir: il voirra ma douleur, Et la rigueur de l’Archer qui me donte. Whoever wishes to see how a god overwhelms me as he attacks me, how he makes himself a vanquisher, how he ignites and freezes my heart again and again, how he derives honor from my shame; whoever  9. See Cécile Alduy, Politique des “Amours”: Poétique et genèse d’un genre français nouveau (1544 – 60) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 117–39. For patronage at the court of Henri II, see Robert J. Knecht, The French Renaissance Court (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 211–25. 10.  In the thirteenth-century legal phrase “dommage et intérêts,” the term carries the sense of an “indemnity” owed for damages that occur between (inter-est) two moments of time. See Le grand Robert de la langue française, ed. Paul Robert, 9 vols., 2nd ed. (Paris: Robert, 1986), 5:426–27. 11.  Petrarch’s poem was translated by Marot in 1539, and it found echoes in Scève’s Délie 278 (1544), Tyard’s sonnet 2 in Erreurs amoureuses 2 (1549), and Du Bellay’s sonnet 61 in Olive (1550), which articulates the author’s poetic manifesto. See Sarah Sturm Maddox, Ronsard, Petrarch, and the “Amours” (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999), 36–43; and Alduy, Politiques des “Amours,” 36–43.

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wishes to see a youthfulness ready to follow in vain the object of its undoing, should come see me: he will see my suffering and the rigor of the archer who tames me. On one level, the poet emerges as an unabashed homo economicus who displays himself to advantage even when events have brought him to disadvantage. He is transacting his identity into a fiction that represents him as a Petrarchan lover. That he does this for his readers’ delight emerges from a pun in the poem’s third word, voyr ‘see’, pronounced in sixteenth-century French as vε:r, homophonic with French vers ‘verse, poetry’. Whoever likes Petrarchan poetry will find it in these sonnets of Les Amours. The first version of the poem’s sestet admits as much in a self-deprecating way: Il cognoistra combien la raison peult Contre son arc, quand une foys il vault, Que nostre coeur son esclave demeure: Et si voirra que je suis trop heureux, D’avoir au flanc l’aiguillon amoureux Plein du venin dont il faut que je meure.

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He will know how much reason can prevail against his bow, when once he decrees that our heart should languish as his slave; and so he will see that I am too happy to bear in my side the amorous spur, full of the poison from which I must perish. Here the speaker quantifies his powers (“combien la raison peult”) in a negative estimate that depicts his relationship to Cupid as an esclave ‘slave’ to his master. And to this the speaker assents (“je suis hereux”) as long as he attracts a readership. The overlap of readers, enlisting Cassandre, potential patrons, courtly society, the greater public, and finally posterity, contrasts sharply with the speaker’s retreat from the visionary posture of his odes to the confessional bearing of his sonnets. His role as a captive suggests that his quest for patronage invites a willing self-exposure.12 The problem is to negotiate a protective cover that might enhance rather than detract from his success. To provide this cover, Ronsard radically revises the poem’s sestet between the second edition of his Oeuvres in 1567 and its fifth edition in 1578.

12.  For Ronsard’s quest for patronage, see Cécile Alduy, “Lyric Economies: Manufacturing Value in French Petrarchan Collections,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 721–53.

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The latter edition introduces, among other poems, three new collections of sonnets—Sur la Mort de Marie, Sonnets et madrigals pour l’Astrée, and Sonnets pour Hélène—each with a distinctive approach to the fourteen-line form. The controlling fiction is that the Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici has prevailed upon him to return to Petrarchism after an interval of twenty-two years.13 A small but telling 1578 revision of line 7 from “me vienne voir: il voirra ma douleur” to “me vienne lire: il lira ma douleur” shifts the poem’s action from seeing the lover’s grief to reading the poet’s verse and feeling its power. In the revised sestet he depicts his relationship to Cupid as a transformative one that affirms his professional worth: Il connoistra que foible est la raison Contre son trait quand sa douce poison Corrompt le sang, tant le mal nous enchante: Et connoistra, que je suis trop heureux D’estre en mourant nouveau Cygne amoureux Qui son obseque à soy mesme se chante.

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He will know that reason is weak against his arrow when its sweet poison corrupts his blood, so much does its evil enchant us. And he will know that I am quite happy to be, while dying, a new swan in love, that sings to itself its own obsequies. In gratitude to his benefactress, Catherine de’ Medici, the speaker represents his labor as a type of disinterested activity that conceals his economic motivation. He locates it upon a site of literary convention free from any apparent obligation or calculation. It is a site, in fact, of classical allusion as the poet imports from Horace’s Ode 2.20 the figure of a swan that performs its sweetest and most elevated song upon approaching its demise. Concurrent with the publication of an expanded Oeuvres in his fifty-fourth year, this figure represents him as a master poet who, as an older lover, is still able to compete with younger poets. The speaker reinforces this point with a latent pun on Cygne ‘swan’ as signe ‘sign’ of its own craft. This wordplay transmits what the speaker has become across the long arc of his poetic development, inviting us to read his work as the “sign” and product of a distinguished career. It has

13.  Between 1553 and 1556, Ronsard added 62 sonnets to the 185 sonnets of the first Les Amours (1552).

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outlasted changing fashion, and even at this late stage it offers new wares to an expectant readership. But by calling attention to the poet’s advanced age, this trope acknowledges a superannuated element in his amatory persona. Ronsard’s final revision of the poem for the sixth edition of his Oeuvres ( January 1584) retrieves some of the moral insight that concludes Petrarch’s sonnet 1 (“che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno” ‘that whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream’) with witty self-deprecation: Et cognoistra que l’homme se deçoit Quand plein d’erreur un aveugle il reçoit Pour sa conduite, un enfant pour son maistre.

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And he will know that a person succumbs to self-deception when, full of error, he engages a blind boy for safe conduct, a child for one’s master. As the speaker evokes a transaction with Cupid, he represents himself no longer as an esclave ‘slave’ to love, but as an unwary client who has taken on a blind boy for a guide. By confessing his dependence upon this minor, the poet admits that he has indentured himself to a poetic style (howsoever varied he would allow it to become) in the Petrarchan mode that, as a young author of ambitious Odes, he had flatly disdained. His career has now come full circle, and the choices that he made when he began his first sonnet cycle have come to stay with him. Both early and late, Petrarchism brings recognition to him just as he brings recognition to it. It enables him, through successive revisions of Les Amours, to present himself as a poet in control of his own fortune, a witty sonneteer who entertains readers at his own expense, but still an artist who values his poetry. To confirm its value, he has recruited commentators willing to document the classical, mythological, and literary sources that inhabit his texts. To the first edition of Les Odes in 1550, Jean Martin had contributed a Breve exposition de quelques passages du Premier Livre des Odes. In 1551 Nicolas Denisot provided a preface and explanatory notes for Ronsard’s poems in the Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois. Now for the second edition of Les Amours Marc Antoine Muret annotates each poem, bestowing upon the entire collection the prestige of a commentary similar to those that had helped to canonize Petrarch’s Rime sparse.14 14.  Marc Antoine Muret (1526–85) arrived in Paris in 1551 from Toulouse, where he had built a reputation for composing musical settings based upon ancient writing about music. In 1554 he’d be

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Muret’s remarks upon sonnet 8 (L 4:12, W 8) show what his commentary could do. Here the speaker, full of self-reproach, represents the beloved as one who has impeded his poetic progress. She has immobilized him in stone, “dans un roc emmuré” ‘immured in a rock’, hindering (among other projects) his work on the Franciade. Muret comments that “l’oeil d’icelle l’empierre” ‘her eye turns him to stone’, adding that Gorgons like Medusa shared “ceste proprieté, que tous ceux qui les regardoient, soudain’ estoient changez en pierres” ‘this characteristic, such that all who looked on them were suddenly turned to stone’.15 This trope of immurement replays the motif of the beloved as Medusa, now dislocated from the homosocial context that defines Petrarch’s use of it.16 Rather than treat the motif as an exchange between men on how to ward off the paralyzing effect of a beloved’s disdain, Ronsard treats it as an expression of self-reproach. Oddly, however, the poem begins as a reproach against Cassandre: Lors que mon oeil pour t’oeillader s’amuse, Le tien habile à ses traits descocher, Estrangement m’em-pierre en un rocher, Comme au regard d’une horrible Meduse.17

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When my eye amuses itself by eying you, yours—adept in shooting its arrows—strangely petrifies me in a mass of stone, as though with the gaze of a horrible Medusa. The speaker’s neologistic transposition of the noun oeil into a verbal infinitive oeillader hints at a strain in his reproach. Oeillader implies his answerability to the charge of “eyeing” her before she casts her spell upon him. The verb activating this spell, m’em-pierre, evokes the French poet’s name Pierre and, through its Latin root, the petra of the Italian poet’s family name. By adopting driven from Paris on charges of sodomy and atheism. His commentary on Les Amours, reprinted in Ronsard’s collected works of 1560, 1567, and 1574, emphasizes classical sources, mythological apparatus, and borrowings from Petrarch and ancient Roman elegiac poets. In addition, an anonymous commentator provided notes for four new odes appended to the 1553 edition of Les Amours. See Jean Céard, “Muret, commentateur des Amours de Ronsard,” in Sur des vers de Ronsard, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), 37–50. 15.  References are to Marc Antoine Muret, Commentaires au Premier Livre des Amours de Ronsard, ed. Jacques Chomart, Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani (Geneva: Droz, 1986), here quoted from p. 5. 16.  For Ronsard’s attempt to distinguish himself from Petrarch in this poem, see Ullrich Langer, Invention, Death, and Self-Definition in the Poetry of Pierre de Ronsard (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1986), 11–21. 17.  1552 text quoted from the Weber edition.

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Petrarch’s lyric mode, he sets upon a task that will impede his epic ambitions, as Petrarch did when he allowed his Rime sparse to usurp his Africa: Moy donc rocher, si dextrement je n’use L’outil des Seurs pour ta gloire esbaucher, Qu’un seul Tuscan est digne de toucher, Non le changé, mais le changeur accuse. Changed as I am into a rock, if I use with no dexterity the muses’ instrument to sketch your glory, which only one Tuscan is worthy to touch, I would blame not the one who has been changed [myself], but rather the agent of change [you].

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Muret is careful to assert in this commentary that the Tuscan poet might be any number of poets other than Petrarch—“Vn Petrarque ou vn semblable à luy” ‘Petrarch or someone like him’ (Muret, Commentaires, p. 5)—but his expansion of possible models points to Ronsard’s absorption into the fashionable circle of Italianate imitators. In a single instant at the beginning of the sestet (“Las, qu’ay je dit?”), the speaker recognizes that he has rebuked Cassandre, le changeur who has disabled him. A revision of line 8 published posthumously in 1587 would obviate the awkward confusion of gender in the original “le changeur” by making Cassandre’s cruauté a new subject of the verb: “Ta cruauté soymesme s’en accuse” ‘Your cruelty itself is to be blamed for it’. But in reproaching her, he now incurs her wrath. The result is that he will—and should—suffer defamation: Las, qu’ay-je dit? Dans un roc emmuré, En te blamant je ne suis asseuré, Tant j’ay grand peur des flammes de ton ire. Et que mon chef par le feu de tes yeux Soit diffamé, comme les monts d’Epire Sont diffamez par la foudre des cieulx. Alas, what have I said? Immured in a rock, in blaming you, I am bolstered with no confidence—such deep fear do I have of the flames of your wrath. How my brow should be smeared by the fire of your eyes, as the mountains of Epirus are smeared by lightening from the heavens! He merits her anger. But worse, as the participial diffamé and diffamez suggest, he merits as well the eclipse of fame that will follow from postponing work on his Franciade.

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Ronsard of course insisted that his epic would emerge one day in polished form. But, as he worked upon Les Amours in 1552–53, he might have felt that he was squandering more than a bit of his talent upon amatory sonnets. He could justify this expenditure by thinking of his sonnets as an instrument and a resource, a means to the end of advertising his poetic skills and attracting a readership of influential patrons newly captivated by an imported Petrarchism.18 We might describe Ronsard’s strategy as an accumulation of “credit,” a specifically entrepreneurial effort to earn poetic “interest” upon his investment in Les Amours and direct it toward his Franciade. It participates in a process that channels available resources to desired ends—in Ronsard’s case, to provide collateral support for his epic ambitions. In this transaction, he revamps his views about poetry and poetics. Exchanging earlier convictions about inspiration for a commitment to craftsmanship and skill grounded in his revision, Ronsard charts for himself a professional route to literary recognition, public acceptance, and economic security. If we set Les Amours in the context of the early 1550s, Ronsard’s gravitation toward the dynamics of interest and investment might seem unexceptional and his entrepreneurial efforts understandable. In December 1545 Pope Paul III had convened the Council of Trent to renovate Catholic doctrine and practice.19 Concerns of the French nobility about doctrines affecting economic practice proved as compelling to the commercial and professional middle classes as they did to the monarchy. François Rabelais’s Tiers livre (spring 1546) held up a funhouse mirror to their debates in Panurge’s praise of debts and debtors, the “esprits animaulx” ‘animal spirits’ that prompt investment, and the “profond abisme” ‘profound abyss’ beneath the practice of borrowing and lending (3.4: 366–67/273); in Pantagruel’s skepticism about the homo economicus as “saige mondian” ‘worldly wise’ (3.37: 3.468/369); in Bridoye’s understanding of money as the basis of all judgments (“pecunia est alter sanguis” ‘money is another blood’) that generate legal decisions so “paradoxe et estrange” ‘paradoxical and strange’ (3.42–43: 484–86/386–88); and in Pantagruel’s invention of the herb Pantagruelion (3.51: 505/406).20 These concerns derive from conventional teachings about 18.  See Michel Simonin, “Ronsard et la poétique des Oeuvres” in his L’encre et la lumière (Geneva: Droz: 2004), 237–52. For the poetics in his prefatory poems, see Malcolm Quainton, “The Liminary Texts of Ronsard’s Amours de Cassandre,” French Studies 53 (1999): 257–78. For economic figurations in the 1552 and 1553 editions of Les Amours, see Alduy, Politique des “Amours,” 174–93. 19.  For the Aristotelian logic of money and its economic regulation, see Jotham Parsons, Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 60–103. 20. See Terence Cave, Pré-histoires II: Langues étrangères et troubles economiques au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 149–57. Quotations from François Rabelais refer to Oeuvres completes, ed. Mireille Huchon and François Moreau, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) and

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matters of distributive and commutative justice, the exchange value of goods, exploitative usury, and permissible rates of interest. The key player in this last regard was the king’s advisor Charles Du Moulin, whose Treatise on Contracts and Usury in 1547 once and for all decoupled from medieval condemnations of usury the legitimate earning of interest upon contractual loans.21 Du Moulin’s argument demonstrates on scriptural grounds that Divine Law not only condones but approves of—and even urges—the payment of interest upon commercial loans. A distinction between fair “interest” and exorbitant “usury” proves crucial to his reasoning. Usury refers to the net profit that a lender makes upon a borrower’s “use” (Latin usus) of money in times of high risk or dire need. Interest, however, refers to a reimbursement for expenses or for loss of profit that a lender might incur for not investing money otherwise during the period of time that “exists between” (Latin inter-est) the conferral of the loan and its repayment.22 “I see no harm in this,” Du Moulin writes, “nothing contrary to divine or natural law; since nothing is done in it contrary to charity, but is done rather from mutual charity. It is plain that one grants the favor of a loan from his property; the other remunerates his benefactor with The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); the first numeral refers to book and chapter, the second to page number in Huchon, ed., and the third to page number in Frame, trans. The term “animal spirits” derives from Galen, who described it as a form of cognitive energy that complements vital and natural spirits originating in the heart and liver. For the expansive meaning of invention in Rabelais, see Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 15–19. 21.  For biography and an inventory of Du Moulin’s works, see Jean-Louis Thireau, Charles Du Moulin (1500 –1566): Etude sur les sources, la méthode, les idées politiques et économiques (Geneva: Droz, 1980). Du Moulin developed the topic in three complementary treatises: Tractatus de usuris, 1542–45, published 1547; Sommaire du traité des usures, a distillation in French of the former text, 1547; and Tractatus de eo quod interest, a specific justification for earned interest, 1547. His argument ultimately contributed to the Counter-Reformation’s approbation of interest on loaned money. Though initially placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559, it received Pius V’s approval in 1567 after the Italian legal scholar Gaspare Cavallini (Gaspar Caballinus) excised passages offensive to theologians. Cavallini then conflated Du Moulin’s two Latin treatises, Tractatus de usuris and Tractatus de eo quod interest, in his own Tractatus commerciorum et usurarum redituumque pecunia constitutorum et monetarum, published at Venice in 1576. For Du Moulin’s approval by the Gallican faction and Cardinal Jean du Bellay, arguing against the papal faction and the Guises’ disapproval, see Donald R. Kelly, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 151–82, and J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1974), 27–58 and 81–89. For Du Moulin’s resonance in Rabelais, see Mireille Huchon, Rabelais (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 351–64, and Cave, Préhistoires II, 152–57. 22.  Latin phrases refer to Du Moulin’s Tractatus in the facsimile edition of his Italian redactor Gaspare Cavallini (Gaspare Caballinus), Tractatus commerciorum et usurorum (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972), here on pp. 15–16. In his Latin text, Cavallini signals the conditional nature of Du Moulin’s principle by shifting from the latter’s indicative verb form inter-est to its subjunctive form intersit in order to stress a gain that the lender might forego during the interval: “tanti sua intersit” ‘from so much that might intervene’ (p. 16).

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a part of the gain derived therefrom, without suffering any loss.”23 Contrary to Aristotelian and Scholastic objections against any compounding of money, the charging of equitable interest obeys natural law when it is practiced in moderation. Justly rewarding the creditor while enabling the debtor to prosper from the loan, it results in a win-win situation (par. 441, p. 247).24 As a legal contract, the agreement to pay a certain interest over a specified period of time should meet the needs of both parties in ways that multiply the assets of each (par. 717, p. 402). What counts in the fair pricing of interest is the nominal value of money whose worth floats as it circulates and multiplies (or diminishes) according to calculable circumstance (par. 808, p. 444).25 In the expanded 1552 edition of Quart livre (partial ed. 1548), Rabelais dramatizes the effects of these new attitudes in bono and in malo. In situations concerning choice and moderation (Mercury’s bargains with Couillatris in the 1552 Prologue; Dindenault’s self-destructive haggling in chapters 5–8), commodification (the Chiquanous’ appurtenances in chapters 12–16), inheritance (the last wills and testaments in chapters 20–21), consumption (Quaresmeprennant’s voraciousness in chapters 30–32), and greed (the papal decretals in chapters 51–53 and Panurge’s merchandising of paroles gelées in chapters 55–56), the new economic peril is not the institutionalization of borrowing and investment but the mismanagement of credit and the fluctuation of interest rates. Ronsard’s investment of time and energy in Les Amours to enhance public interest in his work resonate with Du Moulin’s expectations about the legitimacy of earning interest upon loaned money to compensate for using it otherwise. Both conceive of “interest” as a form of investment. For Du Moulin, it refers in a double sense to the loss of earning power by one who loans money over a measurable period of time and its gain by one who borrows money in the same period. For Ronsard, it refers in a double sense to the earning power of a writer’s literary reputation in a widening circle of readership insofar as public recognition can attract patronage in a gift economy, and to the enhancement of his marketable craftsmanship and skill through experiment and revision in an exchange economy. The latter enhances the value of his future production even if his experimentation with Les Amours delays progress on his Franciade.

23.  Quoted from a partial translation of the relevant passage by Arthur Eli Monroe, ed., Early Economic Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 106. 24. In De eo quod interest, Du Moulin argues that a fair rate of interest would be 5 percent; see Thireau, Charles Du Moulin, 377. 25.  For discussion, see Thireau, Charles Du Moulin, 401–31.

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By positioning his sonnets to Cassandre as an impediment to his epic, Ronsard draws upon Petrarch’s own precedent.26 Laura had distracted the Italian poet from completing his Africa. Or so the early commentators reasoned when they construed the Rime sparse as a substitute for his Latin epic. Francesco Filelfo’s exposition of Petrarch’s sonnet 20, “Vergognando talor ch’ancor si taccia” ‘At times ashamed that I do not speak’, draws a contrast between rima, the vernacular rhyme of Italian poetry that Petrarch dedicated to Laura, and versi, the unrhymed Latin meters in which he composed his Africa, “perche non ha facto di lei qualche singular opra o in rima uulgare o in uersi litterali” ‘because neither in vernacular rhyme nor in elevated classical measures has he fashioned for her any exceptional verse’ (sig. 25v). Petrarch’s poem serves as an explicit model for Ronsard’s sonnet 27 (L 4:30, W 27): “Bien mille fois et mille j’ay tenté / De fredonner sus les nerfz de ma Lyre” ‘Thousands upon thousands of times I’ve attempted to hum on the strings of my lyre’. Instead of contrasting Petrarchan sonnets with his exalted epic, Ronsard presents them as inhibitors of his epic. Evoking the four types of madness outlined by Plato in Phaedrus 245b–c, the speaker concludes that multiple fureurs of love have sapped the concentrated fureur of his vatic inspiration: “Mais tout soubdain je suis espouvanté: . . . / De cent fureurs brusquement tourmenté” ‘But all at once I am frightened, suddenly tormented by a hundred furors’. Unable to sing of his love, he settles for the lesser reward of being consumed by love. Ronsard’s poem nonetheless records the very song that he says he’s unable to sing. Only the sestet deviates from Petrarch’s model as its speaker compares himself to “la Prestresse folle, / Qui bégue perd la voix et la parolle” ‘the mad priestess who, stuttering, loses both voice and words’. Muret’s commentary relates these lines to Vergil’s Sibyl in Aeneid 6.50–51 (“Ceste affection est ainsi descrite en Virgile” ‘This heightened emotion is likewise described by Vergil’, Muret, Commentaires, p. 16), but another pertinent comparison points to Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. For promising to sleep with Apollo, she receives from him the gift of prophecy. When she reneges on her part of the bargain, he renders the gift useless by ensuring that no one would believe her. In his Vie de Ronsard, Binet comments that the mythic Cassandra overtly subtends Ronsard’s portrayal of Cassandre Salviati: “Par ceste Cassandre Troyenne on dit qu’il representa mistiquement l’envie qu’il avoit de chanter l’origine de nos Rois issus des Troyens”  ‘Through this Trojan 26.  For the intensity of Cassandre’s singularity as an agent of seduction, modeled on Petrarch’s Laura but not universalized, see Ullrich Langer, Lyric in the Renaissance from Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 73–101.

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Cassandra some say that he represented covertly the urge that he had to sing of the origins of our monarchs who descended from the Trojans’.27 Conceived in visionary furor, Cassandra’s unheeded words set an unfortunate precedent for a poet who would recount heroic exploits of his monarch’s mythic ancestor, Francus, nephew of the Trojan Cassandra. At this point her name converges with that of the beloved. Object bleeds into subject as Cassandra/Cassandre reduces him to silence in the poem’s 1552 text: “La voix fraude ma bouche, / Et voulant dire en vain je suis béant” ‘My voice belies my mouth and, wishing in vain to speak, I find myself gap-jawed’.28 Like the victim of Apollo’s curse, the would-be poet of the Franciade knows that he possesses a prophetic gift but cannot use it. In the paired sonnets 70 and 71—and especially in their revision of 1578—the speaker attributes his missteps with the Franciade to wounds inflicted by Cassandre and Cupid. Addressing her in sonnet 70 (L 4:60, W 70), “De quelle plante, ou de quelle racine” ‘With what plant or what root’, he attributes to her, “toy qui sçays des herbes le pouvoyr”‘you who know the power of herbs’, the healing powers that Apollo bestowed upon the Trojan Cassandra. In a 1578 revision of the poem’s conclusion, the speaker considers himself a protégé of Apollo and identifies with that god’s infatuation. Now he petitions Cassandre to refrain from wounding him any further: “Pres d’Ilion tu blessas Apollon: . . . / Ne blesse plus l’echolier et le maistre” ‘Near Troy you wounded Apollo. No longer wound the student as well as the master’. The companion poem avers that “Ja deja Mars ma trompe avoit choisie, / Et dans mes vers ja françoys devisoyt” ‘Already Mars had chosen my trumpet and was already speaking French in my verse’. A 1578 revision clarifies the situation. The speaker’s turn to Mars signals that he had begun to compose his martial epic, and his redaction of the second line seals his identification with Francus: “Et dans mes vers ja Francus devisoyt” ‘And Francus was already speaking in my verse’. Cupid nonetheless diverts him from his Franciade: “D’un trait certain me playant jusqu’à l’os” ‘With a sharp arrow wounding me down to the bone’. As Muret comments, “Il fut nauré d’Amour, & par ce moyen contraint à laisser ce tant braue subjet pour descrire les passions amoureux” ‘He was wounded by Cupid, and so was forced to abandon such an epic theme in order to write of his amorous passions’ (Muret, Commentaires, p. 40). Hit by love’s arrow, he shelves his Franciade and concentrates upon sonnets. 27. Binet, Discours de la vie, ed. Laumonier, 16. As the editor notes, this comment appears only in the text’s third edition, 1597. 28.  1552 text quoted from the Weber edition.

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In response to these concerns, Ronsard found himself working in Petrarch’s literary shadow. As a homo economicus, the Italian poet provided him with the example of one who channeled his literary energies into entrepreneurial projects. Like Petrarch, Ronsard makes aesthetic decisions with a view toward their practical consequences. Like Petrarch who regarded the Rime sparse as a distraction from his Africa, he finds that Les Amours has preempted his Franciade. And like Petrarch who complained of being misunderstood, isolated from his beloved, and betrayed by the very writing that issues from his hand, he finds himself on the margins of a court whose literary tastes he disowned. To express this condition, both poets turned to the mythic figure of Bellerophon. For Petrarch in his Rime sparse, the relevant poem is sonnet 35, “Solo et pensoso i più deserti campi / vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti” ‘Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow’. For Ronsard in Les Amours, it is sonnet 103 (L 5:132, W 97), “Sur le sablon la semence j’épan” ‘On the sandy field I scatter my seed’. As sixteenth-century commentators construed Petrarch’s sonnet, the mythic figure of Bellerophon subtends the poem’s action as its speaker recounts his lonely trek through a savage wilderness. Alessandro Vellutello, Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, and Bernardino Daniello locate Petrarch’s source in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations 3 with its paraphrase of Homer’s Iliad 6.200–202: “Qui miser in campis moerens errabat, ipse suum cor edens, hominum vestigia vitans” ‘Weeping, the unfortunate man wandered the fields pouring out his heart and avoiding the traces of men’ (quoted in Vellutello sig. 18v, Gesualdo sig. liiv, and Daniello sig. 24v). Bellerophon, a son of the king of Corinth, has been sent into exile after slaying his brother. When he approaches King Proetus of Tiryns as a supplicant, the latter’s wife makes sexual advances on him. After he rejects her, she accuses him of rape. Reluctant to punish him, Proetus sends him to his father-in-law with a sealed letter instructing the addressee to murder its bearer. The recipient pities Bellerophon and, to avoid killing him directly, sends him on a mission to slay the monstrous Chimera. The hero complies and achieves victory, but only after Athene equips him with the winged horse Pegasus. Reveling in his success, Bellerophon flies astride Pegasus to uncover divine mysteries, but for his pride and arrogance Zeus casts him down to earth where he wanders through the wilderness blind and crippled, avoiding the company of others. Bellerophon figures the misunderstood poet in several ways. As the carrier of a written message that threatens to undo him (Homer’s myth happens to record the earliest Greek reference to acts of reading and writing in an otherwise oral world), he becomes the victim of an inscription that he cannot control, portending the fate of poets who risk revealing too much about

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themselves in their own texts. This catastrophe awaits Petrarch’s speaker in sonnet 35 as he reveals his inner life through the trope of “being read” (“di fuor si legge com’io dentro avampi” ‘anyone can read from without how I am aflame from within’), displaying to an intrusive readership “di che tempre / sia la mia vita, ch’ è celata altrui” ‘the temper of my life, which is hidden from others’. As tamer of Pegasus, he rides the fabled animal that sprang from Medusa’s severed neck, and he allows it to tap the well of Hippocrene that would nourish the muses on Mount Helicon. (Ronsard evokes this part of the myth in his voeu to Les Amours when he devotes himself to the “Diuines Soeurs . . . sur le bord du chevalin crystal” ‘Divine sisters on the banks of the horse’s stream’.) Finally, as one who seeks to penetrate the divine mysteries, Bellerophon anticipates the inspired but presumptuous poet in his pursuit of lasting fame. Natale Conti’s Mythologiae (1567) recounts that “Jupiter, who punishes the arrogant with great severity, decided to crush this rash fool for good. . . . He was struck blind and he wandered over the Aleian plain for the rest of his days.”29 These consequences resonate in Ronsard’s poem, which proceeds to develop one series of tropes grounded in social and economic considerations and another grounded in aesthetic considerations. Compounding their cost is the speaker’s gratuitous offering of himself to the beloved (“Sans qu’on m’invite à toute heure je m’oufre, / Et sans loyer mon âge je dépan”‘Without being bidden I offer myself at once, and without recompense I give away my youth’). In the second quatrain he submits his heart to the alchemical transformation of Cassandre’s gaze, tellingly presented in the form of a painted portrait that evokes Simone Martini’s portrait of Petrarch’s Laura: En voeu ma vie à son portrait j’apan: Devant son feu mon coeur se change en soufre, Et pour ses yeus cruellement je soufre Dix mille maux, et d’un ne me repan. With this vow I dedicate myself to her portrait: before her fire, my heart turns into sulphur; and for her eyes I cruelly suffer 10,000 ills and am recompensed for not a single one. Here the identical rhyme of soufre ‘sulphur’ and soufre ‘suffer’ posits an equivalence between substance (the mineral) and response (anguish), while the root

29. Natale Conti, Mythologiae, trans. and annotated John Mulryan, 2 vols. (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 2:827.

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of the rhyming verbs epan, depan, apan, and repan (from Latin pendere ‘to weigh upon a scale in order to determine a value’) links the speaker’s action to the economics of distributing, dispensing, expending, and repaying.30 The octave plays on these associations as the lover scatters seed in wasteful sand, offers his labor without compensation, expends his energies in devotion to his beloved, and suffers cruelties without repayment. At the opening of the sestet, the noun trampe ‘temper’ broadens the aesthetic perspective: “Qui sçauroit bien, quelle trampe a ma vie, / D’estre amoureux n’auroit jamais envie” ‘Whoever might really know what temper my life has, would never feel envy of my being amorous’. The word refers to the process of imparting strength or toughness to a metal by heating it to a temperature just below its transformation point. Muret’s commentary associates it with the art of manufacturing a knight’s armor: “Metaphore prinse des armuriers” ‘Metaphor borrowed from the work of armorers’ (Muret, Commentaires, p. 55). But, as he implies when he refers to Petrarch’s sonnet 35, “Petrarque en a aussi usé” ‘Petrarch used it as well’, the word also evokes the finesse of a painter who tempers light or shade with color, or a musician who tempers individual notes with contrasting sounds. Readers who discern the “temper” of Ronsard’s amatory woes, his erotic “temperament,” would never agree to exchange places with him. The poet’s emotional predicament is distinctively his own, a claim underscored in line 11 of the poem’s 1553 edition by the verb that conveys his torment, j’ars, with its echo of his name ‘Ronsard’, etymologically ‘burning bramble bush’: Je tremble, j’ars, je me pai d’un amer Qui plus qu’aluine est rempli d’amertume: Je vi d’ennui, de deuil je me consume: En tel estat je suis pour trop aimer. I tremble, I burn, I feed myself with aloes that more than absinthe is filled with bitterness. I live on dread, with grief I am consumed; in such a state am I for loving too much. In a 1572 revision, Ronsard eliminates j’ars and curtails his expression of pain: “De chaud de froid je me sens allumer. / Tout mon plaisir est confit d’amerume” ‘With cold, with heat, I feel myself ignited; all my pleasure is steeped in bitterness’. No longer eager to prove his wit to a readership that

30.  For Ronsard’s fascination with the figure of polyptoton, see Ullrich Langer, Penser les forms du plaisir littéraire à la Renaissance (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2009), 219–24 and 231–39.

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had dismissed him a quarter century earlier, he tones it down and affects the control of a self-confident master. This poem is one of the new sonnets added to Les Amours in 1553, and as something of a postscript, it projects a retrospective character. In retreat at La Possonnière, just as Bellerophon had been in exile when he rode Pegasus to Helicon, he complains that Les Amours has blocked his approach to the Franciade. But by revising the collection with care, and by recruiting Muret to provide a commentary for it, he takes steps to secure his reputation among cognoscenti. Ronsard lays down the mantle of inspired poet and assumes the role of a journeyman poet at work in his study. In this respect, the poem’s self-conscious references to art differ from those expressed in the 1552 edition.31 There it appeared that Ronsard was still negotiating his high-minded aspirations to exalt the monarchy through vatic pronouncement. Here it appears that he is applying himself to process and experiment. Still unsure of his way to reach readers at court with access to patronage and publication, he explores all routes to fulfillment. Two examples occur at the end of the 1552 collection. Following sonnet 200, the madrigal “Un sot Vulcan ma Cyprine faschoit” ‘A buffoonish Vulcan angered my Venus’ (L 4:159, W 195) depicts Cassandre’s jealous husband remonstrating with his wife, possibly because he has found her rewarding the poet’s attention with some show of regard. Cassandre responds with tears: “Ainsi voit on quelquefois en un temps, / Rire et pleurer le soleil du printemps” ‘So one sometimes sees the sun of springtime smile and cry at once’. To elaborate upon this Petrarchan trope, Ronsard borrows the figure of Cupid from Scève’s paired dizains 342 and 343 in Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu. The first dizain, “Quand quelquesfoys d’elle à elle me plaigns” ‘When sometimes I complain to her about her’, elicits Délie’s hurt feelings about the speaker’s accusations, and it ends with Cupid washing his wings “aux larmes de ses yeux” ‘in the tears from her eyes’. The second dizain, “Au vif flambeau de ses yeulx larmoyantz” ‘In the living flame of her weeping eyes’, has Cupid igniting his arrow and wounding the speaker with it: “Je suis blessé, et si ne sçay comment” ‘I am wounded and yet I do not know how’. Ronsard condenses this action into two lines of his second quatrain: “En l’oeil humide alloit baignant son aile, / Puis en l’ardent ses plumes il sechoit” ‘[Cupid] proceeded to bathe his wing in her damp eye and then dry his feathers in her fiery eye’. His reference to Scève gestures toward an earlier

31.  For Ronsard’s effort to shape a stronger sense of sequencing in 1553, see Alduy, Politique des “Amours,” 188–92 and 206–11.

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French poet whose style provides a bridge between his own experimentation and conventions familiar to his anticipated readership.32 Ronsard’s poem is exceptional in two respects. First, it is one of the few entries in Les Amours that refer to Cassandre’s husband in a context pitting him against her in marital discord. Second, the 1584 expansion of its first tercet into a third quatrain turns the poem—originally a sonnet—into a fifteen-line madrigal. This representation of an unhappy marriage may have some bearing upon its composition in 1552 when, after the second assembly of the Council of Trent a year earlier, French bishops decried the council’s refusal to condemn marriages without parental consent licensed by meddlesome clergy as an affront to the legal right of families to manage their estates and lines of inheritance.33 Into this context Ronsard inserts his hybrid sonnet-madrigal to display sympathy for Cassandre’s brave accommodation to her domestic situation. Several poems later, Ronsard depicts Cassandre’s departure from her Loire estate, in sonnet 213 (L 5:153, W 209), “Je suis, je suis plus aise que les Dieux” ‘I am, I am happier than the gods’.34 The poem attempts to bring some closure to the sequence by recording Cassandre’s bestowal of an uninvited kiss upon the speaker. The repeated “Je suis” conveys his excitement at the beginning of the poem in its 1553 edition: “Quand maugre toi tu me baises, Maîtresse” ‘whenever contrary to your own usual behavior you kiss me, mistress’. This act exceeds the speaker’s expectations as a fulfillment of his innermost fantasy, stamping his longing and admiration paid in full, at least for now. In the penultimate poem of Les Amours in 1552, sonnet 226 (L 4:171, W 220), “Veu la douleur qui doucement me lime” ‘In view of the sorrow that chips sweetly away at me’, the speaker avers that he has still more poetry to contribute: “Je ne suis pas / Pour trop aymer à la fin de ma rime” ‘I’m not yet—on account of loving too much—at the end of my rhyme’. He avers too that his poems are not the product of fureur but of an ardeur and (in an internal rhyme) of a labeur that never weary him, “l’ardeur qui de chanter m’anime, / Et qui me rende en ce labeur moins las” ‘the ardor that animates me with singing and leaves me less tired in this labor’. The final poem, s­ onnet

32.  See Enzo Giudici, “Ronsard et l’Ecole lyonnaise,” Réforme Humanisme Renaissance 45 (1997): 67–100. 33.  See Gargantua’s denunciation of marriages without parental consent in Rabelais’s Tiers livre, ch. 48. For the controversy, see Michael Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 281–86, and Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s “Tiers Livre de Pantagruel” (Geneva: Droz, 1997), 179–85. In 1556 Henri II banned such marriages, though they were reinstated seven years later when the council upheld their validity. 34.  1553 text quoted from the Weber edition.

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229 (L 4:172, W 221), “J’alloy roulant ces larmes de mes yeux” ‘I went with tears rolling from my eyes’, evokes a time when the poet’s potential royal patron, Henri II, “loing des bornes de France / Vengeoit l’honneur de ses premiers ayeulz” ‘far from the borders of France, was avenging the honor of his earliest ancestors’.35 This topical turn—resonating with the protonational sentiment that Du Bellay accented in his Deffence et illustration de la langue François and Olive—modifies Ronsard’s search for the attention of a cultural elite fascinated by Petrarchism. With his investment in Les Amours, he reminds others of issues important to the monarch and the courtly nobility. Whether because of Cassandre’s obduracy or because of his own diffidence, the poet had put his epic plans on extended hold. This is not to say that he abandoned them completely. But it is to assert that artistic complications stalled his progress and challenged his youthful convictions about fureur as the motor of his art. They certainly put the brakes on his early development as a poet emulous of the Pindaric and Horatian ode.

35.  The likely occasion was Henri’s campaign against Charles V at Metz, Toul, and Verdun in spring 1552.

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Interest in Ariosto

The career of Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) must have seemed to Ronsard an attractive archetype,at least in its forward-looking trajectory.1 The Italian poet launched his career with elegant Latin verse reflecting his humanist education at Ferrara, and he then embraced vernacular composition with five dramatic comedies in prose and verse (1508–28) and seven satires in terza rima (1517–25).2 Around 1522 he began to revise Italian lyrics that he had drafted as early as 1493, modifying their diction to accord with the stylistic prescriptions of Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua.3 They comprise two pastoral eclogues, twenty-seven capitoli, forty-one sonnets, twelve madrigals, 1.  Like Ronsard, Ariosto had family roots in the military nobility, a classical education, tonsure in minor orders to receive lucrative benefices, hopes for patronage from a powerful cardinal, and aspirations to write a vernacular epic. These aspects of his life emerge in “My Muse Will Have a Story to Paint”: Selected Prose of Ludovico Ariosto, trans. Dennis Looney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 2.  The corpus of his Latin verse includes fifty-seven lyrics of various lengths and meters composed chiefly in 1494–1503. His plays include La cassaria (1508) and I suppositi (1509, revised from prose to verse in 1528–31), Il negromante (1520, rev. 1529), Lena (1528), and Gli studenti (1519, unfinished). His verse satires were published only after his death, pirated in 1534 and then in an edition authorized by his son in 1550. Two minor prose works, Erbolato and Conto dei contadini, were also published posthumously. 3.  For dating, see Cesare Bozzetti, “Notizie sulle Rime dell’Ariosto,” in Studi di filologia a critica offerti dagli allievi a Lanfranco Caretti (Rome: Salerno, 1985), 1:83–118, and Roberto Fedi, La memoria della poesia: Canzonieri, lirici, e libri di rime nel Rinascimento (Rome: Salerno, 1990), 83–115.

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and five canzoni, most (but not all) published posthumously in his Rime (1537, expanded in 1546). In 1504, he began his Orlando Furioso as a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s chivalric romance, Orlando Innamorato (1482–94). He plotted its narrative in a carefully integrated structure of heroic exploits, dynastic narrative, and chivalric romance and published it in forty cantos in 1516. He reissued it with stylistic revisions in 1521 and then republished it with further revision and an expansion to forty-six cantos in 1532.4 His Cinque Canti ‘Five Cantos’, a sequel in a deeper, anxious, more pessimistic key, drafted in 1519 and revised in the 1520s, was published posthumously in 1545. Ariosto’s career impressed Ronsard for several reasons, but two stand out. Ariosto’s lyric and epic poetry challenged Ronsard by accommodating normative Petrarchan elegance to sturdier qualities of classical form, but it also alerted him to possibilities of style embedded in both, and especially to a demanding exercise of craftsmanship and skill that would compromise the Neoplatonic doctrine of furor. Early on, the Orlando Furioso attracted its share of commentaries and critiques. An annotated edition with glosses on vocabulary, mythic references, sententiae, and ancient sources compiled by Petrarch’s commentator, Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano, appeared in 1542 from the press of Alessandro Bindoni at Venice.5 In the same year at Venice, Gabriel Giolito published a rival edition with an extravagant dedication to the future French king Henri II.6 To each canto Giolito added an allegorizing headnote composed by Lodovico Dolce, and at the volume’s end he provided a gloss on difficult vocabulary, classical sources, mythic allusions, and philosophical sententiae found in the poem. Simone Fórnari’s two-volume Spositione sopra l’Orlando Furioso (1549–50) expanded the scope of these moralizing allegorizations in its defense of the romance-epic.7 Subsequent

4.  See Alberto Casadei, Il percorso del “Furioso”: Ricerche intorno alle redazioni del 1516 e del 1521 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 61–112 and 159–72, and Marco Dorigatti, ed., Orlando Furioso secondo la princeps del 1516 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2006). For themes added to the 1532 edition, see Jo Ann Cavallo, The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 82–153. 5. See Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of “Orlando Furioso” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 21–47. 6.  Possibly owing to this extravagant dedication to the future king Henri II, “allo invittissimo prencipe il Delphino di Francia” ‘to the indomitable prince, the Dauphin of France’, quoted from its second edition: Orlando Furioso di M. Ludovico Ariosto novissimamente alla sua integrità ridotto. . . . Aggiuntovi per ciascun canto alcune allegorie et nel fine una breue espositione (Venice: G. Giolito, 1549), sig. Aiir), Giolito’s edition carried special force among French readers. 7.  La spositione di m. Simon Fórnari da Rheggio sopra l’Orlando fvrioso di m. Lvdovico Ariosto, 2 vols. (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1549–50). The first volume offers a biography of Ariosto (15–30), a defense of the poem’s abundance (31–58) and a tally of its learned references (59–795). The second (335 pages) allegorizes various episodes.

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editions of the poem added important commentaries (many cribbed from ideas in Fausto, Dolce, and Fórnari) by G. A. Valvassori (1553), Girolamo Ruscelli (1556), and Tommaso Porcacchi (1566). Full-length critical treatises such as I romanzi by Giovanni Battista Nicolucci (called “Il Pigna”), Giraldi Cinthio’s Discorsi intorno al comporre dei ramanzi (1554), and Antonio Minturno’s L’arte poetica (1564) referred extensively to Ariosto’s poem.8 Fórnari’s Spositione and Pigna’s I romanzi include biographies of Ariosto (based on events recounted in his satires) that document qualities that Ronsard identified with. Ariosto’s father, like Ronsard’s (and Petrarch’s too), pressured his reluctant son to study law and pursue a lucrative career.9 In his personal life, Ariosto—like Ronsard—eschewed courtly intrigue in favor of literary solitude, but he often yielded to distractions and interruptions (not the least of them amatory).10 Presaging Ronsard’s relations with a brigade of literary friends and advisors, Ariosto sought advice from Bembo, Jascopo Sadoleto, Francesco Maria Molza, and others. He also postponed writing his epic for many years in order to select its models, plot its action, and develop its poetic style, just as Ronsard did with his Franciade. The publication of Orlando Furioso, revised line by line and expanded in three editions, lays bare the Italian poet’s habits of work and revision much in the way that Ronsard’s successive editions of his Oeuvres do between 1560 and 1587.11 Fastidious attention to detail became a hallmark of Ariosto’s career, marking his professionalism as a poet and contributing to Ronsard’s esteem for his work. Ariosto’s mingling of archaic diction with boldly colloquial expression, his sprinkling of dialects from Emilia and Lombardy (like Ronsard’s with the dialect of Vendôme),

 8. See Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 48–70.   9.  Fórnari, deriving information from references in the poet’s Satires, emphasizes the violenza of his father’s pressure: La spositione, 1:17. Pigna adds Ovid to the list of poets who suffered the same fate: I romanzi, ed. Salvatore Ritrovato (Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1997). 10.  About Ariosto’s retreat from court life, Fórnari comments, “Amicissimo della liberta refuggiva à tutto suo potere l’ambitione”  ‘Deeply committed to his own freedom, he fled with all his might from the ambition [of a courtly career path]’, La spositione, 1:22. Pigna weighs his sexual pecadillos, “Ma quanto all’impeto dell’amore, il temperarsi non fu in tutto in suo potestà” ‘As for his sexual urges, it was not entirely in his power to practice temperance’, I romanzi, sig. **1r. About his secret marriage to Alessandra Benucci, the widow of Tito Strozzi, Fórnari remarks that “accio non andasse in pericolo di perdere I benefici, che esso come ecclesiastico possedeva”  ‘he didn’t want to put himself in danger of losing the benefices that he possessed as a tonsured cleric’, La spositione, 1:28. 11.  Fórnari writes, “Egli tante volte ridusse sotto la mordace lima, anzi per lo subbio quella refferendo e ritessendo con maravigliosa destrezza” ‘He continually refined his work with a sharp file, even submitting it to the scissors and then reweaving it with marvelous dexterity’, La spositione, 1:21. Pigna adds that too much revision sometimes spoiled his work: “E perciò auendurosi, che alle uolte il cercar troppo di cambiar ogni minima cosa, più tosto di danno gli era, che di giovamento” ‘And venturing sometimes too much upon revising every little detail, he brought harm to the work rather than improvement’, I romanzi, sig. **1r.

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his periodic syntax molded to the contours of his stanzaic units, and his superimposition of forms upon one another summon Petrarchism as one element among several, just this side of primus inter pares.12 Above all, Ariosto parlayed his artistry into support by patrons, demonstrable productivity, and critical recognition, whetting Ronsard’s ambitions and emerging as an exemplary figure of homo economicus in the world of European letters. Owing to Giolito’s 1542 edition of the Orlando Furioso, Ariosto’s epic enjoyed a favorable early reception in French courtly circles.13 In 1543 an anonymous (but mediocre) prose translation of Roland furieux appeared from the press of Sulpice Sabon at Lyon.14 It was reprinted two years later by Galliot Du Pré in Paris, and it underwent six further reprints over the next decade.15 Jacques Peletier du Mans’s “Art poétique” further championed Ariosto as a model for French poets in his Oeuvres poétiques (1547), to which Ronsard contributed his first published poem as a commendatory ode echoing the blazon of Alcina in Orlando Furioso 7.10–15.16 The author of the Franciade eventually decided that his own epic would be more classical than Ariosto’s in its ambitions, more Vergilian in its aureate style, more Homeric in its narrative form. But the Italian poet continued to merit his attention for other reasons. In his encounter with Ariosto’s work, Ronsard pointedly abandons the Neoplatonic doctrine of fureur that had enchanted him a few years earlier. His engagement with Ariosto’s texts would prompt a deliberate,

12.  Fausto da Longiano profiles these features in Bindoni and Pasino’s edition of Orlando Furioso in 1542. They include single consonants instead of the Tuscan double consonants (mezo, aventura, letere) or double ones instead of the Tuscan single ones ( fraccasso, diffetto, comminciare); sibilants instead of Tuscan palatals (azzaio, zurma); substitution of atonic e for i and vice versa (pregione, meglior and mischin, impire); the dative pronoun gli for le and loro; the articles el, li, and e for il, i, and le; and Latinate vocabulary such as nece for morte, tuta for sicura, suave for soave, populo for popolo, all of the preceding substitutions used inconsistently. We can compare Ronsard’s analogous use of Vendômois dialect forms instead of Parisian ones and of Latinate- and Hellenic-stem words instead of native French diction. 13.  There was also an annotated abridgment of the text, Bellezze del Furioso, compiled by Antonio Toscanella (1574). 14.  It is sometimes attributed to Jean Martin, a friend of Peletier and of Thomas Sebillet and a translator of Bembo’s Gl’asolani, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Alberti’s De architectura, and Sannazaro’s Arcadia. 15.  In 1576, Gabriel Chappuys used this translation as the basis for his poetic version of Roland furieux, which itself underwent five editions between that year and 1618. See Alexandre Cioranescu, L’Arioste en France: Des origines à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions des Presses Modernes, 1939), 87–94. 16.  Titled “Ode des beautez qu’il voudroit en s’Amie” ‘Ode on the beauties that he would like in his mistress’ (with the incipit “Quand je seroy si heureux de choisir / une Maistresse” ‘If I were so lucky to choose a mistress’), Ronsard’s poem unfolds in dialogue with Peletier’s ode about masculine beauty, “Des beautez et accomplissements d’un Amant” ‘On the good looks and accomplishments of a lover’, which itself echoes Orlando Furioso 7.12.

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studied, self-conscious exercise of skill and technique, confirming for him the primacy of craftsmanship and style. This engagement resonates with the argument of two poems in Les Amours that obliquely refer to Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78 about Simone Martini. One praises the amateur artist, poet, and musician Nicholas Denisot; the other commends François Clouet, the professional court painter for François I, Henri II, and the royal family. Following Petrarch’s analogues, Ronsard meditates upon the relationship between poetic intuition and artistic skill. In sonnet 138 (L 4:104, W 132), “Hausse ton vol, et d’une aile plus ample” ‘Take flight, and with a broader wing’, Ronsard addresses his young friend Denisot and, with his coinage of the verb fantastiquer ‘fantasize, imagine’, he exalts the artist’s Platonic vision of Cassandre’s beauty:17 Fay, Denisot, tes plumes émouvoir, Jusques au ciel où les dieux ont leur temple. . . . Et pour ma Dame au parfait concevoir, Sur les plus beaulx fantastique un example.

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Denisot, set your quills in motion all the way to heaven where the gods have their temple. . . . And for my lady, in an act of perfect conception, imagine an exemplar surpassing the most beautiful ones. In a series of highly wrought figurations that ornament this heavenly temple, the artist extracts color from a profusion of flowers, and tempers it in the heat of the lover’s tears. The poem concludes with a restatement of Denisot’s “parfait concevoir” as the speaker urges the artist to secure for himself the patron ‘pattern’ of beauty: Puis attachant ton esprit et tes yeulx Droit au le patron desrobé sur les dieux, Pein, Denisot, la beaulté qui me tuë. Then affixing your spirit and your eyes upon the pattern stolen from the gods, Denisot, paint the beauty that keeps killing me.

17.  The poem conceivably refers to the (unattributed) engraved images of Ronsard and Cassandre in the frontispiece of the first edition of Les Amours; see Cécile Alduy, Politique des “Amours”: Poétique et genèse d’un genre français nouveau (1544 –60) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 317–33.

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Not for him the demotic sweat of an Aristotelian journeyman or accomplished technician. At least, not yet. This poem finds its Aristotelian complement in Ronsard’s sonnet 214 (L 5:154, W 210), which the poet added to his 1553 edition of Les Amours. Its incipit, “Telle qu’elle est, dedans ma souvenance / Je la sen peinte” ‘I feel her painted just as she is, within my memory’, refers to Clouet’s finely executed portrait of Cassandre.18 The poet nonetheless argues that the painter’s work will perish as his canvas deteriorates and its colors fade: “L’artifice mourra / Frappé du tans” ‘Its artifice will die, stricken by time’. By contrast, his own versified representation of Cassandre “demourra / Pour estre vif apres ma sepulture” ‘will remain to live on after my burial’. Its vehicle is artful language, here construed as more solid and substantial than Clouet’s medium: “Dans le coeur donque au fond d’un diamant / J’ai son portrait” ‘Hence within my heart I hold her image inside a diamond’. The trope of a picture encased in diamond (from Petrarch’s sonnet 155) sustains the permanence of his love for Cassandre and intimates the sturdiness of his poetic achievement attained through craftsmanship and skill. Ronsard approached at least some of Ariosto’s lyric poetry through anthologies of Italian poets edited by Lodovico Domenichi and published by Gabriel Giolito in 1545 and 1547, whose 1546 and 1548 reprints he possessed and annotated.19 There, next to Ariosto’s sonnet “Chiuso era il sol da un tenebroso velo” ‘The sun was eclipsed by a shadowy veil’ (in the 1546 reprint of Giolito’s first volume, p. 136), Ronsard writes “Bellay” in evident reference to the latter’s version of it in sonnet 11 of Olive, “Des ventz emeus la raige impetueuse” ‘Of swirling winds, the impetuous rage’.20 The speaker of Ariosto’s poem attempts a daring exploit in pursuit of his mistress: “Stav’io per ire oltra le torbid’onde / del fiume altier” ‘I was on the point of going beyond the turbid waves of the ferocious river’. Like the mythic Phaeton, Apollo’s overweening son who fell to his death beside the Po River, he aspires beyond ordinary feats and invites disaster upon himself. His mistress’s eyes lead him onward, prompting a mythic comparison to Leander as he braved the Hellespont: “Il lume / de’ bei vostri occhi vidi, e udi’ parole / che Leandro 18.  1553 text quoted from the Weber edition. In 1578 Ronsard revised its incipit to “Je sens portrait dedans ma souvenane / Tes longs cheveux” ‘I feel your long hair portrayed within my memory’. 19.  For Ronsard’s modeling of specific poems from these anthologies, see JoAnn DellaNeva, Unlikely Exemplars: Reading and Imitating beyond the Italian Canon (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 222–89. 20.  Quotations from Ariosto’s Rime refer to Opere minori di Ludovico Ariosto, ed. Aldo Vallone (Milan: Rizzoli, 1964). For handwritten annotations in Ronsard’s copies of Giolito’s volumes, see DellaNeva, Unlikely Exemplars, 114–21 and 188–91. For annotations in other books from Ronsard’s library, see François Rouget, Ronsard et le livre (Geneva: Droz, 2010), 54–77.

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potean farmi quel giorno” ‘I saw the light of your beautiful eyes and heard words that on that day could have made me Leander’. Joachim Du Bellay omits both mythic allusions in favor of emphasizing the beloved’s eyes, “Ces feux jumeaux, mes fatales etoiles” ‘These twin fires, my fatal stars’. But for all the virtues of its spare form and rhetorical candor, Du Bellay’s poetry was not the kind that Ronsard aimed to profess. Ronsard tried his own hand at rewriting Ariosto’s poem in sonnet 147 (L 4:112, W 142), “Un voile obscur par l’horizon espars / Troubloit le Ciel” ‘A dark veil stretched across the horizon was troubling the sky’.21 Instead of diminishing the poem’s mythological force, he heightens it: “Desja Vulcan les bras de ses souldards / Hastoit . . . / [Et Juppiter] armoit sa main de l’esclair de ses dards” ‘Already Vulcan was spurring the might of his soldiers . . . and Jupiter was arming his own hand with lightening bolts’. At the same time, he transposes the setting from Ariosto’s raging river and Du Bellay’s tempestuous sea to an open field where “my Nymphette . . . / Cueillant des fleurs . . . / Essuya l’air gresleux” ‘My little nymph, gathering flowers, wiped away the hail’. The rural scene generates a play upon the family name of Cassandre’s husband, de Pré, from pres ‘field’, reducing the action to a domestic idyll. Muret notes that Jupiter’s thunderbolts evoke Vergil’s Georgics 1.328 and 1.449, but he doesn’t mention the figures of Vulcan and Jupiter in Petrarch’s sonnet 42, where the one “le braccia a la fucina indarno move” ‘moves his arms in vain at the forge’ while “a Giove tolte son l’arme di mano” ‘weapons were taken from Jove’s hand’.22 Ronsard relates Ariosto and Du Bellay to Petrarch and reanchors all three in the classical authority of Vergil. For other models, Ronsard looked beyond Giolito’s anthologies and included poems from Ariosto’s posthumously published Rime (1537/46). The more he engages with the Italian poet, the more he recalibrates his verse into startlingly original poems. Sonnet 94 (L 4:77, W 90) of Les Amours, “Soit que son or se crespe lentement” ‘Whether her gold hair undulates gently’, sets Ariosto’s sonnet 27, “Son questi i nodi d’or, questi i capelli” ‘Are these knots of gold, this hair’, against Petrarch’s sonnet 196, “L’aura serena che fra verdi fronde” ‘The calm breeze that through green leaves’, and for good measure adds an echo from Horace’s Ode 2.5.23 Its argument presents three views of Cassandre’s hair, first exposed to the breeze (“Qui çà qui là 21.  For Ronsard’s reworking of Du Bellay’s poem, see DellaNeva, Unlikely Exemplars, 257–63. 22.  Peletier’s translation of Vergil’s Georgics in his 1547 Oeuvres might have commanded Muret’s attention. 23.  For the loss of sexual identity in a spectacle of otherness, see Lawrence W. Kritzman, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 113–29.

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par le sein vagabondes” ‘roving here and there across her bosom’) and then covered with a cap (“d’un bonnet”). An intermediate view of Cassandre’s ornamented braid—“Ou soit qu’un noud diapré tortement / De maintz rubis, & maintes perles rondes” ‘Or whether a knot, harmoniously embellished with many a ruby and rounded pearl’—draws upon Ariosto’s “or in treccia or in nastro ed or raccolti / fra perle e gemme” ‘now in braids, now in ribbons, now bound up with pearls and gems’. But you’d never guess from Ronsard’s plush treatment that Ariosto’s poem depicts the beloved’s illness and her physician’s order to lower her fever by cutting her hair. Hovering between a complaint about the beloved’s indisposition and broad satire about professional incompetence, Ariosto’s speaker lampoons the doctor’s antidote: “Fisico indòtto, non era altro aiuto, / altro rimedio in l’arte tua, che torre / sì ricco crin da sì onorata testa?” ‘Ignorant physician, was there no other help, no other remedy in your art than to remove so luxuriant a mane from so honorable a head?’ His target is the dim-witted physician, but the cool hyperbole of “sì ricco crin” and “sì onorata testa” suggests that another target might be the poetic excrescence of an outworn Petrarchism.24 Ronsard picks up this suggestion in his stylized verb adonize and drives it home with a nod to Horace. When Cassandre releases her hair to the breeze, she looks like Venus; but when she hides it beneath a cap, she resembles Adonis:

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Quand d’un bonnet son teste elle Adonise, Et qu’on ne sçait s’elle est fille ou garcon, Tant sa beauté en tous deux se disguise. When she adonises her head with a cap and no one knows whether she’s a girl or a boy, so well is her beauty disguised in all ambiguity. These lines evoke Horace’s Ode 2.5.21–24, whose speaker counsels an impatient husband (evidently a middle-aged man with a very young bride) to postpone sexual gratification until his wife matures. When that happens, Horace promises, her erotic allure will surpass the charms of a boy named Gyges with his “solutis / crinibus ambiguoque vultu” ‘long curls and ambiguous

24.  The Fiordispina episode of Orlando Furioso spoofs the facile gender distinction of hairstyles that “solea far già differenza molta” ‘used to make a great deal of difference’ (25.23). See Mary DeCoste, Hopeless Love: Boiardo, Ariosto, and Narratives of Queer Female Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 76–92 and 126–33; and Eleonora Stoppino, Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in “Orlando Furioso” (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 116–24.

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countenance’ (2.5.23–24). Horace’s hint about the husband’s catamite proclivity tilts the poem toward a commentary on marriages of convenience and sexual ambivalence within Rome’s patrician class.25 Unlike Ariosto and Horace, Ronsard transmits no satiric intent, but he does recognize their witty posturing and their standards of craftsmanship and skill. Not through any burst of poetic furor, but through deftly concentrated poetic technique, he conveys their sophisticated flair. More than Ariosto’s Rime, his Orlando Furioso provides Ronsard’s richest resource. Muret identifies five important borrowings from Ariosto’s epic in Les Amours (though there are many more than that).26 In their totality they refer to three clusters of narrative action. The first, signaled by Muret in sonnets 73 (L 4:66, W 74) and 193 (L 4:152, W 187), concerns Ruggiero’s dalliance with the sorceress Alcina on her enchanted isle.27 The second, signaled by Muret in sonnet 193 and in the madrigal following sonnet 200 (L 4:159, W 195), concerns marriage arrangements for the virtuous Olimpia, her lover Bireno’s betrayal of her, and her betrothal to King Oberto of Ireland.28 The third, signaled by Muret in chanson 146 (L 4:173, W 141), concerns the heroine Bradamante, her loyalty to Ruggiero, and her doubts about his fidelity.29 These clusters originate in different layers of Ariosto’s composition. The Alcina episode in cantos 6–7 and Bradamante’s laments in cantos 30, 32, and 33 appear in the poem’s first edition and are buoyed by Ariosto’s humanist heterodoxy, quasi-hedonist imperturbability, and wry optimism. The materials echoing Olimpia’s reversals in canto 11 and Bradamante’s laments in cantos 44 and 45 derive from the poem’s third edition, and they reflect troubled times for Ariosto and Italy’s city-states, brought on by the poet’s ruptured relations with his d’Este patrons, Charles V’s sack of Rome, Martin Luther’s excommunication, and Henry VIII’s defiance of the papacy. The revised and expanded Orlando Furioso alludes to these strains in ways that impinge upon Ronsard’s choice of his models for Les Amours. One example relates to Ruggiero’s dalliance with Alcina. Before meeting her and succumbing to her sensuous beauty in 7.11–15, the hero overcomes the monstrous Erifilla in 7.3–7. Fórnari proposes two readings of the episode. In one, Erifilla figures the tyranny of a marriage arranged by 25.  Cristoforo Landino’s commentary highlights this proclivity. 26. See Cioranescu, L’Arioste en France, 41–45, 174–79, and 208–12. For a complete inventory of Ariostan borrowings, see Alice Cameron, The Influence of Ariosto’s Epic and Lyric Poetry on Ronsard and His Group (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1930). 27. See OF 6.35–8.16 and 10.35–68. 28. See OF 9.19–10.34 and 11.33–77. 29. See OF 30.82–83; 32.18–25 and 32.37–43; 33.62–64; 44.61–66; and 45.31–39.

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parents or guardians for the sake of extending kinship ties and strengthening a dynastic inheritance.30 Alcina represents the opposite as she entices Ruggiero to her love nest in order to fend off his death at the hands of Magansese rivals.31 The hero’s protector Atlante has in fact sent him to her enchanted isle for this very reason. In the other reading, Erifilla figures a type of married woman who enters into adultery for the monetary inducement that a lover might offer.32 Here Alcina detains Ruggiero with no apparent design beyond serving Atlante’s plan to save the young hero’s life. For Ruggiero who has pledged to marry Bradamante, the significance is twofold: their dynastic union, though destined, will be based wholly on love and not upon a passive assent to interfamily marriage arrangements; and though he is no model of prenuptial chastity, he comes to learn the error of his ways. Nor does the hero’s lapse prevent Ariosto’s narrator from enjoying his own description of Alcina in 7.13–14. The single substantive revision to his blazon of the half-naked enchantress occurs in the final couplet of 7.14. With regard to Alcina’s peignoir, the 1516 version reads: “Non che di fuor però il giudicio manchi; / Ch’in mezzo è stretta, e rivelata a’ fianchi” ‘Not that any surmise might be lacking from what appears on the outside: for she’s narrow at the waist and spread out at the hips’.33 Its 1521 redaction commutes this couplet to “Ben si può giudicar che corrisponde / a quel ch’appar di fuor quel che s’asconde” ‘You could easily surmise that corresponding to what appears on the outside is what’s hidden [on the inside]’. These new verses discard the tedious Petrarchan euphemism of mezzo for ‘waist’ and fianchi for ‘hips’ and they substitute the Ovidian flash of “quel che s’asconde” ‘what’s hidden inside’. Erotic delight gives a fillip to the hero’s refuge from doom. The stumbling block is that as long as he’s sequestered with Alcina, he postpones his marriage with Bradamante. Ruggiero’s dalliance projects a fantasy of sexual pleasure free from calculations of gain and loss, and Ronsard plays with it. For example, the 1552 30.  “Turba anchora l’avaritia il camino, che altrimenti saria libero, quando nel contrattar de matrimoni non si riguarda a ricongiungere le formose co formosi, o le virtuose co vittuosi” ‘Avarice blocks the otherwise clear path [to a holy and honorable love] when in matrimonial contracts no regard is paid to matching the beautiful with the handsome, or the virtuous with the virtuous’ (Fórnari, La spositione, 1:93). 31.  Ariosto discloses this information obliquely at 7.43–44 and in detail at 41.61–67. 32.  “[L’avaritia] fa che tramettano alle persone straniere, e per via di prezzo concedano se stesse contra il dovere della matrimonial fede” ‘[Avarice] brings it about that [wives] hand themselves over to strangers and for a certain price bestow themselves in violation of matrimonial fidelity’ (Fórnari, La spositione, 1:94). 33.  Quotations from Orlando Furioso refer to Orlando furioso, secondo l’edizione del 1532 con le varianti delle edizioni del 1516 e del 1521, ed. Santorre Debenedetti and Cesare Segre (Bologna: Commisione per i testi di lingua, 1960).

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version of sonnet 108 (L 4:81, W 102), “Depuis le jour que le trait otieux” ‘Since the day when the languid shaft’, tells Cassandre that the speaker’s heart “s’alla cacher dans tes ondes d’yvoire, / Et sous l’abri de tes flancz amoureux” ‘went to hide in the swells of your ivory breast and beneath the shelter of your lovely limbs’ (echoing OF 7.14: “Due pome acerbe, e pur d’avorie fatte, / Vengono e van, come onda al primo margo” ‘Two young apples, shaped in ivory, rise and fall like a wave by the shore’). The poem finds precedent in Du Bellay’s Olive where sonnet 71, “Le crespe honneur de cet or blondissant” ‘The soft regalia of this yellowing gold’, likewise echoes Ariosto’s blazon, proceeding through “Cet val d’alabastre, et ces coutaux d’ivoire, / Qui vont ainsi comme les flotz de Loire” ‘This valley of alabaster and these mounds of ivory, which ripple just like wavelets of the Loire’. Du Bellay ventriloquizes his Italian model by finding a French equivalent for each component of Ariosto’s poem, but Ronsard sets out to impose his own distinctive voice and varied range of styles. Each of his revisions from 1578 onward silences an erotic aspect of Ariosto’s model that he is no longer willing to confront. In 1578 he replaces the Ariostan carnality of “de tes flancs amoureux” ‘of your lovely flanks’ with the Petrarchan abstraction of “de ton chef amoureux” ‘of your lovely head’, and in the 1587 edition he enhances it with the Petrarchan convention “de tes crespes cheveux”  ‘of your curly hair’. The result is on one level a repudiation of Ariosto and a reinstatement of Petrarch, but on another level it allows for an intertextuality patterned upon Ariosto’s eclecticism. As Ronsard’s poem ends, the speaker’s mind and spirit fly a mile high, “Comme un esprit qui fuit de son tombeau” ‘Like a spirit that flees from its own tomb’. In his commentary, Muret allegorizes this verse as an allusion to Plato’s doctrine of the soul escaping from its body: “C’est vne allusion à ce que dit Platon, que le corps n’est autre chose qu’vn tombeau de l’ame” ‘It alludes to Plato’s dictum [in Gorgias 493a] that the body is nothing but a tomb for the soul’ (Muret, Commentaires, p. 22). But in the context of Ronsard’s poem, it’s misleading to Platonize this trope. In the sestet’s original version, the speaker’s emotions sway to rhythms of Cassandre’s breasts while his heart “De ça de là par tes flotz il s’esgaye, / . . . s’emmurant dedans leur fortresse” ‘Frolics here and there among your undulations, . . . enclosing itself within your fortress’. A competing Petrarchan trope of the heart as a warrior who takes refuge in the fortress of his mistress’s body gives way in 1578 to the speaker’s renewed focus upon Cassandre’s hair—“En seureté par tes cheveux s’égaye” ‘My heart in surety frolics amid your hair’—and to his expression of chaste fidelity: “Et tellement il s’aime son hostesse, / Que pale et froid sans retourner, me laisse”  ‘And it so loves you, its hostess, that it leaves me pale and cold, never

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to return’.34 In the end, Ronsard salvages the initial figuration of the tomb, but at the expense of eliminating Ariosto’s model and replacing it with Petrarch’s. A different exclusion of Ariosto comes in sonnet 125, “Du feu d’amour, impatient Roger” ‘With the fire of love, impatient Ruggiero’.35 The posthumously published Oeuvres of 1587 deletes this poem, likely because its frank sensuality seems out of place in the revised sequence. The speaker addresses Ariosto’s aroused warrior Ruggiero in bed with Alcina: “Ore planant, ore nouant sus elle, / Dedans le gué d’une beaulté si belle, / Toute une nuit tu apris à nager” ‘Now heaving yourself up, now writhing on top of her, in the stream of such beauty all night long you learned how to swim’. The lines expand upon Ariosto’s trope of the hero’s submersion in delight: “Or sino agli occhi ben nuota nel golfo / de le delizie” ‘Now he was swimming up to his eyes in the gulf of orgasm’ (OF 7.27), but their follow-up crucially reverses the outcome. Ronsard’s speaker attains no satisfaction upon reaching “le port amoureux,” whether because Cassandre still resists him or (more likely) because he’s lost his potency: “Tousjours plus loin quelque horrible tempeste / La single en mer, tant je suis malheureux” ‘Some awful storm always sends [my fragile bark] further out to sea, so unlucky am I’. Amid a vertiginous overthrow of perspectives, the speaker melts into the nadir of dejection. Unlike Ronsard’s revisions that focus on whole lines and extended sections of texts, Ariosto’s revisions focus on single words and attention to details. Occasionally Ariosto adds new stanzas to his poem to clarify its action. An example is the 1532 addition of Olimpia’s story (OF 9.8–10.34 and 11.21–80) with its climactic blazon of her beauty (OF 11.66–69). Ronsard echoes this blazon in sonnet 193 (L 4:152, W 187), “Ces flots jumeaux de laict bien espoissi / Vont et revont” ‘These twin waves of thick rich milk undulate back and forth’, when he describes Cassandre’s cleavage as a snowy path between two hills, “Blanche par tout de neige devalée” ‘Everywhere white, covered with fallen snow’. The lines fuse “Vincano di candor le nievi in tutte” ‘They might surpass the virgin snow in whiteness’ (OF 11.68) with “Bianca nieve è il collo, e ’l petto latte” ‘Snow white is her neck, and her breast is milk’ from the blazon of Alcina (OF 7.14).36 Ronsard then concludes the sestet with an overdetermined allusion to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 34.  1552 text quoted from the Weber edition. 35.  The incipit in the 1552 edition is “Entre tes bras, impatient Roger” ‘Wrapped in your arms, impatient Ruggiero’. 36.  For the poem’s purifying aesthetics that disintegrate the desired object, see Kritzman, Rhetoric of Sexuality, 113–29.

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5:20, “Nevertheles where sinne abunded, there grace abunded muche more,” used by Luther and Calvin as their proof text for the doctrine of divine election: Là tout honneur, là toute grace abonde: Et la beaulté, si quelqu’une est au monde, Vole au sejour de ce beau paradis.

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There all honor, there all grace abounds; and beauty—if there is some of it in this world—flies to the retreat of this beautiful paradise. This casual, half-insouciant echo from scripture proves striking as much for its seeming irreverence as for its textual irrelevance. Ronsard embeds it in an assemblage of echoes from other texts, beginning with its repetition of là: “Là, ô mon ame au plus hault ciel guidée!” ‘There, o my soul, guided to the highest heaven’ from Du Bellay’s sonnet 113 in Olive, “Si nostre vie est moins qu’un journée” ‘If our life is less than the span of a day’, where “l’Idée / De la beauté” evokes the anagrammatic l’idée ‘idea’ of Maurice Scève’s Délie, whose title in turn bears a homophonic relation to the délit ‘delight’ of Ronsard’s poem. It also evokes from Giolito’s debut anthology of Rime diverse an anterior model for Du Bellay’s poem by Petrarch’s commentator Bernardino Daniello (“Se ’l viver nostro è breve oscuro giorno” ‘If our life is a short dark day’) whose sestet beginning “Ivi ’l vero riposo, ivi la pace” Ronsard underlined in his copy of the text.37 In this context, it’s hard to imagine Ronsard at La Possonnière completing Les Amours with an ear tuned to Reformation controversies. But he surely was thinking of how his Franciade might address concerns of the monarchy and the Gallican church at stake in these controversies.38 They return inevitably to questions about marriage and inheritance broached in François Rabelais’s Tiers livre as well as in Ariosto’s epic and dramatized with particular urgency in the hero and heroine’s plight at the end of Orlando Furioso. Here Ruggiero’s prolonged absence ignites Bradamante’s jealous suspicion in a pair of lyric complaints about their delayed marriage (32.18–25 and 37–43), prompting Ariosto to add to his revised edition of 1532 three new

37.  Daniello’s poem appears on p. 316 of Giolito’s 1546 volume. For Du Bellay’s use of the poem, see DellaNeva, Unlikely Exemplars, 200–201. 38.  For the role of preachers in promoting commonplace references to Scripture, see António De Ridder-Vignone, “Incoherent Texts? Storytelling, Preaching, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 21,” Renaissance Quarterly 68 (2015): 465–95.

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episodes about marital fidelity. The first is Bradamante’s encounter with Clodione, whose uncivil jealousy about his virtuous wife receives a powerful rebuke from Tristan (32.50–110). The second is her encounter with Marganore, whose savage barbarity to women earns punishment from the heroine (37.1–122). The third is the attempt of Bradamante’s father Amone to negotiate her marriage to Leone, the son and heir of the Greek emperor Constantine V (44.36–45.117). Dolce moralizes this attempt as one that displays “la natura del uulgo: ilquale communemente apprezza molto piu la richezza e l’altezza d’i grandi, che ’l valor de la virtu”  ‘the nature of the common populace, which generally values the wealth and high status of grandees more than the valor of virtue’ (Giolito edition, sig. 239v).39 In his Olive, Du Bellay echoes Bradamante’s complaints. Ronsard takes this precedent a step further.40 In sonnet 198 (L 4:156, W 192), “Quand le grand oeil dans les Jumeaux arrive” ‘When the great eye arrives in the constellation of Gemini’, Ronsard starts with Bradamante’s climactic complaint (OF 45.31–39).41 The latter unfolds through a seasonal trope that contrasts the “aspro verno”  ‘harsh winter’ (45.38) of the heroine’s discontent against the “desïata dolce primavera” ‘sweet desired springtime’ (45.39) of Ruggiero’s return. Its referent evokes the eternal return of the seasons, whose circularity in the “natural” order corresponds to the perpetuation of lineage among the nobility. Bradamante’s appeal “Deh torna a me, mio sol, torna” ‘O turn to me, my sun, turn’ (45.39) functions as a proxy address to Ruggiero to fulfill their promise as progenitors of a dynastic line reaching back to Hector (coextensive with the Valois dynastic line), and to provide a validation of nature’s law. Far from affirming the pattern of recurrence implied in Ariosto’s trope, Ronsard’s poem disfigures it through a staggering accumulation of intertextual references. 39. In 1564 Porcacchi follows Dolce by allegorizing the action as “l’ambitione e l’auaritia d’alcuni padri in maritar le figliuole” ‘the ambition and avarice of fathers in marrying off their daughters’, quoted from a later edition, Orlando Furioso di M. Lodovico Ariosto, Nuovamente ricoretto con nuovi argomenti di M. Lodovico Dolce . . . & annotationi di M. Tomaso Porcacchi (Venice: Domenico and Giovanni Battista Guerra, 1612), sig. 220v. 40.  Poems from Olive that echo Bradamante’s complaints include sonnet 29 from OF 44.65–66; sonnet 35 from OF 44.61–62; sonnet 37 from OF 32.18–21; and sonnet 47 from OF 33.63–64. For Du Bellay’s gender revisions, see Jessica DeVos, “The Intersexed Intertext: Du Bellay’s Appropriation of Bradamante’s Lyric Laments,” MLN 129 (2014): 881–901. For Ariosto’s Petrarchan style mediated by Dante and Poliziano in these and other passages in Orlando Furioso, see Stefano Jossa, La fantasia e la memoria: Intertestualità ariostesche (Naples: Liguori, 1996), 71–124. 41.  Ronsard also echoes the complaints from OF 32 in sonnet 40 of Les Amours, “Contre mon gré l’atrait de tes beaus yeus” ‘Against my will, the attraction of your beautiful eyes’, and, much later, in sonnet 7 of his Le septiesme livre des poèmes (1569), “Seul je m’avise, & nul ne peut sçavoir” ‘Alone, I take heed and yet can do nothing’.

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Spring arrives when Gemini hosts the sun’s “grand oeil,” drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 2.227 where this “mundi oculus” ‘eye of the world’ avows its love for Leucothoe. Winter begins when the sun is housed in Sagittarius, “quand sa fuite obliquement tardive, / Par le sentier qui roulle de travers, / Atteint l’Archer” ‘when, along the path that tilts awry, its windingly protracted flight reaches the Archer’. The lines evoke both Vergil’s Georgics (“et via secta per ambas / obliquus qua se signorum verteret ordo” ‘and a path cut through both zones where the winding order of the constellations might turn’, 1.238–39) and Petrarch’s sonnet 287 (“Or vedi inseme l’un et l’altro polo, / le stelle vaghe et lor viaggio torto”‘Now you see both the one and the other pole and the wandering stars and their winding journey’). The result of these interwoven references to Ovid, Vergil, and Petrarch is to deflect the primacy of Ariosto’s model. Ronsard’s models include Du Bellay’s Olive, whose sonnet 31—itself an imitation of Orlando Furioso 45.39—borrows Ariosto’s trope of the sun (in Du Bellay’s octave, “Le grand flambeau gouverneur de l’année, / . . . prez, montz, rivaiges orne” ‘The great flame, regulator of the year, . . . decorates the fields, mountains, and river banks’) and Bradamante’s address to the sun (in Du Bellay’s sestet, “O mon Soleil! . . . / Sentir me fais un gracieux printens” ‘O my sun, . . . you allow me to experience a beneficent springtime’). Ronsard’s poem, flooded with its recall of Ovid, Vergil, and Petrarch, registers more subtly gradated tones than Du Bellay’s, partly through references to Maurice Scève in a 1584 revision. In the poem’s original version, when Cassandre’s radiance grows dim, the speaker laments “De mon printempz il avorte le fruit, / Et à myherbe il tond mon esperance”  ‘It aborts the fruit of my springtime and trims my hope to a stubble’.42 In revising these lines, Ronsard draws upon dizain 148 of Délie, “Voy que, l’Hyver tremblant en son sejour”  ‘See how winter shivering in its sojourn’. Echoing Scève’s “Tant que sur moy le tien ingrat froit dure, / Mon espoir est denué de son herbe” ‘As long as your cold ingratitude persists, my hope remains stripped of its leaf ’, Ronsard deepens the dispiriting effect of Cassandre’s withdrawal: “De mes pensers fait avorter le fruit, / Et sans meurir coupe mon esperance” ‘It causes the fruit of my thoughts to abort and it cuts down my hope without ripening it’. The result is a darker turn to despondency than any suggested in Ariosto’s model or Du Bellay’s imitation. Ariosto’s emphasis on absolute loyalty and abiding fidelity in Orlando Furioso collapses in Ronsard’s Les Amours and later in his epic Franciade. What relevance might this have for the social and economic contexts of Ronsard’s poetry? The

42.  1552 version quoted from the Weber edition.

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Italian poem expresses nostalgia for the old social bonds that proved crucial for the military defense of shared borderlines. Its feudal ethos had local relevance for the city-states of Ariosto’s Italy, under siege since the French and Spanish invasions of the late fifteenth century and lamented in the poem’s revisions after the sack of Rome in 1527.43 The Franciade on the other hand posits the emergence of social, political, and economic bonds shaped in France by long-distance contacts and interpersonal networks of commerce and diplomacy. The expansive modernity of Ronsard’s world called for a reimagining of communal alliances with a new economic rationale for displaying trust and inspiring it in others. Diplomacy summoned merchants and tradesmen to calculate their dealings with others so that strangers wouldn’t lose confidence in them.44 Within the shape-shifting contours of Europe, this diplomacy helped to engineer an economy based upon international trade, requiring individuals to offer and accept credit and foreign currency in exchange for goods without knowing anything specific about the character of those extending it to them.45 Ronsard negotiates these principles in the Franciade as its hero embarks upon a quest of his own. He rejects Ariosto’s mode of chivalric epic with its nostalgic feudal ethos in favor of a quasi-Homeric and occasionally Vergilian mode of heroic epic, yet replete with its own share of romantic adventure and social entanglement.46 Book 2 records Francus’s efforts to earn the trust of the Cretan king in hospitality and benefaction en route northward. The action demonstrates his prudent management of affairs and his rational assessment of opportunity. It projects the very opposite of impulsive decision-making undertaken by Ariosto’s heroes. To be sure, the Franciade dramatizes erratic behavior, but it is usually associated with furor in a negative sense and is always incurred at great cost to the participants. This negativity, present in the poem’s 1572 début, increases with Ronsard’s revisions for its inclusion in his 1584 Oeuvres.

43.  For Ariosto’s stylization and mediation of historical crisis in his 1532 text, see Albert Ascoli, “Ariosto’s ‘Fier Pastor’: Form and History in Orlando Furioso,” in Ascoli, A Local Habitation and a Name (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 205–42. 44.  For this aspect of economic diplomacy, see Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 53–63. 45.  Ibid., 67–74. 46.  For the poem’s political economy, see Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 190–94. For its Homeric mode, see Marc Bizer, Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 83–90 and 112–17. For the poet’s burden of obligation to literary ancestors, see Anthony Welch, Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 51–65.

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The poem begins with Jupiter’s recollection of the final night of the Trojan War when he helped Francus to escape from the rage of Achilles’s son, Pyrrhus, “Cet arrogant qui les Dieux despitoit, / Qui fureur son pere surmontoit” ‘that master of arrogance who despised the gods and surpassed his father in furor’ (1584: 1.95–96).47 In the second book, Francus wins the trust of the Cretan king with a victory over the giant Phovére, who boasts vainly of his “braves fureurs” (1572: 2.1143; 1584: 2.1083). This episode offers the poem’s greatest concentration of Ariostan echoes by incorporating elements of Ruggiero’s and Orlando’s battles with Proteus’s orc in Orlando Furioso 10–11 and their combat with the Saracens Agramante and Rodomonte in Orlando Furioso 41 and 46. Ronsard’s third and fourth books turn to the fureur of unrequited love and its violent aftermath. The King of Crete rewards Francus for his valor by offering him the hand of his daughter Hyante, who has been wounded by Cupid and succored by Venus. But her sister Clymene, also encouraged by Venus, succumbs to rivalrous passion. Poisoned by Jealousy with suicidal rage—“Dans l’estomac jette luy la rancoeur, / Le desespoir, la fureur, et la rage” ‘Into her stomach she hurled rancor, despair, furor, and rage’ (1572: 3.1336–37; 1584: 3.1144–45)—Clymene plunges into the sea. In book 4 her father and brother, possessed by fureur (1584: 4.55), drive Francus from Crete, whereupon Hyante prophecies a long history of war in his future, conceiving “rien que fureur et horreur” ‘nothing but furor and horror’ (1584: 4.624). Long before concentrating upon his epic, Ronsard had turned away from Ariosto. His assiduous study of the Rime and Orlando Furioso and his incorporation of their figures and tropes into his early Les Amours would put into question for him the primacy of poetic fureur and would teach him the value of a disciplined craftsmanship. Upon preparing the Franciade for publication in 1572, he wrote a preface dismissing Ariosto on grounds of his atrocious and hallucinatory imagination. The Italian poet conceived a “poësie fantastique” in which “les membres sont aucunement beaux, mais le corps est tellement contrefaict & monstrueux qu’il ressemble mieux aux resveries d’un malade de fievre” ‘its members are in some ways beautiful, but its body is so disfigured and monstrous that it seems more like the ravings of a sick man’ (Céard 1:1182). In his judgment, Ariosto’s overheated fantasy violates the natural aesthetic facilité of Homer, the “curieuse diligence”  ‘careful diligence’ of Vergil, and the studied fluency of Petrarch.

47.  Quotations from 1584 refer to Céard’s edition; in the following sentences, those from 1572 refer to Laumonier’s edition.

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In this light we might consider one of the final poems added to Les Amours in 1553, sonnet 219 (L 5:160, W 216), “Depuis le jour que mal sain je souspire” ‘Since the day that I bemoan in my unhealthy state of mind’, in which Ronsard expresses uneasiness about taking Petrarch as his model.48 In its original version, the speaker characterizes himself as “mal sain” ‘in an unhealthy state of mind’ because of his love. In a revision of 1578, the adjective captif replaces “mal sain.” The speaker is captive not only to a mistress, but also to a poetic institution. His style reflects this captivity and even shapes the outcome. Life imitates art, and here Ronsard imitates one of Petrarch’s anniversary poems, as his second line affirms: “L’an dedans soi s’est roue par set fois” ‘The year has wheeled upon itself seven times’. The relation of Ronsard’s verb roue to Petrarch’s sonnet 122 is palpable: “Dicesette anni à già rivolto il cielo” ‘The heavens have already wheeled seventeen years’. But equally palpable is the chronological inference that when the speaker met Cassandre seven years earlier in the mid-1540s, he had already been a reader of Petrarch.49 The second quatrain offers his critique of Petrarchan hyperbole when it recounts his initial response to the Petrarchan model: Quand je soulois en ma jeunesse lire Du Florentin les lamentables vois, Comme incredule alors je ne pouvois, En le moquant, me contenir de rire.

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When in my youth I used to read the Florentine’s lamentations, as an incredulous bystander at the time I couldn’t refrain from laughter in ridiculing him. It seems significant that the object of the speaker’s reading is the plural noun vois, evidently the collective ‘words’ of the Florentine writer but also his several rhetorical ‘voices’ as a lover, a poet, a scholar, a writer of compliments and complaints, and as one who negotiates the competing claims that they make upon him. It’s conceivable that vois also refers to translations and imitations by Clément Marot, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Scève, Vasquin Phileuil, or Peletier du Mans that, in the 1530s to 1540s, had begun to make Petrarch accessible to a French readership.

48.  1553 text quoted from the Weber edition. 49.  As the poem was added to Les Amours in 1553, “seven years” implies that Ronsard met Cassandre Salviati in 1546. Elsewhere the poet records the date as April 1545 (see sonnet 124).

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In the tercet that follows, the speaker attributes his incredulity to inexperience: “Je ne pensoi, tant novice j’estoi, / Qu’homme eust senti ce que je ne sentoy, / Et par mon fait les autres je jugeoye” ‘I didn’t think, such a novice was I, that anyone had felt what I hadn’t felt, and by my own experience I judged others’. The judgment (“par mon fait”) can refer to the speaker’s lived experience as a poet who has criticized the writing of others on the basis of his own preferences. But it can as well refer to his experience as a reader who has come to understand texts in more complex ways. Discarding filters of prejudice and stereotyped reading habits, he glimpses opportunities in the Rime sparse ripe for the picking. Among them are themes and motifs that attract a current readership and for which he has developed a facility of expression. His revised attitude toward Petrarch, earned through his encounter with Ariosto in draft upon draft of Les Amours during the early 1550s, expresses his mature attitude toward poetic composition. Like reading, which is always subject to rereading and builds upon it, writing builds upon rewriting, and the subsequent history of Ronsard’s work will embrace a hefty amount of revision. The entrepreneurial writer keeps up with his readership’s tastes, even as he redefines his own ambitions. Ronsard’s revisions of this poem develop its metapoetic context. A redaction of line 5 in 1578 replaces “en ma jeunesse” with “en mon estude”  ‘in my study’, the place where he examined and absorbed Ariosto’s example, where he had submitted his poetry to close analysis, where he surrendered his faith in the power of fureur to his practice of revision. The shift from “jeunesse” to “estude” detemporalizes a specific moment of composition and replaces it with the recursive activity of reading and writing as part of a process. No longer do his adolescent years define his response to Petrarch’s woes; instead, his analytic rereadings of Petrarch prompt him to regard these woes as an etiological fiction, a pretext for writing. A further revision of line 11 printed in 1587 confirms this impression. In it the speaker presents himself as a reader at work by his own writing desk, “Pensant 1’Amour estre oeuvre d’escritoire” ‘Thinking love to be the work of my writing desk’. He is intent on polishing his literary skill, and a revision of the first quatrain reinforces this commitment. There he cancels the topos of the revolving heavens—“a già rivolto il cielo” from Petrarch’s sonnet 122. As Muret notes, he substitutes for it a classical topos drawn from Vergil’s Georgics 2.402: “Comme un serpent l’an s’est tourné sept fois” ‘Like a serpent the year has turned on itself seven times’. The classical tenor of the new allusion distances the text from its earlier archetypes. Ronsard is reworking not just Petrarch’s Rime sparse, but a whole body of poetry that includes texts by Vergil, Horace, Catullus, Ovid,

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the Greek Anthology, and moderns such as Marot, Scève, Du Bellay, Pontus de Tyard, and—among others—Ariosto. In the event, Ronsard fills his poetry with echoes from these predecessors, not in competition or rivalry with them but in emulation and assimilation of their skills. In this way he builds upon and extends Ariosto’s fusion of Petrarch with the ancient classics. As homo economicus, Ronsard takes possession of these resources. Resisting the impulse simply to exploit the popularity of Petrarch or Ariosto at the hands of Du Bellay and others in the later 1540s, Ronsard ponders, stretches, plies, and plunders their forms in order to conceive them anew. In his carefully honed melding of these texts, he achieves poetic virtuosity through craftsmanship, calling into question the doctrine of fureur. What we’ve been tracing here is an evolution of the poet’s early style from the forced antiquarianism of his odes to the self-conscious stylization of Les Amours. Ronsard’s obsessive habits of revision attest to his commitment as a writer. They reveal second thoughts about his earlier inspired verse, the aspirations of subsequent verse in relation to his evolving aesthetic, his efforts to please new patrons and a changing readership, and his canny attempts to cash in on a growing reputation by offering new versions of older poems for a public willing to encounter revised editions of his Oeuvres in successive iterations from 1560 to 1587. In this sense they furnish a record of the poet’s flexibility and his adjustment to the changing tastes of patronage. So, as early as Les Amours and throughout seven carefully revised editions of his complete works, Ronsard reimagines publication as an invitation to the art of revision, in which the voice that we hear is that of the poet forging ahead, adapting to change, and the sight that we see is of him at his desk in La Possonnière, with his back turned, before a stack of writing paper and an open book.50

50.  For other pronouncements on craftsmanship and technique, see his praise of Remy Belleau’s translations from Anacreon, “tant d’arts laborieux” ‘so many labor-intensive works’ (Elégie à Christophe de Choiseul, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, 2:803, line 95); his commendation of difficult style in Hynne de l’hiver, “m’esgrafignant les mains avant que l’apporter” ‘scraping my hands before wearing the laurel crown’ (ibid., 2:570, lines 5–7); and his defense of artistry as a specialized skill, “artifice à part”  ‘a skill apart’ against the attacks of Calvinist preachers (Response aux injures et calomnies, 1563, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:1044–70, lines 809–10), and the Calvinists’ debt to him for “ma plenitude” (Response, lines 966–70). See Isidore Silver, The Intellectual Evolution of Ronsard, 3 vols. (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1969), 2:170–96).

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Ch ap ter 3

Passions and Privations

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Writing Sonnets like a Pro in Les Amours de Marie

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, ratified bet­ ween Henri II and Charles V on 24 April 1559, ended more than six decades of war that bankrupted their kingdoms. Eleven weeks later, Henri was fatally wounded during a ceremonial joust staged at the wedding ceremonies for his daughter Elizabeth de Valois to Charles’s son Philip II. France soon fell into political crisis exacerbated by an ongoing price revolution that had befallen Europe. Baffled by it, contemporary observers blamed the cycle of inflation and deflation variously on Spanish treachery, papal intrigue, English parsimony, and French ineptitude. In 1566 Charles IX’s master of accounts, Jean Cherruyt de Malestroit, tried to exonerate the crown by arguing in his Paradoxes sur le faict des monnoyes that inflation was just an illusion, since prices had changed only in mathematical proportion to earlier revaluations of gold and silver. In his Reply to the Paradoxes of M. de Malestroit (1568), Jean Bodin (1530–96)—formerly a professor of law at Toulouse and since 1561 a jurist and royal attorney in the Parlement of Paris—offered a different explanation. He pinned its cause to vast quantities of gold and silver brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish conquistadores. Observers two decades earlier had already related the illusion of abundance to Spain’s importation of gold and silver. François Rabelais’s extravagant claims about Pantagruelion in the closing chapters of Tiers livre (1546) figure (among other things) enthusiasms awakened by “tant d’effectz admirables” 174

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‘so many admirable effects’ of money now circulating across France (3.51: 506/427). Two years later Noël du Fail (1520?–91) expressed caution in his Baliverneries et les contes de Eutrapel ‘Tall Tales and the Stories of Eutrapel’ (1548). There the mercurial raconteur Eutrapel (from ευτράπελος ‘versatile, sprightly’) compares his rustic bliss in the past with problems occasioned by the “abondance d’argent” in the present, “qui est à cause des pays nouvellement trouvés et des minières d’or et d’argent que les Espagnoles et Portugais en apportent”  ‘traceable to lands newly discovered and to the mining of gold and silver that the Spanish and Portuguese derived from it’.1 No one, however, took the additional step that Bodin did when he adduced causes such as the rise of monopolies, irrational pricing, and scarcities occasioned by export and waste. He appealed to the French crown to regulate public finance, but he also celebrated the plenitude of natural resources and attainable wealth bestowed on France by God, open to infinite recycling by nature.2 The basis for Bodin’s argument is a quantity theory of money, whereby a mathematical increase in the supply of money generates a corresponding increase in the demand for goods and in the wealth of producers and suppliers: “The principal reason which raises the price of everything, wherever one may be, is . . . the abundance of gold & silver, which causes the depreciation [mespris] of these & the dearness of the things prized [prisees].”3 Abundance begets abundance as it spurs consumers to resist hoarding specie and to spend what they have, thereby accelerating the economy. Inflation, he perceived, results not from the commodity values of monetary metals, but from the velocity or rapidity of their circulation. Prices rise as coins recirculate, multiplying their exchange value through each cycle, but the outcome proves salutary as the rising tide raises all boats. Bodin’s focus upon circulation introduces a wholly new element into the economic model of mercantile transaction.4 Adjustments occur regularly within the system, and they proceed less from arbitrary changes in consumers’ tastes or preferences than from a producer’s innovative combination of raw materials, labor,

1.  Noël du Fail, Conte 22, “Du temps présent et passé,” in Propos rustiques, baliverneries, contes et discours d’Eutrapel, ed. Jean-Marie Guicharde (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1842), 287. 2.  For Bodin’s fascination with rhetorical copia, see Cave, Pré-histoires II, 114–24. 3.  Quotations are from Arthur Eli Monroe, ed., Early Economic Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 127. For the context of inflation and reform, see Jotham Parsons, Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 104–52. 4.  See Josef Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 311–17, and Cynthia Taft Morris, “Some Neglected Aspects of Sixteenth-Century Economic Thought,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 9 (1958): 160–71.

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capital, and entrepreneurial skills, marking a departure from past methods and prompting new ones. Bodin’s convictions about entrepreneurship subtend the fifth book of his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), where the author evolves his theory of climate and geography as influences upon social, cultural, political, and economic developments.5 Nations located in temperate zones (such as France) are best disposed to prosper and advance through commerce, transactions, and trade, thereby avoiding hardships constant in the north and indolence common in the south: “The northern races are ordained to labour and the mechanical arts, and the people of the middle regions to bargain [negocier], trade [traffiquer], judge [ juger], persuade [haranguer], command, establish commonwealths, and make laws and ordinances for the other races.”6 Bodin offers a new conception of “natural law,” one that displaces a preordained hierarchy by a range of differences based upon material quantity and elemental quality. For Bodin, the talent for turning a profit seems a matter of Gallic instinct. Monopolists succeed by devising alternative approaches to production and distribution, opening new market opportunities through a “creative destruction” of older strategies and techniques.7 Ronsard displayed similar convictions in presenting his work to the public. The model that he fastened upon was to advertise his poetic development in a series of collected editions that offered both new and revised texts for public consumption. Each enlarged edition supplanted previous ones with an improved text. In practice, Ronsard was combining and recombining his poetic materials to generate a superior product. Instead of responding to readerly demand, he was himself creating a new demand and educating a readership in his preferred modes and styles. By offering his first edition of Les Oeuvres de Pierre de Ronsard in four 16o volumes at the press of Gabriel Buon in Paris in late November 1560, he hoped to show that at least his publishers supported his claims for continued attention. He could profit initially—but only in small increments—from selling his manuscripts to the publisher. He would profit more securely by investing his social and cultural capital into the effort of attracting court sponsorship. Recognition of his work attained through publication would open doors to potentially lucrative 5.  This trope already had a pedigree extending to Herodotus, Pliny, and Aulus Gellius. 6.  Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la république (Paris: Jacques du Puis, 1583; Facsimile edition: Darmstadt: Scientia Aalen, 1961), 690; translation by M. J. Tooley, Six Books of the Commonwealth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), 154. 7.  The phrase is Schumpeter’s to explain a “spontaneous and discontinuous change in the channels of flow as an embodiment of the entrepreneurial system,” in The Theory of Economic Development, trans. Redvers Opie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), 64.

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long-term patronage.8 Patronage and prestige become the economic concomitants of enhanced print circulation and economic exchange. Already in August 1556 Ronsard had set his sights upon receiving sustained support from Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, addressing the latter as “Mon Mecene” ‘My Mecenas’ in an “Epistre” to him at the end of his Second livre des Hynnes (in Céard 2:862, line 132). Relinquishing any pretense that the Franciade would be easy to write, he forecasts ten years of laborious revision, “Car un livre si grand et si plein d’artifice / Ne part ainsi des mains sans qu’on le repolisse” ‘For a book so big and so full of artifice doesn’t leave one’s hands unless one polishes it over and over again’ (lines 231–32). In his Oeuvres of 1560, Ronsard added to Le Premier Livre des Hynnes a “Hynne de Charles de Lorraine” commending his generosity, as well as a “Suite de l’hynne de Charles de Lorraine” praising him as chief architect of the treaty at Cateau-Cambrésis and appealing to him bluntly for patronage: “Par ta bonté mets en repos d’esprit / Celui qui met tes vertus par escrit” ‘Through your beneficence, give him peace of mind who gives your virtues written form’ (Céard 2:632, lines 115–16). Finally during François II’s brief reign in 1560–61, Ronsard wrote the bitter “Le Procès” ‘The Trial’. Here he indicts the cardinal for reneging upon support, and he finishes the poem with a half-threat “Que vous acquiterez bien tost de vostre déte / Pour n’encourir l’aigreur d’un medisant Poëte” ‘That you will straightaway pay your debt so as not to incur the rancor of a bad-mouthing poet’ (Céard 2:77, lines 239–40). To none of these poems did Charles pay any attention.9 Not only did Charles lose interest in Ronsard, but by 1560 the French court had lost interest in Petrarchism. The poet’s favored project in the late 1550s had been Les Hynnes (1555) and Le second livre des Hynnes (1556), whose high style supplanted that of his odes. The Hynne d’or (1556), for example, compares the fertility and abundance of France to the prosperity that poets deserve.10 Playing on the first syllable of Doret’s name, Ronsard  8. See Cave, Pre-histoires II, 165–76. For linguistic capital as a counter to commodified publication, see Cécile Alduy, “Lyric Economies: Manufacturing Value in French Lyric Collections,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 721–53. For labile transformations of texts in successive editions as a circulation of form, see Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Nidra Poller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 203–7. For detailed analysis of Ronsard’s revisions in Les Odes and Le Premier Livre et le Second Livre des Amours, see Louis Terreaux, Ronsard correcteur de ses oeuvres (Geneva: Droz, 1968), passim.   9.  Ronsard published the poem as a pamphlet five years later, when he became convinced that the cardinal’s patronage was a lost cause. For its genesis and revisions in manuscript, see François Rouget, Ronsard et le livre (Geneva: Droz, 2010), 146–51. 10.  For tensions between a qualitative appreciation of gold as a mark of status and a quantitative evaluation of money in the Hynne d’or, see Jonathan Patterson, Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 142–59. For tropes of abundance, see Terence Cave,

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subordinates the muses to the enabling power of wealth: “Ce ne sont pas, Dorat, les Muses qui les baillent, / C’est le precieux Or, il les faut acheter” ‘It’s not the muses, Dorat, who confer books—it’s precious gold; you need to buy books’ (lines 108–9). Aristotle got it right in the Nicomachean Ethics 1.8.15 when he construed wealth as a pragmatic means to a productive end: “Non pas comme vertu, mais comme l’instrument / Par lequel le vertu se monstre clairement” ‘Not as a virtue itself, but as the instrument by which virtue might shine forth’ (lines 213–14).11 While Ronsard was developing a new high style in Hynnes, he was also experimenting with a softer, more varied style in several short sonnet cycles published between 1554 and 1569. In 1554 Le Bocage includes twelve sonnets (one in decasyllabic verse, eleven in dodecasyllabic verse) and one elegy addressed to Cassandre. The same year Les Meslanges includes five sonnets (three in decasyllabic verse, two in dodecasyllabic verse), two elegies, two odes, and one chanson to Cassandre. In 1555 La continuation des Amours offers seventy sonnets (mostly in dodecasyllabic verse) addressed to Marie de Bourgeuil, his real or imagined beloved from the countryside near Tours, whose easygoing disposition contrasts with Cassandre’s courtly temperament. In 1556 La nouvelle continuation des Amours presents nineteen chansons, seventeen sonnets (all in dodecasyllabic verse), four elegies, and two odes to Marie. In 1559 the Second Livre des Meslanges includes sixteen sonnets (all in dodecasyllabic verse) for yet another beloved named Sinope. The workshop in Petrarchism at La Possonnière in 1552–53 remained in business for the rest of the decade as Ronsard ventured upon yet other modes and styles and submitted draft after draft of his work to meticulous revision. For the first edition of his Oeuvres in 1560, Ronsard renamed the generic Les Amours as his Premier Livre des Amours and inserted into it various sonnets, chansons, elegies, and odes from Le Bocage and Les Meslanges.12 To it he adds a Second Livre des Amours, incorporating sixty-eight sonnets for Marie from his Continuation des Amours along with other poems from La nouvelle continuation. He also includes from the Second Livre des Meslanges his sixteen sonnets for Sinope, after changing the recipient’s name to “Marie.” And just as he

The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 233–56, and for social significance see Daniel Ménager, Ronsard: Le roi, le poète, et les hommes (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 97–115. 11.  For the cultural context, see Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 189–236, and Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion, 34–43; for its monetary context, see Parsons, Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France, 247–53. 12.  For the integration of Les Meslanges into Les Amours, see Cécile Alduy, Politique des “Amours”: Poétique et genèse d’un genre français nouveau (1544 –60) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), 356–66 and 457–65.

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had recruited Marc Antoine Muret to provide a commentary for Les Amours, so he recruits another friend, Remy Belleau, to provide one for his Second Livre des Amours. Belleau had recently returned to France after travel to Italy and was eager to rejoin court culture in Ronsard’s company. His annotations differ vastly from Muret’s. Instead of identifying rhetorical figurations and classical allusions as the latter had done, Belleau projects upon Ronsard’s poems a narrative context, connects their action to events in the poet’s life, and charts his affective development. One result is to commodify the author himself as a public figure, ambiguating the line between lyric poetry and fictional narrative or coded biography. Building upon classical precedents in Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus, the lover represents his passions as both foreordained and freely willed. His privations resulting from Marie’s obstinacy drive him to experiment with alternate modes of exaltation and despair. The cycle replicates successions of inflation and deflation that had intrigued observers of the midcentury price revolution.13 The slender matter of Petrarchan sonnets expands into full-blown chansons, elegies, and odes while the extended matter of classical forms contracts into fourteen-line sonnets. A pulmonary effect propels the collection across lines of alexandrine verse with varying rhythms of 2–4, 3–3, and 4–2 hemistiches. An example from Le Bocage (1554) is sonnet 6 (L 6:50, W 6), “Bien que ton oeil me face une dure escarmouche” ‘Although your eye attacks me in a tough skirmish’, first inserted into the Cassandre poems as sonnet 223 in Le Premier Livre des Amours in his 1560 Oeuvres and then dispatched to the Marie poems as sonnet 70 of Le Second Livre des Amours in his 1578 Oeuvres and finally as sonnet 64 of Le Second Livre in his 1584 Oeuvres.14 The poem’s radical displacement from one context to another might suggest that it offers little or no narrative distinction to begin with. Its subtleties seem more a matter of technique than of vision. The lover argues that, despite the torment of love, he’ll gladly submit to it; but if he dies of its wounds, his beloved will suffer more than he does since she’ll have lost her chances for poetic immortality: “Ainsi, mort je serai libre de peine & toi / Cruelle, de ton nom tu seras la meurtriere” ‘So, dead I’ll be free from pain and you, cruel one, will be the assassin of your own name’.15 Ronsard’s wit reverses the expectations. A fractional pause before the phrase “& toi” and an enjambment after it

13. See Andrea Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit: The Price Revolution in Intellectual Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 14.  For Ronsard’s taste for variety in the latter volume, see Ullrich Langer, Penser les formes du plaisir littéraire à la Renaissance (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2009), 79–88. 15.  1554 text quoted from the Weber edition.

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suggest that the speaker is glad to be rid of his mistress. In this game of love he emerges as a winner as long as she needs him to immortalize her name. The poem evokes Petrarch’s sonnet 224, whose speaker initiates a series of fourteen conditional noun subjects (“S’una fede amorosa, un cor non finto . . .” ‘If faithfulness in love, an unfeigning heart . . .’) that govern the verb in its penultimate verse: “son le cagion’ ch’amando i’ mi distempre” ‘they are the causes that I untune myself with love’. A stronger outcome emerges in the final line: “Vostro, donna, ’l peccato, et mio fia ’l danno”  ‘Yours will be the blame, Lady, mine the loss’. Petrarch’s lover, drained of hope, registers his pain in a heap of nouns that struggle to make sense. Ronsard’s lover on the other hand remains emotionally detached, never for a moment jeopardizing his composure. The poem’s technical resources sustain its equilibrium through an intricate homophony that conveys blandishment and a note of sangue froid: “Si tu me veus tuer, tu’ moi, je le veus bien, / Ma mort te sera perte, à moi un tresgrand bien” ‘If you want to kill me, kill me; I want it. My death will be your loss, an enormous benefit to me’. The argument finds closure by associating the speaker with his oeuvre: “Et l’oeuvre qu’à ton los je veux mettre en lumiere / Finera par ma mort, finissant mon emoi” ‘And the work that I want to bring to light in praise of you will come to an end with my death, ending my chagrin’. The work that he expends his breath upon is both the book that records his agony (“livre de peine”) and what remains of him afterwards when he is dead and “libre de peine” ‘free from pain’. The payoff is that his complaint against one beloved proves interchangeable with complaints against others. Removing this sonnet from his poems for Cassandre and inserting it into those for Marie in 1578 overturns its rhetorical situation. The exchange prompts Belleau to comment: “Le Poëte asseure, bien que sa Dame luy soit tousjours cruelle & fascheuse, qu’il ne laissera jamais de l’aimer” ‘The poet assures his lady that, although she might be forever cruel and relentless toward him, he’ll never stop loving her’.16 By revising “depuis set ans” in line 3 marking the duration of his affair with Cassandre in Les Amours, to “depuis trois ans” marking its duration with Marie in Le Second Livre des Amours, the poet applies his argument to a new context: “Je mourray bien heureux, s’il te souvient de moy. / La mort n’est pas grand mal, c’est chose naturelle” ‘I will die happy enough if it reminds you of me. Death is no big deal: it’s just something natural’. The lover’s sangue

16.  Quotations refer to Remy Belleau, Commentaire au Second Livre des Amours de Ronsard, ed. Marie-Madeleine Fontaine et François Lecercle (Geneva: Droz, 1986), here on sig. 81r. After 1560 Belleau contributed no further to it. In 1567, someone else—possibly Ronsard—revised the commentary, not reprinted in 1584. For analysis, see Alduy, Politique des “Amours,” 131–39.

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turns even more froid than it was in the original version, belying the sincerity of his complaint in the first instance and the authenticity of his gambit in the second. In Les Meslanges (November 1554), Ronsard includes forms (elegy, ode, sonnet, chanson) in which he had already displayed considerable mastery. To them he adds others such as the ballade derived from Clément Marot, the epigram from Johannes Secundus’s neo-Latin verse, and the Anacreontic lyric from the Greek Anthology. One of its poems migrates to the Premier Livre des Amours in 1560 and then to the Second Livre des Amours in his Oeuvres of 1567 where it serves as sonnet 32 (L 6:224, W 6). Representing the beloved as a Medusa, it compares her beauty, cruelty, and chastity to those of the angels, Mars, and Diana: J’ai pour maistresse une etrange Gorgonne Qui va passant les Anges en beauté: C’est un vray Mars en dure cruauté, En chasteté la fille de Latonne.

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I have for my mistress a strange Gorgon, who surpasses the angels in beauty. She’s a veritable Mars in her hard cruelty; in her chastity, the daughter of Latona. Each of these comparisons summons a recognizable trope from Petrarch’s Rime.17 As the beloved assumes various mythic shapes, the speaker likewise undergoes a transformation: “Car si j’avoi de chair en coeur humain, / Long tems y a qu’il fust reduit en cendre” ‘For if I had a heart of flesh, it would long ago have been reduced to ash’.18 His heart becomes a salamander in a trope that evokes Marot (epigram 148: “Pourquoy mon cueur en cendre ne se treuve”‘Because my heart is not reduced to ash’) and Maurice Scève (Délie 199: “Sans lesion le Serpent Royal vit”  ‘Without injury, the Royal Salamander lives’), both of them paying homage to François I’s emblem of himself as an invincible salamander. Ronsard gestures toward poets of the 1540s (Marot died in 1544; Scève published his Délie in 1545), toward his appreciation of them, and toward the velocity of change that propels him in the 1550s, with

17.  For Ronsard’s treatment of the Medusa figure, see Lawrence W. Kritzman, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 97–111; for associations of Medusa with metamorphic destruction and the latter with demonology, see Kathleen Perry [Long], Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 144–96. 18.  1554 text quoted from the Weber edition.

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revisions in the late 1560s, to synthesize their work with that of Petrarch, the Greek and Latin classics, and other humanist precedents, recirculating their energy and imparting a wholly new direction to their meaning. From 1554 onward Ronsard continued to generate new forms from old ones. His Continuation des Amours (1555) and Nouvelle Continuation des Amours (1556) include twelve sonnets in decasyllabic verse and seventy-four sonnets in dodecasyllablic verse (along with one madrigal, an ode, three elegies, and twenty-one chansons). In 1560 he discards thirty-three of these sonnets and incorporates the rest into Le Second Livre des Amours addressed to Marie. Fourteen of them focus on literary topics and address such friends as Pontus de Tyard, Joachim Du Bellay, and Etienne Jodelle. The others are largely amatory, ranging from expressions of frustration and supplication to proclamations of sexual potency and erotic pleasure. Their tone, as the speaker avers in sonnet 60 of the 1584 edition (L 7:188, W Continuation 70), favors a relaxed, more casual style than “mon grave premier style” in Les Amours, and it mingles elements of Greek pastoral, Roman elegy, and classical Anacreontics with Petrarchan motifs. The most dramatic examples completely transform their models. Sonnet 37 in the 1584 edition (L 7:267, W Nouvelle Continuation 27) fuses three Petrarchan texts (including two in vita di Laura and one in morte di Laura) and converts their bathetic laments into affirmations of his delight with Marie. Its first line—“J’ay cent mille tourmens, et n’en voudrois moins d’un” ‘I endure a hundred thousand torments, and I would want not a single one less’—echoes from Petrarch’s sonnet 231, “I’ mi vivea di mia sorte contento” ‘I was living contented with my fate’, whose speaker estimates his suffering to be worth more than the pleasure of gratified lovers: “Mille piacer’ non vaglion un tormento” ‘A thousand [of their] pleasures are not worth one of my torments’. Petrarch’s mathematical trope—“men non ne voglio una” ‘I would not wish [my torments] less even by one’—offers a basis for Ronsard’s computation: “Cent mille tourmens” amounts to “moins d’un.” Belleau comments in his paraphrase that “le trauail le sert de repos, le déplaisir de plaisir, & qu’il ne voudroit la diminution du moindre de ses mauz” ‘labor amounts to relaxation, displeasure to pleasure, and he wouldn’t wish for an abatement of the least of his suffering’ (Belleau, Commentaire, sig. 46r). In effect, Petrarchan oxymoron advances from functioning as a trope to motivating a complete dramatic situation. The sestet then proceeds to conflate two entirely different dramatic situations, one from Petrarch’s sonnet 174 in vita di Laura where he accepts his fate, the other from sonnet 296 in morte di Laura where he mourns his dead beloved. It’s as though he were pursuing Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo’s

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comment on the latter poem that it echoes and inverts the former: “E portar tormento . . . si come nel Son. Fiera stella” ‘And to bear torment as in sonnet 174’ (sig. ccxcvir). In sonnet 296, Petrarch prefers to weep for Laura than to praise any other woman, “di tal piaga / morrir contento” ‘to die content with such a wound’. In an earlier version of his poem, Ronsard salvages the Petrarchan model by substituting one set of words (dispos, repos) for another (malade, travail), scrambling their effects as he winks at the strangeness of “ce langage”: Tant plus je suis malade, & plus je suis dispos J’appelle mon travail un gratieux repos Amour m’aprend par cueur ce langage.19

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In so much more of a sorry state am I, and yet in such good spirits, that I term my torment a blessed repose: Love makes me learn this language by heart. The poem’s conclusion (“il le dit & le jure / Par son arc & ses traitz, et je le veux bien croire”‘[Cupid] says so and he swears it by his bow and arrows, and I really choose to believe it’) reverts to the end of Petrarch’s sonnet 174, whose speaker makes peace with Love by accepting his fate: “E tu me ’l giuri / per l’orato tuo strale, et io tel credo” ‘And you swear it to me by your golden arrow, and I believe such a thing’. Ronsard is, in effect, retracing the journey backwards from Petrarch’s sonnet 296 in morte to sonnet 174 in vita, forging a link between the two poems that synthesizes their energies. He lightens Petrarch’s serious approach with a profusion of sibilants and bilabials (m, p, b) (“il vault trop mieux mourir pour si belle victoire” ‘it’s much better to die for such a lovely victory’) and of rhythmic repetitions and parallels (“il le dit & le jure / Par son arc & ses traits”). As the poem veers toward playfulness, it prompts further revisions that accentuate its free spirit. In 1578 the first couplet in the sestet becomes a distich that turns the speaker’s predicament against itself: “Plus je suis abaissé plus j’espere de gloire: / Plus je suis en l’obscur plus j’espere de jour” ‘The more I am humiliated, the more I hope for glory; the more I fall into darkness, the more I hope for day’. Cupid bears the brunt of the speaker’s attack for having accentuated this predicament, figuring the antitheses of good and bad fortune that beset him, “Qu’il blanchist et noircist ma fortune à son tour”  ‘That he brightens and darkens my fortune by his twists and turns’. By 19.  1556 text quoted from the Weber edition.

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traversing the extremes of Petrarch’s experience, Ronsard displays his own virtuosity and seals his own reputation. Similar traversals mark the Second Livre des Meslanges, composed in 1559. This collection incorporates a minisequence of sixteen sonnets in dodecasyllabic verse about the speaker’s love for a woman named Sinope. Her name evokes the destructive power of her eyes (Greek σίνειν ‘destroy’ οψ ‘eyesight’), dramatizing a more obsessive, at times more violent involvement than in the other sequences.20 In 1578 Ronsard revisited these poems and, substituting the disyllabic “Marie” for “Sinope,” he transferred nine of them to his Second Livre des Amours. Sonnet 40 (L 10:91, W 2 Meslanges 6) in the Second Livre typifies this transfer as the speaker loses himself in his beloved’s eyes: Quand ravy je me pais sur vostre belle face, Je voy dedans vos yeux je ne sçay quoy de blanc, Je ne sçay quoy de noir, qui m’esmeut tout le sang, Et qui jusques au coeur de veine en veine passe.

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When ravished I feed upon your gorgeous face, I see within your eyes I know-not-what whiteness, I know-not-what blackness, which gets all my blood pumping, coursing from vein to vein all the way to my heart. The poem fuses Petrarch’s sonnet 151, whose speaker is vanquished by the “bianco et nero” ‘white and black’ of Laura’s eyes, with sonnet 152, whose speaker feels a “dolce veneno” ‘sweet poison’ gushing “al cor . . . fra le vene” ‘from my heart through my veins’. At first it’s not clear that Sinope’s effect is so toxic as Laura’s. After all, Cupid resides within her eyes, a motif that usually precedes happy effects: “Je voy dedans Amour qui va changeant de place” ‘Inside I see Love, who moves about changing his position’. Petrarch’s three canzoni degli occhi, canzoni 71–73, record similar motifs, as Love’s presence in Laura’s eyes energizes the poet’s “debile stile” ‘weak style’ (71.8) and leads him “al glorïoso fine” ‘toward the glorious goal’ (72.8). Ronsard’s version conflates this “glorïoso fine” with the “fosco et torbido pensero” ‘dark and turbid thought’ of Petrarch’s sonnet 151. When Ronsard conjoins these models, they rework not only Petrarch’s dramatic trajectory in the Rime sparse, but Ronsard’s self-critical approach to Petrarch as well. Sinope’s toxicity drives his speaker to the extreme of denying

20.  Alternately, the name could derive from the storm-tossed seaport on the Black Sea where the cynic Diogenes was born, and hence synonymous with “stormy” and “cynical.”

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king, country, and family: “Que je ni’rois les Dieux, et trahirois mon Roy, / Je vendrois mon pays, je meurtrirois mon pere” ‘I’d blaspheme the gods and betray my king; I’d sell my country, I’d slay my father’. The trope—just this side of appalling when read in the context of the Sinope series—seems engagingly naive in the bucolic fantasy of the Marie sequence. But it remains a literary conceit, drawn from a composite of models in the Rime sparse: Telle rage me tient apres que j’ay tasté A longs traits amoureux de la poison amere, Qui sort de ces beaux yeux dont je suis enchanté.

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Such rage grips me after I’ve tasted in long amorous draughts the bitter poison that issues from these stunning eyes, with which I am captivated. A profusion of internal assonance and consonance (tant and sens, taté and traits, amoureux and yeux, poison and dont) produces tightly woven aural effects that mimic the speaker’s entrapment. In Belleau’s paraphrase, “Il dit qu’en voiant les yeus de sa Sinope qu’il est tellement hors soi, & qu’il n’a nul soucy de sa vie” ‘He says that upon seeing Sinope’s eyes he is so beside himself that he has no concern for his own life’ (Belleau, Commentaire, sig. 59v). Ronsard’s craftsmanship could hardly be more focused. Far from adapting to the tastes and preferences of a fluctuant readership, Ronsard upsets expectations about what has become familiar and routine in his style, declaring much of it obsolete. Between 1563 and 1578 he makes radical changes in his oeuvre, canceling out scores of older texts, adding new ones, and shifting poems back and forth between the two books of Amours for Cassandre and Marie.21 His Second Livre des Amours in 1560 expands the form, range, and content of his sonnets for Marie and accommodates further development as the cycle grows. In response to the economic crisis in mid-decade, the poet sought various kinds of sponsorship and support, ranging from commissions to write specific topical poems to agreements

21.  After 1560, Ronsard published in decasyllabic verse three new sonnets in Les trois livres du Recueil des nouvelles Poësies (1563), and two years later five new sonnets in Elégies, mascarades, bergeries (1565). He revised these poems and added them to his Le Second Livre des Amours in 1567, along with one poem (readdressed to Marie) from Le Premier Livre des Amours. In 1571 he added twenty-one sonnets in decasyllabic verse from his Septiesme Livre des Poemes to Le Second Livre des Amours. In the fifth collected works of 1578 (now in seven volumes), he transferred twelve sonnets from Le Premier Livre des Amours to Le Second Livre des Amours for Marie, and another twenty-eight poems from the Marie cycle to Les Amours diverses and Le Premier Livre des Amours.

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to compose short sequences of amatory verse on consignment for specific lovers. From the outset he convinced himself that he needed to do so. Plagued with misgivings in a 1560 Discours addressed to the court architect Pierre Lescot (Céard 2:793–97), he seriously questions whether he should have followed his father’s advice to pursue a more lucrative career. The poem recounts how his father had warned him about the hardships of a literary career (“Que te sçauroient donner les Muses qui n’ont rien?” ‘What can the muses, who own nothing, give to you?’, line 27), equating poetic fureur with a guarantee of lifelong poverty: “Mais avec sa fureur qu’il appelle divine, / Meurt tousjours accueilly d’une palle famine”  ‘But with the furor that a poet calls Divine, he dies in the arms of pale Hunger’ (Céard 2:794, lines 37–38). Here Ronsard replays the tensions between father and son that Petrarch recorded in Seniles 16.1.22 The tone shifts to satire as his father steers him toward the study of law: “Hante-moy les Palais, caresse-moy Bartolle” ‘Frequent for me the courts of justice, fondle the law books of Bartollus’ (line 46); of medicine, “l’argenteuse science” ‘the money-making science’ (line 53); and of arms: “Par si noble moyen souvent on devient riche” ‘On such a noble track you’ll get rich’ (line 69). The monetary rewards of these pursuits pale in comparison to the thrill, the excitement, the passion of writing poetry. In the end, following his natural bent, he serves the entire kingdom with his verse: “Donc suivant ma nature aux Muses inclinée . . . / J’enrichy nostre France” ‘Hence following my own nature directed toward the muses, I enriched all France’ (lines 101, 103). The trope of nature in its abundance, “dés le berceau l’abondance ” (line 118), replaces the specter of poverty, and the pleasure of work overcomes privation, even when he sublimates his own preferences and writes to please others. A group of sonnets addressed to Isabelle de La Tour-Limeuil, initially published in Les nouvelles poésies (1563) and then republished in Elegies, Mascarades, et Bergerie (1565), typifies his commissioned assignments. From the first collection, a sonnet in decasyllabic verse that begins “Certes mon oeil fut trop avantureux” ‘Certainly my eye was too bold’ (L 12:171, W Nouvelles 4) announces two corrections, first at the end of the octave: “Cruel non, mais doucement rebelle / A ce desir qui me rend malheureux” ‘Cruel, no, but sweetly rebellious to the desire that leaves me unhappy’, and then in line 9: “Malheureux, non, heureux je me confesse”‘Unhappy, no, I confess myself happy’. This confessional mode recurs in the second tercet: “Je l’aime tant 22.  Francesco Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 1:293.

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qu’aimer je ne puis, / Je suis tant sien que plus mien je ne suis” ‘I love her so much that I cannot love myself, I am so much hers that I am no longer my own’. Dissociating himself from his patron, Ronsard questions who really owns the text. After its publication in Les nouvelles poésies and Elegies, he reclaims his ownership of the poem in 1567–72 by inserting it as sonnet 104 into his Second Livre des Amours for Marie de Bourgeuil and finally in 1578–84 as sonnet 164 into his Premier Livre des Amours for Cassandre. As the speaker recovers the poem, he revises its sestet so as to express regret for his surrender to the beloved: “En luy plaisant, je cherche à me desplaire” ‘In pleasing her, I try to displease myself ’. Isabelle disappears as its original addressee, and its decasyllabic verse now matches the dominant meter of Le Premier Livre des Amours. Ronsard’s return to decasyllabic verse coincides with a renewal of royal support for his endeavors. In 1565, he published a short essay, the Abbregé de l’art poétique françois, addressed to Alphonse Delbene, a young courtier-poet of Italian parentage who had asked for advice about French prosody. While much of the response seems simplistic, its preponderant thrust favors a high degree of flexibility, mobility, and innovation in composing verse.23 It urges poets to expand their vocabulary by reverting to older, even obsolete forms of usage; by coining new words based on Greek and Latin etymologies; and by forming nouns based on adjectives, verbs based on nouns, and adverbs based on verbs. The principle of abundance that empowers Bodin’s quantity theory of money animates Ronsard’s views about language: “Plus nous aurons de mots en nostre langue, plus elle sera parfaitte” ‘The more words we have in our language, the richer it will be’ (Céard, 2:1186). Still, from the outset he recognizes that at court the primary readership for poetry consists of “Damoyselles et jeunes Gentils hommes” (2:1177). Unhappily, the fifteen-year-old King Charles IX enjoyed old-fashioned vers communs, and courtly fashion complied with him.24 The poet regrets his decision—urged by Charles—to rewrite his Franciade in decasyllables rather than alexandrines: “Il s’en faut prendre à ceux qui ont puissance de me commander et non à ma volonté: car cela est fait contre mon gré” ‘It’s because of those who have power to command me, and not my caprice, for I do it against my will’ (2:1184). With this recasting of his epic, he all but sabotaged its outcome.

23.  For linguistic variation and diversity as a facet of nature, see Michel Jenneret, Perpetual Motion, 175–93. 24.  For court patronage under Charles IX during Catherine de’ Medici’s regency, see Robert J. Knecht, The French Renaissance Court (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 259–66.

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Nine of Ronsard’s longer poems in alexandrine verse assembled under the title Discours des miseres de ce temps and republished in the second edition of his collected Oeuvres (1567) suggest what his Franciade might have been if freed from the constraint of decasyllabic verse.25 The earliest poem, the Discours à Guillaume des Autels (published in the Oeuvres of 1560, revised in 1562 and 1578, Céard 2:1011–16), assails the Reformist fureur of Luther and Calvin for having shattered the unity of France with “une opinion / Diverse” ‘a multiform opinion’ (lines 119–20), where the adjective diverse punningly casts their fureur as an antitype of good verse. In a potent simile in the Continuation du discours (published anonymously in 1562, Céard 2:997–1006), the French populace is driven mad by Reformist doctrine “comme Oreste agité des fureurs infernales” ‘like Orestes, spooked by infernal Furor’ (line 248). The Remonstrance au peuple de France (published anonymously in 1563, Céard 2:1020–39) evokes Vergil’s trope of furor as a snake (Aeneid 7.341–58) hurled by the monster of opinion at Luther, so that “Luy soufle vivement une ame serpentine, / Et son venin mortel vomist en sa poitrine” ‘It breathes violently into him a serpent’s soul, and vomits its deadly poison into his chest’ (lines 307–8). Not the least of Ronsard’s debts in the Discours is to Rabelais. In 1554 the poet had composed an epitaph in his honor, good-naturedly teasing him as a “gallant” who “alteré, sans nul sejour, / . . . boivoit nuit et jour” ‘parched, without a break, drank night and day’ (Céard 2:986, lines 19–20). Though he had died in disrepute, Rabelais gained a new readership during the religious wars of the 1560s, and young writers such as Etienne Pasquier and Louis le Caron turned to his Quart livre for satiric guidance.26 So too did Ronsard. Flashes of Rabelaisian wit light up his Remonstrance in its catalog of “ces noms qui sont finis en os”  ‘these names that have ended up in a bone-pile’ (line 213) and his Response aux injures (1563) in its parody of biblical hermeneutics. More importantly, Rabelais contributes to Ronsard’s reversal of his aesthetic outlook at the end of the 1560s. La Lyre (March 1569, Céard 2:689–99) extols the generosity of Jean Dutreuilh de Belot, a Bordeaux magistrate who 25.  For the manuscript genesis of these Discours, see Rouget, Ronsard et le livre, 151–55. For an alternative model for the singularity of Ronsard’s voice in these poems, see the analysis of Du Bellay’s Les Regrets in Ullrich Langer, Lyric in the Renaissance, 102–24. 26. For the rise of satiric texts modeled on Rabelais in the 1560s, see Antonia Szabari, Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 149–52; Mireille Huchon, Rabelais grammarien: De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, vol. 16 of Études rabelaisiennes (Geneva: Droz, 1981), 412–85; and Marcel de Grève, L’Interprétation de Rabelais au XVIe siècle, vol. 3 of Études rabelaisiennes (Geneva: Droz, 1961). For Ronsard’s response to Protestant invective by defending his role at court, see Ullrich Langer, Vertu du discours, discours de la vertu (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 74–94.

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befriended the poet with the gift of a lyre that renewed his spirits after a bout of quartan fever nine months earlier. Its speaker commends his benefactor as a type of Rabelaisian Silenus, “De front austere et de triste visage, / Au reste gay docte prudent et sage” ‘With an austere forehead and a sad-looking face, but otherwise merry, learned, prudent, and wise’ (lines 201–2).27 His virtues provide bodily strength and soulful wisdom, material nourishment and moral support, and his benefaction aligns poetry to its sister arts with a fully fleshed wisdom. In La Lyre, these values emend the priority of divine inspiration over human accomplishment celebrated in the “Ode à Michel de L’Hospital” nineteen years earlier. The speaker’s description of his poetic fureur (“Colere ardant furieux agité, / Je tremble tout dessous la Deité” ‘Raging, burning, furious, impassioned, I tremble all over beneath the Deity’, lines 55–56) offers a powerful account of headlong energy. Nothing inhibits its manic force: “Lors que la vérve en moi s’est desbordée, / Impetueux sans raison ny conseil” ‘Whenever the energy has overflowed inside me, [I rush] precipitously without reason or caution’ (lines 70–71). But its proclivities are random and arbitrary and its effects dissipate rapidly: “Quand la fureur me laisse, tout soudain / Plume et papier me tombent de la main. . . . / Je ne suis rien qu’un corps mort et perclus” ‘When the fury leaves me, at once pen and paper fall from my hand. . . . I’m nothing but a dead and palsied body (lines 79–92).28 This ghastly result vitiates the effect of fureur and propels the poet toward a new evaluation of discipline and hard work. In the poem’s second half, human effort replaces divine fureur in the work of Belot’s lyre-maker who has decorated the instrument’s frame with enameled images of Apollo, Cupid, Venus, Bacchus, Mercury, and other deities. In the poem’s key episode, Mercury shapes a lute from a tortoise’s shell and gives it to Apollo “en contre-eschange” (line 407) for having stolen Admetus’s cattle. The mischievous boy-god labors at the intersection of art and commerce, representing for Ronsard the transactional character of art in negotiating between extremes of passion and privation. The “accords delectables” ‘delightful harmonies’ (line 397) of his invention suppress Apollo’s “poignante rage” ‘striking fury’ (line 402), and they succeed in doing their job. Mercury appeases Apollo’s wrath (l’ire ‘ire’) with his gift of the instrument

27.  In the Prologue to Gargantua, derived from Erasmus’s Adages 3.3.1 and Plato’s Symposium 215a–222a. For the relevance of Rabelais’s verbal sound effects, see Duane Rudolph, “Reading Rabelais’ Sacred Noise,” Renaissance and Reformation 29 (2005): 23–40. 28.  For Ronsard’s late treatment of fureur as a form of self-alienation, see Michel Simonin, “Ronsard et l’exil de l’âme,” in his L’encre et la lumière, 297–310.

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(the lyre) that the act of reading (lire ‘reading’) brings to life. The homophony of l’ire, lyre, and lire accomplishes an exchange of functions among myth, music, and poem that marks the poet’s role in society and assigns a value to it, much as tradesmen or merchants assign values to what they sell. And Mercury knows how to do this since he himself serves as patron of merchants. Whatever Ronsard had written about the power of fureur at the beginning of his poem, he now reverses it with a deft manipulation of words on the printed page. As Charles IX’s taste for decasyllabic verse continued to count in courtly circles, the poet returned to it in Sonnets et madrigals pour Astrée (1574), preserved as an independent cycle in his later Oeuvres and marking his final incursion into that meter. The poems were commissioned by Beranger du Gast, the captain of Henri duc d’Anjou’s guards, for his mistress Françoise d’Estrées, the wife of the king’s artillery master. Encoding the beloved’s name as Astrée ‘Starry One’, Ronsard conducts an experiment in acoustic imitation. An example is sonnet 12 (L 17:188, W 13). In a profusion of the closed vowel sounds [e], [i], and [ə], its despairing speaker vocalizes the sound of wailing between clenched teeth: “Je haïssois et ma vie et mes ans, / Triste j’estois de moy-mesme homicide” ‘I hated both my life and my advanced age; sad, I was suicidal about myself ’. In alternating open and closed vowel sounds, Cupid offers some dispassionate advice: “Peins le portrait au milieu de tes gans”  ‘Paint the portrait [of your mistress] in the center of your gloves’. This talismanic portrait returns the speaker to Laura’s portrait in Petrarch’s sonnets 77–78. By contrast with those poems, Ronsard’s sonnet dissolves the tension between inspiration and acquired technique and ends by privileging the latter: Car dés le jour que je fey la peinture, Heureux je vey proposer mes desseins. Comment n’auroy-je une bonne aventure, Quand j’ai tousjours mon Astre entre les mains. For, from the day that I fashioned her portrait, I was happy to see my designs succeed. How could I not enjoy a pleasing outcome, when I hold my star forever in my hands. At least in his own imagination, the speaker’s placement of Astrée’s portrait “entre mes mains” submits her to his artistic control. The literal claim is facetious, but it equates him to one “qui maistre te preside” ‘who as a master governs you’—as a master, that is, of stylized performance, conditioning it

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against the randomness of furor. As we’ll see in the next section, Ronsard resorts to similar contrivances in his Sonnets pour Hélène, but not until he embarks upon a quite different foray into the Petrarchan mode. After Charles IX’s death in May 1574, court fashion shifted to accommodate the unschooled tastes of Henri. Ronsard seized upon an opportunity in November 1574 when the twenty-three-year-old king commissioned him to write a cycle of poems mourning the death of his mistress Marie de Clèves, the wife of Henri de Bourbon, prince of Condé. Because she shared the name of Ronsard’s Marie, the poet intuited the possibility of one day incorporating this cycle into Le Second Livre des Amours and bringing closure to it as a newly annexed Part II: Sur la Mort de Marie.29 As sonnet 13 of this short sub-cycle, Ronsard’s “Epitaphe de Marie” (L 17:143, W Mort 16) no longer concerns Marie de Clevès, but Marie de Bourgeuil, whose charms inspired his experimental sonnets. Its model is Petrarch’s sonnet 308, “Quella per cui con Sorga ò cangiato Arno” ‘She for whom I exchanged Arno for Sorgue’, whose speaker rejects his Tuscan patrimony and the papal court at Avignon to live near Laura in Vaucluse. After her death Petrarch can neither sing about her (“ò riprovato indarno” ‘I’ve tried in vain’), nor sketch her image “col mio stile” ‘with my pen/style’. Poetry fails him at this juncture: “Ivi manca l’ardir, l’ingegno et l’arte” ‘There fails my daring, my wit, and my art’. Trading Petrarch’s terms “Sorga” and “Arno” for his own “Anjou” and “Vendômois,” Ronsard’s speaker transforms the king’s Marie into his Marie: “Cy reposent les oz de la belle Marie, / Qui me fist pour Anjou quitter le Vandomois” ‘Here repose the bones of beautiful Marie, who made me forsake the Vendômois for Anjou’. His lament brings to the sequence a more tranquil stylistic register than heretofore. With echoes from Petrarch’s sonnet 342, “Del cibo onde ’l signor mio sempre abonda”‘With the food of which my lord is always generous’, Marie’s death propels an inversion of values in which her heightened existence in another world represents bliss, while the diminished existence of those who remain on earth represents affliction: “O beauté sans seconde! / Maintenant tu es vive, et je suis mort d’ennuy” ‘O beauty without peer! Now you are alive and I have died with grief ’. Commenting on Petrarch’s poem, Gesualdo suggests that Laura is a literary figure for all the fictional beloveds ever celebrated in amatory poetry: “Ne PRIMA, cioè nel tempo antico hebbe simile ne al suo tempo hebbe seconda” ‘Neither at first, i.e., in ancient times, did

29.  See Sarah Sturm Maddox, Ronsard, Petrarch, and the “Amours” (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999), 128–58.

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she have any peer; nor in her own time did she have any rival’ (sig. cccxxvir). Ronsard’s artistry speaks to the precepts of an earlier literary generation, yet for him they hardly reflect nostalgia for older Petrarchan conventions. They instead project a moral judgment in response to the confusions of France as its corrupt monarchy sinks into the vortex of civil war. The poem’s 1578 text ends in pessimism: “Ha, siecle malheureux! malheureux est celuy / Qui s’abuse d’Amour, et qui se fie au Monde” ‘Unhappy century! unhappy is he who is betrayed by love and who places his trust in this world.30 The Sonnets sur la Mort de Marie offer no substitute for the high style. But their alexandrine verses signal an entente between epic and lyric. They convey a serious attitude and a deep emotion not always available in Ronsard’s earlier poetry, and they at least provisionally appease the antagonistic tendencies that harrowed his career. For all that, constantly adapting to trends and patrons’ wishes, Le Second Livre des Amours exemplifies part of an oeuvre built upon a variety of models, including ones that the poet submits to continual revision. Much of it originates on demand from courtly patrons and benefactors, including Charles IX and Henri III. Even if Ronsard merchandizes his wares and accedes to his readers’ various wishes, he frames the results with concerns of his own. In the end, these concerns justify his withdrawal, both from Henri III whose self-centeredness he deplored and from a court whose tastes and support did not live up to his expectations. As one folds into the other, Ronsard strategizes his options and maximizes his efficiency in order to shore up his reputation and to profit from his own life experiences. In doing so, he learns how to live on credit in a world where nothing is concrete, where there is only speculation, a game of mirrors.

30.  1578 text quoted from the Weber edition.

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Ch ap ter 4

The Smirched Muse

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Commercializing Sonnets pour Hélène

The fifth and newly revised edition of Ronsard’s Oeuvres, published on 6 February 1578 after six months of laborious preparation, included a new sonnet sequence for one of the queen mother’s maids of honor, Hélène de Surgères.1 If a late addition to Claude Binet’s Vie de Ronsard is trustworthy, Catherine de’ Medici had prevailed upon the poet to do this.2 We don’t know when he began to work on it—he had likely met Hélène at the salon of the then Comtesse de Retz in 1570—but he completed it at his benefice near Croixval in 1576. It consists of two parts with no overt distinguishing features between them, offering sixty poems in Le premiere livre des sonnets pour Hélène and fifty-five poems in Le second livre des sonnets pour Hélène. To this two-part collection the poet attached fifty-one Amours diverses, thirty-nine of which he integrated into his Sonnets pour Hélène in the sixth

1.  Serving the queen mother as a maid of honor since at least May 1566, Hélène descended from minor nobility in Clermont-Surgères, a distant cousin of the Comtesse de Retz and a regular at her salon discussed below; unmarried, she had been engaged to Jacques de la Rivière who died in 1569 fighting in the civil war; see Michel Simonin, “Hélène avant Surgères,” in his L’encre et la lumière, 279–96. 2.  Binet writes that Ronsard’s love for Hélène was chaste and unconsummated: Claude Binet, Discours de la vie de Pierre de Ronsard, ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris: Hachette, 1901), 166.

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edition of his Oeuvres (1584).3 On 21 February 1578 his name entered the list of annual Royal Pensions for 1,200 livres tournois, which rose to 2,000 livres tournois eighteen months later. After that date, the poet absented himself from court in revulsion at Henri III’s dysfunctional behavior. Ronsard’s return to Petrarchism in these years suggests that he had gotten over his disappointment with the Franciade. His earlier poems had abounded in erudite allusions drawn from the ghetto of a literary life. His later ones build upon observations about himself and others, spun from experience and fused with a smart, sophisticated use of Petrarchan topoi. Sonnet 1 of Le premier livre des sonnets pour Hélène (L 17:194, W 1.1), “Ce premier jour de May, Helene, je vous jure” ‘This first day of May, Hélène, I pledge to you’, returns to the introductory poem of Les Amours. Just as that poem echoed Petrarch’s sonnet 248, so this one echoes Petrarch’s complement to it, sonnet 247. There Petrarch establishes a literary context for the speaker’s celebration of Laura’s beauty: “Parrà forse ad alcun che ’n lodar quella / ch’i’ adoro in terra, errante sia ’l mio stile” ‘It will perhaps seem to someone that, in praise of her whom I adore on earth, my pen errs’. To describe her would challenge the greatest stylists of antiquity, whom Petrarch identifies as Demosthenes, Cicero, Vergil, and Homer by their birthplaces, and as Pindar and Horace by their distinctive lyres: “E cosa da stancare Athene, Arpino, / Mantova et Smirna, et l’una et l’altra lira” ‘It would exhaust Athens, Arpinum, Mantua, and Smyrna, and the one and the other lyre’. In writing about Laura, however, the poet is driven by forces beyond his will. As Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo comments, “il fatto e le stelle haueano ordinato, che la lingua del P. hauesse M.L. e le lodi di lei a cantare” ‘Fate and the stars have ordained that Petrarch’s tongue would have taken Laura and her praises for matter to sing about’ (sig. cclxiiv). It is a poem not so much about the disruption of a poet’s efforts to attain his goals as it is about their continuity. Sonnets pour Hélène 1.1 inverts these claims. It details the “creative destruction” that Ronsard continues to wreak upon his poems as he revises, updates, and replaces them with something new. It begins with an oath sworn upon a catalog of motifs drawn from both Les Amours and Le second livre des Amours: “Par les prez par les bois herissez de verdure . . . / Par tous les rossignols” ‘By the meadows, the woods bristling with green, by all the nightingales’. “Les prez” evokes the seigneural name of Cassandre’s husband Jean “de Pray,” while “les bois” and “les rossignols” evoke the rustic habitation of Marie de Bourgueil. The speaker’s address to Hélène at the start of his sestet bears an 3.  For the sixth edition of his Oeuvres (4 January 1584), Ronsard moved eight of these poems into Le premier livre des sonnets pour Hélène and twenty-five into Le second livre des sonnets pour Hélène.

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ironic valence in relation to Petrarch’s constrained will, “non per electïon, ma per destino” ‘not by choice but by destiny’, as it proclaims her his freely chosen beloved: “J’ay par electïon / Et non à la volée aimé vostre jeunesse” ‘By choice and not upon any flight of fancy have I loved your youthfulness’. The word electïon conveys a writerly touch as well, referring to the poet’s formative experiences in reading Petrarch, his lectiones that have imbued his writing with the Italian poet’s figures and tropes. Petrarch’s juxtaposition of epic poets (Homer, Vergil), lyric poets (Pindar, Horace), and political orators (Demosthenes, Cicero) points to everything that Ronsard had aspired to be but is no longer: a poet acclaimed for his epic, skilled also in the ode and in a rhetorical discours that shapes public conscience amid political strife. If time has not allowed him to secure these goals, he has nonetheless pursued a remarkable career, even as he inverts the Petrarchan model that he so obviously imitates: “Je suis de ma fortune autheur, je le confesse”  ‘I am the author of my own fortune, I freely confess’. Still, he is neither the arbiter of his own destiny nor the “autheur” of his own fortunes. By feeding Catherine de’ Medici’s Italianate appetite with yet another sonnet sequence, he has become the compliant servant of a courtly readership that imposes his theme. Just as the sonnets to Cassandre exploit a coincidence between her name and that of Troy’s unheeded prophetess, so these to Hélène pursue connections with her Greek namesake, Leda’s daughter begotten by Zeus and married to the Spartan king Menelaus, whose elopement with Prince Paris ignited the Trojan war.4 The etymology of Hélène, ελισσειν ‘turn round, reverse, destroy’, colors Ronsard’s speaker as a hapless object of vicissitude in sonnet 1.2 (L 17:195, W 1.2): “Tant tu te resjouis / D’acquerir par ma mort le surnom de cruelle” ‘So much do you rejoice in acquiring the name of “cruel one” by means of my death’. In sonnet 1.3 (L 17:196, W 1.3), the punning associations of her name and haleine ‘breath’ mark her as one whose cool retorts fan the lover’s ardor: “Ma douce haleine / Qui froide rafraischis la chaleur de mon coeur” ‘My sweet breath that, chilly as it is, refreshes the heat of my heart’. Instead of extinguishing his passion, her “nom si fatal” stimulates it: Hereux celuy qui souffre une amoureuse peine Pour un nom si fatal: heureuse la douleur, Bien-heureux le torment, qui vient pour la valeur Des yeux, non pas des yeux, mais des flames d’Helene.5 4.  See Sarah Sturm Maddox, Ronsard, Petrarch, and the “Amours” (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999), 82–127, especially 91–94. 5.  In 1584 “des flames” is revised to “de l’astre” ‘fatal star’.

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Happy is he who suffers amorous pain for so fatal a name; happy the ache, the woe, happy the torments that occur as the price of Helen’s eyes—no, not her eyes, but her flames.

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The repetitions in this quatrain exploit a contrast between Homer’s Penelope and Helen: “Nom, malheur des Troyens, sujet de mon souci, / Ma sage Penelope et mon Helene aussi” ‘A name—curse of Trojans, subject of my worry, my circumspect Penelope, and my Helen as well’. The lover suffers not because the unwed Hélène remains faithful to a husband (as did Penelope and Laura, or for that matter his own Cassandre), nor because—like Helen—she has been unfaithful and adulterous. Instead, with willful indifference she withholds her favors from everyone. In Ronsard’s eyes, she is an anerotic woman who has chosen to ignore his attentions. Her radical individuality blurs her resemblance to Petrarch’s and Homer’s and his own earlier archetypes alike. Still other poems challenge these archetypes. Sonnet 1.9 (L 17:204, W 1.10), for example, evokes the royal precincts where Hélène lives among the queen mother’s retinue: “L’autre jour que j’estois sur le haut d’un degré, / Passant tu m’advisas, et me tournant la veue, / Tu m’esblouïs mes yeux” ‘The other day as I stood at the top of a staircase, upon passing by, you caught a glimpse of me and turning your glance to me, you dazzled my eyes’. In this setting, “le haut d’un degré” literally denotes a palace staircase, and it conveys a social distinction of habitat that, since his earliest days, the speaker once craved and has now achieved as a court poet. But none of this matters to Hélène. She greets him with a sign of dismissal, a gesture echoed in the facile homophony of signe/cygne: Lors si ta belle main passant ne m’eust fait signe, Main blanche, qui se vante estre fille d’un Cygne, Je fusse mort, Helene, aux rayons de tes yeux. Then if your fair hand in passing by had not given me a sign [of dismissal], your white hand, you who boast of being the daughter of a swan, I would have died, Hélène, amid the beams of your eyes. Hélène thinks herself as special as was the Greek Helen, fathered by Zeus in disguise as a swan. This comparison actually heightens the distance between the two Helens, the one a semidivine queen whose fate shaped the course of history, the other a proud young woman who rebuffs her admirers. Hélène enjoys dismissing her would-be lover while he rationalizes

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her dismissal as an act that saves him from the fire of her eyes. But he has enough maturity and experience to know better. He’s not at all a young Trojan prince linked to a mistress through fatal destiny, but an old courtier who pursues her with a perverse will. The speaker’s Petrarchan obsessions enact a reflux of Ronsard’s diffidence as a court poet. No longer inspired by divine fureur, he’s simply a performer whose talent for writing poems risks being undervalued. In response to this situation, his narrative becomes a study in dashed aspirations. Young lovers who once seemed so captivating in Les Amours might now seem fatuous to a cynical readership, especially if the poet casts himself once again as an unrequited lover. The members of his brigade have wrinkled up or passed on, and yet he wants to pretend that his Petrarchism hasn’t aged at all. How could this kind of poetry remain as fresh as it was when he half reluctantly tried to master it in Les Amours?6 An answer to this question comes in sonnet 1.26 (L 17:211, W 1.19), “Je fuy les pas frayez du meschant populaire” ‘I flee the steps worn bare by the foolish populace’. This poem dramatizes the speaker’s critical assessment of his own fiction-making powers. Like sonnet 103 in the Cassandre cycle (“Sur le sablon la semence j’épan” ‘On the sandy field I scatter my seed’), it refers explicitly to Petrarch’s sonnet 35, “Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi” ‘Alone and filled with care, the most deserted fields’. In his earlier poem, following Petrarch’s depiction of the speaker as a writer betrayed by his verses about Laura, Ronsard figures himself as a type of maligned Bellerophon. Here in a metaphor of musical tempering that recalls Petrarch’s “di che tempre / sia la mia vita” ‘the temper of my life’, Ronsard refigures himself as a poet who flaunts his detachment from threadbare convention: “Les rochers, les forests desja sçavent assez / Quelle trampe a ma vie estrange et solitaire” ‘The rocks, the forests already know enough what temper my strange, solitary life has’. The adjectives estrange and solitaire cast their melancholy humor upon Ronsard’s octave, as though to reverse Petrarch’s tormented and strained “tempre.” To record his song, Ronsard’s speaker has enlisted Love as his trusted scribe, his secretaire. This secretary not only accompanies him, but also assists him in expressing his own thoughts, radically modifying and finally transforming them:

6. For Sonnets pour Hélène as a synthesis of lyric voice and intertextuality, see Benedikte Andersson, L’invention lyrique:Visages d’auteur, figures du poète et voix lyrique chez Ronsard (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), 443–80.

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Si ne suis-je si seul, qu’Amour mon secretaire N’accompagne mes pieds debiles et cassez: Qu’il ne conte mes maux et presens et passez A ceste voix sans corps, qui rien ne sçauroit taire.

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I am yet not so alone that Love, my secretary, does not accompany my weak, tired feet, and that he does not recount my present and past ills in this disembodied voice that wouldn’t know how to keep silent. As a product of self-conscious rhetoric, the disembodied voice of Love invents an image of the beloved untrue to nature. Its purpose is to assuage the speaker’s own conflicted emotions: “Je m’arreste, et je dy, Se pourroit-il bien faire / Qu’elle pensast, parlast, ou se souvint de moy?” ‘I stop and say: Could it well be that she has thought of, spoken of, or remembered me?’. In aroused speculation he thinks of Hélène as thinking of him in quiet retrospection. Projecting his imagination upon her, he succumbs to its competing impulses. On the one hand his fiction-making cautions him to subdue his agitation; on the other, it exposes him to self-deception. Such evasions mark Petrarch’s poem, but for Ronsard, they prove more complex. His speaker actively induces his own amatory tribulation, heightening its pathos and relishing his enjoyment of it. Nowhere is his self-deception stronger than in the poem’s concluding verses, and nowhere does he appear more oblivious to it: “Encore que je me trompe, abusé du contraire, / Pour me faire plaisir, Hélène, je le croy”‘Although I deceive myself, tricked by what’s contrary-tofact, to please myself, Hélène, I believe it’. The poem complements Petrarch’s agonized situation by serving up a dollop of wit. The speaker, no less than the beloved, is a practitioner of bad faith, he in self-incrimination and she in self-exculpation. One consequence is that Ronsard reinvents a sonnet form that had occupied his attention for a quarter century. This time a young poet named Philippe Desportes has captured the esteem of a new generation of court literati with his adaptations of Petrarch and Ariosto. Ronsard uses the newcomer as his sounding board. Born into a wealthy clothier-merchant family at Chartres in 1546, Desportes received a classical education, evidently to prepare for holy orders and lucrative ecclesiastical posts.7 He had arrived in Paris by January 1567 when, along with Ronsard, he contributed interludes to Jean-Antoine de Baïf ’s comic drama Le brave (based upon Plautus’s Miles

7.  See Jacques Lavaud, Un poète de cour au temps des derniers Valois, Philippe Desportes (Paris: Droz, 1936), 1–9.

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gloriosus). In spring 1568, Ronsard withdrew to Saint-Cosme and worked steadily upon the first four books of his Franciade, eventually published in September 1572. Desportes meanwhile pursued his advancement at the Valois court in Paris. In November 1570 when Ronsard returned to court, the young poet joined him and Baïf in meetings of Charles IX’s Académie de poésie et de musique, a precursor of the polymathic Académie du palais that Henri III would inaugurate in January 1576.8 Ronsard and Desportes also participated in a literary circle convened by Marguerite de Valois’s friend the Comtesse de Retz (after 1573, the Maréschale de Retz) at her residence in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.9 Known alternatively as the Salon vert (for the color of the room in which it met) or the Cabinet de Dictynne (for a Cretan goddess associated with Cybelle and Artemis), it attracted rising young poets such as Baïf, Amadis Jamyn, Etienne Jodelle, Nicholas Rapin, and Agrippa d’Aubigné. Its purpose was to promote an aesthetic ideal of refinement and virtue that might counter the escalating violence of France’s civil war. Its vehicles were a chaste-minded renewal of Petrarchism, which had fallen into eclipse since the late 1550s, and a revival of interest in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, where fierce knights tame their violent impulses with Petrarchan docility.10 During the late 1560s, Desportes had begun paraphrasing, translating, and adapting parts of Ariosto’s epic in dodecasyllabic couplets, and with a dedication to Charles IX he published them in 1572 as Les imitations de l’Arioste.11 Its selections embroider upon psychological contours of the Italian narrative but eliminate its droll ironies and erotic suggestiveness. The latter, of course, are exactly the qualities that Ronsard had magnified when he borrowed from Ariosto, and his contrast with Desportes could hardly be greater.

  8.  For the academy that Charles instituted in 1570 with an emphasis upon music, see Frances Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1947), 36–76 and 199–235. For the Palace Academy that Henri instituted in 1576 to educate himself and his advisors in science, philosophy, and the arts, see Robert J. Sealy, The Palace Academy of Henry III (Geneva: Droz, 1981), with Ronsard’s participation (27–84) in a lecture on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard et al., 2:1189–94).   9.  Inheriting the title of comtesse from her family, she brought the status of comte to her husband, the Florentine banker-nobleman Albert de Gondi. Three years later he was promoted to the rank of mareschal; see Lavaud, Un poète, 61–94. 10.  See Sergio Zatti, “Valori d’uso e valori di scambio,” in Il Furioso fra epos e romanzo (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1990), 9–37. 11. See Les imitations de l’Arioste par Philippe Desportes, ed. Jacques Lavaud (Paris: Droz, 1936), and Rosanna Gorris, “Desportes et les Imitations de l’Arioste,” in Philippe Desportes (1546 –1606): Un poète presque parfait entre Renaissance et classicisme, ed. Jean Balsamo (Paris: Klincksieck, 2000), 173–212. Its 1,681 lines of dodecasyllabic couplets stitch together key stanzas from cantos 1, 19, 23, 24, 32–36, and 46.

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As for Desportes’s Petrarchism, a curious lack of personality pervades his Les amours de Diane, a cycle of seventy sonnets and sixteen chansons dedicated to the future Henri III and published in his Premiers oeuvres poétiques in 1573.12 This lack weakens both the speaker’s voice and the beloved’s represented character.13 It might stem from Desportes’s depiction of three very different mistresses under the name of a single beloved. In 1569–70, the eighteen-year-old Henri pursued a married woman whose husband proved ineffectually jealous. All indications point to the wife of Antoine III d’Estrées, who had been the honoree of Ronsard’s Sonnets pour Astrée five years earlier. By November 1570, Henri turned his attention to a younger woman, Renée de Rieux, for whom he arranged a marriage at court in September 1573, when he left (with Desportes in his entourage) to assume the throne of Poland.14 Meanwhile, a few months earlier (beginning in June 1573), Henri had a short affair with the wife of Henri de Bourbon, the woman whose death Ronsard had mourned in his Sonnets sur la Mort de Marie. Each furnishes a different prototype for Desportes’s composite (and improbably chaste) Diane, all three fictionalized at Henri’s request and included in the poet’s Oeuvres. Sonnet 43 of Desportes’s Amours de Diane provides a good example. Like 1.26 in Sonnets pour Hélène (and sonnet 103 in Les Amours), it follows the pattern of Petrarch’s sonnet 35. Its speaker sharpens his skills against the whetstone of Ronsard’s wit, but the result seems flat as it transforms Petrarch’s topos of solitude into a trope of devotion to the beloved. The poem becomes a temple to his goddess: Solitaire et pensif, dans un bois écarté, Bien loin du populaire et de la tourbe espesse, Je veux bastir un temple à ma fiere deesse, Pour appendre mes voeux à sa divinité.15

12.  Also included in Desportes’s Premières oeuvres is a second cycle of sonnets and chansons, Les amours de Hippolyte, written on commission for Bussy d’Amboise to commemorate his scandalous profession of love for the king’s sister, Marguerite de Valois, who in August 1572 married Henri de Navarre; see Lavaud, Un poète, 162–67. 13.  See François Rouget, “Philippe Desportes et les inflexions métriques de la voix lyrique,” in Balsamo, Philippe Desportes (1546 –1606), 293–314; Olivia Rosenthal, “Phillipe Desportes: Esquisse d’une poétique des oeuvres,” in Balsamo, Philippe Desportes (1546 –1606), 355–74; and Giselle Matthieu-Castellani, Les thèmes amoureux dans la poésie française, 1570 –1600 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975), 209–66. 14. Lavaud, Un poète, 152. 15.  Quotations refer to Philippe Desportes, Les amours de Diane, ed. Victor E. Graham (Geneva: Droz, 1959).

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Alone and pensive in a remote forest isolated from the herd of common people and the dense crowd, I wish to construct a temple to my proud goddess, in order to apprise this divinity of my vows to her. Without a trace of irony, the speaker claims ritualized status for himself and carries his solemn figuration of the spotless beloved to a hyperbolic extreme: Mon oeil sera la lampe, ardant continuelle Devant l’image saint d’une dame si belle; Mon corps sera l’autel, et mes souspirs les voeux.

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My eye will be a lamp burning continually before the sacred image of so beautiful a lady; my body will be her altar, and my sighs her votive offering. Desportes’s self-willed distance from the populaire is the opposite of Ronsard’s. For the latter, as we’ve seen in this chapter’s first section, the public “qui sçauroit bien” serves as a marker for the speaker’s anxieties about imprudent self-revelation. For Desportes, it serves as a marker for the privileged economy of the salon, a sign for the circumscribed but highly elite readership that this poet had cultivated. Desportes’s loyalty to his powerful benefactors made him their rentier, accepting their payment for his work from a situation of advantage. He entered into this situation at a time when factionalism at court had grown to a degree that repulsed Ronsard.16 For both it overlapped with Michel Eyquem de Montaigne’s retreat to his chateau outside of Bordeaux in 1572, where he drafted his first essays. In one of the earliest of them, “One Man’s Profit is Another Man’s Harm” (1.22), his reflections upon factionalism lead to the mercantilist conclusion that “our private wishes are for the most part born and nourished at the expense of others.”17 The writer had emerged as a landowning nobleman upon the death of his father Pierre Eyquem in 1568, cementing the goal of his great-grandfather, the wine merchant Ramon Eyquem, who in 1477 paid for a title of nobility “de Montaigne” that would become effective three generations later when Pierre died. Henceforth debarred as a condition of this title from pursuing gainful employment in a professional career, he spent the rest of his life meditating and writing upon 16.  For court patronage under Henri III, see Robert J. Knecht, The French Renaissance Court (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 283–95. 17.  The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 77.

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the arbitrariness of human customs, conventions, practices, laws, and beliefs such as those that brought him to this estate. Not by coincidence the essay that follows is titled “Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law” (1.23). Desportes’s work was aimed at immediate rewards. For Ronsard, it was an entrepreneurial investment aimed at an extended return from a wider, long-distance readership that he’d cultivate with affectionate irony as a “meschant populaire” ‘foolish populace’ (Hélène 1.26). Despite their differences, Ronsard seemed kindly disposed toward Desportes, as though acknowledging the stimulation of their encounter. His elegy A Philippe Des-Portes (composed in the early 1570s, published in 1583) represents their accord as an incentive to work for pleasure and profit, with both trumping the distant reward of eternal fame: “Il gist à l’oeuvre seul, impossible à la cendre / De ceux que la Mort faict soubs les ombres descendre” ‘[Happiness] resides in the act of work, impossible for the ashes of those whom Death forces to descend beneath the shades’ (lines 25–26, in Céard 4.416).18 Its requital is “L’usufruit seulement, que present il doit prendre” ‘simply the usufruct that one should seize in the present’ (line 38). The poet embraces his notion of celebrity in the participial form of renommée ‘being renowned’: “Quant à moy, j’aime mieux trente ans de renommee”  ‘As for me, I would prefer thirty years of being renowned’ (line 62). Its opposite is “Un renom journalier qui doit bien-tost mourir” ‘A day-to-day renown that must soon pass away’ (line 84). As the contrast implies, his otherwise companionable colleague Desportes seeks a “renom journalier,” but Ronsard reaches toward a longer durée—which, with bemused self-irony, he limits to exactly three decades. The more Ronsard laughs at his own expense—even if he appears to compromise the fame that he seeks—the more he arrives at a new type of love poetry. An example follows in sonnet 1.31 (L 17:214, W 1.24), “Ostez vostre beauté, ostez vostre jeunesse” ‘Away with your beauty, away with your youth’. On one level the poem is a version of Petrarch’s sonnet 236, “Amor, io fallo, et veggio il mio fallire” ‘Love, I transgress and I see my transgression’. Ronsard’s argument follows the Italian model, but its diction and figurations begin to fray outward. Petrarch’s speaker confesses that he has overstepped bounds by declaring his love for Laura, but he blames her for having spurred him on: “Or fa’ almen ch’ella senta, / et le mie colpe a se stessa perdoni”  ‘Now at least make her perceive it, and make her pardon herself for my transgressions’. Ronsard’s speaker addresses Hélène directly and—emboldened by the

18.  For the poem as an ambivalent palinode, see Langer, Invention, 89–96.

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rhyme word precieux—he faults her for having triggered his furieux response: “Voz dons si precieux / Me font en les voyant devenir furieux” ‘Such precious gifts of yours make me become furious upon seeing them’. Reverting to fureur, he now indicts it: “Tant je suis agité d’une fureur extréme” ‘So much am I agitated by a consummate furor’. Everything that his poetic fureur had stood for now comes under assault, and he imputes the blame to Hélène for leading him on: “Pource si quelquefois je vous touche la main” ‘That is why I sometimes touch your hand’. The result is a coy defense for a bolder, more overt, and frankly outrageous physical harassment than any suggested by Petrarch. And so the speaker ends his poem: “Mais douce, pardonnez mes fautes à vous-mesme” ‘But, my sweet, pardon yourself for my offenses’. Against the mythic frame of Helen’s reciprocal attraction to Paris, Ronsard’s Hélène does not share his affection, much less his libido. Instead of being a handsome young prince, he’s a somewhat sad and not very wise old man pursuing a younger woman who doesn’t care for him. The situation would be heartbreaking if it weren’t so funny. Part of its comic effect derives from the speaker’s circumspect protest. You can reasonably expect that he’s not going to limit this display of affection to touching Hélène’s hand. Sonnet 1.49 (L 17:228, W 1.41) “D’un solitaire pas je ne marche en nul lieu” ‘With solitary steps I walk nowhere’, returns him to Petrarch’s sonnet 35, “Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi” ‘Alone and filled with care, the most deserted fields’. Here, instead of confiding his thoughts to the wilderness as Petrarch did (“Altro schermo non trovo che mi scampi” ‘No other shield do I find to protect me’), he allows Amour, the “bon artisan,” to imprint an image of Hélène and her parting words upon his imagination, “l’image / Au profond du penser de ton gentil visage, / Et des mots gracieux de ton dernier Adieu” ‘the image of your gentle countenance and the gracious words of your previous farewell’. The emphasis upon her words is important, because in Petrarch’s poem Laura remains silent and remote. In Ronsard’s 1584 revision, Hélène steps forth as a verbally accomplished interlocutor. His reworking of line 4 replaces “mots gracieux” with “propos douteux,” calling attention to her flirtatious skill as she conveys to him an ambiguous message. Her words deflate his ego, compete with his poetry, lead him away from higher-minded literary endeavors, and anchor his attention in the career-saving sonnet mode that he earlier despised. In the poem’s sestet, the speaker construes Hélène’s effect upon him as ambrosial nourishment, “D’une si rare et douce ambrosine viande” ‘Of so rare and sweet an ambrosian repast’, recalling the incipit of Petrarch’s sonnet 193, “Pasco la mente d’un sì nobil cibo” ‘I nourish my mind with a food so noble’. Ronsard had already reworked this verse in sonnet 10 of Les Amours

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(L 4:14, W 10): “Je pais mon cueur d’une telle ambrosie . . . / Qu’autre appareil ne paist ma fantasie” ‘I feed my heart with such ambrosia that no other sustenance feeds my fantasy’.19 There Cassandre’s youthful beauty satisfied his appetite. Now he craves Hélène’s company, and he expresses this wish with a taut rhyme whose repeated uis-sounds mimic an assent of oui to Hélène’s words: Ce jour de mille jours m’effaça les ennuis: Car tant opiniastre en ce plaisir je suis, Que mon ame pour vivre autre bien ne demande.

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This day erased for me the torments of a thousand days. For so stubborn am I in this pleasure that my soul needs no other nourishment to live. In its sidelong way this conclusion reverts to Petrarch’s sonnet 193, whose speaker honors Laura’s discourse even when he can’t capture “quella voce” in his own poetic diction. In this voice he finds “quanto in questa vita / arte, ingegno, et Natura e ’l ciel pò fare”  ‘all that Art, Wit, and Nature and Heaven can do in this life’, presaging sonnet 248, “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura / e ’l Ciel” ‘Whoever wishes to see how much Nature and Heaven’, where Laura epitomizes all that Nature and Heaven can do. As we’ve seen, the Les sonnets pour Hélène I begins with a declaration that inverts the sentiment of Petrarch’s sonnet 247, whose speaker avows his gravitation toward Laura “non per electiön, ma per destino” ‘not by choice but by destiny’. Hélène’s aging lover submits with a freedom of choice that he proudly proclaims, “par election, / Et non à la volée” ‘By choice, and not upon any flight of fancy’. He is the autheur of his own misfortune as well as of a book about it, and just as he has chosen to initiate this affair, so might he choose to end it with a voluntary adieu. The stage has been set for a confrontation of strong-willed personalities that transacts and inverts the lover’s helplessness in Petrarch’s Rime sparse. In effect, Le second livre des sonnets pour Hélène allows Ronsard to begin all over again. A break in the cycle signals his recharging of energy. Repudiating the flow of amatory compliment and complaint in earlier works, the speaker halts their forward motion, revalues their effect, and resumes his narrative from an emended point of view. Starting in sonnet 2.1 (L 17:247, W 2.1) with the disparity between their ages, he protests that his advancing years don’t matter: “Soit qu’un sage amoureux ou 19.  1552 text quoted from the Weber edition.

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soit qu’un sot me lise, / Il ne doit s’esbahir voyant mon chef grison”  ‘Whether a wise lover or a fool reads me, he shouldn’t be amazed seeing my gray head’. His insistence that he still enjoys an undiminished sex drive erases Petrarch’s plangent lament in morte di Laura that, just as his libido was waning, Laura was taken from him: “Poco avev’ a ’ndugiar, ché gli anni e ’l pelo / cangiavano i costumi” ‘She only needed to wait a little, for years and gray hair were changing my habits’ (sonnet 316). In a wave of the hand, Ronsard overturns Petrarch’s quaint gestures and reclaims his own phallic pride. And he overturns not just Petrarchan posturing, but Neoplatonic attitudinizing as well, so as to give an additional jolt to his stylized Petrarchism. The sestet of sonnet 2.1 announces headlong skepticism about Plato’s unctuous idealism and that of his followers, and it rejects the heroic vainglory portrayed in classical myth: Lecteur, je ne veux estre escolier de Platon, Qui la vertu nous presche, et ne fait pas de mesme: Ny volontaire Icare ou lourdaut Phaëthon, Perdus pour attenter une sotise extrême.

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Reader, I don’t want to be a scholar of Plato, who preaches virtue to us but doesn’t practice it himself, nor a willful Icarus or a loutish Phaeton, undone for attempting something extremely foolish. The syntax is just vague enough to suggest that the speaker is deriding not Plato but some generic escolier of Plato. Ronsard’s contemporary Pierre Boaistuau (1517–66) in his Histoires prodigieuses (1560) had already bantered about Plato’s lust for Archenassa (and Socrates’s for Aspasia, and Aristotle’s for Hermia): “J’ai honte, & suis presque confus” ‘I’m embarrassed and pretty confused [about this stuff]’.20 But the poet’s derision of Icarus and Phaeton suggests that he might be parrying a thrust at Desportes, whose Amours de Hippolite (1572–73) deploys high-flown allusions to both mythic figures. Sonnet 1 of that sequence opens with “Icare est cheut icy le jeune audacieux / Qui pour voler au Ciel eut assez de courage” ‘Here fell Icarus, the audacious young man who had enough courage to fly to heaven’, and sonnet 9 heralds its speaker’s rebirth as a “nouveau frere d’Icare—un vol trop temeraire” ‘new brother of Icarus—in a flight too bold’.21 As for Phaeton, 20.  Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses (Paris: Jean Longis, 1560), facsimile prefaced by Yves Florenne (Paris: Club français du livre, 1961), 130–32. 21. Quotations refer to Philippe Desportes, Les Amours d’Hippolyte, ed. Victor E. Graham (Geneva: Droz, 1960).

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its first elegy registers admiration for the aspiring young man: “Appelle qui voudra Phaëthon miserable / D’avoir trop entrepris, je l’estime louable” ‘Call—whoever will—Phaeton miserable for having undertaken too much; I esteem him praiseworthy’ (lines 41–42). Desportes professes to sanitize the Petrarchan lyric by dressing its energies in Platonic conceit and exalted mythic allusion. Ronsard dismisses these tactics as ineffectual. At least some of Ronsard’s attention focuses on spoofing the refined tastes of a readership that has warmed to Desportes. Sonnet 2.3 (L 17:149, W 2.3)—clearly modeled on Petrarch’s sonnet 192, “Stiamo, Amor, a veder la gloria nostra”  ‘Let us stay, Love, to see our glory’—figures Hélène as suprahuman. Whether recognizing their disparity in age and complexion, or oblivious to the perils lurking in it, the speaker tries to impress a young woman indifferent to, if not unworthy of, his attentions: Amour, qui as ton regne en ce monde si ample, Voy ta gloire et la mienne errer en ce jardin: Voy comme son bel oeil, mon bel astre divin, Reluist comme une lampe ardente dans un Temple.

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Love, you who maintain your kingdom in this world so wide, see your glory and mine amble in this garden; see how her beautiful eye, my beautiful divine star, shines like a burning lamp within a temple. In his commentary on Petrarch’s poem, Gesualdo remarks that excellence such as Laura’s should inspire a lover to outperform himself: “Vediamo i Platonici, iquali dicino, che la persona amata desta lo ‘ngegno de l’amante tanto, . . . e che l’amante pone tutti i suoi studi in seguire la dignità de la cosa amata” ‘We find Platonists who say that the beloved awakens the lover’s ingenuity, . . . and that he puts all his effort into preserving her dignity’ (sig. ccxiiv). Ronsard’s poem exerts effort to show how its speaker goes beyond the call of duty, despite the difference between his emotional attachment and hers. Petrarch ends his quatrain with a straightforward metonymy that compares Laura to a “lume che ’l Cielo in terra mostra” ‘light that shows Heaven on earth’. Ronsard goes further with a catachresis that figures Hélène’s eye (“mon bel astre divin”) as a lamp that shines in the temple of Love. A revision in 1584 sharpens the trope so that Hélène’s eye “surmonte de clairté les lampes de ton Temple” ‘exceeds in clarity the lamp of your temple’. We’ve already encountered this trope in Desportes’s Diane 1.43, whose speaker describes his devotion to the beloved as a sacred illumination (“la lampe, ardant continuelle”) within Love’s temple (“un temple à ma fiere deesse”).

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Ronsard grabs the younger poet’s diction and puts it to a test, miming its pretension. For Hélène such pretension seems empty as she cares not a jot for her poet. In the sestet’s first version, she promenades in self-absorption: “Regardela marcher toute pensive à soy” ‘Look at her walking, completely abstracted within herself ’. A revision in the 1587 edition accentuates her arrogance: “Voy-la marcher pensive, et n’aymer rien que soy” ‘See her walking with an abstracted air, and loving nothing but herself ’. At this point the speaker’s verbal maneuver is more than just a subtle put-down of Hélène’s egotism. Flaunting his poetic virtuosity, he implies that poems about one-sided love (and about the economic reward of catering to an audience that wants them) have driven him to ridiculous posturing and foolish behavior. Many of Ronsard’s Amours diverses composed in the 1570s offer a similar critique of one-sided love. Though these poems record addresses to various women, possibly written on commission from various courtiers, the poet integrates some of them into his Sonnets pour Hélène in the sixth and penultimate edition of his Oeuvres (1584). Sonnet 30 from Les Amours diverses (L 17:318, W 30), brought into the Hélène sequence as sonnet 2.26, locates the action at a time when the kingdom, amid the turmoil of civil war, is beset with fratricidal strife: “Au milieu de la guerre, en un siecle sans foy, / Entre mille procez, est-ce pas grand’ folie / D’escrire de l’Amour?” ‘Amid war, in a faithless century, among a thousand legal and political trials, isn’t it the height of madness to write about Love?’22 The speaker’s folie expresses a perversion of the fureur that had served Platonists as a divine inspiration for poetry. It amounts in fact to a pathology described by Socrates in Phaedrus 237b–241d and 250a–257c as the very opposite of creative fureur: “Tu ne m’es plus Amour, tu m’es une Furie” ‘For me, you’re no longer Love; you’re an avenging Fury’. The beneficent fureur that he had embraced in his youth redounds on him with a vengeance as he now forsakes his own self-interests. His sonnets compete with commercial transactions, a suggestion implanted by the reference to his current preoccupation with a legal settlement in the poem’s final lines: “Muses je prens mon sac, je seray plus heureux / En gaignant mes procez, qu’en suivant voz rivieres” ‘Muses, I’m grabbing my briefcase; I’ll be happier upon winning my lawsuits than upon tracking your streams’.23 The 22.  Line 11, “Voir une Thebaïde” ‘See a Thebaid’, summons a date after 25 September 1575 when Henri III’s brother, François d’Alençon, broke ranks with the monarchy in order to abet the rival Politique faction. 23.  The plural procès extends Ronsard’s satiric thrust to a multitude of contemporary legal disputes. See Pierre de Ronsard, Les Amours, ed. by Henri Weber and Catherine Weber (Paris: Garnier, 1963), 780; Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène, ed. Malcolm Smith (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 130; and Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Céard et al., 2:1387.

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speaker’s witty disparagement of Platonic furor and Petrarchan amor signals a return to sanity and the work of writing serious poetry. In sonnet 2.36, originally sonnet 27 of Les Amours diverses (L 17:316, W diverses 27), the speaker’s recognition of his plight echoes the “favola fui gran tempo” ‘for a long time I was the talk of the crowd’, “meco mi vergogno” ‘I am ashamed of myself within’, and “vergogna è ’l frutto” ‘shame is the fruit’ of Petrarch’s sonnet 1, propelling him toward shame-faced silence: “J’ay honte de ma honte, il est temps de me taire, / Sans faire l’amoureux en un chef si grison”  ‘I bear the shame of my shame; it is time to fall silent without turning the lover into such a gray-head’. His calculation of a five-year immurement echoes (although in comically reduced form) Petrarch’s twenty-one-year devotion to Laura, while his analogy to captivity on the high seas evokes the specter of commercial ruin: “Voicy le cinquiesme an de ma longue prison, / Esclave entre les mains d’une belle Corsaire” ‘Here is the fifth year of my long imprisonment, a slave in the hands of a beautiful Corsair’. For all these reasons, the speaker now wants to deflect his amatory energies toward a pursuit of Aristotelian philosophy and, in a line revised for the 1587 edition, toward a courtly domestication of Plato: Maintenant je veux estre importun amoureux Du bon pere Aristote, et d’un soin genereux Courtizer un Platon à nostre vie utile.24

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Now I want to be an amorous suitor of good father Aristotle, and with a noble intent to pay court to a Plato useful to our way of life. The idea of converting Plato’s philosophy to something blandly utilitarian undercuts its claims to an idealized truth, goodness, and beauty, deflating them to a set of tastes, tools, and arbitrary preferences. Freeing himself from Amour, the speaker punctures his Petrarchan associations of Cupid’s wings with poetic flight and of his own feet with rhythmic measures: “Il vole comme un Dieu: homme je vais à pié. / Il est jeune, il est fort: je suis gris et debile” ‘[Cupid] flies as a god; human, I tread on foot; he is young, he is strong; I am gray and feeble’. Even as Plato and Cupid fall to their share of debunking, the speaker submits to his burden of old age.

24.  The original version of this final line is “Courtizer & servir la beauté de sa fille” ‘To court and serve the beauty of his daughter’. Aristotle’s “daughter” is Philosophy, and the poem makes no reference to Plato.

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In sonnet 2.43 (L 17:265, W 2.24) Ronsard channels this burden into a voucher for his own professionalism. Projecting Hélène into the future as an elderly woman, the speaker imagines her singing his verses and praising his poetic skills: Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle, Assise aupres du feu, devidant et filant, Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant, Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j’estoit belle. When you will be very old, seated at evening by candlelight near the fire, spinning and winding thread, you will say in amazement while singing my verses, “Ronsard used to celebrate me when I was young.”

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At the end of the octave, he repeats his own name, using it to usurp Hélène’s “nom” when he fantasizes that there will be no servant “Qui au bruit de Ronsard ne s’aille resveillant, / Benissant vostre nom de louange immortelle” ‘Who at the sound of the name “Ronsard” will not wake up, blessing your name with immortal praise’. A revision in 1584 casually replaces “Ronsard” with “mon nom” where the trochaic beat sharpens the accent on the consonants m and n in anticipation of “vostre nom.” This promotion of his name over hers generates—again at Hélène’s expense—a withering contrast between him and her in the sestet: Je seray sous la terre et fantaume sans os Par les ombres myrtheux je prendray mon repos: Vous serez au fouyer une vieille accroupie, Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain. I will be beneath the earth, a phantom without bones: I will take my rest among the shadowy myrtles. You will be an old woman hunched at the fireplace, feeling regret about my love and your proud disdain. Ronsard’s removal of himself from the scene may suggest that his target is not just Hélène’s character, but the entire economy of court poetry with its posturing and pleading and vying to delight the vagaries of a philistine readership. In this milieu, younger poets such as Desportes have thrived, and it seems no accident that Ronsard alludes to the latter’s work when he imagines Hélène as “au fouyer une vieille accroupie.” The words scramble a phrase from an epigram by Desportes, “Je t’apporte, ô Sommeil” ‘I bring to you,

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o Sleep’, published in his Oeuvres of 1575.25 Its speaker promises a votive offering to the god of sleep if the beloved’s chambermaid dozes off: “Tant qu’Alison, la vielle accroupie au foyer / . . . Laisse choir le fuseau, cesse de babiller” ‘So that Alison, the old woman hunched by the fireplace, might let her spindle fall and cease babbling’.26 His goal is to enjoy furtive intimacy with Ysabeau, “Afin qu’à mon plaisir j’embrasse ma rebelle” ‘In order that I might embrace my little rebel for my pleasure’. Ronsard’s version of the trope attempts a more sophisticated negotiation of its possibilities, as Hélène herself becomes an older woman, now bereft of her lover’s company. This inversion contravenes the fashionable dictates of court poetry that the poet should offer his talents to a recalcitrant mistress and an eavesdropping readership. Ronsard inserts himself into the center of the action by exalting his name, his talent, and the status of his art. Hélène’s words ventriloquize his song, sparking in her servant an admiration not of what she has become in old age but of what the poet had once described when she was young (“de louange immortelle”). The sestet’s contrast of the rounded and sibilant os and repos with the closed accroupie allows us to hear the trailing “oh” of her regret and the whining “ayy” of her self-reproach. The poem’s wit derives from a transaction between two of Petrarch’s poems about Laura’s misgivings in her old age. In sonnet 12, “Se la mia vita da l’aspro tormento / si può tanto schermire” ‘If my life can withstand the bitter torment’, the speaker fantasizes that one day he might venture to declare his love to a gray-haired Laura: “Pur mi darà tanta baldanza Amore”  ‘Yet at least Love will give me so much boldness’. Gesualdo comments that the speaker’s circumlocution avoids an unpalatable truth by projecting it as a future utterance: “E cosi da l’hora par ch’egli si confortasse di quello ch’avenir douea” ‘And so for now it appears that he might have been comforted by what ought to happen’ (sig. xiiir). He adds that euphemism constitutes an abuse of rhetoric, registering this criticism in terms that could equally describe Desportes’s style: “Vizio sarebbe quello, che grecamente si chiama περίαλογία, quando in semplice e brieue cosa molte e souerchie parole indarno consumiamo” ‘That would amount to an abuse that the Greeks call perialogia [‘roundabout discourse’], when we use many high-flown words in vain to express something that calls for a short and simple explanation’ (sig. xiiir). Ronsard might not have agreed with Gesualdo’s assessment of Petrarch’s style, but he could well have found it symptomatic of a rhetorical mode that was winning applause in Henri’s court. 25.  Quotations refer to Philippe Desportes, Diverses Amours et autres Oeuvres meslées, ed. Victor E. Graham (Geneva: Droz, 1963). 26.  Ibid., 205.

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In sonnet 203, “Lasso, ch’i’ ardo, et altri non me ’l crede” ‘Alas, I burn and I am not believed’, Petrarch again conjures up an older Laura with just a whiff of reproach for her intransigence toward him. His evocation of doubting Thomas (“Infinita bellezza et poca fede” ‘Infinite beauty and little faith’, cf. Matthew 8:26) forces Laura to acknowledge that his poetry might have a potent effect upon future readers who’ll celebrate his artistry: “Quest’arder . . . ne porian infiammar fors’ancor mille” ‘This ardor of mine . . . could perhaps yet inflame thousands’. Gesualdo confirms the poet’s hunch: “E veramente non fu falso l’augurio del Poeta ne [su] ul suo giudicio vano. . . . E già ne tempi nostri se ne vengono mille e mille accesi” ‘Indeed the poet’s wishes didn’t prove false or vain in his estimation. . . . And already in our era thousands upon thousands find themselves fired up by it’ (sig. ccxxiv). Bernardino Daniello reprises this judgment: “Ne prognisticò il falso; percioche, che è le sue rime leggendo non s’infiammi di caldo amoroso desio?”  ‘Nor did he predict wrongly: for is there anyone who, upon reading his poems, is not inflamed with warm amorous desires?’ (sig.110r). Ronsard’s sonnet 2.24 fuses both of Petrarch’s poems and suspends them in a distillation of reminiscences from classical Latin poetry about the carpe diem motif. The most evident of these classical poems is Tibullus’s elegy 1.3 whose speaker, dying of wounds in a foreign war, imagines that an aged chaperone will comfort his beloved: “Haec tibi fabellas referat positaque lucerna / deducat plena stamina longa colu” ‘The old woman shall tell thee stories when the lamp is in its place, as she draws the long yarn from the loaded distaff ’.27 But this projection rebounds upon its speaker who wishfully ascribes to his beloved a lifetime of mourning for him. In reality, as Tibullus gently implies, she’ll weep for a while and then forget about him when a new lover comes along: “Et adsidue proelia miscet amor”  ‘Love never lets his warfare cease’ (line 64). Ronsard captures a flicker of this irony in his speaker’s self-absorption and mildly diffident conclusion: “Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain” ‘Live now, if you believe what I’m saying; don’t wait until tomorrow’. For all the labor that he invests in his marketable skills, he can never be sure that readers will respond as he would like. Yet another classical reminiscence comes from Horace’s Ode 4.10.6, and it likewise projects an unwelcome future. Here a mature lover warns a young man that one day he’ll no longer attract suitors, even and especially when he most wants to: “Dices ‘heu,’ quotiens te speculo videris alterem” ‘As often as 27.  Quotations from Tibullus refer to Catullus, Tibullus, and Pervigilium Veneris, trans. J. P. Postgate, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), here quoted from lines 85–86.

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you gaze in the mirror at your altered features, you shall say: “Alas!” ’ The twist here is that Horace’s poem refers to pederasty. The adolescent boy does not yet have a “faciem hispidam”‘whiskery face’, but as the years pass he will outgrow his ephebic allure and, “his animis” ‘in a newer frame of mind’, will regret his lost opportunities. Ronsard suggests that Hélène will likewise pay a penalty for her youthful arrogance. Like Horace’s boy, she is now attractive but uninterested and will soon become interested but unattractive. And like Horace’s boy, she’s ungrateful to a lover who has showered her with gifts of poetry in hope of requital. Sonnet 2.55 (L 17:276, W 2.37) sharpens the poet’s stance toward his contemporaries, chiefly Desportes; toward the first of the moderns, Petrarch; and toward the ancients, represented by the epic verse of Homer and Vergil. Hélène’s name captures some of the tensions inscribed in the latter. But now the poet avers that he’d once considered masking her identity with another name: “Je te voulois nommer, pour Helene, Ortygie” ‘Instead of Hélène, I wanted to call you Ortygia’. Referring to the floating island in the harbor of Syracuse where Leto gave birth to the virginal Diana (according to the Homeric Hymn 3 to Apollo), the name is itself a floating signifier that points to Hélène’s rigid chastity and evasive moods, but also summons the “Diana” that masks Desportes’s composite objects of Henri III’s adulterous love in Les amours de Diane. Rhyming renom with nom, he professes with false modesty to renovate—and to improve upon—Diana’s reputation by writing sonnets to his own Hélène: “Renouvellant en toy d’Ortyge le renom. / Le tien est plus fatal: Helene est un beau nom” ‘Renewing in you the fame of Ortigia. Yours is more fateful: Helen is a fine name for you’. In the end he reverts to her real name not because of any wish to please her (he knows that nothing can please her), but because of its classical associations. The name brought honor to the Greeks (and presumably will do so to Ronsard), however much destruction its bearer (including the present Hélène) has trailed in her wake: “Helene, honneur des Grecs, la terreur de Phrygie” ‘Helen, glory of the Greeks, terror of Troy’. Ronsard will emulate Homer and bring praise to himself by singing about his Hélène: “Je puis suivant son train qui va sans compagnon, / Te chantant m’honorer” ‘I could—while following [Homer’s] example that proceeds without peer—honor myself by singing about you’. But by comparing her finally to Laura, “Laure ne te veincroit de renom ny d’honneur” ‘Laura would surpass her in neither fame nor honor’, the speaker circles back to the Rime sparse. For his models, Ronsard conflates Petrarch’s sonnets 186 (“Se Virgilio et Homero avvessin visto / quel sole” ‘If Vergil and Homer had seen that sun’) and 187 (“Giunto Alexandro a la famosa tomba” ‘When Alexander came

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to the famous tomb’). Here the Italian poet questions his skill to represent the heroic Scipio in his epic and the beloved Laura in his sonnets. Homer, Orpheus, and Vergil have risen to the task, but Petrarch chafes that he cannot. Lodovico Castelvetro notes the citation of Vergil as a pastoral rather than epic poet (“pastor ch’ ancor Mantova onora” ‘the shepherd whom Mantua still honors’): “Non intende per cio che con tali versi si potessero far conte le lode di Laura” ‘He doesn’t mean by this that with such modest verses Laura’s praises would have been paid in full’ (Rime del Petrarca, sig. 331r). The irony isn’t lost on Ronsard, who assumes that a poet’s career must traverse the full cursus of styles and modes, beginning as Vergil did with humble forms such as pastoral and attaining highest distinction with epic. The French poet has already run the gamut from lyric to epic (and like Petrarch he remains conscious of his failure in the latter). His younger rival Desportes has not, nor does he give any evidence of intending to do so.28 In order to honor the queen mother’s wish for sonnets, but also to reprove Desportes’s popularity, Ronsard approaches the Petrarchan model as a foil against which to display his own attainments. In effect he gains his poetic freedom by renouncing it in favor of what his readership asks for. Sonnet 2.68 (L 17:282, W 2.46) explores this paradox by pursuing as its model Petrarch’s sonnet 97, “Ahi bella libertà, come tu m’ai, /partendoti da me, mostrato” ‘Ah, sweet liberty, how by departing from me you have shown me’. Ronsard’s speaker addresses his own liberty with questions about how he came to lose it: “Ah, belle liberté, qui me servois d’escorte, / Quand le pied me portoit où libre je voulois!” ‘Ah, liberty, you who served as my escort when my foot brought me to the place where I wanted to be free’. The trope of the foot refers to the speaker’s metrical skills, the sonorous basis of his compositional craft. In Petrarch’s model, the same trope conveys the lover’s inability to exclude Laura from his rhymes: “Solo del suo nome / vo impiendo l’aere”  ‘With her name only I fill the air’. Petrarch’s obsession with Laura has come at a cost—specifically of abandoning his epic Africa: “Amor in altra parte non mi sprona” ‘Love does not spur me anywhere else’. The word AMOR is heavily charged. It refers of course to the speaker’s attraction to Laura. But palindromically as ROMA it evokes the topic of his

28.  He would fall from grace in 1585 when his benefactor, the Duc de Joyeuse, joined the ultra-Catholic League against Henri III. Regaining prestige under Henri IV, he retreated to various benefices. See Jacqueline Boucher, “Philippe Desportes et la chute de Henri III: Un ambitieux déçu,” in Balsamo, Philippe Desportes (1546 –1606), 19–36, and, in the same volume, Michel Simonin, “Desportes au palais et aux champs, 1583–1606),” 37–86.

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historical epic. Love has preempted his involvement with classical forms and ancient styles, again sapping energies that he would have devoted to epic. Ronsard’s speaker has committed himself to rules of versification that can be abrogated only at the cost of art. The experience of love has animated him to project his rhetorical voice: “Quand je suis amoureux j’ai l’esprit et la vois, / L’invention meilleure et la Muse plus forte” ‘When I’m in love, I enjoy spirit and a voice, better invention and a stronger muse’. He feels obliged, even with curtailed freedom, to seek out this experience and inscribe it in his verse. The rewards multiply as he gains an affective outlet, a compelling reason to write poetry, and a taste of immortality: Il me faut donc aimer pour avoir bon esprit, afin de concevoir des enfans par escrit, Pour allonger mon nom aux despens de ma peine.

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I must consequently love so as to possess the spirit and wit to beget children through my writing, so as to perpetuate my name at the cost of my pain. The agent of these rewards is the very liberty that he’d surrendered at the start of this affair. Petrarch’s speaker in sonnet 97 laments “la piagha ond’io non guerrò mai” ‘the wound of which I shall never be cured’ with a moral urgency that limits his freedom. Ronsard’s treatment is more spirited. It deploys a linguistic pun buried in the Latin derivation of liberté from the collective noun liberi, liberorum ‘offspring’, designating children of the patrician class born with a freedom to inherit their parents’ titles and property. But paronomastically imbedded in this word is the unrelated noun liber ‘book’ (from liber ‘bark of a tree’, used in making paper), which evokes the speaker’s profession as a writer. In this association, the word liberté affirms his right to poetic immortality through the texts that he has generated, “enfans par escrit,” and that he’ll pass on to posterity “pour allonger mon nom.”29 The word also acknowledges the literary inheritance that he’s received from his poetic forebears—from Petrarch, of course, whose sonnet form he’s transacting, but also from Homer who wrote about a different Helen, “le sujet qui fut d’Homere le plaisir” ‘the subject that provided Homer’s pleasure’. Helen’s name concludes the poem, “Ceste toute divine et vertueuse Heleine” ‘This 29.  The trope of one’s writing as “brain children” derives from Plato, Phaedrus 258c and Symposium 208e–209a, and is referenced by Montaigne in the concluding paragraphs of Essays 2.8, “Of the Affection of Fathers for Their Children” (1578–80), Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Frame, 291–93.

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wholly divine and virtuous Heleine’, rhyming with peine in a variant spelling that evokes haleine, the ‘breath’ of emotion in affective love, the breath of poetry in the spoken word, and the breath of fame bequeathed to posterity. In the end it’s the liber ‘book’ and the promise of poetic immortality—even if only for thirty years—that occupy Ronsard’s attention. Drafting this poem in the mid-1570s, Ronsard’s late efforts overlap with Montaigne’s early ones. Reflecting upon his family in “On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children” (2.8) and decrying his father’s unwillingness to release his inheritance to his bloodline offspring before he died, Montaigne opposes to the latter the idea of “enfans par escrit” ‘children begotten through writing’ generated by powerful authors. Ronsard surely thought of his poems as “enfans par escrit,” yet he inverts Montaigne’s notion of inheritance by insisting that these enfans should support him. In conventional thinking, readers enter the book market with well-formed literary tastes, and writers who practice their craft scramble to honor their readers’ preferences. But Ronsard discovered that the greatest writers decide which literary products are best for them to produce, and then they persuade readers to want them. The first model is context-free and largely adventitious, but the second—envisioned and patented by Ronsard—is steeped in context and depends upon how authors approach customs and conventions. Then and now such contexts, customs, and conventions count for everything. Ronsard proved a master of them.

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Pa rt Thr e e

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Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Economy of Petrarchan Aesthetics

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Ch ap ter 1

To Possess Is Not to Own The Cost of the Dark Lady and the Young Man

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Despite Shakespeare’s stature as a “European author,” Anglo-American scholarship has largely avoided the implications of Shakespeare’s access to continental texts and their European vernaculars.1 But the facts are incontestable: Among probable sources for his plays, at least nine

1.  Hyder Edward Rollins, for example, surveys possible foreign sources for Sonnets, but dismisses them as “accidental,” “incidental,” and “based on Renaissance commonplace” in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, ed. Rollins, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1944), 125–32. For the Italian presence in England, see Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially 15–53, 134–54, and, with a focus on John Florio, 157–254; and Jason Lawrence, “ Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?”: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 19–61, with reference to Shakespeare on 118–42 and 151–65. Assessments of ­Shakespeare’s familiarity with Italian culture appear in Michele Marrapodi, Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Marrapodi, ed., Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Jack D’Amico, Shakespeare and Italy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 14–20; Alistair Fox, The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 83–91 and 180–217; Robin Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare (New York: Longman, 1995), 277–310. For Shakespeare and French culture, see Michael Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), 13–75; Richard Hillman, French Reflections in the Shakespearean Tragic (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012); and Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 181–226. For printed miscellanies of Spanish verse as models for Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes, see J. Christopher Warner, The Making and Marketing of Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 62–86. 219

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appear in Italian, French, and Spanish narratives for which no known English translations survive.2 Many of his plays use European languages for dramatic effect, chiefly French and Italian, but also Spanish, Dutch, and a vague Portuguese. London proved a hospitable setting for these efforts. According to the census of 1593, some 5,450 Huguenot refugees from France and the Low Countries and several hundred merchants from Italy and Spain lived and worked as resident aliens in the City, Westminster, and Southwark, constituting about 5 percent of the population and providing casual opportunities for Londoners to hear, learn, read, and speak various continental vernaculars and to exchange ideas about European cultural production.3 In fall 1604 (and possibly before and after that), Shakespeare had lodged at the home of a French Huguenot refugee, Christophe Mountjoy, a designer of luxury headwear living in the foreign-dominated community of Cripplegate Ward near the northwest corner of the city’s walls.4 In such cosmopolitan surroundings, Shake-speares Sonnets (SR 20 May 1609) appeared through the auspices of Thomas Thorpe, the entrepreneurial businessman and publisher of literary 2.  These include Two Gentlemen of Verona from Montemayor’s Diana enamorada (translated by B. Yonge around 1582 but not published until 1598); Merchant of Venice from story 4.1 of Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (1558) or possibly story 14 of Masuccio di Salerno’s Il Novellino (1476); Merry Wives of Windsor from story 1.2 of Il Pecorone; Hamlet from Belleforest’s Histories tragiques 5.3 (1582); Twelfth Night from the Sienese play Gl’Ingannati (1538, translated into French as Les Abusez by Charles Estienne in 1548); Othello from story 3.7 of Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1566, translated into French by Gabriel Chappuys in 1584); and Cymbeline from story 2.9 of Boccaccio’s Decameron (translated into French by Antoine Le Maçon in 1545). The lost Cardenio may evoke Cervantes’s Don Quixote (translated by Skelton in 1612). Measure for Measure may refer to story 8.5 of Hecatommithi, translated into French by Chappuys. 3.  See Irene Scouludi, “Alien Immigration into and Alien Communities in London, 1558–1640,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London 16 (1937): 27–50, and Scouludi, “The Stranger Community in London,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London 24 (1987): 434–42; and Thomas Wyatt, “Aliens in England before the Huguenots,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London 19 (1953): 74–94; statistics for these studies are derived from Returns of Aliens Dwelling in the City and Suburbs of London from the Reign of Henry VIII to That of James I, ed. R. E. G. Kirk and Ernest F. Kirk, in The Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, vol. 10, nos. 2 (for the years 1571–97) and 3 (for the years 1598–1625) (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1902–7). For patterns of immigration, see Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions, and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996), 29–35 and 51–60; Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain, 2nd ed. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), 74–117; and Ole Peter Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 98–119. See also Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 50–69, and Jeremy Boulton, Neighborhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 60–73. 4.  See the spirited account in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, new ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 464–72, with documentation in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 2:87–95. For Mountjoy’s disorderly lifestyle, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (London: Methuen, 2010), 238–41.

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dramas by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Thorpe would have purchased the author’s manuscript, arranged for its printing by George Eld, and delivered copies to two different booksellers, William Aspley and John Wright. On all counts, the production and distribution of Sonnets took place in a “mobile and culturally pressured milieu,” where English as well as continental texts found a readership among overlapping social worlds inhabited by writers, scholars, lawyers, doctors, highly skilled artisans, courtiers, and state bureaucrats.5 Within this environment, though not entirely of it, Shakespeare in his Sonnets transacted the poetic form associated with Petrarch, claiming ownership of it with craftsmanship and skill.6 A generally accepted chronology posits that Shakespeare drafted his sonnets at various intervals, periodically pausing (sometimes for long stretches), revising what he had written (as did Samuel Daniel, Henry Constable, and Michael Drayton), and recalibrating his work at different stages in the process.7 The variety of styles, modes, and dramatic situations suggests that he may have drafted several short collections of sonnets on diverse themes and then folded them into a single sequence clustered around his relations with a (perhaps composite) Young Man and an ambiguous Dark Lady. He almost certainly redacted many of the Young Man sonnets before Thorpe acquired them.8 Statistical studies of the sonnets’ rare words and rhymes conclude that around 1594, and possibly earlier, he composed the Dark Lady sonnets 127–54; that around 1594–95, with additions and likely revisions into the seventeenth century, he drafted sonnets 1–60, mostly about a Young Man; that around 1595, or possibly later, he drafted sonnets 61–103, partly about eternal fame and rival poets; and that in 1599–1605 he composed sonnets 104–26 partly reflecting social currents around the turn of the century, with some sonnets datable to 1603–4.9 I don’t want to dwell 5.  I owe the phrase to Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), vii–viii, with speculation about Rabelaisian analogues in Love’s Labor’s Lost, All’s Well That Ends Well, and King Lear on 58–59, 99–100, and 136–38. 6. For Sonnets as intensely Petrarchan and insistently anti-Petrarchan, see Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 119–34. 7.  A list of English sonnet sequences from the Short Title Catalogue appears in Thomas P. Roche Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS, 1989), 518–22. 8.  James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 197–202. 9.  A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott, “When Did Shakespeare Write Sonnets 1609?” Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 69–109, who designate four zones of composition and possible revision: 1595 or earlier, with additions and revisions up to 1609 (sonnets 1–60); 1595 or earlier, with little or no revision afterwards (sonnets 61–103); 1597–1603 (sonnets 104–26); and pre-1595 (sonnets 127–54). See refinements to this schema by Colin Burrow in his edition of William Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 103–11.

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upon issues of dating and classifying rhymes and rare words (which, as we’ll see, include such surprisingly banal ones as “advocate” and “rent”). But I do want to interrogate what a habit of compilation and revision might mean to Shakespeare in economic terms as he prepared his sonnets before selling them to Thorpe for publication.10 In this scenario, Shakespeare’s motivations for shaping and revising his sonnets diverge from, as well as coincide with, his commercial prospects.11 He had already launched his theatrical career in London by 1589, the year in which Thomas Nashe, a poor minister’s son recently down from Cambridge, sought to ingratiate himself with some of London’s University Wits ( John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge) by volunteering a preface for Greene’s pastoral romance Menaphon.12 Dedicated to “the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities,” this preface bristles at the work of “vainglorious tragedians skilled with inkhorn terms” (= Thomas Kyd?), “idiot art-masters” swollen with blank verse (= Christopher Marlowe?), and “deeply-red grammarians [= ‘grammar school graduates’, including Shakespeare?] . . . that feed on nought but the crumbs that fall from the translator’s trencher.”13 Among English poets, he commends George Gascoigne, who “first beat the path to that perfection which our best poets have aspired to since his departure”; the “divine” Edmund Spenser, a “miracle of wit”; and “many most able men to revive poetry” such as

MacDonald P. Jackson, “Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 59–75, highlights the statistical significance of the period 1595–99 for many of sonnets 1–103, along with the period 1603–5 for sonnets 104–26. 10.  For a concise review of editorial practices, see H. R. Woudhuysen, “The Foundations of Shakespeare’s Text,” Proceedings of the British Academy 125 (2004): 69–100; for consensus on Shakespeare’s habits of revision, see Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 19–43, with distinctions between editorial and authorial revisions on 87–89; for the composition of playscripts in separate parts, see Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially 328–52 on prosody and rhetoric; and Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004). 11.  See Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, 246–56. For Shakespeare’s involvement in publishing his plays, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 78–100. 12.  See the characterizations of them in Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 199–225; Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5–26; and George K. Hunter, English Drama, 1586– 1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 22–39. 13. Robert Greene, Menaphon (London, 1589), A2r–v. For Shakespeare’s contacts with Nashe and Greene, see Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Lost Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 49–59; E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years”, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 59–76; Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, 62–93; and Greenblatt, Will in the World, 149–74.

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Matthew Roydon and Thomas Atchelow, who would publish little and fade from view.14 Nashe piqued many an author’s pride by referring to them collectively as opportunists and poseurs. Greene added to these insults in his penitential Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, allegedly penned on his deathbed in 1592. In an epistle prefacing the text, the writer advises his fellow Wits to mistrust theatrical “Puppets” and “Apes” who debase the efforts of better-educated playwrights.15 Among these targets is Shakespeare, thinly disguised as “an upstart Crow” who “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.”16 The attack would only press the twenty-eight-year-old from Stratford to catch up with and surpass Greene’s favored authors. The University Wits readily displayed their familiarity with classical authors, especially Ovid and Virgil, and modern continental poets, including Petrarch and those indebted to him such as Ariosto, Ronsard, Philippe Desportes, and Torquato Tasso. An aspiring writer from Stratford might match these Wits by thumbing through Latin (and perhaps Greek) texts that he’d encountered in grammar school, and by immersing himself in Italian, French, Spanish, and other European texts as well. As it happens, Shakespeare had already collaborated with the Oxford graduate George Peele on Titus Andronicus (1592), a play teeming with classically imbued references to Ovid and Seneca.17 Sonnets may be seen as a belated response to the cognoscenti’s approbation of continental forms in the late 1580s, to Nashe’s and Greene’s disparagement of grandiose ambition in the early 1590s, and to the advocacy of classical gravitas in verse and drama by emergent talents such as Jonson, Marston, and Chapman at the end of the decade.18 Certainly it exhibits Shakespeare’s interest in and allegiance to the poetic forms, styles, and modes of the early to mid-1590s when he began drafting his sonnets and circulating some of them 14.  See Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108–40, and Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 56–77. 15. Authorship of this epistle has been attributed to Greene’s publisher, Henry Chettle; see Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, which proposes Thomas Nashe as author, 48–55. 16.  Greene’s Groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of repentance (London, 1592), F1v. 17.  In addition to Bart Van Ess, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 35–55, and Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare Only (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 151–54, see Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 79–101, and Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 177–78. 18.  See James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), especially 105–33 on As You Like It and Sonnets, and Potter, Life of William Shakespeare, 245–47. For Jonson’s response, see James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 133–90.

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in manuscript among readers who at times transcribed their own copies.19 The incentive—whether his or Thorpe’s or yet someone else’s—to publish them in 1609 when Petrarchism was no longer popular brings their author back to a pivotal moment in 1591 when the piratical printer Thomas Newman published a manuscript of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (possibly edited by Nashe), igniting a sonnet craze that defined the next decade. Within a few years, Spenser completed his Amoretti (SR 19 November 1594), using models by Petrarch, Tasso, Ronsard, Desportes, and others to portray mature courtship and married love. As I’ll argue in later sections of this chapter, both Sidney and Spenser had a belated impact upon Shakespeare when he revised his Young Man sonnets. In the Introduction to this book, I’ve referred to the legal distinction between “ownership” and “possession” as a thematic concern in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.20 In the course of the sequence, the half-driven, half-wounded speaker discovers that he can’t claim absolute ownership over the affections of a mistress who’s an adulteress, or of a Young Man who’s much admired by a gaggle of clients and rival poets. Through mishaps and betrayals he finds that, although he might presume to possess the affection of his mistress and the Young Man, he can never truly own those of either. Nor can he even claim rights of tenancy and possession over them, however much emotional energy he expends on both. The speaker recognizes—and re-cognizes—his vulnerability periodically throughout the sequence. Differences between the poems addressed to the Dark Lady and to the Young Man are stylistically significant, and they point to a literary distinction between the speaker’s ownership and possession of rhetorical materials and poetic conventions. I’m going to argue that in the Dark Lady poems, which represent Shakespeare’s earliest ventures into the sonnet mode, the poet demonstrates that he possesses more than enough skill to write Petrarchan sonnets, though he exercises it in a largely parodic vein. These poems send up the speaker’s Petrarchan compliments and complaints almost as a cruel joke, as when he lavishes them upon an adulterous woman whose mercurial responses alternately puzzle and paralyze him. The stylistic evidence of chronologically rare words in these poems suggests their composition relatively early in Shakespeare’s career.

19.  Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia (London: P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598) mentions the poet’s “sugred Sonnets among his private friends” (sig. 281v–282r), implying their manuscript circulation. 20.  See Braden Cormack, “Decision, Possession, and the Time of Law in Winter’s Tale and the Sonnets,” in Shakespeare and the Law, ed. Cormack et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 44–78.

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By contrast, in the Young Man sonnets that Shakespeare drafted and completed somewhat later, the poet takes ownership over the form and content of Petrarchism and he directs the results to a wholly new mode of poetic expression. These sonnets depict an ebb and flow of friendship with the addressee that swells into an obsession on the speaker’s part and then drains into competition with the youth for the attentions of the Dark Lady and the services of rival poets. The speaker is, in effect, revising the Petrarchan premises that he parodied in the Dark Lady poems and is recasting them to express not just emotional relationships to the Young Man, but social, cultural, political, and economic relationships to others as well. I’ve already mentioned the possibility that sonnets 1–126 might originally have consisted of several short sequences on topics concerning procreation, eternizing fame, rival poetry, and courtly conduct, perhaps addressing several different protagonists. Part of Shakespeare’s efforts before publication may have been to revise and coordinate them into a sequence about the speaker’s relationship with a single friend. Aside from their extraordinary range of tones, moods, and dramatic situations, there’s no evidence for proving or disproving a unitary composition of the Young Man sonnets. In terms of stylistic evidence based on juxtapositions of early and late rare-word usage in single poems, there are grounds to posit Shakespeare’s efforts to revise what came to constitute the first half of Sonnets, along with his relatively late efforts to compose the last quarter of them. As a particular case, let’s look at two clusters of sonnets by Shakespeare that explore problems of ownership and possession in the Dark Lady and Young Man poems. In one, sonnets 8 and 128 dramatize the effects of a musical performance upon the speaker and his addressees. In the other, sonnets 24, 46, 47, and 137–42 dramatize the effects of a debate between the lover’s heart and eyes. In both, the speaker claims title to another person’s awareness. Sonnet 128 (“How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st”) at the beginning of the Dark Lady sequence and sonnet 8 (“Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly”) near the beginning of the Young Man sequence represent the participants as musicians.21 Sonnet 128 depicts the Dark Lady

21.  All quotations from Sonnets refer to Shake-speare’s Sonnets, ed. with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Throughout this chapter, I’ve greatly profited from the notes and commentaries on Shakespeare’s poems in The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), The Sonnets, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Arden Shakespeare Edition (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, and Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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performing on a spinet-like keyboard, “that blessèd wood whose motion sounds / With thy sweet fingers,” which the speaker regards with a mixture of jealousy and annoyance. Sonnet 8 expands the action so that the speaker imagines himself as well as the Young Man to be musicians. We realize too that the author would have been at least to some extent an adroit musician in his professional capacity as a playwright, songwriter, stage performer, and perhaps singer, instrumentalist, and behind-the-scenes production manager. The parallels between both poems allow us to approach the Dark Lady and the Young Man as complementary but yet distinct objects of the speaker’s affection. A convenient analogue for the poem addressed to the Dark Lady is Petrarch’s sonnet 167, “Quando Amor i belli occhi a terra inclina” ‘When Love bends her lovely eyes to the ground’, and for the poem addressed to the Young Man, an analogue is Petrarch’s sonnet 131, “Io canterei d’Amor sì novamente” ‘I would sing of love in so rare a way’. This is not to say that Shakespeare pointedly imitates Petrarch’s model, but it is to situate him in relation to the Italian poet as I’ve situated other Renaissance writers. The tonality of sonnet 128 is distinctly parodic.22 Addressing the Dark Lady as “sweet music” (“when thou, my music, music playst”), the speaker taints her as a creator of dissonant and discordant notes. Unlike the Young Man who in sonnet 8 is a passive and indifferent listener, she’s an active and aggressive musician who performs her song to the speaker’s discomfort: “With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st / The wiry concord that mine ear confounds.” In economic terms, her keyboard skills suggest either that she may be a semiprofessional performer of music and poetry, or else that, like the Young Man, she has acquired these skills as a product of breeding and refinement.23 This register inflects her performance, implying that while the Dark Lady may share the poet’s cultural ambitions, she may also share something of the Young Man’s high social status in terms of her wealth and family connections. In Petrarch’s sonnet 167, Cupid acts as a maestro who gathers Laura’s “vaghi spirti in un sospiro” ‘wandering breath into a sigh’ and then releases it in a voice that is “chiara, soave, angelica, divina” ‘clear, soft, angelic, divine’.

22.  See Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 74–76, and Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 207–20. For the poem’s embodiment of speaker and addressee, see David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 67–68. 23.  In A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The Problems Solved (London: Macmillan, 1973), see the claim—now discredited—that she was Aemelia Lanier, daughter of the Italian-born court musician Battista Bassano and after 1611 a published poet in her own right.

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The effect ravishes the speaker: “Sento far del mio cor dolce rapina” ‘I feel my heart sweetly stolen away’. Eliciting from him a kind of death wish—“se ’l ciel sì honesta morte mi destina” ‘if heaven reserves me for so virtuous a death’—Laura plays her role as a virtual siren, “questa sola fra noi del ciel sirena” ‘this single heavenly siren among us’, who enchants her listener and lures him to self-destruction. Petrarch’s commentators nonetheless idealize the poem’s action in ways that Shakespeare characteristically resists. For Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, music calms the speaker’s agitation and purifies his desire; the sound of Laura’s voice beguiles him “di dolzezza” ‘with sweetness’ while its innocence “affrena il gran desir”  ‘restrains his great desire’ (sig. ccxviiir). For Bernardino Daniello, this music echoes the harmony of the cosmos where, according to the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic 10.617b–d, each sphere holds a siren who sings a separate musical note in a particular key, each contributing to “un canto in lode de gli Dei” ‘a song in praise of the deities’ (sig. 98v). As Lodovico Castelvetro adds, the sirens in bono lead men “al cielo” ‘onwards to heaven’ (sig. 308r), countering their role in malo as servants of pre-Olympian death goddesses (according to Strabo 1.2.12) who, chanting dirges to the music of a lyre, become angels of death to those who listen to them. Sonnet 128 approaches some of these darker tones as though to anticipate the contrasts in sonnet 144 where the Young Man is “the better angel” while she appears “the worser spirit . . . coloured ill.” And yet the poem’s overall tone veers toward comic effect. The suspended syntax of its octave withholds the subject and verb of its main clause until the second quatrain: “How oft . . . / Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap / To kiss the tender inward of thy hand.” Here the speaker hyperbolizes the proximity of the Lady’s fingers to the (inaccurately termed) “jacks” of a wooden keyboard. As it jumps from the seventh verse to embrace the eighth, an enjambment of “leap / To kiss” mimics the octave’s droll humor. Measured against commentaries on Petrarch’s analogue, however, this wit turns sour. The contact of the beloved’s fingers with the keyboard stimulates the speaker’s jealousy. Her digital promiscuity disturbs him “Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap, / At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand.” That the instrument appears to be “virginal” contrasts with the Dark Lady’s experience as a well-practiced adulteress.24

24.  See the play upon “virginal” as Leontes sizes up Hermione and Polyxenes during their dance in WT 1.2.125. Abbreviations for the titles of Shakespeare’s plays come from MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003), 278–79.

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In the Dark Lady poems, Shakespeare flaunts his verbal skills, self-assurance, and technical abilities to parody Petrarch’s amatory situations. His Young Man poems draw upon more complex assumptions that concern the social order and its attendant consequences. As the speaker turns his attention to the Young Man, he evokes issues of ownership and possession with reference to his friend’s privileged way of life, to his own professional status as a poet among rival poets, and to his economic success as somehow dependent upon the youth’s approval. Among these poems, Shakespeare’s representation of himself as a musician in sonnet 8 compares with Petrarch’s sonnet 131 where the lover expresses concerns about his poetic powers and professional competence: Io canterei d’Amor sì novamente ch’al duro fiancho il dì mille sospiri trarrei per forza, et mille alti desire raccenderei ne la gelata mente.

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I would sing of love in so rare a way that from her cruel side I would draw by force a thousand sighs in a day, and a thousand high desires I would kindle in her frozen mind. As Gesualdo points out, the conditional mood of canterei in line 1 implies a dialogue with someone—a male friend or perhaps a poetic rival—who asks, “S’egli far potesse cantando quello ch’egli qui dimostra, che far potrebbe” ‘Whether by singing he could accomplish what he here proves he could do’ (sig. clxxxviir). Antonio Brucioli imagines a similar situation: “Appare, che alcuno gli havesse domandato quello che facesse se fusse apresso à M. Laura” ‘It seems that someone had asked him what he would do if he were with Laura’ (sig. 102r). The poem proceeds as Petrarch’s answer to an interlocutor who challenges him about overcoming Laura’s obduracy. The last word in the first line focuses his emphasis: he would sing so freshly, so creatively, so prodigiously (novamente) that he’d draw “mille sospiri” from Laura’s “duro fiancho,” and would spark “mille alti desiri” in her “gelata mente.” Alessandro Vellutello explicitly identifies the speaker’s success with rhetorical efficacy, demarcating “tutti quelli effetti che ne seguirebbero” ‘all those effects that would follow from it’, so that “Amore si desterebbe in lei” ‘Love would be awakened in her’ (sig. 63r). As in his Medusa poems, Petrarch’s speaker boasts that he can overcome Laura’s resistance: “e ’l bel viso vedrei cangiar sovente” ‘And I would see her lovely face change expression frequently’. His real competitor is not Laura but the acquaintance who motivates his bragging

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match. Laura, a pawn in this androcentric debate, serves chiefly as a witness to the speaker’s rhetorical skill. Shakespeare’s sonnet 8 likewise registers its speaker’s debate with the Young Man in terms of his musical competence:

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Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly? Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy. Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly, Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy? Its opening phrase, “Music to hear,” is ambiguous.25 It could address the Young Man with a compliment, to be followed by a statement of puzzlement: “[You yourself are] music to hear, [so then] why hear’st thou music sadly?” Or it could issue a statement about the speaker’s skill in making music, to be followed by his expression of irritation with the Young Man for not appreciating it: “[I’ve provided you with] music to hear, [so then] why hear’st thou music sadly?” It might combine both possibilities: “[You are] music to hear [and I’ve provided you with more] music to hear, [so then] why hear’st thou music sadly?” The first two cases convey the Petrarchan psychology of devoted lovers and reluctant beloveds. The third engages both participants as they oppose each other. Their concern is less the production or reception of music than a jockeying by one to controvert the other. Their antagonism ignites in line 2 with a form of oxymoron that affronts the listener for replying “sadly” to music that others would greet “sweetly.” The next two lines convey a passive-aggressive response by the Young Man to music that he loves “not gladly” and yet receives “with pleasure” as an annoyance. The speaker challenges the Young Man’s intransigence with an overflow of fractious energy. The hypermetrical feminine endings of lines 1 and 3 (like those in lines 9 and 11) convey this overflow, refusing the metrical regularity that one might anticipate in a poem about music. Significantly the word “annoy,” used as a noun, counts as one of Shakespeare’s early rare usages, suggesting that for all its stylish technique, the poem may have started out as an early composition but then benefited from being licked into shape in a skillful, carefully considered revision.26

25.  For Renaissance emphases upon the promiscuity of musical meaning, see Joseph Ortiz, Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 88–119. 26.  For “annoy,” most significant are Ven. 497 and 599, and Luc. 1109; see also see 3H6 5.7.45 and Tit. 4.1.49.

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With its verbal energy, contrasting emotion, and double-edged wordplay, the second quatrain turns logical proposition into rhetorical badgering as the speaker prods the unresponsive Young Man to listen to his music. He sharpens his argument in a conditional clause that associates the trope of musical harmony with the state of marriage and then reproves the Young Man’s petulance against it: “If the true concord of well-tunèd sounds, / By unions married, do offend thine ear, / They do but sweetly chide thee.” The octave’s final lines focus on the Young Man’s reluctance to marry, but as their clauses shift from a single subject (“concord”) to a plural one (“they,” referring to sounds), they violate grammatical parallelism: “They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds / In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.” Thrusting multiplicity against singularity, their syntax mimes a frontal attack on the Young Man’s obstinacy. The sestet begins with a strong imperative, again associating harmony with marriage: “Mark how one string, sweet husband to another / . . . Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother.” The argument resumes with force, only mildly tempered by feminine rhymes in lines 9 and 11 (“anóther, móther”) and by the syncopated rhythm of line 10, “Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,” where the trisyllabic mútùàl contracts to a disyllabic mútu^al. The next verse, “Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing,” echoes the previous “one string” and grammatically paired “each in each” with a staccato “all in one, one” jab at the Young Man’s singularity. The closing couplet, “Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one, / Sings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none,’ ” imputes words to the “speechless” music as it addresses the Young Man in taunting syllables. The poem’s ending stretches out a potential pun on “sing” and “sing-leness” (already registered in line 8) as its scornful “thou single” excludes the youth from the music of human life. Their concluding words “prove none” state that a nobleman without an heir betrays his ancestry (“none,” with a play on the homophonic “nun,” as though consigning the Young Man to a feminized cloister).27 The crude pun on “none / nun” connects with another potentially crude pun in line 8, a pun on parts that refers to voices in polyphonic song but also to genital body parts confounded by the Young Man’s celibacy. It’s as though with a coarse jocularity the speaker is buddying-up to his friend even while, 27.  As Kerrigan, Duncan-Jones, and Burrow point out, the figure echoes Marlowe’s “One is no number; maids are nothing then, / Without the sweet society of men” (Hero and Leander, lines 255–56). Duncan-Jones adds “he will also be none in the sense of ‘a nonentity’ if he fails to transmit his inherited aristocratic identity,” page 8. For pronoun references and gender distinctions in sonnet 20, see Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 155–61.

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with the sophistication of his musical trope, he’s offering a serious argument about marriage and procreation. The poem radiates competing claims of jest and earnestness, suggesting that it had started off in one direction but then shifted course. Surely its urbanity marks an advance upon the elemental parody of sonnet 128. There the poet possessed enough skill—and then some—to send up the Petrarchan musical hyperbole with a passel of jokes. In sonnet 8, his ownership of the trope runs deeper until it catches the Young Man off guard with a challenge to his masculinity and to his station in life. A similar pattern emerges when we compare sonnets 137–42, which address the Dark Lady about a debate between the speaker’s heart and eyes, to sonnets 24, 46, and 47, which address the Young Man on the same topic. Their shared locus classicus in Petrarch’s Rime sparse is sonnet 84, “Occhi, piangete: accompagnate il core” ‘Eyes, weep; accompany the heart’.28 One of this poem’s distinctive features is that its speaker sides with his heart as it accuses his eyes: “Già prima ebbe per voi l’entrata Amore” ‘Through you Love first had entrance’. Put on trial, his eyes accuse his heart of inspiring them with hope that Laura would respond: “Noi gli aprimmo la via per quella spene” ‘We opened the way to him because of that hope’. Petrarch’s Italian commentators question which participant—the heart or the eyes—better represents the lover’s case. Antonio da Tempo judges the heart guilty for having fostered the speaker’s hope: “La cagione fu desso cuore perho che di speranza a esso M. F. il quale hora come deluso ne muor che lui otterebe la cosa amata” ‘The fault was the heart’s because it gave hope to Petrarch, who is now dying from it as though deluded that he would obtain his beloved’ (sig. xlviv). Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano assigns guilt to both the eyes and the heart: “Che l’uno e l’altro e stato in colpa: & l’uno e l’altro merta la punitione” ‘The one and the other are to blame and both merit punishment’ (sig. 32r). Gesualdo concludes that “la lite pendente si lasci” ‘the dispute is left in suspension’ (sig. cxxv), and Sylvano da Venafro agrees: “Lascia il Poeta la controversia indecisa” ‘The poet leaves the controversy undecided’ (sig. lxxviir). A comparable suspension animates Shakespeare’s poems to the Dark Lady as their speaker permits his heart and eyes to deceive him. He understands that possessing the beloved through his eyes does not guarantee him ownership of her heart. What if she’s hoodwinking him by inviting his persistence while betraying it? And what if her new partner turns out to be his young friend? In these poems, the lover shapes a self-assertive rhetoric that appears cynical and detached. He knows that his heart tricks his eyes, but he assents 28.  For Stilnovisti precedent, see Cary Howie, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 103–12.

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to the dupery because he believes that he can control the outcome. In poems to the Young Man, however, he fashions an agonistic yet self-effacing rhetoric that bares his indecision. He once again knows that his heart is tricking his eyes, but this time he accepts the situation because he feels some palpable yet unresolved need to sustain the Young Man’s friendship. Rhetoric serves as an instrument of compromise and self-preservation—in the latter case, the only instrument—in a world infected with opportunism and self-interest. In conventional Petrarchism there’s a rift between the timorous lover and the scornful beloved, but in Sonnets there’s a breach between the speaker’s tenuous upward mobility and a barrier of social advantages enjoyed by the Young Man. From this perspective, Shakespeare’s poems to the Dark Lady convey a streetwise awareness of her questionable behavior, with all of its demimonde appurtenances. Yet they also entertain a sense of the speaker’s professional solidarity with her. Like him, she is talented in music and song, composition and performance, though she seems thoughtless about flipping the switch between play-acting on the one hand and honesty on the other. His poems to the Young Man convey a sharper, more penetrating awareness of the latter’s social status—he’s highly regarded and possibly endowed with noble pedigree—and of the speaker’s pragmatic deference to it. Yet the older man seems quite enchanted by the youth’s misbehavior, in thrall to his mystique, and captured by an irrational admiration of his allure. In each case, the eyes render an empirical judgment upon what they see, but the heart skews its interpretation. Blinded by the Young Man’s charm, the eyes make an emotional investment that the heart pays for. As the older man begins to falter, his observers itch to say “I told you so.” In the Dark Lady group, the motif of heart and eyes links a half dozen poems beginning with sonnet 137, where the speaker complains that Cupid has corrupted his judgment: “Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forgèd hooks, / Whereto the judgement of my heart is tied?” In sonnet 138, “When my love swears that she is made of truth,” he admits to a conflict between knowing what his eyes abhor and believing what his heart prefers: “I do believe her though I know she lies.” In sonnets 139 and 140, he implores the Dark Lady to divert her gaze from other men, at least in his presence (“Tell me thou lov’st elsewhére; but in my sight, / Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside,” sonnet 139), and at most in her outward demeanor (“Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide,” sonnet 140). In sonnet 141, “In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,” he argues that his emotions endorse love despite the evidence of what he sees (“But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise”), and in sonnet 142 he yields to her even as she persists in

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betraying him: “Be it lawful I love thee as thou lov’st those / Whom thine eyes woo as mine impórtune thee.” With their focus on the competition between his eyes and heart, these poems record the attractions and repulsions of a man not entirely honest with himself, beguiled by a woman whose honesty and fidelity prove just as unstable as his. All these arguments enliven sonnet 137. Here the speaker addresses Cupid—the god of Love, Petrarch’s Amore—whom he assails for blinding him to the Dark Lady’s moral imperfections: “Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to mine eyes, / That they behold and see not what they see?” The verb see pertains in two ways: the first relating to the faculty of vision and the lover’s perception of his beloved’s features; the second relating to the faculty of judgment and the lover’s understanding of his beloved’s misbehavior. The bond between these two faculties dissolves into the fathomless duplication of “see not what they see.” The verb’s persistence in line 3, “see where it lies,” blurs both meanings: “They know what beauty is, see where it lies, / Yet what the best is take the worst to be.” Here the object of sight refers to the place where beauty rests (lies = “resides”), but also to the place where the Dark Lady utters words of falsehood (lies = “deceives, deludes”) and engages in promiscuous activity with other men (lies = “sleeps with”). The possibility of deception condenses the moral and intellectual problem. The lover’s fractious sense data define the Dark Lady’s worst conduct as though it were the best. The word corrupt in line 5 forecasts a syntactic and semantic disjunction. Though it seems at first to function as a verb, “If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks,” it in fact operates as a participial adjective (corrupt = “having been corrupted”) accompanied by a prepositional phrase of agency (“by [their] over-partial looks”) in the completed clause of line 6: “If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks / Be anchored in the bay where all men ride.”29 The verses teem with misrepresentation as the eyes in question seem curiously dissociated from their owner. Without violence to the poem’s argument, they can belong to the speaker, to the beloved, or to both. Partiality has corrupted his eyes as they view her “anchored in the bay.” Promiscuity has corrupted her eyes as they migrate “over-partial” toward other men. His eyes, a prey to what flatters them, submit to her falsehood. Her eyes, a prey to easy virtue, promote this falsehood. When they focus upon him, they become “hooks” fashioned by the god of love: “Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forgèd hooks, / Whereto the judgement of my heart is tied?” The spelling of “tide” in the 1609 Quarto secures the nautical trope latent 29.  As an adjective, it appears as a rare word in Shakespeare’s lexicon, both early and late. Most relevant are 1H6 5.5.45, MV 3.2.75, MM 3.1.243, and H8 1.2.156.

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in “anchored,” asserting both the speaker’s involuntary tug (tide) toward and deliberate attachment (tied) to the source of his discontent. Despite his better judgment, he commits his heart to calamitous affection. In the second quatrain, the speaker begins to question himself. This shift of address from the god of Love marks a conventional Petrarchan division between octave and sestet. As a rhetorician, the speaker accuses Cupid of impairing his vision. The trope of the Dark Lady as a “bay where all men ride,” alternatively evoking a “bay-horse” with a sexually suggestive rider or an “open harbor” that accommodates an entire fleet, gives way to another trope that represents her as a “plot” of dirt, a marked-off area of property or real estate, or, more damagingly, as a cheap and sluttish “common place”:

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Why should my heart think that a several plot, Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place? Or mine eyes, seeing this, say this is not To put fair truth upon so foul a face? Again the trope transposes from one register to another. In the context of its territorial demarcation, “several” can mean both “private” and “public” from its Janus-like etymology as “various, multiple, unrestricted,” but also “separate, distinct, individual.” In the context of the beloved’s promiscuity, it calls up her assorted contrivances (“several plot”) against the speaker. Evoking omnifarious outcomes (again a “several plot”), it locks into a theatrical register, associating the beloved’s intrigues with dramatic inventions and histrionic contrivances. Likewise the associations of “common place” slide from the domain of a “public or private space” to the speaker’s conscious or unconscious preoccupation with the rhetorical space of a locus communis. He’s obsessed not just with the beloved’s manner of behavior but with his own manner of expression. Even as he juxtaposes the contrarieties of “fair” and “foul” in bono and in malo, he understands that these terms radicalize her ambiguity. The question of whether “this is not” represents his eyes’ self-serving denial of truth, or whether it bolsters their claim to have reached a more accommodating truth, finds an answer in both possibilities at once. The result is the speaker’s rueful recognition that “In things right true my heart and eyes have erred.” By representing the Dark Lady’s deception in figures that exceed the limits of direct statement, by expressing outrage and anxiety in tropes that widen the spread of their own meaning, by opening the poem to a drift of destabilized, polysemous, multivalent language, the speaker reaches a sublimated acceptance of her deceit. As these rhetorical transactions expand his awareness,

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they negotiate his frantic bargaining and contested judgment into moral complexity. The authority of linguistic rules imposes a frame upon the speaker’s invention in poems that follow. It’s significant that sonnet 138, “When my love swears that she is made of truth,” breaches this authority, and that among all Shakespeare’s sonnets only this one (and, to a lesser extent, sonnet 144, “Two loves I have of comfort and despair”) might allow a possible glimpse into the author’s workshop of revision. Sonnet 138 first appeared with sonnet 144 and three previously published poems from Love’s Labor’s Lost in William Jaggard’s 1599 publication of The Passionate Pilgrim, an octavo volume of twenty short poems putatively “by W. Shakespeare” (though only five were authentically his).30 The differences between Jaggard’s version of sonnet 138 and the one printed in the 1609 Quarto are striking, and—unless Jaggard’s version is simply the result of memorial transmission—they provide tangible evidence of authorial revision.31 The repeated rhyme of “young / tongue” in lines 5 and 7 and lines 9 and 11 of the earlier version, and its displacement by “unjust / trust” in lines 9 and 11 of the quarto, for example, point to a revision that heightens the poem’s tension between “unjust” dishonesty and credible “trust.” Equally relevant are the earlier version’s nine repetitions of the word “love” (variably as a noun or verb), reduced in the quarto to four repetitions, chiefly by substituting “she” and “her” for its usage as “my beloved.” The revision anchors the poem’s action in a strong-willed behavior of personae (“she” and “me”) who engage each other at cross-purposes. In the earlier version’s “Unskilful in the world’s false forgeries” (reworked in the quarto as “Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties”), the word “forgeries” expresses the concept of artistic fabrication and rhetorical construction.32 To it is coupled an association with “lacking skill.” But “forgery” is an early rare word in Shakespeare’s lexicon, and its occurrence here conveys a sense of “fraudulent imitation.”33 The word “subtleties” on the other hand is a late rare word in Shakespeare’s lexicon (see Pericles 2.5.39 and Tempest 5.1.126), and it evokes the idea of sophistic

30.  Quotations from Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, 341. 31.  See Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 85–97; Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 149–58; Shapiro, A Year in the Life, 188–206; and Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance, 54–58. 32.  “Forge” derives from Old French forgier and Latin fabricare; the OED cites Chaucer’s “Cupyde our lord his arwes forge and fyle,” Parliament of Foules 212, and “forge a long tale,” Parson’s Tale 53. 33.  The OED cites “Guilty of treason, forgery, and shift,” Lucrece 920. See also Luc. 460, along with 3H6 3.3.175 and MND 2.1.81.

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refinement in a philosophical argument.34 The poem’s revised alignment of “subtleties” with a certain kind of craftsmanship and rhetorical skill raises an epistemological question about the grounds for verifying “simple truth.” This last phrase enters the revision in line 8 as “On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed” (which replaces Jaggard’s “Outfacing faults in love, with love’s ill rest”). As an antidote to elite conceptions of Platonic inspiration that benefit the few, the poet’s frank admission of rhetorical skill allows for more candor than any ascribed to poetic furor. The result proves more complex than its counterparts in other poems to the Dark Lady, where parody seems a major goal. In sonnet 138, sure-handed skill animates the poem. Poems about the heart and eyes addressed to the Young Man (sonnets 24, 46, and 47, with subsequent references in 62, 93, and 113) bear no overt traces of revision. Yet, as with sonnet 8 and sonnet 128 on the Young Man’s and Dark Lady’s music, these poems to the friend display more refined craftsmanship than those to the mistress. At the very least, their complexity suggests layers of a performative sensibility and self-reflexive wit. Shakespeare’s sonnet 24, “Mine eye hath played the painter,” details this conceit more cleverly than the others, and perhaps too cleverly since I know of no modern commentary on it (even and especially mine) that succeeds in penetrating the give-and-take of its rhetorical energy. The poem’s casual transfer of one vision for another goes something like this: the speaker’s eye paints the Young Man’s image in the speaker’s heart; the speaker’s body frames this image and constitutes its perspective: “My body is the frame wherein ’tis held, / And pérspective it is best painter’s art.” The Young Man can view this picture only through the speaker’s eyes—into which he must gaze in order to see it: “For through the painter must you see his skill / To find where your true image pictured lies.” The speaker’s heart displays the image as though it were mounted in an artist’s shop, in such a way that the shop’s windows appear glazed with a reflection of the beholder’s eyes as they look upon the picture: “Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still, / That hath his windows glazèd with thine eyes.”35 Significantly the word perspective—meaning “an optical illusion of depth and focus produced by a rounded glass or mirror”—provides a key to this reading, and significantly the word is one of Shakespeare’s middle to late rare words, suggesting its connection to some revision after 1595.36 34.  The OED cites Chaucer’s “subtiltie of speche” in House of Fame 835. 35.  For the framing trope, see Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass,Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 166–98. 36.  The relevant use is Bertram’s in AW W 5.3.48; but see also R2 2.2.18 and TN 5.1.207. MacDonald Jackson characterizes it as a “middle” rare word in “Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 52 (2001): 63.

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At this point the analogy refracts into separate components that prove difficult to coordinate: “Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done.” The Young Man’s image reflects the speaker’s labor (“Mine eyes have drawn thy shape”). As the youth’s eyes peer through the older man’s, they furnish windows to the speaker’s heart (“and thine for me / Are windows to my breast”).37 They allow the sun—a trope for the Young Man— “to peep, to gaze therein.” Here the youth looks upon his own image in the speaker’s eyes as well as in his heart, evoking a narcissistic enjoyment in their reflection. But any paraphrase barely approximates what’s happening here. The problem in explaining these lines points to a larger problem underlying the older man’s imagined relationship with his friend. It’s difficult to stabilize this relationship, for the reader no less than for the speaker who struggles to understand and express it. On the surface his eyes reflect the friend’s external image, but they can’t know what feelings or emotions lie hidden in his heart: “Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art; / They draw but what they see, know not the heart.” The speaker becomes a prisoner of his own heart as he willfully projects upon it an image of the Young Man or, better, an image of what he wants the Young Man to be. The word heart, homophonic with art, emblematizes his entrapment. In the final line, the speaker’s art represents the youth in his outward splendor without affirming or denying the duplicity latent in his heart. The older man’s imperfect knowledge and self-awareness will return to haunt him in later struggles. We’ve seen an analogue for the portrait in the lover’s heart and the speaker’s effort to understand its meaning in sonnet 214 (L 5:154, W 210) of Ronsard’s Les Amours.38 The latter refers to Petrarch’s sonnet 155, where Cupid sculpts Laura’s image in diamond within the poet’s heart.39 Closer to home in the 1580s and early 1590s, Thomas Watson and Henry Constable imported this trope into their debates between the heart and eyes, which Barnabe Barnes and Michael Drayton in turn expanded.40 We can imagine 37.  If the one looks into the other’s eyes, he will see his own material image reflected there, so that the speaker’s eyes literally carry the image of the Young Man’s eyes mirrored in them. 38.  Other examples include Ronsard’s sonnets 2 (L 4:6, W 2) and 108 (L 4:81, W 122) in Les Amours, and sonnets 1.57 (L 17:242, W 1.51) and 2.18 (L 17:258, W 2.15) in Sonnets pour Hélène. 39.  Gesualdo comments on the diamond in that poem where Laura laments the death of a family member “chel pianto, & il lamento di lei gli era fisso ne la mente non altramente, che si scolpisce, e si scrive saldamente in durissima pietra, qual è il Diamante” ‘that her weeping and lamentation were fixed in his memory no less than it were sculpted and written solidly in the hardest stone, i.e., diamond’ (sig. clxxxviiv). 40.  See sonnets 45 and 46 from Thomas Watson’s Teares of Fancie (1580s, SR 1593), “My Mistres seeing her faire counterfet,” and sonnet 1.5 of Constable’s Diana (SR 1592, revised in SR 1594), “Thine eye, the glass where I behold my heart.” For debates about analogous ownership versus possession, see Watson’s sonnets 19 and 20 (“My Hart impos’d this penance on mine eies” and “My Hart

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Shakespeare in the early 1590s matching his wits against those of his elders by engaging these motifs (and perhaps later motivating Barnes and Drayton to match their wits against his). By 1594 he was exploring Sidney’s continental-style Petrarchism when he put finishing touches to Love’s Labor’s Lost, where the hyperbolic wit of courtiers and commoners at the King of Navarre’s “little academe” (1.1.13) invites a profusion of stylish effects.41 When the play’s master of casuistry, Beroin, renounces his “taffeta phrases” and “figures pedantical” (5.2.407–9), his mockery of poetic furor signals his maturation as a poet, betokening Shakespeare’s entry into a new phase of composition and revision in his work as a playwright. In studying Sidney, he’d been focusing upon a model of form while dramatizing his alienation from it in the play’s suspended conclusion. With newfound skill he returns to Sonnets to apply what he’s learned. I’d conjecture that Spenser’s influence played an important role as well, early on through his depiction of promiscuity and adultery in book 3 of the Faerie Queene (SR 1 December 1589). The Malecasta episode at the beginning of that book touches upon the idea of a lover’s jealous possessiveness with its Chaucerian evocation of tyrannical “maistery” (3.1.25), and the Malbecco-Helenore episode at its end develops this idea in the context of adultery (3.9.10, 3.10.2). The seductive Paridell “in whom a kindly pride / Of gratious speach, and skill his words to frame / Abounded” (3.9.32) affords a model for Shakespeare’s Young Man as he proves adept in beguiling “both eyes and hart attonce” (3.10.5). Still later after the publication of the Second Part of the Faerie Queene (SR 20 January 1596), book 4 broadens this theme to include issues of male friendship.42 Not the least of its applications occurs in Spenser’s continuation of Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Topaz. Here England’s “new poet” takes possession of Chaucer’s narrative and asserts his ownership over it when Priamond, Diamond, and Triamond challenge Cambell for the hand of Canacee. The deaths of the first two and the “traduction” of Priamond

accus’d mine eies and was offended”) and Constable’s sonnet 6.7 (“My Heart, mine Eye accuseth of his death”). See also sonnet 20 from Barnabe Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenope (SR 1593), “These Eyes (thy Beauty’s Tenants!) pay due tears,” and Amour 33 from Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (SR 1594) where the lover’s heart and eyes agree to share possession of the beloved: “Each one of these, doth ayde unto the other lande.” 41.  For Philip Sidney as the play’s presiding spirit, see Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, New Arden ed. (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1998), 1–7, 10–16, and textual notes passim. 42.  For traces of complicated revision in book 4, see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 328–30; for the Temple of Venus as a revisionary “correction” of earlier episodes, see Carol V. Kaske, Spenser’s Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 65–69.

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and Diamond into Triamond (4.3.13) figure the process of literary history by which canonical texts are absorbed into later works—in this case, Chaucer’s earlier “sources” into the Tale of Sir Topaz and then into book 4 of the Faerie Queene. Or further, into Shakespeare’s poems and plays, with Spenser’s echo of the playwright’s name when Paridell and Blandamour dispute each other’s claim to false Florimell and “gan their shiuering speares to shake” (4.2.14).43 The poet of Sonnets appears to be organizing and reorganizing his collection so as to accommodate it to the work of his predecessors. Shakespeare’s sonnets to the Young Man consequently record a more variable ebb and flow of attraction and repulsion than those to the Dark Lady, and their variability surfaces and resurfaces in a more jagged, less linear or resolved implied narrative. These poems about the eyes and heart appear unevenly distributed throughout the sequence, less constrained to tell a single story and more than flexible in combining with other themes such as the velocity of time and the speaker’s antagonism with rival poets. In the Young Man he finds something of a match for his rhetorical skills, a recipient who can stand up to his argument and attack. Economic contingencies intervene, and they force the speaker to defer to his friend’s social standing. The range of problems in this group summons a bolder use of language, a more intricate handling of figures and tropes, a more subtle calibration of voice and address than in the Dark Lady group. In the present arrangement of Sonnets, the first sixty or so poems adumbrate a narrative in which a Young Man betrays the speaker’s trust and yet retains his friendly temper. In this context, sonnets 46 and 47 renew the debate between the speaker’s heart and eyes, casting it in terms of a legal argument about property rights staged in the presence of a deciding jury. The jury, “A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart,” seems biased in favor of its landlord, the heart, so that the eyes must present an especially vigorous defense. The decision concerns “How to divide the conquest of thy sight,” where thy (referring to the Young Man) functions as an objective rather than possessive genitive (“thy sight” = the speaker’s perception of his friend’s image). How should the heart and eye respect each other’s access to the Young Man? “Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar, / My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.” It might seem that the eye is defending its possession of some outward image of the Young Man, while the heart is claiming its absolute ownership of his inner space, “A closet never pierced 43.  For the simplicity of books 1–3 and the ornateness of books 4–6, see Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life, 235–39; for Spenser’s poetics of revision, see Harry Berger, Revisionary Play: Studies in Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

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with crystal eyes.” The eye counters with an assertion that in itself the Young Man’s “fair appearance lies,” where—as in sonnet 137—the verb lies (in the sense of “rests, resides” just three lines earlier: “Thou in him dost lie”) now projects just enough flavor of “deceive, delude” to suggest some yet unspecified offense that the Young Man has committed. This, with corroboration from sonnets 34, 35, 40, and 42, leads to the exposure of his involvement with the Dark Lady. Sonnet 46 ends with a provisional resolution delivered as a contingency plea in which “mine eye’s due is thy outward part, / And my heart’s right thy inward love of heart.” And yet this resolution seems unbalanced, upset by the awkwardly repeated part/heart rhyme from the preceding quatrain—perhaps because its author shelved this poem with plans for yet another revision that he never got to make.44 But having arrived at this resolution, both parties agree to a reciprocal exchange of rights in sonnet 47, “And each doth good turns now unto the other.” In the friend’s absence, the eye might feast upon his painted picture to quench its desire, and it might even share this picture with the heart: “And to the painted banquet bids my heart.” The heart reciprocates by dispensing its rumination about the youth, so that the eye “in his thoughts of love doth share a part.” The chief beneficiary is the speaker: “So either by thy picture or my love, / Thyself away are present still with me.” The Young Man enters as much as he ever will into the speaker’s possession. The speaker can hardly expect to be so lucky again. Not the least goal of the poet’s revisions might have been to introduce a narrative order into the collection (or perhaps stitched-together collections) of verse drafted earlier. A narrative that links the Young Man to the Dark Lady emerges in sonnet 35, “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done,” where the youth appears guilty of some transgression that affects the speaker. Sonnet 40, “Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all,” suggests that the youth has seduced his friend’s mistress. As the older man judges his behavior, the fault merits forgiveness as an illusion cast by the accident of time: “What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?” Time’s forward pace, introduced in the procreation group, continues to advance. Sonnet 49, for example, conveys time’s adversarial nature in alienating the Young Man from the speaker: “Against that time (if ever that time come) / When I shall see thee frown on my defects.” The speaker more than half expects that one day he’ll fall out of favor with the Young Man. In deference to the youth, he calculates a cost-benefit analysis of the future when “thy love hath cast his utmost

44.  Blakemore Evans considers the poem a hasty first draft, Shakespeare, The Sonnets, 156.

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sum, / Called to that audit by advised respects.” And to this analysis he adds legal justification: “the strength of laws, / Since why to love I can allege no cause.” Put on the defensive “against myself ” by legal and economic logic, he confesses to “the knowledge of mine own desert,” with a loss that he purports to deserve. As this motif unfolds after sonnet 55 (“Not marble nor the gilded monuments”), time becomes the speaker’s rival for possession, let alone ownership, of the Young Man. In sonnet 63, “Against my love shall be as I am now,” the speaker directs his command of language as a weapon against the assault, if not the mortal effects, of time upon his friend. Two senses of the word “against” epitomize these effects. In the first, occurring in the poem’s opening line as it did in sonnet 49, the word means “in anticipation of the time when”: “Against [the time when] my love shall be [as old] as I am now.” In the second, occurring in the poem’s third quatrain, the word means “contrary to” or “opposing”: “Against confounding age’s cruel knife.” Both usages convey the speaker’s precarious hold upon his friend’s future, starting with the latter’s retention of youth. The major adversary is “time’s injurious hand.” It threatens both the speaker as already older than the Young Man (“as I am now”) and the Young Man in the future as older than he is now: “When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow / With lines and wrinkles.” The counter to this destruction wrought by “time’s injurious hand” is a product of the speaker’s own “hand,” the written “lines” that will eternize the Young Man in his verse: “His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,  / And they shall live, and he in them still green.” This couplet—like many in Sonnets—seems an all too easy solution.45 The speaker has already shown the difficulty of sustaining his art when a curious slant rhyme of fortify and memory upsets the third quatrain: For such a time do I now fortify Against confounding age’s cruel knife, That he shall never cut from memory My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life. The off-rhyme of “fortify” with “memory” suggests an attenuation of poetic skill as “memory” falls out of step with “confounding” time. To remedy the rest, the poet faces further prospects of revision and adjustment. 45.  For the possibility that Shakespeare kept a copybook of couplets from which he began to write individual sonnets, see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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Many of the sonnets to the Young Man therefore remain stubbornly opaque, suggesting that Shakespeare continued to work on them long after he drafted his poems to the Dark Lady, and that he revised at least some of them before their publication in 1609. If—as appears likely from the concentration of late rare words in the first sixty or so poems—he revised them around the turn of the century, and perhaps after 1603, his redactions proceed from puzzles and solutions encountered in the Young Man poems as a group. For a younger Shakespeare, author of the Dark Lady sonnets, there are beguiling questions about style: just how much could he take from a then fashionable Petrarchan discourse and convert it to witty, parodic, and inverted ends? For a more mature Shakespeare, author and reviser of the Young Man sonnets, the questions—often rooted in social and economic competition—become more complex.46 Just how much could he adapt from a now attenuated Petrarchan discourse and make it heartfelt, soulfully his?

46.  For autonomous identity in relation to property and possession across Shakespeare’s career, see David Hawkes, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 161–78.

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Ch ap ter 2

Polish and Skill

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Will’s Interest and Self-Interest in Sonnets 61–99

Though Robert Greene was only six years older than Shakespeare (and Thomas Nashe was three years younger), they along with Thomas Watson, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe had attained some measure of fame (though without sustained success). Shakespeare—eventually the most successful of all—might have envied their university access to courtly and bureaucratic networks, but he soon found other ways to advance in socially mobile, culturally diverse London. The publication of Venus and Adonis (SR 18 April 1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (SR 9 May 1594), both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, marked a strong bid for his patronage while displaying an Ovidian and Vergilian bookishness and continental sophistication.1 Between the September 1591 publication of John Florio’s Second Fruits with its guide to Italian grammar through dialogues and phrase lists, and the 1594 appearance of Love’s Labor’s Lost, the poet-playwright learned enough Italian to feed Holofernes a Venetian proverb and to enrich his play with various

1.  For Shakespeare’s efforts to cultivate Southampton’s patronage, see G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). See also Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 109–15 and 123–27. 243

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French and Italian locutions.2 Ensuing plays with an Italianate cast include Romeo and Juliet (1595), Merchant of Venice (1596–97, based on story 4.1 of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il pecorone), and Much Ado about Nothing (1598, with the defamation of Hero evoking cantos 4–6 of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and story 20 of Matteo Bandello’s Novelle). By 1599 (if not before) he acquired enough French to write the language lesson scenes in Henry V, or at least to supervise someone’s writing of them. Cultural polish might have assuaged the pain of rebukes from Nashe and Greene, but it couldn’t guarantee Shakespeare a successful career. If the playwright hoped that sonnet writing would confer luster, he risked being thought obsolete by the mid-1590s, when the sonnet craze had run its course. Romeo and Juliet portrays sonnet writing as, if not passé, at least associated with a world of depraved Italianate blood feud. Mercutio teases a “fishified” Romeo “for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in,” adding that “Laura to his lady [Juliet] was a kitchen wench” (2.3.37–38).3 A decade later, the play’s Third Quarto (1609, unrevised and poorly printed) appeared within months of Sonnets, perhaps to be marketed in tandem with it (though it’s hard to see how). The Petrarchan and Ovidian love poetry of Romeo and Juliet is thoroughly conventional, while the form and rhetorical situations of Sonnets call into question much of their conventionality. The narrative order that links the Dark Lady sonnets to those about the Young Man may be a relatively late interpolation, brought into shape after 1600 with other revisions in sonnets 1–60. The narrative order of sonnets 61–99 remains especially untidy. I’m going to argue that this group has two focal points, each projecting important economic concerns. Some qualifications ensue. First, it’s not at all certain that the addressee of these sonnets is the Young Man of the procreation poems. Composed at various times, they may invoke multiple addressees.4 Some may be male—possibly the Young Man, but also other friends, business and professional associates, patrons, family members, and so on.5 Some may be female—possibly the Dark Lady, but also other women, including the author’s wife. It’s not even certain that the speaker of the Young Man poems bears the same persona as 2.  See Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 166–202 and 231–54. 3.  On the play’s use of Elizabethan sonnet sequences, see Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons, Arden Shakespeare 2 (New York: Methuen, 1980), 42–52. 4.  See Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 178–88, and Dubrow, “ ‘Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1996): 291–305. 5.  For overlapping subcycles in Sonnets, see Neil Rudenstine, Ideas of Order: A Close-Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014).

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that of the Dark Lady poems (where he explicitly names himself “Will” in sonnet 136). For simplicity I’m going to assume that, in the 1609 arrangement of Sonnets, the addressee of the first 126 poems is the Young Man introduced in the procreation sonnets and that the speaker is the same “Will.” There’s enough continuity of tone and affect to suggest a narrative about a timorous poet, a Young Man, a Dark Lady, and their sordid relationship. What remains constant are the speaker’s alternating indifference and obsession, confidence and diffidence. What differs—as I want to show in the following pages—is the concern of sonnets 61–99 to show what a poet can do with cultural polish and technical skill. This midsection of Sonnets attempts some of the most ambitious—though not always successful—poems in the sequence. One focal point of these sonnets encompasses the “rival poet poems” (sonnets 78-80, and 82–86) that explicitly evoke the speaker’s economic concern to surpass his competitors in winning the Young Man’s attention. Here the speaker responds to the youth’s animal spirits as he favors now one, now another of the various writers clamoring for recognition. The speaker’s options are to surrender to the Young Man’s whims or shape his interests and manipulate his preferences. A second focal point—perhaps less self-evident for its economic implications—encompasses the so-called eternizing poems (sonnets 55, 60, and 63–65).6 Based upon the Horatian and Ovidian motif of poetic immortality, they allow the speaker to meditate upon the relationship between his own worth and the passage of time. This cycle of eternizing poems and, associated with it, those anticipating the speaker’s death in sonnets 71–74 further link the passage of time to the poet’s status in his profession. The speaker is concerned not just to seize time and transcend mortality but to derive profit from these acts in personal and professional terms. By fusing the classical motif of fleeting time with the Petrarchan motif of the poet’s skill as just barely adequate to preserve the beloved’s memory, the speaker confronts his potential for success or failure in both arenas. Inscribed in these poems is an encounter with the Platonic aesthetics of furor as opposed to an Aristotelian aesthetics of craftsmanship and skill, along with their respective economics of patronage and entrepreneurship. Sonnet 64 affords an example. The poem sustains a dialogue with Petrarch’s sonnet 248, “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura” ‘Whoever wishes to see how much Nature’, as refracted through such English poems as Thomas Watson’s metaphrase of Petrarch’s sonnet in his Hecatompathia 6.  In her influential All in War with Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 3–63, Anne Ferry objects to the grouping of these poems on their “eternizing theme” since the speaker’s resistance to a timebound order predominates throughout the Young Man sonnets.

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(1582) as “Who list to vewe dame Natures cunning skil” (in the form of an eighteen-line poem that adds a couplet to each of its first two quatrains), Philip Sidney’s “Who will in fairest booke of Nature know” (sonnet 71 of Astrophil and Stella), Giles Fletcher’s “In time the strong and stately turrets fall” (sonnet 28 of Licia, 1593), and Michael Drayton’s “Stay, stay, sweet Time, behold or ere thou passe” (Amour 7 of Ideas Mirrour, later revised as sonnet 17 of Idea), but also such continental models as Joachim Du Bellay’s “Qui voudra voir la plus precieux arbre” ‘Whoever would like to see the most precious tree’ (sonnet 62 of Olive) and Ronsard’s “Qui vouldra voyr comme un Dieu me surmonte”  ‘Whoever wishes to see how a god overwhelms me’ (sonnet 1 of Les Amours). Shakespeare’s version responds to the first words of Petrarch’s “Chi vuol veder” by recasting the hypothetical “Whoever wishes to see” into a past definite tense at the beginning of each quatrain: “When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced,” “When I have seen the hungry ocean gain,” and “When I have seen such interchange of state.” The final line of its last quatrain recounts the topos of Petrarch’s poem: “That time will come and take my love away.” Hardly victorious against ravaging time, the speaker represents himself as much its victim as the Young Man will be: “This thought is as a death, which cannot choose / But weep to have that which it fears to lose.” Himself a figure of “outworn buried age,” he has become an “eternall slave to mortal rage.” This designation is not accidental. Time is his adversary in more senses than one, not just as a force that annihilates everything, but as a sort of “rage” that countervails his own poetic rage. Synonymous with “poetic furor,” the word rage points to the origin of creative insight and artistic intuition. Through it, the speaker challenges destructive time by fashioning a poem that preserves the Young Man’s excellence while assessing his own roles as homo litterarum and homo economicus in a world of competing energies. The poem’s first quatrain no sooner conveys the idea of Platonic furor as antithetical to “the rich proud cost of outworn buried age” than its second quatrain subverts this antithesis by evoking a debased society teeming with crass commercialism. Here the sea erodes the shore. It does so first in the trope of a marketplace exchange in which one party profits at another’s expense (“When I have seen the hungry ocean gain / Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,” where the word “hungry” projects the extortioner’s greed and the enjambment “gain / Advantage” enacts the inevitable divide between success and failure, victory and defeat). And it does so again in the trope of a business calculation in which one party strategizes for profit as the other sinks into loss, “Increasing store with loss, and loss with store.” In this “interchange of state, / Or state itself confounded to decay,” the speaker’s survival depends upon honing his professional skills, even at the emotional

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cost (where confounded means “spent”) of acknowledging “That time will come and take my love away.” Just as in Petrarch’s poem, so in Shakespeare’s the addressee—here the Young Man—represents a storehouse of value and excellence in the present age “which it fears to lose.” And just as in Petrarch’s poem Laura’s “mirabil tempre” ‘marvelous tempering’ succumbs to mortality, so in Shakespeare’s poem the extravagances of “rich proud cost” and “sometime lofty towers” fall to decay. The poem’s phonic pattern mimics this decay by contracting its rhythmic tempo to diminishing cadences. Its regular iambic pattern gives way to dactylic, trochaic, and anapestic variations in lines of multiple stresses (“The rích próud cóst of óutworn búried áge”; “And the fírm sóil wín of the wátery máin”). In this arena of challenge and compromise, transaction and exchange, the speaker performs as best he can by ordering his highly crafted verse as a retort to time’s rage.7 At first he smarts because time is robbing him of what is most precious, but then he responds with a sidelong glance at Petrarch by shaping his words into an artifact that restores what time has taken. The adjacent sonnet 65 flaunts the speaker’s skill in a suite of technically brilliant metaphors: “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, / But sad mortality o’ersways their power.” Its argument unfolds in a series of questions that cross-examine human efforts to withstand time. In another seeming recall of Petrarch’s sonnet 248 (“Cosa bella mortal passa et non dura” ‘This beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure’), its first quatrain ends with a nod to the aesthetics of furor in juxtaposing rage against beauty. Against the “rage” of time and decay, this poem conveys a possibility of preserving “beauty” (in this case, the Young Man’s) even if it’s fragile as a flower: “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” In the second quatrain, rhetorical questioning gives way to violent chaos as time attacks its victim. Here the Young Man’s eloquent discourse, his metonymic “honey breath,” yields to the physical force of “batt’ring days.” By the third quatrain, time and death have achieved their conquest and they pack their spoils of war inside a victor’s coffer: “Where, alack, / Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?” Parallel tropes of the writer’s “strong hand” and time’s “swift foot” interrogate the speaker’s skill in halting time’s advance: “Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?” To this question the closing couplet offers an ambiguous response: “O none, unless this miracle have might / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.” The

7.  See Spenser’s Ruines 5.12–14, translating Du Bellay’s version of Petrarch’s sonnet 248.

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word unless qualifies this response with the contingency of some miraculous artistry (analogous to Petrarch’s “mirabil tempre”). The product of the “strong hand” is the poem written in “black ink.” It counters time’s “swift foot” with the rhythmic precision of metrical “feet,” displacing its opponent with verse that withstands time. But the outcome is full of compromise. In ensuing poems, the speaker focuses attention upon himself as an object of decay in his advancing age (hyperbolized in sonnet 66, “Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry”; if this poem dates from the mid-1590s, its author had barely passed his thirtieth birthday). The speaker sees himself as time’s prisoner, occluded from an eternity of changeless form and entrenched in a world of lank and moldering matter. Forswearing Platonic inspiration, he turns to the techniques of art and their deployment through Aristotelian craftsmanship. In this regard, the outrageous proposition of sonnet 71, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead,” unfolds with a deliberate sense of avoiding all compromise as its speaker refuses commemoration upon fleeing “From this vile world” to another one, “with vildest worms to dwell.” The poem begins as a riff on popular ballads in which widows recover quickly from their loss upon the funeral bell and fast remarry to the tolling of a wedding bell.8 In Shakespeare’s version of the topos, the Young Man’s short-lived remembrance supplants that of a spouse. In this respect, the speaker appears to challenge the Young Man’s affection for him. Yet even this challenge signals his emotional investment in the Young Man. His caution, registered in the argumentative “nay” and the tentative “if ” of the second quatrain, gives way to a tangle of clauses beginning with “for I love you so”: Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe. The injunction implies that he’d rather be forgotten than cause his friend the pain of mourning. But if that is so, the speaker then parries a forceful thrust by denying the Young Man a healing bereavement.9 8.  See for example Benedick’s cynical retort: “If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps” (Ado 5.2.64–66), and compare Isabella Whitney’s “Bid them cease / my absence for to mone” (lines 299–300) in The Maner of Her Wyll, in Renaissance Women Poets, ed. Danielle Clarke (London: Penguin Books, 2000). 9.  For the poem’s self-mocking qualities, see Shake-speare’s Sonnets, ed. Booth 257–59.

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The third quatrain channels this energy in a yet more aggressive way as it comes to question the youth’s command of language implied in the word “rehearse.” The quatrain opens with attention to the Young Man’s reading skills as he interprets the speaker’s signs of love: “O if, I say, you look upon this verse, / When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay.” Yet it quickly focuses upon the Young Man’s writing or expressive skills: “Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, / But let your love ev’n with my life decay.” In the sense of “to say, repeat, mention, or narrate in a formal manner” (OED, meanings 1, 2, 3, 4), the term “rehearse” could point to the youth’s exclamation of his friend’s name upon reading Sonnets, much in the way that Ronsard imagines a similar exclamation in sonnet 2.43 (L 17:265, W 2.24), “Quand vous serez bien vieille” ‘When you will be very old’. But in a more circumspect rhetorical sense it could point to the Young Man’s attempt to eulogize his friend in a public declamation. The speaker would rather “be forgot” than risk having the Young Man “rehearse” his name that way. The poem’s closing couplet attempts to rationalize this injunction: “Lest the wise world should look into your moan, / And mock you with me after I am gone.” On the one hand the speaker actively dissuades his friend from memorializing him since a less-than-eloquent attempt could prompt slanderous critics to deride both of them. On the other hand, the poem that precedes this one counsels the Young Man not to take offense at derision by evoking Greene’s slur of “upstart crow” once hurled at the poet-playwright: “The ornament of beauty is suspéct, / A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air” (sonnet 70). And in sonnet 66, “Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry,” the speaker views the corruption of the present era as one that reduces a person of merit to “a beggar born.” Here the speaker’s wish to earn fame is no small literary convention, but a performative act grounded in social behavior. It registers his intent not just to gain professional recognition but also and especially to engrave his name in what we now call “literary history.” As a concomitant of this intent, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead” ties the speaker’s idea of literary value to ways in which others perceive his work, both now and in the future. In effect the poem inverts Petrarch’s topos about time’s conquest of Laura. Instead of forecasting the beloved’s demise, it forecasts the speaker’s demise. And instead of asking the survivor to utter his name, it advises the Young Man to remain silent. For Laura as Petrarch’s emblem of doomed perfection, it substitutes the speaker himself as one whose expression of love epitomizes misunderstood value. When he fantasizes himself in the object-position of Laura, he insinuates his own pride as an accomplished poet whose skill derives from Petrarchan precedent.

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Traces of this precedent inhabit sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.” Here the iterated “In me thou seest” (lines 5 and 9) and “This thou perceiv’st” (line 13) evoke Petrarch’s trope of seeing (“Chi vuol veder . . . / Vedrà”), again directing attention to the speaker. But whereas other poets (such as Ronsard) had expressed supreme confidence in their skill, this one evinces diffidence as its speaker reclaims from the ravages of time the moral worth of his soon-to-be-spent identity. Deflecting mortality upon himself as he forecasts his own extinction, he ends by exhorting the Young Man “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” In the event, he interpolates a poetic agenda that revisits his body of work. The “yellow leaves” that signal autumnal decrease in the first quatrain, for example, evoke the already fading sheets of paper upon which he has written verses, while their diminution as “yellow leaves, or none, or few” bears witness to his declining productivity. Likewise, the suspensive enjambment of iambics in “do hang / Upon these boughs” and the trochaic inversion of these iambics in “Báre rùined chóirs” transpose to silence the once vibrant music of the speaker’s earlier verse.10 The word “choirs”—represented in the 1609 Quarto as “quiers,” which evokes “quires”—reinforces the idea of paper “leaves” gathered to form a manuscript or printed book. In the second quatrain the iteration of twilight as it dims (“fadeth,” reprising the yellowing of leaves in the previous quatrain) into “black night” (identified as “Death’s second self ”) proceeds through a slowly attenuated syntax that again mimics decline: “Such day, / As after sunset fadeth in the west, / [such day] Which by and by black night doth take away, / [black night which is] Death’s second self.” It comes as a shock, then, to discover a resurgent energy in the third quatrain, “In me thou seest the glowing of such fires.” Here this “glowing” of embers on the self-consuming “ashes of his youth” draws the dynamics of life and death into a chiasmus that imbues death with life as well as life with death.11 This new trope represents the speaker’s demise not only in causal terms, but also in temporal terms of poetic duration. The speaker is leaving behind a body of verse that will continue to express his love, an 10.  Booth scans the phrase in regular iambics: “Bàre rú-ìned choírs”; Burrow suggests the figurative dimension of “quires.” 11.  The equation of the poet’s verse with glowing embers has a rich Petrarchan pedigree. Sonnet 203 of the Rime sparse prophesies that Petrarch’s verse will infiammare ‘inflame’ future readers. Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo glosses these lines as a fulfilled prophecy: “Il Poe. dice, che questa sua opera . . . dovea essere in tanto pregio apo coloro, che verrebbeno poi” ‘The poet says that his work . . . ought to be valued by those yet to come’ (sig. ccxlixr); and Bernardino Daniello adds that Petrarch’s reputation bears out his prediction: “Ne pronosticò il falso; percioche, che è la sua rime leggendo non s’infiammi?”  ‘He didn’t predict wrongly, since who now reads his poems without being set aflame by them?’ (sig. 110r).

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implication emerging from the present participial noun in “the glowing of such fire.” Poems that follow weigh the claims of this immortality against the circumscribed experience of their author’s association with the Young Man. In the end, poetry survives not because of an author’s wit or originality, but because of his or her work invested in it, to get the outcome and the finish just right.12 Sonnet 74 follows with the conjunctive But, thereby resuming its predecessor’s argument and measuring its effect through an almost off-handed economic calculation:

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But be contented when that fell arrest Without all bail shall carry me away, My life hath in this line some interest, Which for memorial still with thee shall stay. Here the noun bail (French bailler  ‘give’), a financial security “given” to guarantee the trust of someone or something—and a rare word that Shakespeare used both early and late in his career—plays off against the newly minted sixteenth-century noun interest in the following line.13 The bail would appear to be the accumulated sum of the speaker’s efforts to attain immortality. Now, however, he cannot allocate it to ward off personal death. His verse that remains may have some value if it affectively disposes the Young Man to “be contented.” If so, it will have acquired “some interest” for the speaker, too. The meaning of interest functions on two interlocking levels. As a legal term with the conventional meaning of “share” or “title” (as “interest in a business”), it conveys the speaker’s intent to bestow upon the Young Man the gift of his verse to compensate for his death. But interest also conveys the modern idea of “earning” a return on some capital investment. In this sense the speaker’s “line” of verse would constitute a measure of his intellectual capital, with some potential for extra value derived from his writing especially well as opposed to writing just merely at all. The speaker craves recognition for rising above the norm for literary achievement, and he craves it here and now. Poetic immortality may carry some vague interest for him as an imagined continuance after death, but the practical interest that matters most to him is

12.  The sentiment evokes Montaigne’s “You do not die of being sick, you die of being alive” (Essays 3.13, “Of Experience,” trans. Frame, 837). Compare Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 335. 13.  OED, sense 10, citing Henry VIII’s 1548 legislation curbing interest; Shakespeare replicates this sense in MV 1.3.45, 71, 88; and Tim. 1.2.197, 3.4.51, 3.6.106.

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one that he can earn through his work as a writer, to be reinvested after his death in the Young Man’s remembrance.14 As the speaker develops this connection in the second quatrain, his corporeal matter is due “owed” to the earth at burial, but the spiritual endowment of his verse (“spirit,” with an aural pun—“spir’t”/“spear”—on the poet’s name) can accede to the Young Man: “The earth can have but earth, which is his due; / My spirit is thine, the better part of me.” His spirit has in fact a value greater than his corporeal presence. The latter is “Too base of thee to be rememb’red,” registered in a hypometric verse whose absent syllable signals its deflation of value. At this point, in a play of pronominal antecedents that appear to bleed into one another—“The worth of that is that which it contains, / And that is this [i.e., the verse], and this with thee remains”—the speaker affirms the merit of his verse as the residue that remains of his soul (“that which it [i.e., his body] contains”). Here the worth of labor is its exchange value figured in the ostentatious shifting of demonstrative pronouns “this” and “that.” Just as a body is appraised for the soul that it “contains,” so this verse can be appraised as a substitute for the body that it replaces. What counts now is not its remunerative worth but its affective consequence. On the threshold of a new understanding, the speaker questions his credibility in the marketplace of literary production. And in this self-evaluation, the marketplace of literary production is very much on his mind. Seeing himself through the Young Man’s eyes, the speaker assesses whether he’s worthy of the youth. At least part of the problem is that some taint of commercialism has gotten in the way of their relationship. While the Young Man belongs to a social elite, the speaker belongs to a demimonde of poets, artists, musicians, and performers. Though this homo litterarum is, like Petrarch, a homo economicus who survives as a merchant of verse, “inops mercator,” he inhabits a world more sordid than the one the Italian poet knew.15 Alert to the dissolute reputation of men of the theater, the speaker of Sonnets takes pains to represent himself as a respectable poet in his petitions to the Young Man. Sonnet 76, “Why is my verse so barren of new pride, / So far from variation or quick change,” provides an example. Its octave unfolds in a series of three interrogatives (“why . . . why . . . why?”) punctuated in the 1609 Quarto with four question marks, posing both a stylistic and a historical

14.  See Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 152–57. 15. For similarities between author and character, see Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Shakespeare likely drafted this section of Sonnets in 1594–95 just before completing The Merchant of Venice (1596–97).

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problem in relation to the “new pride” of current literary fashion. As lines 3 to 6 span the second half of the first quatrain and the first half of the second quatrain, they appear to lack the rhyme words of a single quatrain and almost resemble blank verse as they aim to disparage “new-found” experiment in favor of a restrained (“noted”—that is, distinctive, or perhaps just merely “knotted” and gnarled) style:

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Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods, and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed? The etymology of “verse” from versare ‘to change, to turn’, signaling the transposition of meter from one line of poetry to another, sharpens the point: if change and variation are essential to the idea of poetry, then how can this verse that the speaker describes as “far from variation” properly be considered as verse at all?16 By what standard or norm does the speaker question his resistance to “variation”? Does it derive from his own distinctive style, utterly impervious to change? Or does it reflect upon some alien style, shared as conventional by many poets? Or is the speaker apologizing for his denunciation of a current mode, even at the risk of flattening out his personal style? These questions trouble the speaker’s relationship to Petrarchan precedent, and in particular his incongruous relationship to Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, whose piratical publication by Thomas Newman in 1591 was followed by a second unauthorized edition published by Matthew Lownes that same year and yet another edition published by Newman shortly afterward. Sonnet 76 initiates an encounter with Sidney that portends its speaker’s dealings with rival poets who follow. The second half of its first quatrain, “Why with the time do I not glance aside / To new-found methods, and to compounds strange,” recalls Astrophil’s indictment of “daintie wits” and “Pindare’s Apes” who “with strange similies enrich each line” (Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 3). Astrophil’s criticism aims at the style of Ronsard, master of extravagant neologisms and compound word formations, a feature that Shakespeare’s speaker isolates in his own compound formation “new-found methods,” which glances at Astrophil’s criticism of “new found Tropes” (sonnet 3) and “Dictionarie’s methode” 16. For the opposition of linguistic variation to the teleology of sex and money, see David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580 –1680 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 108–11.

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(sonnet 15). Is Shakespeare’s speaker emulating Astrophil or mocking him? Sidney’s speaker denounces Petrarch’s discourse only to adopt his own version of it without quite acknowledging the model that it is based upon. Does Shakespeare’s reenact the same evasions and self-deceptions? Or does he make finer distinctions when he censures the Petrarchan craze that followed in Sidney’s wake? These questions haunt Shakespeare’s second quatrain, “Why write I still all one, ever the same, / And keep invention in a noted weed.” Short of repeating exactly the same formulaic diction, it might seem impossible for any poet to write “all one, ever the same” as Astrophil professes to do at the end of his sonnet 90, where “all my words thy beauty doth endite.” Yet Shakespeare’s phrase “noted weed” dents the idea of endless iteration. As a distinctive (“noted”) garment and a “knotted weed,” it refers to a crabbed style that the speaker has cultivated. Even the curious “That euery word doth almost fel my name” in the 1609 Quarto (whose ending most editors emend to “tell my name”) raises questions. In relation to the garden metaphor implied by “weed,” the speaker’s literary reputation (“my name”) might seem a tender growth that his excrescent words strangle—“fell”—or overturn. The eccentricity of his verse can only “tell” or reveal his identity in every turn of phrase, “Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?” The protean, radically changeful style of Sonnets disputes the speaker’s claim that it is “all one, ever the same,” as multiple shifts of meaning within this poem readily demonstrate. But the opposite is also true. For all its changefulness, his style continually reclaims the same ground. At the beginning of the third quatrain, for example, though the acoustic pun of “O know” as “O no” seems to inaugurate a new direction, it only reinforces an argument that the Young Man should have taken to heart: “O know, sweet love, I always write of you, / And you and love are still my argument.” Various meanings of the word “still” spawn equivocation. Its temporal adverbial meaning of “yet, now, unceasingly” conveys a sense of progressive, dynamic, perpetual unfolding, while its descriptive adjectival meaning of “unmoved, unmoving; unchanged, unchanging” conveys a sense of static, retrograde inertia. The speaker addresses this equivocation by embracing it without reserve in yet another equivocation: “Spending again what is already spent.” The metaphor of expense insinuates a new motivation for his resistance to change. As he succumbs to convention despite his efforts to avoid it, he reassures himself that his own “spending” has exchange value. In terms of his clientage with the Young Man, he is performing a service that the latter should reward. One answer to this question “Why write

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I still all one, ever the same” is that his friend wants him to write this way and, as a potential patron, will pay him to do so. It might seem that the speaker has reached a plateau of assurance and self-esteem with his celebration of poetic conventionality in “So all my best is dressing old words new.” The unconventionality of applying Petrarchan figures to male friendship blunts the specter of patronage that turns their relationship into something of a business deal. The dominant focus of sonnets 61–103 shifts at this point from eternizing the Young Man and imputing a special interest and distinctive value to the speaker’s poetry, to framing his poetry in the context of a contemporary market for such verse.17 Their new concern invokes competition in the marketplace and pits the speaker’s chances for success against those of his rivals. As the latter bring their verses wrapped in last month’s broadsheets, he finds his effort to write “all one, ever the same” at an aesthetic and economic crossroads. In sonnet 78 the newly challenged speaker complains that other poets have edged into the Young Man’s milieu and are presenting their work to his approving eye: “As every alien pen hath got my use, / And under thee their poesy disperse.” The dressed-up, mildly disparaging term poesy conveys some of their pretension about portraying their addressees in less-than-forthright terms. Such sophistry and evasions seem all the more acute by comparison with this speaker’s simplicity when he acknowledges the Young Man’s patronage as “thy aid” and “gentle grace” (sonnet 79), “your shallowest help” (sonnet 80), “a poet’s debt” (sonnet 83), and his own “lean penury” (sonnet 84). That the Young Man enjoys the blandishment of rival poets (“Being fond on praise,” sonnet 84) deepens the problem when they stretch their figurations to the limit, “which makes your praises worse.”18 Complaining in sonnet 78 that his friend’s favor toward others has taught “heavy ignorance aloft to fly” and has “added feathers to the learned’s wing,” the speaker ends by confessing his own “rude ignorance.” Recalling Greene’s “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” the trope of “added feathers” casts disparagement upon learned rivals but does little to numb the sting of earlier criticism or the press of current competition. The speaker consequently complains that, with “what strainèd touches 17.  For the relationship of measurement to metrical value, see Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasurement of Renaissance Man (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 41–79. 18.  For the capacity of these sonnets to simulate intellection, see Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 138–42 on sonnet 81, and Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 215–26 on sonnets 82–89.

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rhetoric can lend” (sonnet 82), his rival poets have violated Sidney’s precept to “looke in thy heart and write” (Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 1). Surely his exhortation to “Let him but copy what in you is writ / Not making worse what nature made so clear” (sonnet 84) evokes—even outrageously duplicates—Sidney’s “Then all my deed / But Copying is, what in her Nature writes” (Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 3). Sonnet 86 more explicitly evokes an aesthetics of craftsmanship and skill and its associated labor theory of value. The speaker represents the poetry of at least one rival as a merchant vessel set upon a colonizing venture aimed at the Young Man: “Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, / Bound for the prize of all too precious you.” In the context of “prize” and “precious,” the homophony of “full sail” and “full sale” underlines the pecuniary motivation at stake. Its outcome calls for the Young Man’s bestowal of favor, certainly, but also, the poem argues, a bestowal that’s calibrated to the skill of each contestant. Two competing theories of verse composition—Platonic and Aristotelian—emerge in the second quatrain. The rival poet’s allegation that he has been “by spirits taught to write / Above a mortal pitch” implies a Platonic reliance upon furor and divine inspiration with its concomitant endorsement of innate gifts, favored talents, and special election. At the same time, the verse—“Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write”—poses a metrical difficulty, pointing to technical problems that the speaker aims to address. If we pronounce “spirit” and “spirits” as equally trochaic, then the line will be hypermetric. One solution that preserves the semblance of iambic pentameter is to pronounce “spirit” as monosyllabic (“spir’t”) and “spirits” as disyllabic, and Shakespeare often recurred to this solution in his plays.19 While the rival poet swaggers with a sense of heavenly inspiration, the speaker sets himself to the earthbound task of making a poem with actively sought and patiently acquired skill. The speaker’s answer to the rival poet’s hankering for approval comes in the quatrain’s penultimate line with a resounding “No”: “No, neither he, nor his compeers by night / Giving him aid, my verse astonishèd.” Its final verb “astonishèd” lampoons the antagonist’s claims for divine inspiration. Affirming that neither the rival poet nor his friends, a cabal of self-selected apologists for an elite doctrine of aesthetics, have astonishèd him, the speaker posits a fanciful etymology for the verb as “a-stone-ish” in the sense of “turn to stone, petrify.” With his focus on “stone” summoning Petrarch’s name, the riposte “petrarchizes” his verse in the manner of the Rime sparse, 19.  Booth notes this feature, Shake-speare’s Sonnets, 289, and refers to Edwin A. Abbott, Shakespearian Grammar (London: Macmillan, 1870), who in turn cites forty-four examples in all phases of composition on 359–63.

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its most inventive continental imitators, and its foremost English inheritors. His couplet reproves the Young Man for commending his rival: “But when your countenance filled up his line, / Then lacked I matter, that enfeebled mine.” The double play on “filled” as “filed, sharpened, polished” as well as “packed, stuffed” sparks a sense of humor and defrays his belligerence. The Young Man’s wealth and good looks inspire rivals to bloated encomium and empty verse, but they in turn motivate the speaker to sharpen his verse with Horace’s file and to flesh it out with the techniques of Quintilian’s copia.20 The speaker writes not as one moved by any presumptive furor, inspiration, or “rage,” but as one motivated by a concern to teach, nurture, and persuade the Young Man to more judicious behavior, even though the youth pays scant attention to him. Sonnets 87 and 88 announce a rupture between the speaker and his friend, and in both cases the argument takes an economic turn. Sonnet 87, for example, opens with a defiant “Farewell,” compromised by the admission “thou art too dear for my possessing, / And like enough thou knowst thy estimate.” Here the speaker calculates both the inflationary cost of his emotional attachment to the Young Man and the deflationary relation between the youth’s response and his own unworthiness. The verb “estimate,” affording one of the poem’s only two regular iambic line-endings, yields to a kind of number-crunching in its rhythm.21 The other iambic line-ending is the rhyming “detérminàte” in line 4, a late rare word in Shakespeare’s lexicon, which points to a possible late revision.22 The poem’s second quatrain, with each of its line endings in an unaccented eleventh syllable, has its speaker express dismay at the Young Man’s calculated indifference toward his good will: “For how do I hold thee but by thy granting.” The follow-up verse—“And for that riches where is my deserving?”—presents the speaker’s unworthiness as just cause for the Young Man’s scorn. The unbalanced cadence of these verses, with parallel emphases on their personal pronouns in “bút by thý  gránting” and “whére is mý  desérving,” accentuates the imbalance in the protagonists’ relationship. The third quatrain attributes the Young Man’s earlier favor to mistaken assumptions: “Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing, / Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking.” The prominently placed “Or” opens the possibility that either the speaker or the Young Man—and perhaps 20.  MacDonald P. Jackson argues for a late dating (1598–1600) after Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598) with its comparative assessments of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chapman. See his “Francis Meres and the Cultural Contexts of Shakespeare’s Rival Poet Sonnets,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 56 (2005): 224–46. 21.  See Vendler’s alternative analysis of the poem’s feminine line-endings, Art, 380–83. 22. See TN 2.1.19, Oth. 4.2.219, and H8 2.4.173.

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both—overestimates the other’s value, while the syntactic ambiguity of me as either subject or object of “mistaking” suggests that each is deluded about rights to absolute ownership and temporal possession of the other. As the next line implies, the entire quatrain dramatizes the work of misprision: “So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, / Comes home again, on better judgment making.” The concluding couplet extends this assessment to the idea of sovereignty, which defines a title of absolute ownership: “Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: / In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.” The trope of the dream underscores the speaker’s fantasy of dominion over the Young Man, even while the pluperfect “have I had” undermines this fantasy by relegating it to the remote past. The illusion of sovereignty has already begun to fade as the speaker awakens to reality.23 Sonnet 88 opens with a suggestion that the Young Man has deliberately “disposed” himself to misjudgment, and yet the speaker equally deliberately defends the Young Man, refractory to his own interests: “Upon thy side against myself I’ll fight.” Confessing to the warp in his own character, “With mine own weakness being best acquainted,” he now launches upon a self-incriminating narrative about his personal transgressions: “Upon thy part I can set down a story / Of faults concealed, wherein I am attainted.” As he baldly asserts, his “double vantage” of deeming the Young Man more valuable than himself and then of rescinding this evaluation depends not upon his friend’s virtue, but upon his own skill with words: “The injuries that to myself I do, / Doing thee vantage, double vantage me.” The very act of addressing the youth as an object of affection while deferring to his sovereignty triggers a strain in his account as one party acquires the other’s weakness. With respect to the Young Man, the older man seems a figure of rhetorical authority, yet in relation to the youth’s status and prestige he remains subordinate. With respect to the speaker, the youth seems callous and deceitful, yet in relation to his mentor’s worldly experience he seems naive. A similar juxtaposition of worldly experience and self-constraint, of callous deceit and unaffected naïveté, informs the poem printed with Sonnets in 1609, A Lover’s Complaint.24 The latter’s cross-references with Sonnets are 23.  In Alessandro Vellutello’s reorganized numbering, Petrarch’s sonnet 248 follows sonnet 212, an anniversary poem that marks the poet’s twentieth year with Laura, showing the lover in a state of delusion: “Et beato in sogno dice, per non poter esser in quello alcuna vera beatitudine, ma solamente illusioni & errori” ‘Blessed in sleep means not to be in any true state of blessedness, but only in a state of illusion and error’ (sig. 112v). 24. In Shakespeare, “A Lover’s Complaint,” and John Davies of Hereford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Brian Vickers attributes its authorship to Davies rather than Shakespeare, an attribution deftly refuted by MacDonald P. Jackson as caught in “a rip-tide of error” in Determining the Shakespeare Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 129–218, quoted from page 4.

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many, but those that capture strong attention characterize poetry as a matter of polish and skill, craftsmanship and technique. The Young Man who seduces the Maid in this poem is a master of social polish and verbal skill, and what he can do with them wreaks havoc upon the Maid. Her response in such circumstances is rage (lines 55 and 160), which Sonnets identifies with poetic furor. Correspondingly the Young Man’s “register of lies” (line 52), through which he plots to take her virginity, identifies with rhetorical mastery: “He had the dialect and different skill, / Catching all passions in his craft of will” (lines 125–26). The Maid disparages the latter as “merely but art, / And bastards of his foul adulterate heart” (lines 173–74). She misjudges, that is, the power of his craft (“what a hell of witchcraft,” line 288), dismissing it to her peril in her circular argument as “but an art of craft” (line 295). That this dismissal has material consequences is registered in economic tropes.25 The tears that she sheds fall into the river “like usury applying wet to wet” (line 40), and the reputation that she has lost was something that she possessed absolutely, “my own fee-simple” that “with his art in youth and youth in art / Threw my affections in his charmèd power” (lines 144–46). Recent commentary has noted the poem’s Spenserian echoes, and they become a stand-in for the poem’s relation to Petrarchism.26 The Young Man’s supposedly unrequited lovers have regaled him with “tributes” and “talents” (lines 197–204) in the form of precious jewels. Each has an economic equivalent, “Figuring that they their passions likewise lent me” (line 199). Along with gems come “deep-brained sonnets that did amplify / Each stone’s dear nature, worth, and quality” (lines 209–10). The Young Man promises them to the Maid to further his seduction: “I hoard them not, / But yield them up where I myself must render: / That is to you, my origin and ender” (lines 220–22). Their conveyance transmits a distorted sacral resonance (“Take all these similes to your own command, / Hallowed with sighs that burning lungs did raise,” lines 227–28), magnified by the seducer’s treasured “device” sent to him by a nun whose “Religious love put out Religion’s eye” (line 250). With his Amoretti published in 1595, Spenser tamed Petrarch’s religious scruples by directing the force of human love to companionate marriage. Shakespeare further secularizes this force by directing it to the exercise of mutual respect. Sonnet 94, “They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none,” 25.  See Christopher Warley, Reading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 29–46. 26.  See, for example, Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 239–66, and, in relation to Shakespeare’s other works, Heather Dubrow, “Authorizers in Henry V, A Lover’s Complaint, and Othello,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s “Lover’s Complaint,” ed. Shirley Sharon-Zisser, (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 121–36.

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captures this direction at the beginning of its second quatrain: “They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces.” I think it significant that as this part of Sonnets draws to its end, we find a strong intervention from Petrarch’s Rime sparse in a pair of poems about the speaker’s separation from the Young Man. These poems, sonnets 97 (“How like a winter hath my absence been”) and 98 (“From you have I been absent in the spring”), suggest a fresh start after the dramatic convulsions of the rival poet and renunciation sonnets. As a pair, both develop the topos of seasonal change that figures richly in Petrarch’s sonnet 310, when after Laura’s death “Zephiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena” ‘Zephyrus returns and leads back the fine weather’, and the speaker laments: “Ma per me, lasso, tornano i più gravi / sospiri” ‘But to me, alas, come back heavier sighs’. The English adaptation of Petrarch’s poem by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, “The soote season, that bud and blome furth brings”—appearing prominently as sonnet 2 in Richard Tottel’s anthology of Songes and Sonnettes (1557)—offers a flashpoint for Shakespeare’s sonnets 97 and 98.27 We might note that Surrey’s poem carries no reference to the death of a beloved, but instead, like Shakespeare’s poems, it refers to the speaker’s absence. Shakespeare’s development of the theme—reminiscent of Surrey’s—pursues a series of rhetorical corrections signaled by “And yet” in the second quatrain: “And yet this time removed was summer’s time.” The speaker revises his earlier impression of “old December’s bareness” by correlating it with the fullness of “summer’s time,” but he also positions that “time” for a notional correction. The season, it turns out, is not “summer” but rather, as the following line specifies, “teeming autumn big with rich increase.” And yet his interior season remains winter, the landscape of bare branches and austerity at the heart of things. And so another correction follows in the third quatrain with “Yet this abundant issue seemed to me / But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit.” The harvest appears orphaned because the inseminating springtime has long since passed. Yet another correction follows as we learn that its passing is not just temporal but also situational: “And thou away, the very birds are mute.” The speaker, now in the role of a surrogate father-figure, turns out to experience a kind of orphaning when he is separated from the youth, struggling with some of life’s cruelest disharmonies. He appears to have no choice but to suffer his friend’s absence. Bound by professional duties, and also by the restraints of social deference to

27. Quotations from Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Others, ed. Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (London: Penguin Classics, 2011).

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a privileged Young Man, he represents himself moving through sonnet 97 as though against his will. Sonnet 98 follows with closer affinities to Petrarch’s model, approximating its mythological subtexts. The argument begins by contrasting the personification of “proud-pied April” with the aged “heavy Saturn” who impulsively “laughed and leapt with him”: From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him. In the second quatrain the speaker adjusts this figure with a casual reference to his competence as a storyteller:

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Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flow’rs in odor and in hue, Could make me any summer’s story tell. By contrast with the general evocations of flora and fauna in Surrey’s sonnet, this poem recalls Petrarch’s specific mythic allusions. “The lays of birds” evokes the latter’s Procne and Philomela, and the “sweet smell” of flowers evokes floral Persephone. Shakespeare’s “lily’s white” and “deep vermilion in the rose”—the unique occurrence of “vermilion” in his canon—echoes the pairing of white and vermilion in Petrarch’s sonnet 310, “Et primavera candida et vermiglia” ‘And Spring all white and vermilion’.28 Shakespeare’s speaker as much as winks at the coincidence when, with a nonchalance that belies his craft, he echoes his own qualifiers—“but . . . but,” “you, you”— midline in the second half of the third quatrain: “They were but sweet, but figures of delight, / Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.” The more he tries to explain away these “figures” (“but sweet,” “but figures of delight,” “you, you pattern”), the more he calls attention to them by summoning a distinctly rhetorical terminology (“figures,” “pattern”). His resolution is soothing, elegant, familiar, yet booby-trapped with surprises. These poems are then followed by the peculiar fifteen-line sonnet 99, “The forward violet thus did I chide,” whose extra verse exceeds the boundaries of standard sonnet form. Modern editors regard this poem an early text

28.  See Petrarch’s conventional pairing in Rime 44.2, 46.1, 127.71, 131.9, 157.12, and 210.3.

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left unrevised, whether negligently or deliberately, as one that the poet just couldn’t get wholly right. The poem’s superfluous verse is likely its first line, which constitutes a directive for reading the sonnet rather than a functioning component of its rhetorical argument. The speaker is addressing a “forward violet” and is berating it for having derived its fragrance and colors from the Young Man’s breath and complexion. Once the reader catches this intent, the argument appears clear enough. But if the poem had begun directly with what now appears as its second line, “Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,” the attributive “sweet thief ” (referring to the violet, but echoing from sonnet 48 in reference to the Young Man) would generate a momentary confusion. The poet solves the problem by appending an extra verse to explain the poem’s conceit while accentuating its Petrarchan contrivance. It’s as though Shakespeare were allowing himself to be caught red-handed in a correction, if not an experiment, opening a window to his workshop and providing a glimpse of his efforts to assemble a manuscript of poems, many of them fully formed, some yet to be drafted, and still others awaiting revision as time might allow. The superfluity of sonnet 99 becomes a marker of Shakespeare’s concern with the craft of poetry. In this sense, its limitations call attention to differences between the efforts of amateur versifiers and the craftsmanship of experienced poets. Shakespeare’s sonnets represent their speaker in a world of enterprise and negotiation where to an important degree he acknowledges his authorial dependence upon a determinate order of patronage. His poems pursue a Petrarchan modality favored by this order, even though some of them represent their speaker in pursuit of literary recognition through alternative means and different modalities. From this perspective, Sonnets reveals a strain between competing claims of enterprise and negotiation on the one hand and privileged sponsorship and patronage on the other. The collection in turn connects with the poetic efforts of other late Elizabethan dramatists (as the next section of this chapter will argue, Jonson, Marston, and George Chapman) whose contributions and innovations emerge alongside those that he would continue to make between 1599 and 1604. The convulsions of sonnets 87 and 88, the sense of a fresh start in sonnets 97 and 98, and the confusions of sonnet 99 limn Shakespeare’s indecision about constructing a narrative sequence from initially unrelated sonnets. The poet might have thought that by the mid- to late 1590s his personal history and that of Elizabethan England were firmly shaped. The achievements of a now aging queen, the growth and diversification of London’s economy, and his own ascendance as a shareholder and co-owner of the Globe all made for

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a sense of the end of an era and the definitive sealing of his authorial self. Poems are not placeholders for biographical revelations, but they can and do convey the writer’s moods and dramatic affect. The speaker sometimes speaks as though much of his life had gone by and there was little more to anticipate. But the first decade of the approaching century would offer more and a chance to revise some of his earlier work.

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Ch ap ter 3

Owning Up to Furor

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The “Poets’ War” and Its Aftermath in Sonnets 100 –126

Shakespeare drafted sonnets 104 to 126 in all likelihood some eight or more years after he composed his earliest sonnets. Most of the former belong to a period (around 1599–1605, plausibly June 1603–April 1604 during the closure of theaters because of plague) when the poet-playwright faced competition posed by a new generation of classically educated poets and playwrights. Ben Jonson’s revival of Horatian literary precepts spurred John Marston, George Chapman, and Thomas Dekker to respond sometimes rancorously to his imperious tenets. Opinions differ as to the extent of what Dekker called a “terrible Poetomachia [poets’ war],” but for much of 1599–1601 these poet-playwrights clamored for attention by satirizing one another.1 The effects of their rivalry bore an 1.  Jonson irritated Marston with his call to formal discipline in Every Man in His Humor (1598), which itself exploited Chapman’s comedy of humors, A Humorous Day’s Mirth (1597). In 1598 Marston represented Jonson as the pretentious Chrisoganus in his Histriomastix. Jonson replied with a parody of Marston’s style by the clownish Clove in Every Man out of His Humor (1599) and the sybaritic Hedon in Cynthia’s Revels (1600). Marston then lampooned Jonson as Brabant Senior in Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1601) and as Lampatho Doria in What You Will (1601). Jonson hit back in The Poetaster (1601) by modeling the prolix Crispinus upon Marston, the subservient Demetrius upon Dekker, the dissolute Ovid upon Elizabethan love poets, and the high-minded Horace upon himself. Dekker entered the fray with his Satiromastix (1601) by representing Horace as a workaday hack. See James E. Bednarz, “Representing Jonson: Historiomastix and the Origin of the Poets’ War,” Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 1–30, and Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: 264

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imprint upon late Elizabethan and early Jacobean poetry and drama. The quarrel hardly concerned the ethical import of satire—each party agreed upon its moral usefulness—but it did raise contentious questions about style and modality, whether acerbic, esoteric, and abstruse (Marston, Chapman, Dekker) or tempered by classical decorum and comic detachment ( Jonson). For the most part, Shakespeare remained an outside observer of the squabble—though Jaques in As You Like It (1599), Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1601), and the Homeric heroes of Troilus and Cressida (1602) recall in diverse ways the flushed humors of Jonson’s egotistical characters, the self-absorbed vanity of Lampatho Doria in Marston’s What You Will (1601), and the contentious protagonists in Chapman’s translation of the Iliad (books 1–2 and 7–11, 1598; completed 1611). Eventually the warring parties reconciled, and in the process Shakespeare joined with Jonson, Marston, and Chapman in contributing to a volume of poetry in 1601 that included and was named after a long mixed-genre poem by the obscure Robert Chester, Love’s Martyr. The latter poem, originally published ten years earlier, was now being reissued in homage to Chester’s recently knighted employer, Sir John Salusbury, whose allegiance to Elizabeth after Essex’s rebellion garnered the contributors’ respect.2 Chester (or possibly the publisher Edward Blount) might have asked Jonson to recruit “the best and chiefest of our moderne writers” (as its appendix proclaims) to accompany Love’s Martyr with its account of Nature’s plea for the solitary Phoenix to reproduce by mating with a Welsh Turtledove (honoring Salusbury’s Welsh ancestry).3 Four unsigned poems, one untitled poem by Shakespeare, four poems by Marston, one by Chapman, and four by Jonson fill seventeen pages at the end of the volume. Shakespeare’s contribution, now usually referred to as “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” signals his at least marginal interest in settling the “poets’ war” (a bit of theatrical controversy might have been good for business, but too much would have been bad), as well as in collaborating with and competing amicably against its major participants. Every offering in the volume augurs a new poetic mode emergent at the turn of the century as each author relinquishes satire to embrace classical epideictic verse that commends Columbia University Press, 2001), especially 105–33. See also Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (London: Methuen, 2010), 126–44; James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 133–39; and David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 63–85. 2.  See James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Truth of Love: The Mystery of “The Phoenix and the Turtle” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 71–103. 3.  Quotations are from Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: or Rosalins Complaint: Allegorically shadowing the truth of Love, in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle (London: Imprinted [by Richard Field] for E.B., 1601), here 165.

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Salusbury. Marston’s “Perfectioni Hymnus” mounts a deferential argument that admits its own insufficiency: “Now feebler Genius end thy slighter riming” (175). Chapman’s “Peristeros, or the Male Turtle” emblematizes Salusbury as a turtledove by elaborating upon shadowy tropes of “truth eterniz’d in a constant heart” (176).4 Jonson’s four poems—his Horatian “Praeludium,” “Epode,” “Ode ενθουσιαςική,” and his song “Now, after all, let no man”—mark the author’s breaking of new ground, confirmed that year by his tribute to the critical sanity of Horace in The Poetaster (SR 21 December 1601).5 Here the Roman poet disparages fashionable love elegies by Ovid (functioning as a stand-in for Petrarchism: “O, in no labyrinth can I safelier err, / Than when I lose myself in praising her,” 1.3.45–46), but he also denounces the satire of poetasters (modeled on Marston and Dekker) for spewing poison without providing moral instruction (“Such as will bite / And gnaw their absent friends, not cure their fame,” 5.3.285–86). Evoking richly detailed lyrics from an earlier decade, Shakespeare’s contribution aspires to greater delight than the cold comfort of Chapman’s or Marston’s forced classicism or the initial gestures of Jonson’s plain style. Tellingly, it establishes a link with Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser by evoking Matthew Roydon’s “Elegie” for Sidney, first published in the anthology The Phoenix Nest (1593) and later reprinted with Spenser’s Astrophel at the end of Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1595).6 Roydon reports that “The Turtle dove, with Tunes of ruthe, / Shewd feeling passion of his death” and foresees that Sidney’s spirit will rise as from the phoenix’s ashes, “an offspring neere that kinde, / But hardly a peere to that, I doubt” (lines 192–213). Shakespeare’s verse form resurrects Sidney’s spirit by deploying the latter’s trochaic tetrameter and avian imagery from the Eighth Song of Astrophil and Stella, “In a grove most rich of shade, / Where birds wanton musicke made.” Like others in the volume, the poem departs from its author’s customary styles and modalities, in order to declare its poetic autonomy through enigmatic conceits

4. Shakespeare may have known Chapman, Salusbury’s colleague at Middle Temple, since a performance of Comedy of Errors at Grey’s Inn, Christmas 1594. Marston arrived at Middle Temple in 1594, fluent in Italian through his Florentine mother, Maria Guarsi; see Philip Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 83–124. 5.  The first two of Jonson’s poems reappear in The Forrest (1616 Folio) as poems X and XI. Jonson addressed the “Ode” in manuscript to Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Quotations are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6. See The Phoenix Nest, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931); this anthology also contains a fair sample of sonnets by Philippe Desportes and Ronsard translated by Thomas Lodge, William Smith, and others; see 73, 76–77, 79–80, 81, 87, 90–92, 93, 96, and 102, with their endnotes.

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and moral abstraction.7 Framed first in deflationary trochees (lines 1–52) to interrogate the willingness of the phoenix and turtledove to immolate themselves as “Two distincts, division none” (line 27), and then in a jaunty monorhyme (lines 53–67) to counterpoint Reason’s lament that “Truth and beauty burièd be” (line 64), its meters call attention to their own competing claims. In the genre of a priestly “anthem” (line 21), its speaker moves from the world of coterie verse to one of public engagement as he intones upon paradoxes relating to love and constancy. Doing so, he challenges the logic of economic-minded Property (“Property was thus appalled / That the self was not the same,” lines 37–38) and of logic-laden Reason (“Reason in itself confounded / Saw division grow together,” lines 41–42). The word “Property” likely carries its early philosophical meaning of “the condition of being owned by or belonging to the same person or thing” (OED 1) or “an attribute or quality belonging to a thing or person” (OED 5) rather than its economic meaning of “that which one owns; a possession [usually material] or possessions collectively” (OED 2, with few examples before the seventeenth century). Still, the economic register applies to Shakespeare’s context (the lovers are possessive of each other, as though claiming ownership over each other), and it contributes to the challenge that confounds Reason (as two become one). The situation harbors legal and political implications (the lovers defy social and economic conventions as well as philosophical and theological ones), and in this way it projects concerns that emerge in sonnets 104–26, marking the author’s transition toward these later poems. Hieatt, Hieatt, and Prescott note that Shakespeare’s sonnets 100–103 betray the “suggestion of papering over a gap” in the published order of the 1609 Quarto.8 Their concentration of the poet’s early rare words links some of them to previous poems about the Young Man, while occasional late rare words introduce the possibility of their composition or revision after 1599. Their thematic focus upon the speaker’s writing block works as a buffer zone between the previous group of Young Man poems (sonnets 61–99) and the following one (sonnets 104–26). Sonnets 100–101 appear further connected to each other by their address to a “truant muse” who has abandoned the speaker, leaving him bereft of poetic inspiration and—in this void—dependent upon exercising his acquired skills and techniques. In

7.  For the poem’s modulation of art, religion, politics, and commerce see Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 173–97. 8.  A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott, “When Did Shakespeare Write Sonnets 1609?” Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 96.

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sonnet 100 he wonders why this muse has squandered gifts of poetic furor on less ambitious writers—“Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song”— mobilizing a lopsided economy of inspiration to “lend base subjects light.” Prevailing upon the muse in economic fairness to “redeem / In gentle numbers time so idly spent,” he reaffirms that the Young Man’s receptive “ear” motivates him to “both skill and argument.” He serves notice, that is, that his own professional resources will see him through this rough patch. A startling feature of this poem at the end of its third quatrain is the word “Satire” (emphasized in the 1609 Quarto by being capitalized and italicized), dispatching the speaker’s muse to “be a Satire to decay, / And make time’s spoils despisèd everywhere.” Here the word functions in a now obsolete usage that the OED cites (II.4) from John Harington’s Ulysses upon Aiax (1598) as “a satirical person, satirist.” Its profile calls attention to the currency of satire in London at the turn of the century, which spurred an ineffective Bishops’ Order against satires and epigrams (1 June 1599), as well as to the speaker’s affinity with a guild of poet-playwrights (among them Jonson, Marston, and Chapman) dedicated to its cultivation. But this focus misrepresents his primary target. In “be a Satire to decay,” he is urging his muse to denounce time’s ravages upon the Young Man while he eternizes the latter’s fame through poetry. Sonnet 101 iterates this goal. Rebuking the muse for hewing to a Platonic (and antipoetic) dictum that “Truth needs no colour, . . . / Beauty no pencil,” he counters it by affirming his own rhetorical skill: “Then do thy office, muse, I teach thee how / To make him seem long hence as he shows now.” The phrase “long hence” implies that he no longer writes in privacy for the Young Man. By publishing his poetry for posterity, he looks professionally toward a broader readership that will acclaim his accomplishment as much as his friend’s attributes. Sonnet 102 disputes the notion that the speaker needs to publish his verse: “That love is merchandised, whose rich esteeming / The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.” By contrast, it justifies his flight from the marketplace on grounds that “wild music burthens every bough, / And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.” He now appeals to the mythic figure of Philomela, an exemplar of mellifluous verse who falls silent “in growth of riper days.” Sonnet 103 sharpens this retreat as it circumscribes the speaker’s relationship with the Young Man: “For to no other pass my verses tend, / Than of your graces and your gifts to tell.” The verb “tell” points outwardly toward publication, but also inwardly toward tallying up the Young Man’s reciprocal “gifts” to the poet. Grounded in an awareness of the marketplace, and deeply conscious of economic forces averse to his old-style preferences, the speaker questions the commercial value of disseminating his verse in print.

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Much in the speaker’s attitude depends upon the timing of his composition. Hieatt, Hieatt, and Prescott’s chronology reveals a density of late rare Shakespearean words in sonnets 104–26, pointing toward their inception at the beginning of the seventeenth century. As a group these poems chronicle Shakespeare’s rejoinder to the satiric and epideictic styles of Jonson, Marston, and Chapman. Allusive references to James I’s coronation in June 1603 and his royal pardon of Elizabeth I’s detainees in the Tower provide evidence for dating sonnet 107, while further references to “kingly” in sonnet 114 and the king’s “canopy” in sonnet 125 imply their completion after James’s accession. Yet for all their inclination toward types of moral observation associated with Jonsonian classicism, these poems affirm Shakespeare’s continued investment in the then out-of-fashion fourteen-line Elizabethan form. From this perspective sonnet 104, “To me, fair friend, you never can be old,” ushers in a new part of the sequence. Recycling the Petrarchan topos of fleeting time from the procreation and eternizing poems to the Young Man, the speaker offers a subjective impression about his friend’s youthfulness as it appears to him if not to anyone else. When juxtaposed against “fair friend,” the phrase “to me” insinuates a contrast or opposition between the speaker and someone else (probably the Young Man). The Young Man is growing older, but—as the ontological untruth of “you never can be old” implies—the speaker vigorously contests this charge at the expense of reason and all evidence of the senses. Whether he’s responding to imputations by his friend or to those by competing poets, the speaker bases his defense upon an earlier Petrarchan poetics. The poem’s models once more suggest Petrarch’s sonnet 248, “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura” ‘Whoever wishes to see how much Nature’, with touches of Petrarch’s anniversary poems to Laura. Complex wordplay links these models. For example, the play on “I” and “eye” in the first quatrain associates the speaker’s own person (“I”) with the Young Man’s point of view (“your eye”) in an act of perception (“I eyed”) whose phonic cadence signals affirmation and assent (aye, aye, ayed): “For as you were when first your eye I eyed, / Such seems your beauty still.” The technique reprises Petrarch’s fascination with vocalic repetition in his sonnet 248, as in “costei, / ch’è sola un sol” ‘she who alone is a sun’, as well as the play of anaphora cultivated by other poets, such as Ronsard whose sonnet 8 in Les Amours Shakespeare echoes: “Lorsque mon oeil pour t’oeillader s’amuse” ‘When my eye amuses itself eyeing you’. The word “still” resounds in the sestet, but with a shift from its adverbial meaning (“even now”) in line 3 to an adjectival meaning (“quiet, motionless”) in line 11: “So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand / Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived.”

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This shift from a temporal to a descriptive mode clinches the poem’s argument as “still” insinuates a lack of change or motion belied by the passage of time. The parenthetical “methinks” affirms a subjective dimension that the independent verbs “hath motion” and “may be deceived” call into question. The Young Man’s qualities only seem to remain unchanged after three years. In reality, nothing escapes the mutations wrought by time; and the speaker deludes himself if he thinks otherwise. Other forms of wordplay extend through the poem. The word three, for example, repeated three times in close articulation with the “process of the seasons,” designates the third anniversary of their meeting: “Three winters cold, / Have from the forests shook three summers pride, / Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned.” The second quatrain ends with a concrete reference to two specific months (April, June) and a repetition of the word “first” from the poem’s second line: “Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned, / Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.” “Yet” with its temporal adverbial meaning of “even now” in line 8 yields in line 9 to its conjunctive meaning of “nonetheless”: “Ah yet doth beauty, like a dial hand, / Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived.” The phrase “steal from his figure” invites a supplementary meaning with the rhetorical term figure. Time not only robs the Young Man of his physical beauty, but it also chips away at the poem’s figural artifice. The speaker’s eye is deceived, and so too is his faith in the durability of poetic style. The speaker needs a readership that will judge his poem beyond the fashions of time, a requisite that prompts his shift from the familiar and singular thou to the formal and possibly plural you: “For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred, / Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.” For this readership the Young Man’s excellence will belong to the past, a matter finished, complete, beyond transformation, and indifferent to any further pressure of time. Critics in the speaker’s era may disparage his retrograde style, but those in the future might judge the outcome differently. Significantly, however, the poem’s readership is unbred, either “unborn” (as “ere you were born” in the final line would imply) or “uncouth”—or perhaps both—and hence powerless to judge true excellence. Here a conceptual echo of “Ma se più tarda, avrà da pianger sempre” ‘But if he delays too long he shall have reason to weep forever’ from Petrarch’s sonnet 248 imbues this poem with a reminder of its fragile beauty as well as of the friend’s inevitable mortality. I’ve already suggested Shakespeare’s intimations of this topos (“cosa bella mortal passa e non duro” ‘this beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure’) in the eternizing sonnets 64, 65, and 73. There the poet’s tropes become victims of spoliation, directing the reader’s

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attention toward their decomposing efforts to win the Young Man’s favor amid uncertainty. Here the speaker reverses this direction and projects his artistry back upon the Young Man as a paragon of excellence who “never can be old.” As in the Rime sparse where Laura epitomizes such excellence before succumbing to her death in sonnet 267, “Oime il bel viso” ‘Alas the lovely face’, so in Sonnets the Young Man epitomizes it—despite all his failings—up through the precipitately foreshortened sonnet 126, “O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy pow’r / Dost hold time’s fickle glass.” This happens, not because he’s a steadfast exemplar, but because in an age such as the present—and with a shift in perspective toward his freshness and vigor— he stands out against the obloquy of his times, against even the speaker’s self-inculpating ruination. Sonnet 105 shelters the stylishly mannerist qualities of this Petrarchism under attack, along with the Petrarchan thematics of idolizing the beloved: “Let not my love be called idolatry, / Nor my belovèd as an idol show.” As it happens, idolatry and idol are generally rare words in Shakespeare’s lexicon, and both of them occur in an anti-Petrarchan context in Troilus and Cressida (1602).9 The first figures in the debate between Hector and Troilus on the reasonableness of returning Helen to Menelaus (Hector’s “She is not worth what she doth cost. / . . . ’Tis mad idolatry / To make the service greater than the god,” 2.2.51–57, against Troilus’s willingness “to stand firm by honor,” 2.2.68). The second figures in Achilles’s display of vainglory when he falls for Ulysses’s trick of holding Ajax and others “an idol more than he” (2.3.180), earning Thersites’s contempt as a “picture of what thou seem’st, and idol of idiot-worshippers” (5.1.6). In sonnet 105, a revaluation of “constancy” as a positive good supplants the Petrarchan resonance of “idolatry” as a human overvaluation of some limited good: “Therefore my verse to constancy confined, / One thing expressing, leaves out difference.”10 Against the Jonsonian plain style, this revaluation clears a space for rhetorical variation: “Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument, / Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words.” Recalling the Sidneian poetics of sonnet 76 (“Why write I still all one, ever the same”), its rhetorical effect derives from the Petrarchan fusion of older and newer, ancient and modern literary values.

 9. In addition to Troilus, “idolatry” figures in Shakespeare’s early plays: TGV 4.4.195, LLL 4.3.70, Rom. 2.1.156, and MND 1.1.109; “idol” figures in Ven. 212, TGV 4.4.129, H5 4.1.217, TN 3.4.332; the related “idolatrous” figures in AW W 1.1.93. 10.  For parallels between the play and Sonnets, see Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, 252–56.

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An example of this fusion informs Shakespeare’s sonnet 106, whose tropes juxtapose ancient representations against modern ones. The poem’s octave frames them in its opening and closing lines:

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When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights . . . I see their ántique pen would have expressed Ev’n such a beauty as you master now. Embedded within these lines is a history of literary representation from earlier times (incarnated in the Spenserian archaism “fairest wights”) encompassing classical antiquity (instantiated by an “antique pen”) and directed toward beauty in both sexes (conveyed in “praise of ladies dead and lovely knights”).11 This history implicitly embraces, among “ladies dead,” Homer’s Helen, Ovid’s Corinna, Petrarch’s Laura, and, among “lovely knights,” Chaucer’s Troilus, but also and especially Spenser’s “famous warriors of the anticke world” from the incipit of sonnet 69 in Amoretti. The latter offers a striking template for Shakespeare’s equivalent quatrain as it exalts the preeminence of Aristotelian craft over Platonic inspiration. With its eye upon “eternity”—or, at least in terms of effect, upon “all posterity”—Spenser’s poem tallies its value according to the canons of time: “Even this verse vowd to eternity, / shall be thereof immortall moniment.” It is an achievement, in the poem’s final verse, “gotten at last with labour and long toyle.” The poet’s success owes nothing to any spurious infusion of furor but everything to patience, perseverance, and no small cultivation of verbal skill. So too the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnet disparages other literary precedents whose styles of “prefiguring” the Young Man prove tenuous. This usually happens when their origins in Platonic ideas downplay craftsmanship and technique: “And for they looked with but divining eyes, / They had no skill enough your worth to sing.” The “worth” of the poem proves directly proportional to the “skill enough” that shapes it. Palpable reminiscences of Spenser in sonnet 106 evoke yet another Elizabethan poet. It is Samuel Daniel, whose sonnet 52 from Delia, “Let others sing of Knights and Palladines,” complicates the “aged accents and vntimely words” of bygone literary models. Son of a professional musician and a former matriculant at Oxford, he came to the attention of Sidney’s sister Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, when twenty-eight of his sonnets appeared

11.  See Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, 207–38.

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in Newman’s unauthorized edition of Astrophil and Stella, under the heading of “Poems and Sonnets of Sundrie Other Noble Men and Gentlemen, the Author of this Poem SD.” Perhaps complicit in this event, Daniel protested it as a betrayal and proceeded to revise, rearrange, and augment these poems in his sonnet sequence Delia in 1592, and to republish it with minor corrections the same year. In 1594 he once more expanded the sequence and revised twenty sonnets. For his first collected works in 1601 he again revised his sonnets and added two new ones. We have here the outlines of a new professionalism whose significance for Shakespeare was important. Unlike Daniel who left a public record of his revisions in print (notably so in his Civil Wars), Shakespeare revised his sonnets in private, withholding them from publication until they took shape. In this regard, he emulated Spenser, who likewise revised in private his Faerie Queene, Complaints, and Amoretti. Then, as Daniel expanded his repertoire across several genres, he received patronage from the Countess of Pembroke, Lord Mountjoy, the Countess of Cumberland, and the Earl of Hertford; possibly through the influence of the Countess of Bedford, he became Licenser for the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1604; and in 1607 he was appointed a groom of Queen Anne’s Privy Chamber. By contrast, although Shakespeare courted the attention of the Earl of Southampton with Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), he abandoned this pursuit after becoming in 1595 a sharer in Lord Chamberlain’s Men and thereafter an investor in the new Globe Theater. In this regard, he carried out his professionalism through commercial ventures in the public sphere, independent of private support. Equally important as the “Poets’ War” was winding down, he continued to define his artistic differences from Jonson, Marston, and Chapman. Sonnet 107, “Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul,” deepens his response to Jonson’s confident classicism. It seems no accident that “prophetic” is a distinctively late rare word in his lexicon, building upon but also obscuring the idea of “prophecies” in sonnet 106.12 Here the speaker acknowledges that neither his foreboding nor that “Of the wide world . . . / Can yet the lease of my true love control, / Supposed as forfeit to a cónfined doom.” The phrase “cónfined doom” has been taken to refer to Elizabeth’s sentencing of both Southampton and Pembroke to the Tower in 1601. This poem counters her decree by arguing that nothing can limit the duration of “my true love” (construed as the speaker’s emotional attachment to the Young Man) or hinder the reciprocity that “my true love” (construed as the

12.  “Prophetic” occurs in Jn. 3.4.126, Ham. 1.5.41, Tro. 2.2.103, Oth. 3.4.69, and Mac. 1.3.79.

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Young Man himself ) might offer to the speaker. Hailed as “master” of all beauty in the preceding poem, the Young Man emerges as a human being in thrall to a monarch’s supremacy as well as to time and impending mortality. Subject to them, he is “forfeit” to the “doom” that each metes out. Jonson’s sense of moral integrity and inner containment is being put to the test. If we date the poem to a period just after Queen Elizabeth’s death, its conclusion is vaguely discomforting. Contemporaries applaud the succession of King James who displays a certain wisdom in reversing the judgments of his predecessor. The speaker is gladdened that “Now with the drops of this most balmy time / My love looks fresh” (where “balmy time” refers to James I’s coronation and “my love looks fresh” marks the release of Southampton and Pembroke from prison). He then proceeds to express a brash confidence in his own poetic immortality by means of which “death to me subscribes, / Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme.” But instead of fostering confidence, the poem tests presumption. The “monument” that its final couplet promises to the Young Man will stand “when tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent,” a condition not likely to persist in the alteration of time. The dynamics of history may promise change, but their fulfillment stands in abeyance. Shakespeare’s acknowledgment of contingency contrasts with Jonson’s attempted trust in stability. Associated with the Petrarchan form in which it is crafted, Shakespeare’s “rhyme” vows to defeat Death, which itself “insults [= ‘triumphs’] o’er dull and speechless tribes.” The reference to “speechless tribes” proposes an antitype to Revelation 7:8 in which members from the twelve tribes of Israel—among them twelve thousand of the “tribe of Benjamin”—are saved with the “seal of God,” implying in the Geneva Bible the Calvinist doctrine of divine election.13 In 1623 Jonson would invoke this proof text in “An Epistle Answering to One that Asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben” in Under-wood. Addressing an aspirant to his poetic circle, he presents himself as a somewhat diffident role model who cherishes the concept of an idealized self. The poem’s dominant trope of “mine owne fraile pitcher” nonetheless suggests a fragile vessel that inversely contains while pouring out, that floats on water but is always imperiled “Lest it be justled, crack’d, made naught, or lesse” (lines 56–58).14 Although he aspires to “Live 13.  See the commentary in the Geneva Bible: “Those that are sealed by the spirit of God” (116v). “Tribe” itself is a late rare word in Shakespeare’s lexicon: Oth. 1.3.344, 3.3.173, 5.2.341; Lr. 1.2.14; Cor. 4.2.24, 5.6.128; but also MV 1.3.46, 52, 106. For Shakespeare’s use of Revelation, see Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 271–304. 14.  See Richard Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 112–57.

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to that point I will; for which I am Man, / And dwell as in my Center, as I can” (lines 59–60), the double use of “as” weakens his claim. Jonson carries his ideal of moral poise and emotional tranquility to a conclusion that Shakespeare’s poems resist. The “center” of Sonnets proves to be a comfortless illusion, wracked by exigency and doubt and by monarchs who impose their “tyrants’ crests” on human will. Sonnet 109, “O never say that I was false of heart,” likewise presents its speaker as living outside the comfort zone of Jonsonian stability in at least two senses: first, as one whose theatrical career requires him to travel on provincial tours, sometimes at risk of compromising his emotional attachments when “absence seemed my flame to qualify”; and second, as one who nonetheless pursues his deepest convictions even when they fly in the face of conventional mores, exposing him to charges of wrongful behavior. The trope of undertaking a journey unfolds in the domain of Petrarchan discourse (“my flame,” “my soul,” “thy breast,” “my home of love”) where he locates his errant soul in the Young Man’s heart.15 Anticipating—perhaps even prompting—Jonson’s self-questioning resolve to “dwell as in my Center, as I can,” Shakespeare’s fallible speaker deconstructs the standard of a presumably centered self. The poem’s rhetorical energies work hard to minimize the speaker’s guilt even as its Petrarchan associations work to indict him. The “if/then” clause in the second quatrain, for example, lends a hypothetical quality to his alleged dereliction—“if I have ranged”—before it affirms his positive efforts to redeem himself: “Like him that travels I return again, / Just to the time, not with the time exchanged.” In its facile rhyme with again, the hyperbolic trope of stain hints that the speaker protests too much with his tears of self-pity, “So that myself bring water for my stain.” Turning the tears of a Petrarchan lover against himself, now in repentance but with more than a hint of egotism, the speaker denies that time has altered his disposition. Neither in his role as an itinerant observer not in his conduct as a self-willed agent can he deny his shortcomings or those of others. In sonnet 110, the Sidneian (and Ronsardian) compounds—“my best-oflove,” “a god-in-love,” “next-my-heaven-the-best,” and “thy pure and most-most-loving heart,” the last two addressed to the Young Man in the final couplet—help to resolve the speaker’s admission of guilt by a metrical emphasis on “have” in the poem’s first line: “Alás ’tis trúe, I háve gone hére and thére.” Again the speaker, cast in the role of a Jonsonian traveler and man of the theater, becomes an object of self-observation and c­ ensorious

15.  See sonnets 22 and 44 in the context of Petrarch’s sonnet 12.

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j­ udgment.16 Neither affirming nor denying rumors about his misdeeds, he tries to fix an alternative interpretation upon them. As in the preceding poem, his rhetoric raises doubts about his conduct in relation to skewed reports defaming it. In “These blenches gave my heart another youth, / And worse essays proved thee my best-of-love,” for example, the phrase “another youth” functions as a metonymy for “freshness,” conveying the speaker’s renewed commitment to the Young Man upon being absolved by him. But it can also signal “another young man,” a rival youth whose waywardness has provoked a breach of trust. Through this thicket of ambiguity, the speaker calls into question the rumors about him and his exculpatory responses to them. His admission that he has “made myself a motley to the view” comments upon the public nature of his private life but also upon its performative nature as well. The actor’s job is to play various roles, even countervailing ones that bear no relation to his lived experience. The playwright’s job is to invent personae, pitting one against another in a frame of dramatic action, fleshing out their conflicting interests, generating multiple voices that speak to and past one another. The playwright’s attachment to various roles, like the actor’s, undergoes change, shifts perspectives, and trades identities in a rhetorical heterocosm that subsists fleetingly on the stage. The theatrical profession exposes actors, playwrights, and audiences to the relativity of discourse and action. As it turns out, this sonnet uses its Petrarchan compound-word locutions as though to lock into formulaic phrases the mutating affects that unsettle both the speaker and the Young Man. Each points variously to both participants’ defensive, aggressive, self-indulgent, and self-defeating postures.17 Ensuing poems dilate the speaker’s observation of himself as an object of critique. Sonnet 113, “Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,” and its paired poem, sonnet 114, “Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,” iterate the Petrarchan quarrel between the heart and eyes, though with significant differences. For one, the speaker’s “mind” now replaces his “heart” in contestation with his eyes, and the conflict becomes a wholly interior one. For another, these poems assimilate the motion of “eyes” to that of Petrarch’s wandering in canzoni 126 and 129 and sonnets 176 and 177. There, as Petrarch’s speaker journeys away from Laura, his imagination

16.  For this role as integral to the speaker’s self-presentation, see Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, 202–38. 17.  See also “you are my all-the-world” (sonnet 112), “your own dear-purchased right” (sonnet 117), “your n’er-cloying sweetness” and “policy-in-love” (sonnet 118).

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transposes diverse physical forms into recurrent images of her.18 Likewise, as Shakespeare’s speaker travels in sonnet 113, he fantasizes the Young Man’s presence everywhere, so that the eye “no form delivers to the heart / Of bird, of flow’r, or shape, which it doth latch.”19 Almost immediately the heart, as the regnant seat of consciousness, refracts all these forms into simulacra of the Young Man: “For if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight, / . . . it shapes them to your feature.” The sonnet’s couplet registers this interaction of mind and eye in a particularly dense syntactic construction, further complicated by the quarto’s printing of its penultimate word: “Incapable of more, replete with you, / My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue.” Editors have questioned the reference of mine. According to the poem’s apparent logic, it may refer to “my eye” or “my mind,” but also to “my mien,” “my truth,” or “my untruth.” The confusion mimes the speaker’s confusion. His mind conspires against its own better judgment by welcoming the senses’ false report, making his eyes a coconspirator in the speaker’s self-subversion. Sonnet 114, extending the argument of sonnet 113, heightens the latter’s focus on “mind” by figuring it as a monarch “crowned with you” but yet afflicted with a “plague” of “flattery”: “Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you, / Drink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery?” This amalgam of metaphor (“monarch”) and metonymy (“monarch’s plague”) contrasts with the directness of the succeeding verse, “Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true.” Plain statement offers an alternative explanation for the psychic action: the eye’s interchange with mind is an instance of “alchemy— / To make of monsters and things indigest / Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble.” The earlier compound projects a moral argument: flattery of any sort is dishonest and corrupting. The supplemental statement offers a palliative argument, with a mitigating consequence: love can alter and transform one’s image of the world. In the first instance, the sensate eye proves deceptive, an outcome compatible with the lower appetitive status of the senses in relation to the mind. In the second, the mind accedes to the eye’s deceit, an outcome that suspends the intellect’s higher governing status in relation to the senses. With the opening words of the third quatrain

18.  “Sento Amor sì da presso / che del suo proprio error l’alma s’appaga” ‘I feel Love so close by that my soul is satisfied by its own deception’, canzone 129.36–37. Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo glosses the trope as “resta contenta del suo ERRORE, di ueder la sembianza imaginata, come se il uero uolto fosse” ‘he remains content with his own mistake in regarding her imagined semblance as though it were her real face’ (sig. clxvir). 19.  In the 1609 text, “latch” appears as “lack,” itself a plausible choice, but one that results in an off-rhyme with the following line. “Latch” meaning “catch, grasp” is a rare word in Shakespeare’s lexicon, appearing early (MND 3.2.36) and late (Lr. 2.1.54 and Mac. 4.3.194).

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(“O ’tis the first”), the speaker appears to reject the idealizing explanation (that love is transformative) in favor of a naturalistic one (that the senses can deceive one’s mind). But as he proceeds, he exonerates the eye’s deception by arguing that as a servant to the monarchical mind, the eye is only trying to please its master: “’Tis flatt’ry in my seeing, / And my great mind most kingly drinks it up.” This extended metaphor of the monarch accentuates the sovereign’s vulnerability to self-serving interests of attendant subjects and subordinates. Or more generally, it draws attention to the vulnerability of a person of high rank to machinations by those in lower ranks, construing the relationship between the Young Man and the speaker in these terms. Although the latter fulfills his duty as the former’s mentor by warning him of exposure to the blandishment and opportunism of others, he’s not exempt from bestowing his own kind of flattery. The moral consequences of his action are distilled into the trope of a cup brimming with toxic flattery: “Mine eye well knows what with his gust is greeing, / And to his palate doth prepare the cup.” Here a confusion of pronoun references effects a moral blur in its crossing of appositives. Do both uses of “his” refer to the kingly mind, for which the eye prepares the poison? If so, the mind invites its own destruction. Or does the first “his” refer to the eye itself as it craves recognition and reward? If so, the eye’s “gust” becomes a facilitator for its own survival and promotion. A similar confusion of pronoun references infects the concluding couplet: “If it be poisoned, ’tis the lesser sin / That mine eye loves it and doth first begin.” Does the first “it” refer to the cup and the second to the cup’s contents? If so, the eye’s act of poisoning is a “lesser sin” because it is pleased by a sweet taste in the cup (“mine eye love[s] it”) and by a desire to share this taste with the king. Or do both uses of “it” refer to the kingly mind? If so, the poisoning follows from the mind’s “lesser sin” of acceding to deception (“lesser” than the eye’s direct sin of preparing the cup). Even as the couplet pretends to answer the first quatrain’s question, it reopens the question: Which is more to blame, the eye or the mind? the servant or the master? the speaker or the Young Man? The conclusion suspends the poem’s Petrarchan potential for expressing emotional conflict as well as its Jonsonian potential for reaching a moral balance. These poems consequently project shifting relationships between a Petrarchan aesthetic and a Jonsonian one. On the one hand they take their cues from figurations of “heart” and “eyes,” of fleeting time and aging beauty, while moving toward the Jonsonian “mind” of social criticism and balanced judgment. On the other, they mount a resistance to Jonsonian lucidity as they drift back toward Petrarchan ambiguity. A complex example

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is sonnet 116, a poem that can be understood across a spectrum of possibilities from honest and sincere statement in the plain Jonsonian style to a rhetorical and perhaps ironic give-and-take in a highly figured Petrarchan style. Much depends upon the dramatic register that we ascribe to its first quatrain:

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Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. If we read the rhythm of these lines with a regular iambic cadence and understand it as contributing to a direct argument, the metrical emphasis will fall on such words as me in the first line and is in the second line (but definitely not on either instance of not in these lines). This emphasis will give voice to a speaker who is addressing an interlocutor, the Young Man, whose trite argument about love’s transience he vigorously contests: “Allow me not to agree; in my view, love is not so vacillating as you have claimed.”20 From this perspective, however, the poem risks evoking pale truisms about love as an unchanging ideal. The Young Man may have tried to justify his own transgressions by expounding upon the delights of variety and change, but the speaker is justifying and rationalizing his own steadfastness by arguing for the moral worth of constancy. The concluding couplet—“If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved”—marks QED to a series of tautologies about steadiness, cohesion, and balance amid motion, movement, and mobility. But if we instead read the quatrain as a performative argument and assign a variable cadence to its rhythms, the metrical emphasis might well fall on both instances of “not” in its opening lines as well as on two more “nots,” two “nos,” two “nevers,” one “nor,” and one “unknown” in ensuing lines. It amounts, in other words, to a case of special pleading that undermines its own fragile premises. This plea gives tremulous voice to a speaker who is acquiescing to the Young Man’s fickle excuses without disturbing them, even though he himself endorses the contrary: “Don’t let me stand in the way of your preference for someone else; my love for you is so constant that it will 20.  See Vendler’s persuasive analysis, Art, 487–93, as well as David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 163–68, and Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–43; for the poem’s melding of skepticism and belief, see Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 68–71.

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persist even if you decide to remove yourself from me.” From this perspective the poem unfolds as a contrary-to-fact exercise in Petrarchan wit that simultaneously attacks and condones its addressee’s inconstancy, proving against all odds that true love values constancy even if it permits the opposite in order to oblige a friend: “O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Even still, the friend’s rejection of this possibility demonstrates that the love between the speaker and himself has indeed been “shaken” and that his denial has propelled the speaker into doubt. The poem’s argument sustains a tension between the integrity that the speaker embraces as he defends his convictions, and the postures that he feigns as he articulates them; between the fixity of his moral ideals, and the plasticity of his rhetorical efforts to express them. After he adjusts his rationale in tropes that populate the second and third quatrains, he arrives at the resilience of his closing couplet where the Petrarchan word error marks a presumptive codicil to his argument: “If this [argument] be error [= straying from the path; an invitation to promiscuity] and upon me proved [= turned against my defense], / I never writ [which is manifestly untrue], nor no man ever loved [which remains to be proved].” As with Petrarch’s repeated assertions that his written poetry testifies to his love, so here the speaker’s avowal of authorship (or, more accurately, his denial of the contrary, as “I never writ”) testifies to his probity. But yet the speaker’s implied claim that his own love “alters not” remains to be proved, as does his negative claim that “no man ever loved.” The entire argument reflects a projection of his will upon reality. The poem has generated much commentary, ranging from an affirmation of its Jonsonian “centeredness” to an undermining of its Petrarchan artifice and compromise.21 Its placement in this section of Sonnets, identified with the turn from Elizabethan expressive exuberance to Jacobean moral assurance, might accommodate both. The poem confronts its Jonsonian plain style with a relish for Petrarchan antitheses, playing one off against the other. It dares the reader to test an understanding of each verse against its contrasting possibilities and to strengthen whichever sentiment the reader prefers to vindicate. As with the sonnets that precede it, its argument admits of no ready resolution. But its craftsmanship conclusively demonstrates what a professional poet can do with rhetorical skill. Without waiting for Platonic inspiration, this well-equipped author manufactures a poem that articulates a set

21.  Booth assimilates the grandeur of its sentiment to pettiness of its teasing tone, Shake-speare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 387–92; Richard Lanham sees it working both ways so that it functions as “two different poems [that] share the same words,” in The Motives of Eloquence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 128.

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of opposing—and generically incompatible—meanings with equal conviction. This is not to say that he records the process with a wholly ambivalent edge—at best quixotic, at worst cynical. It is rather to say that he dramatizes it by testing out his ideas, revising them as they clash, and in general returning to each claim with a view toward questioning it if only obliquely, or at least troubling it collaterally and without commitment. Then at the very end of the Young Man sequence the speaker of Sonnets stages an abrupt turnaround. Here he begins to distrust the very sort of revisionary rhetoric that he plies so flexibly elsewhere. He knows that the eloquence of some others, particularly of those who compete for the Young Man’s attention, may perversely transgress ethical boundaries. In sonnets 124 and 125, the last two complete poems addressed to the Young Man, the speaker undertakes his role as senior advisor with special care.22 In the former, “If my dear love were but the child of state,” he explains his affection in terms of competing claims associated with social, cultural, and political rhetoric. These claims turn on two distinctly different meanings of policy and politic in lines 9 and 11:

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It fears not policy, that heretic Which works on leases of short numb’red hours, But all alone stands hugely politic, That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with show’rs. The first meaning of policy—though not one exemplified here—suggests legitimate statecraft, the maintenance of a well-run polis from which the word itself derives. Its second meaning, however, and one that surely pertains (as cued by the word “heretic”), suggests the deterioration of policy into self-interested expedience.23 The word politic likewise carries two meanings, the first in relation to prudence and prudential conduct, the second in relation to craftiness and dissimulation. The quatrain mixes these meanings when it claims that false love submits to corruption and manipulation for its own advantage (“short number’d hours”), while true love serves the best interests of everyone by opposing rash action (which “grows with heat”) and quick or easy gratification (which “drowns with show’rs”). In either case, the lover has no way of knowing whether the beloved is self-seeking or open-minded, churlish or well-tempered, perfidious or magnanimous. 22.  See Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance, 120. 23.  See Thomas M. Greene, The Vulnerable Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 229–44.

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To resolve this dilemma, the speaker fashions a particularly difficult couplet that permits two diametrically opposite meanings: “To this I witness call the fools of time, / Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.” If the “fools of time” are victims of criminal oppression—those who have suffered social injustice, political assault, and perhaps religious martyrdom—their witness calls attention to dangers that imperil the speaker in his self-sacrificing devotion to the Young Man.24 If such “fools” also include self-aggrandizers and seekers of gain, those who are sentenced to die after having “lived for crime” in pursuit of degenerate pleasure (suggested as a current trend in line 8, “Whereto th’ inviting time our fashion calls”), then their witness is questionable. The couplet allows for both possibilities at once. The single denominator that links them is a discovery of truth as cognate with the discovery of being true to oneself and others. Both sets of fools encounter a version of truth. The first set dies after suffering from the wrongful actions perpetrated by others. The second dies after making others suffer from wrongful actions that it has perpetrated. Each category in its own radically different, mutually exclusive way illustrates the depth of the speaker’s conviction, but in the first instance the illustration projects his idealism, while in the second it projects his cynicism. The speaker is in practice providing the Young Man with an education in critical thinking. In sonnet 125 he disavows all interest in acting for social advantage or economic gain: “Were’t ought to me I bore the canopy, / With my extern the outward honoring.” His scoffing estimate of transitory honor (such as bearing the canopy for a king or public dignitary) is that it aims to set “great bases for eternity,” but the esteem that it confers turns out to be “more short than waste or ruining.” An echo of “eternity” and “ruin” from the earlier eternizing sonnets to the Young Man is unmistakable, but its application proves deflationary. The speaker’s disregard for mere artifice posits his acceptance of honor on faith and, upon receipt, his becoming subject to “paying too much rent / For compound sweet forgoing simple savor.” With the phrase “paying too much rent” in relation to ownership and possession, an echo from sonnets to the Dark Lady is unmistakable (specifically in reference to her robbing “others’ beds’ revénues of their rents” in sonnet 142), and again its application proves deflationary. The speaker can never fully possess what he rents, much less ever own it, but can at most accept it as part of a “mutual render, only me for thee.” Not even an ideal world could erase the social or economic differences between himself and the Young Man

24.  See Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, 25–26.

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that this rental entails. From one perspective, “mutual render” may refer to the self-canceling evasions that each has practiced on the other, balancing their shared bad faith and misbehavior. From another, it could refer to the speaker’s wish that poetry in praise of his friend might repair the breach between them. The former records a cynical version of their relationship; the latter an idealized version, or at least one that attempts to rebalance each person’s perspective. The sudden intrusion of a third party into the couplet signals an impingement of real-world behavior upon the speaker’s idealized view: “Hence, thou suborned informer! A true soul / When most impeached stands least in thy control.”25 This shift of address from thee of the Young Man to thou of the “suborned informer” marks the single occasion in Sonnets where the speaker moves from one fictive addressee to another. This strategy at the end of the Young Man sequence serves to emphasize the speaker’s rejection of a predatory ethos. Self-seekers suborned through bribes to slander others will stop at nothing to gain advantage. This fragile, conscientious defense of his poem appeals to a mature, mutually shared, fully appraised understanding of truth, in which any act of standing up to evil requires an intervention of principle. No longer addressed to a self-absorbed Young Man whom the speaker would educate, nor even to a Dark Lady whom he alternatively loves and mistrusts, the poem evokes and disparages its “suborned informer” as a pernicious embodiment of homo economicus. Finally, then, the poet who began his career as a homo economicus in relation to a Young Man whose social advantage could improve his own status presents us with another kind of homo economicus who prospers as a malign informer. It could be that the speaker is addressing a potential version of himself in some new role as cultural commentator, informing upon those in society who maximize their success to the detriment of others. His sonnets about the Dark Lady, a rival poet, and the Young Man—and especially those about the Young Man in this group of sonnets that veer toward a social critique—appear pierced with doubt but wholly free from biased assertions and tendentious denials, neither pro nor con in speculation or judgment. Their speaker seems not an “ego” but just an “eye,” seeking out tangible elements of human experience, neither condemning nor adjudicating among them, but only displaying aspects of them with analytical patience. He remains conscious that, as a rhetorical shape-shifter (and, if we accept his 25.  For structural parallels linking diplomacy to theatricality and spying in Hamlet, see Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 138–62.

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persona as having a career on the stage, as a theatrical shape-shifter, too), he does not wholly circumscribe the Young Man’s character, but instead conveys a sketch of it and permits himself and others to explore its possibilities. Or rather, he exercises the writer’s—and mobilizes the reader’s—responsibility to reflect upon its limits.26 His professional duty to assess and revise the results before publishing them takes him back to the earliest poems of the Young Man sequence. In returning to them, Shakespeare presents himself not just as a homo economicus but also as every inch the homo litterarum.

26.  For limits of aristocratic worth and mercantile value in Shakespeare’s late plays, see David Hawkes, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 111–25.

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Ch ap ter 4

Shakespeare as Professional

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The Economy of Revision in Sonnets 1–60

To take only Hamlet (1600), Troilus and Cressida (1602), Othello (1603–4), and King Lear (1604–5), dozens of additions, deletions, and emendations large and small in their folio publication (1623) display conscientious revisions of the texts earlier published in their quarto format (1604, 1609, 1622, and 1608 respectively).1 Their folio versions consistently ambiguate Hamlet’s fate, destiny, and power of agency; they reduce Troilus’s amatory preoccupation and heighten the Trojans’ military focus; they accentuate Othello’s turmoil and Desdemona’s innocence; and they minimize Lear’s madness while strengthening his powers of recognition. The closure of London’s theaters because of plague from summer 1603 to April 1604 and again in spring–summer 1609 may have afforded the author time for fresh revision, but we have no day-to-day evidence to document his editorial practices. We can only assume that he redacted his work with diligence and some regularity. Certainly King Lear—the play with the deepest evidence of redaction—thematizes the work of revision at the end of folio’s act 1 with the Duke of Albany’s “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well” (1.4.318), itself echoed in sonnet 103 (“Alack what poverty my muse brings forth”) as the speaker laments, “Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, / To 1.  See Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 133–87. 285

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mar the subject that before were well?” Evidence based on tonal and stylistic matters and on differences in Shakespeare’s early and late lexicon offers slender but useful guides. In sonnets 1–60, the strange combination of early rare and late rare words suggests late revisions of early drafts. In them, the prominence of echoes from Philip Sidney’s and Edmund Spenser’s sonnets likewise suggests a deliberate incorporation of their work not found elsewhere in Shakespeare’s sequence. William Ponsonby’s publication of Sidney’s works made available in 1598 a definitive Astrophil and Stella, supervised with help from the Countess of Pembroke who, as Hugh Sanford implies in his preface, was moved “to take in hand the wiping way those spots wherewith the beauties thereof were unworthily blemished.”2 Less than a year later, Spenser’s untimely death on 16 January 1599 brought to a close his lifetime work, prompting successors to revalue his sonnets in Complaints (SR December 1590), which includes his Ruines of Rome, Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, Visions of Bellay, and Visions of Petrarch, and in Amoretti (SR November 1594).3 I’m going to argue that in the wake of these events, Shakespeare reassessed the work of both poets, and that the results of this reassessment imbue his late revisions. The problem is that for his speaker, the personae of Sidney’s and Spenser’s speakers hardly correspond. Sidney’s self-pitying scion of privilege laments the failure of his “great expectation” in sonnet 21 of Astrophil and Stella. Spenser’s middle-aged civil servant at last attains emotional maturity through the tutelage of his young bride (though Amoretti ends with the slander of a “venemous toung” in sonnet 86, perhaps in imitation of the slanderer in sonnets 97, 98, 101, and 102 of Joachim Du Bellay’s Olive). Shakespeare’s speaker, neither an aristocrat nor a gentleman, is a poet-playwright (as implied in sonnet 23) in urban, professional, heteroglot, multiclass London. One consideration for Shakespeare’s revisions might have been to fictionalize the speaker’s character with either a greater or lesser degree of semblance to its now famous author. In Astrophil and Stella Sidney had concocted a thinly disguised version of his own youthful misadventures, fashioned for a coterie readership that knew of the author’s encounter with Penelope Rich and his contretemps with Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Oxford. In Amoretti and Epithalamion, Spenser had offered a benign, often self-effacing

2.  Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, . . . with sundry new additions of the same Author (London: William Ponsonby, 1598), fol. *4v. 3.  Andrew Hadfield speculates upon a possible meeting of Shakespeare and Spenser at a performance of Henry IV, Part 2 at Whitehall in December 1598; see Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 392.

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version of himself as a husband, son, and subject of three “Elizabeths” (sonnet 74), as the author of “six books” about the “Queene of faëry” (sonnets 33 and 80), and as a bridegroom on summer solstice (Epithalamion 265). As published, Shakespeare’s Sonnets recalls Sidney’s and Spenser’s precedents in several ways. With respect to Sidney, it draws attention to the speaker’s occasional follies stemming from his putatively dissolute life in the theater and related to his and the Young Man’s sexual improbity with the Dark Lady. With respect to Spenser, it draws attention to the speaker’s self-deprecating profile of himself as a maturing poet in a compromising environment.4 Like both, it draws attention to the dynamics of maturation in Shakespeare’s profile, as though the poet-playwright were reflecting upon his development as he revised some of his earlier compositions. We don’t know how much autobiographical freight Sonnets carries, and whether revisions—if any—intensify or diminish the author’s relationship to the poetic speaker. The published Sonnets nonetheless invests a fair amount of irony in the speaker’s hesitant advancement, much as Astrophil and Stella and Amoretti do in theirs, and this investment appears palpable in sonnets 1–60. For a contrast between possibly early drafts and later revisions, we could look at sonnets 96–103 at the end of the early and unrevised zone of sonnets 61–103. Sonnet 96 notably repeats the final couplet of sonnet 36. Editors have speculated about this repetition, most attributing it to a printer’s error.5 Structural similarities have led some to consider sonnet 96 as a reworking of sonnet 36 with their differences sustained in purposeful counterpoint to one another.6 But for readers to notice this counterpoint, the material space between these poems—barring an error in placement—obscures their affinity. We might instead posit an Ur-version of sonnet 36 (drafted ca. 1594, with or without its final couplet), a revision of this draft as sonnet 96 with its current couplet (ca. 1595), and a final revision of sonnet 36 as we now have it (perhaps after 1599, intended to be paired with sonnet 96 in the zone

4. For Amoretti as representing a major shift from depicting the poet as an abject male suitor to a position of authority, see Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 136–51. For Spenser’s anticourtly critique in his shorter poems, see Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life, 240–42 and 313–20. For his London readership of merchants, artisans, and urban professionals, see Michael Murrin, Trade and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 207–25. 5. See A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1944); but Kerrigan suggests that it’s a deliberate repetition that concludes a series of sonnets critical of the Young Man. 6. See Shake-speare’s Sonnets, ed. with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 313.

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of revised sonnets 1–60, but left unpaired through an error on the author’s, publisher’s, or printer’s part).7 Thematic affinities between these poems deserve consideration. Sonnet 96, “Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness” (where “wantonness” is a rare word used in Shakespeare’s middle period, 1598–1601), inquires how the Young Man’s bad reputation might damage the speaker’s credibility.8 The friend has an advantage of being so admired by others that they forgive his shortcomings: “Thou mak’st faults graces that to thee resort.” If he abuses this advantage—“How many gazers mightst thou lead away”—he risks demeaning himself and by association the speaker as well. The couplet issues a plea for the youth to protect their shared reputation: “But do not so; I love thee in such sort, / As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.” Sonnet 36 inverts this plea. It begins by admitting that the Young Man should distinguish himself from the speaker: “Let me confess that we two must be twain.” The reason is that the speaker’s “blots”—his soiled reputation—can damage the youth’s credibility: “I may not evermore acknowledge thee, / Lest my bewailèd guilt should do thee shame” (where “bewailèd” is a rare word used in two late plays, Coriolanus and Henry VIII).9 Sealing the speaker’s argument is “honour,” rendered first as a verb and then as a noun: “Nor thou with public kindness honour me, / Unless thou take that honour from thy name.” The couplet consequently issues a plea for the Young Man not to compromise his reputation: “But do not so; I love thee in such sort, / As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.” The lines, though identical to those in sonnet 96, bear a different import in each context. The reason is that the antecedent of “But do not so” may refer equally to the preceding line (“Unless thou tak’st that honour from thy name”) or to the line before it (“Nor thou with public kindness honour me”), or possibly to both. In the first case—as in sonnet 96—the speaker urges his friend not to compromise his reputation since it will reflect poorly on both of them. In the second case, he urges his friend to honor him with public favor, since he needs it to enhance his reputation. This difference is significant. In the first instance, the speaker would share the Young Man’s poor reputation, but as a mutual burden that he accepts because of his choice to support his friend. In the second, he needs his friend’s approval and would suffer if it should

7.  An economical explanation might point to sonnet 96 as the Ur-version (ca. 1595, perhaps lightly revised ca. 1599) and sonnet 36 as a fully composed variant of it (after 1599); this explanation, however, would not account for retaining the revised sonnet 96 in the printed sequence. 8. See Jn. 4.1.16, 1H4 5.2.68, Wiv. 4.2.184, Ham. 3.1.142, Tro. 3.3.135. 9. See Cor. 5.6.151 and H8 3.2.255, but also MND 4.1.54.

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be denied. The latter is more complex since, while it may include the first option, it decidedly exposes the speaker’s abject dependence upon the Young Man. It associates the crisis on a double front with “honour”—both the Young Man’s and the speaker’s. And it carries further significance for dating the poem and situating it within the development of Shakespeare’s career. As it happens, sonnet 36 puts to a test the speaker’s confidence in both his own “honour” and that of his friend previously inscribed in sonnet 25. There the speaker concedes, “Let those who are in favor with their stars / Of public honour and proud titles boast,” and then avers his own delight in commending the Young Man, “Whilst I whom fortune of such triumph bars, / Unlooked for joy in that I honour most.” Confident of being esteemed by his friend, the speaker compares his being favored with that of “The painful warrior famousèd for worth” who after defeat “Is from the book of honour razed quite” (where the faulty rhyme word “worth” in the 1609 quarto—likely a printer’s error rather than an oversight in the poet’s revision—is usually emended to “fight”). In addition to sonnets 25 and 36, the sequence’s only other occurrence of “honour” comes in the late–zone sonnet 125, “Were’t ought to me I bore the canopy, / With my extern the outward honoring.” True, the theme of honor pervades Shakespeare’s plays and those of his contemporaries. In the sense of personal integrity, high distinction, and good name, it saturates his middle period from 1598 to 1604, notably in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida. The Second Quarto (1604) of Hamlet uniquely includes the soliloquy “How all occasions do inform against me,” where greatness is “greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honor’s at the stake” (4.1.54–55).10 While this soliloquy neatly—perhaps too neatly—resolves Hamlet’s indecision, the later folio pointedly omits it with the effect of intensifying the play’s political or ideological claims—some might also say metaphysical or theological convictions—of accidental agency and random fortuitousness. Problems associated with honor continue to resurface in Measure for Measure (1603), Othello (1603–4), and All’s Well That Ends Well (1604–5). In the last of these plays, the Countess distinguishes between the “honor” of Bertram’s noble “blood” and “the honor” that he loses by renouncing Helena 10.  For tensions between poetic inspiration and artisanal labor as factors distinguishing the First Quarto from the Second and signaling a publishing strategy rather than an authorial revision, see Zachary Lesser, “Hamlet” after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 58–71. For the Second Quarto as exemplifying more than a rough draft but less than a final version of the play, which reveals “the businesslike aspect of Shakespeare doing his own editing,” see John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 71–85.

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(3.2.67–90), while the latter demonstrates in the King’s eyes that “honors thrive / When rather from our acts we them derive” (2.3.133–34). Even the cowardly Parolles respects “honor” of a sort when “by the hand of a soldier” he agrees to retrieve his lost drum (3.6.63). Not coincidently All’s Well That Ends Well presents the poet-playwright’s final dramatic sonnet, though in a debased mode when Helena uses it to lie about her departure from France as “Saint Jaques’ pilgrim, thither gone” (3.4.4–17); Parolles later approximates the form in elegiac couplets to defame his master: “Men are to mell with, boys are not to kiss” (4.3.220).11 From the procreation poems at the opening of the Young Man group, sonnet 17 illustrates possibilities of revision that draw upon examples of both Sidney and Spenser. In it, Shakespeare’s speaker brings Sidney’s and Spenser’s courtly discourse into contact with the discourse of a broader commercial, professional, and economic world. Within this space he negotiates among these kinds of discourse as they depict values of various life experiences and social relationships. Here is sonnet 17: Who will believe my verse in time to come If it were filled with your most high deserts? Though yet heav’n knows it is but as a tomb Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, “This poet lies— Such heav’nly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.” So should my papers, yellowed with their age, Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue, And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage And stretchèd meter of an ántique song: But were some child of yours alive that time, You should live twice in it and in my rhyme. The poem rehearses yet another version of Petrarch’s sonnet 248, “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura” ‘Whoever wishes to see how much Nature’. Just as Petrarch’s opening line invokes a future reader (“Chi vuol veder” ‘Whoever wishes to see’), so does Shakespeare’s: “Who will believe my verse in time to come.” Just as Petrarch’s second quatrain argues that a single 11.  The play’s representation of Helena as slave to her love for Bertram also recalls sonnets 57 and 58.

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glimpse of Laura would dispel all doubt about her perfection (“Et venga tosto” ‘And let him come soon’), so Shakespeare’s argues that any reader might be pardoned for doubting his claim that “Such heav’nly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.” And just as Petrarch’s sestet expresses diffidence about the author’s poetic skill (“Allor dirà che mie rime son mute” ‘Then he will say that my rhymes are mute’), so does Shakespeare’s: “So should my papers . . . / Be scorned.”12 These parallels coincide with those in Sidney’s sonnet 71, where Astrophil summons a reader—“Who will in fairest booke of Nature know”—and then bids this person to decipher Stella’s worth: “to reade in thee, / Stella, those faire lines, which true goodnesse show.” Astrophil’s assessment of her worth through the act of “reading [poetic] lines” generates in Shakespeare’s sonnet the speaker’s meditation upon being able to “write the beauty” of the Young Man’s excellence “in fresh [poetic] numbers.” In this contact area, Sidney’s focus on Astrophil’s reading mediates Shakespeare’s focus on his speaker’s writing. Astrophil’s naïveté, at odds with his author’s courtly sophistication, vanishes in the Shakespearean speaker’s sense of his own professional competence. As Shakespeare’s speaker works upon his poem, echoes from Spenser intervene. In Ruines of Rome, Spenser’s undated (but probably youthful and subsequently revised) translation of sonnet 5 from Joachim Du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome echoes Petrarch’s sonnet 248: “Who lists to see, what ever nature, arte, / And heaven could doo, O Rome, thee let him see.”13 Here Spenser’s second quatrain compares modern Rome to its ancient counterpart “like a corse drawne forth out of the tombe.”14 The translation of Du Bellay’s sepulture as “tombe” reverberates in Shakespeare’s comparison of his speaker’s verse to the Young Man’s qualities: “It is but as a tomb / Which hides your life.” Sonnet 32 of Spenser’s Ruines turns to Rome’s artifacts that endure “not in paper writ,” which Shakespeare echoes in “my papers, yellowed with age.” Still more: Spenser’s injunction to his lute in sonnet 32 of Ruines of Rome to “Cease not to sounde these olde antiquities” devolves in Shakespeare’s sonnet 12.  Perhaps this reflects a gesture toward Ronsard’s opening sonnet in Les Amours, “Qui voudra voyr comme un Dieu me surmonte” ‘Whoever wishes to see how a god overwhelms me’. 13.  Until then, Ruines was the largest collection of sonnets published in England, with a rhyme scheme developed by the Earl of Surrey and later adopted by Samuel Daniel and Shakespeare. See A. Kent Hieatt, “The Genesis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” PMLA 98 (1983): 800–14, and Anne Lake Prescott, “Du Bellay and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 134–50. For Spenser’s gravitation toward Du Bellay as a theorist and a poet, see David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 32–39 and 167–77. 14.  Du Bellay’s verse reads “Tiré de nuict hors de sa sepulture” ‘Drawn at night out of its sepulchre’.

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to the “stretchèd meter of an ántique song,” which itself countermands an aesthetics of furor, dismissively termed as “a poet’s rage” in sonnet 17. We may find here a distant reference to Spenser’s sonnet 69 in Amoretti with its abandonment of poetic furor in favor of craftsmanship and skill, “gotten at last with labour and long toyle.” If we retrace the steps of sonnet 17 backward from its speaker’s rejection of “a poet’s rage / And stretchèd meter” at the end of the third quatrain, we can see how much its evocation of Sidney and Spenser bolsters his confidence in a practiced skill. For example, “If I could write the beauty of your eyes” complements from Sidney’s sonnet 71 “to reade in thee, / Stella, those faire lines” and launches in the second quatrain a display of Shakespeare’s metrical wit in crafting the poem’s “fresh numbers.” The pentameter verse about “number[ing] all your graces” ends with an eleventh syllable in the feminine (or trochaic) rhyme of “grácès.” This rhyme in turn generates yet another eleven-syllable verse ending in “fácès,” with a further display of technical skill. As it happens, the verse “Such heav’nly touches ne’er touched earthly faces” may expand to a pre-Sidneian, pre-Spenserian “poulter’s measure” of fourteen syllables if we pronounce “heavenly” as trisyllabic and “touches,” “never,” and “touchèd” as disyllabic. But if we pronounce “heav’nly” as disyllabic and “touch(e)s,” “ne’er,” and “touch(e)d” as monosyllabic, the line contracts to a standard pentameter. If we reinstate “touchès” as disyllabic, it lengthens into an eleven-syllable line with feminine rhyme: “Sùch heáv’nly toúchès né’er toùch’d eárthly fácès.” At this very moment when the speaker seems to devalue his skill, he lands back on his feet and affirms his worth as a metrical craftsman. My long rehearsal of intertextual echoes in sonnet 17 might itself seem “stretched.” But there can be no doubt that the poem displays Shakespeare’s appreciation of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Spenser’s Ruines of Rome and Amoretti. The poems that directly precede it go out of their way to stress the freshness of their speaker’s approach and the novelty of his sequence.15 Shakespeare’s sonnet 13, for example, records the speaker’s gradual, almost imperceptible fall into love for the Young Man. Between the opposing claims of its argument about mortality, “love” enters surreptitiously as a vocative address, barely calling attention to itself as the speaker’s first overt declaration of affect (“O that you were yourself, but love you are / No longer yours than you yourself here live”). The lines that follow underscore the provisionality of this admission by juxtaposing three different meanings attached to the 15.  See Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 94–97.

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verb should: hortatory, as it behooves the Young Man to defend himself against mortality (“Against this coming end you should prepare”); conditional, as he might rescue his beauty by begetting an heir (“So should that beauty which you hold in lease / Find no determination”); and future-more-vivid as it enables his survival (“When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear”). These distinctions govern the rhetorical question of the poem’s third quatrain: “Who lets so fair a house fall to decay?” The challenge proves to be superfluous with the couplet’s definite answer: “O none but unthrifts, dear my love you know.” Here the speaker softens the implication that his friend might be an “unthrift” by recalling the submerged vocative from line 1 (“but love you are”) and reinscribing it unambiguously as “dear my love.” At the same time the reasoning for this expression of love—“You had a father, let your son say so”—dampens any personal claims implicit in it. Shakespeare’s Petrarchism acquires a distinctively revisionary cast as its tropes engage those of Sidney and Spenser. This cast seems all the more apparent when Shakespeare’s thematics differ markedly from those of his predecessors. Sonnet 15, for example, ends with the speaker’s counterinsurgency against destructive time: “And all in war with time for love of you, / As he [i.e., time] takes from you, I engraft you new,” where “engraft” insinuates the root of Greek γράφειν ‘write’. Here the victory of writing against time echoes but thematically inverts the argument of sonnet 7 in Spenser’s Ruines of Rome, where Rome loses its war against time and its decay: “And though your frames do for a time make warre / Gainst time, yet time in time shall ruinate / Your wordes and names.” Shakespeare’s emphasis upon victory reproves Spenser’s (and ultimately Du Bellay’s) insistence upon defeat. A similar cast dominates further echoes from Spenser and Sidney in poems that follow sonnet 17. Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” for example, registers a belated reference to the opening of Spenser’s sonnet 9, “Long-while I sought to what I might compare.” Spenser’s speaker directs the work of inventio to comparing his beloved’s eyes with divinity: “Then to the Maker selfe they likest be.” Shakespeare’s directs it to acquiring a mastery over his verse that immortalizes the Young Man: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. Here the “eternal lines” of poetry (summoning “those faire lines, which true goodnesse show” from Sidney’s sonnet 71) supplant the Young Man’s

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genealogical “lines of life” evoked in Shakespeare’s sonnet 16 (where an expectation that “this time’s pencil or my pupil pen / Neither in inward worth nor outward fair / Can make you live” echoes Spenser’s despondent wish in sonnet 25 of Ruines of Rome “that at least I could with pencil fine, / Fashion the pourtraicts of these Palacis”). In sonnet 18, this process of invention activates the speaker’s claims to poetic skill. But juxtaposed against the foreordained conquest of death averred at the end of the third quatrain, it also dramatizes the fragility of anything permanent or absolute in the poet’s changing self.16 An echo of the Young Man’s “eternal summer” in the speaker’s “eternal lines” creates a brief rapport between the older man and his friend. But the final couplet forestalls their union by associating such “eternal lines” unequivocally with “this,” the concrete material poem that an expectant reader holds in hand: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” The poem owes its purchase upon time to Sidney’s and Spenser’s poetic models, its recurrent evocations of them, and its emendation of their attitudes toward temporality. A striking example of the speaker’s debt to Sidney—and ultimately to Petrarch—is sonnet 23, “As an unperfect actor on the stage,” where “unperfect” is a late rare word that conveys the poem’s retrospective tenor.17 Its dramatic opening line summons Shakespeare’s theatrical experience, and in this sense contributes to the author’s shadowy self-representation in the manner of Sidney’s alter ego. But it also echoes (or presages) a revealing simile at the climax of Coriolanus (1608) when the exiled Roman consul stifles his instinct to listen to his mother, wife, and son: “Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part” (5.3.40–41). Coriolanus flees from language because he knows that words can lead to violent consequences, as they do in his disastrous reactions to Sicinius’s use of “shall” (3.1.91-103) and Aufidius’s utterance of “boy” (5.6.99–115). Sonnet 23 proceeds with less gravitas, but it makes a no less stringent statement about the power of language to accredit action. In this sense, it extends the Petrarchan topos of the tongue-tied lover and Sidney’s critique of furor poeticus. In Shakespeare’s poem, Astrophil’s folly lends contrastive weight to the evolving maturity of Shakespeare’s speaker. As the poem develops, the figure of an actor fumbling his lines, “Who with his fear is put besides his part,” yields to the generic figuration of one whose “rage”—an emotional if not poetic furor—implodes: “Or some fierce

16.  For patterns within and between this sonnet and others, see Boyd, Why Lyrics Last, 163–66. 17.  Found in the form “imperfect” in Oth. 1.3.99, Lr. 4.6.5, Mac. 1.3.72, and Cor. 2.1.45. For the poem’s semi-theatrical register, see David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 128–30.

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thing replete with too much rage, / Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart.”18 The poem’s action returns to the “poet’s rage” and “your true rites” of Shakespeare’s sonnet 17, echoing terms that Sidney had used in his sonnet 74: “Poore Layman I, for sacred rites unfit.” There Astrophil abjures the Platonic poetics of the Pléiade: “Some do I heare of Poets’ furie tell, / But (God wot) wot not what they meane by it.” Sidney’s speaker proclaims his originality—“I am no pick-purse of another’s wit”—and his investment in direct simplicity: “My thoughts I speake, and what I speake doth flow / In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please.” So does Shakespeare’s speaker champion simplicity to express “the perfect ceremony of love’s rite” before transferring his tongue-tied words to written “books”: “O let my books be then the eloquence / And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.” Investing confidence in the written expression of his “silent love,” he concludes with a correction of Sidney’s “pick-purse of another’s wit” that “To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.”19 This peculiar concentration of Astrophil’s words (“fury,” “rites,” “another’s wit”) resonates in those of Shakespeare’s speaker (“rage,” “rite,” “love’s fine wit”), as though attending to a dialogue with Sidney on the topic of poetry and poetics. So much would seem remarkable enough. But this sonnet extends that dialogue by recruiting the topos of a tongue-tied lover from Sidney’s sonnet 47, “What, have I thus betrayed my libertie?” Sidney exploits the humor of Astrophil’s indignant question as the young but deluded sensualist asks whether amatory devotion has compromised his aristocratic freedom: “Or am I borne a slave, / Whose necke becomes such yoke of tyranny?” On the verge of renouncing Stella, the lover retreats in a hilarious hyperdramatic reversal that begs to be read in a stage whisper alternating with histrionic outbursts: “Let her go. Soft, but here she comes. Go to, / Unkind, I love you not: O me, that eye / Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie.” One glimpse of her glowering eye reduces him to silence. Sidney’s model for Astrophil’s retreat comes from Petrarch’s sonnet 169, “Pien d’un vago penser che me desvia” ‘Full of a yearning thought that makes me stray’, which recounts the speaker’s failure of nerve when Laura passes before him. Their meeting ends in suspension as the lover falls mute: “Tanto gli ò dir che ’ncominciar non oso” ‘I have so much to say to her that I dare not begin’. Petrarch’s commentators offer various explanations for this

18.  For the collapse of the trope, see Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 199–203. 19.  Duncan-Jones further suggests a reference to Sidney’s sonnet 54, “Dumbe swannes, not chatring Pies, do Lovers prove, / They love indeed, who quake to say they love.”

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suspension. Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano, Sylvano da Venafro, and Bernardino Daniello draw upon the poem’s first line, “Pien d’un vago penser,” to speculate that its speaker is rapt in ecstatic imagination about Laura and can utter no words to express his emotion.20 Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, however, derides these commentators as “ingegnosi giovani” ‘ingenious young readers’ for imposing such lofty thoughts upon an awkward encounter between the stuttering poet and his beloved: “Per hauerle a dir lungamente non osa incominciare” ‘Because of needing to speak with her at such great length, he does not dare to begin’ (sig. cxcvv). Sidney’s poem clearly taps into this perception of comic reversal as a riposte to the Platonic furor of conventional Petrarchan lovers. Shakespeare’s version of the topos takes a different turn as his speaker appears to collapse under the weight of his effort to speak: “And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay, / O’ercharged with burthen of my own love’s might.” Among commentators on Petrarch’s sonnet 169, Alessandro Vellutello had examined its speaker’s possible motivations for not daring (“non oso”) to address Laura. One is that he worries about offending her commitment to chastity: “Treme e non ardisce per la rigidita, da qual vede tal dolcezza in lei esser accompagnata” ‘He does not dare to speak because of the high moral standard to which he sees her sweetness is linked’ (sig. 70r). For Shakespeare’s speaker, a specter of transgression lurks around the edges of his sequence, not just of this poem. His attachment to the Young Man is one matter, but their tawdry relationship with the Dark Lady is another. Overlaying both is his theatrical trope of an “unperfect actor” amid the tinsel trappings of a public playhouse, its vagabond actors, and their ragtag world of day-to-day living. Certainly his figuration contrasts with “the perfect ceremony of love’s rite” that the speaker will “forget” to perform. Shakespeare’s speaker is caught in a bind as he focuses upon the competing claims of his commercial transactions and his high-minded poetic aspirations. Just as in the first quatrain he rhymes stage with rage, diminishing the strength of his poetic furor as he does, so he rhymes his theatrical part with his affective heart. His appeal to the latter, itself in its Elizabethan pronunciation homophonic with art, has the effect of juxtaposing inspired poetry against stage-bound pantomime. As his words zig and then zag, he resorts to the silent persuasion of writing to elevate his wavering performance: “O let my books be then the eloquence / And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.” As much as any word in the poem, “books” lays bare the speaker’s literary 20.  See Daniello’s comment that Laura’s disdain “è cagione, ch’egli morir desidera”‘is the reason why he wants to die’ (sig. 113r).

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ambitions. Though possibly referring to theatrical prompt-books for public performances, it more plausibly refers to his authorial seriousness, whether in manuscript or published form, whether as a private and personal or public and professional endeavor. The idea of “recompense” in the following line (“Who plead for love and look for recompense”) suggests that—even though he surely means emotional requital for his love—the subtext of commercial compensation still governs his thoughts. The speaker is aching to prove his worth and justify his creative output in an economically viable poetic career. A notable density of reference to Sidney clusters around sonnet 23. For example, sonnet 21 (“So is it not with me as with that muse”) takes up Astrophil’s repudiation of the classical muses from the sestet of sonnet 3 in Astrophil and Stella: “For me in sooth, no Muse but one I know.” Shakespeare’s speaker in sonnet 21 insists that a poet need only write about truth that the Young Man already commands: “O let me true in love but truly write.”21 Likewise Astrophil, recanting “new found Tropes” and “strange similies,” insists that the substance of his poetic work “But Copying is, what in her Nature writes.” Shakespeare’s rhyme word “write” (“let me . . . write,” leading to “not so bright”) echoes Sidney’s final rhyme (“what in her Nature writes,” devolving from “my poore sprites”), while his hortatory subjunctive (augmented by “Let them say more”) parallels the same grammatical construction in Sidney’s “Let daintie wits crie . . . / Or else let them . . . shine.” And just as in sonnet 15 of Astrophil and Stella Sidney’s speaker distances himself from “poore Petrarch’s long deceased woes” since “sure at length stolen goods do come to light,” so Shakespeare’s speaker in the final line of sonnet 21 picks up the economic implications of dealing in shoddy goods. Conniving merchants speak in hyperbole when they hawk inferior wares, but he refuses to play that game as he hoards the object of his love and refuses to deal: “I will not praise that purpose not to sell.” He then mutes his commendation of the Young Man (“My love is as fair / As any mother’s child”) in a spectacular disavowal of Petrarchism. But yet the author’s manifest purchase upon Sidney’s and Spenser’s texts, his recurrent evocations of them in varied contexts, and his revised attitudes toward them only reaffirm Petrarchism’s grip upon him. On the other side of Shakespeare’s sonnet 23, the paired sonnets 27 and 28 rehearse Sidney’s topos of the Petrarchan lover’s sleepless nights.22

21.  See also Sidney’s sonnet 28: “But know that I in pure simplicitie / Breathe out the flames.” For the poem’s quasi-performative effect, see Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 220–25, and Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance, 36–37. 22.  For the harmonic pairing of these poems, see Boyd, Why Lyrics Last, 121.

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Shakespeare’s version is paired just as four of Sidney’s models are paired in sonnets 88–89 and 98–99 of Astrophil and Stella. In sonnet 27, “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, / The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,” the word “travel” (spelled “trauaill” in the 1609 Quarto) refers to the speaker’s imaginative movement toward the Young Man across a distance that separates them. The word also evokes the labor or “travail” that the poet-playwright performs to meet his professional obligations, whether in the London playhouse or on provincial tours. The two possibilities of “travel” and “travail” coalesce in “But then begins a journey in my head / To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired,” where “journey” derives from jour ‘day’ and indicates both “a day’s travel” and “a day’s work.” As the speaker laments the effort that he must expend to reach his friend, he accomplishes through his poetry the work that he owes to him, the labor of extoling him and expressing a wish to be near him. In “then my thoughts, from far where I abide, / Intend a zelous pilgrimage to thee,” the word “intend” in its sixteenth-century usage refers to the expansion of his thoughts (“intend” = “to stretch out, extend”) until they reach his friend wherever he may be. There is here no distinction between the speaker’s diurnal labor as a poet in the Young Man’s entourage and his nightly torment as a lover in the latter’s absence. He is always at work, whether as a poet or lover, whether for the friend or himself, and he knows no rest. Astrophil and Stella deals collectively with similar motifs of absence (“Out traytour absence” sonnet 88, and “Now that of absence the most irksome night,” sonnet 89) and nocturnal solitude (“Ah bed, the field where joye’s peace some do see,” sonnet 98, and “When far spent perswades each mortall eye,” sonnet 99). They deal as well as with the prospect of emotional reward (“Where memory sets foorth the beams of love,” sonnet 88) and of financial compensation through imaginative labor (Stella “oft shewes a present pay,” sonnet 88). Sidney’s sonnet 89 deploys “night” seven times as a rhyme word (alternating with “day”), while Shakespeare’s sonnets 27 and 28 deploy it three times (rhyming with “sight,” “plight,” and “bright”), and five more times as a nonrhyme word.23 The apparition of Shakespeare’s young man (“Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night, / Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new,” sonnet 27) occurs against a background like the one recounted by Astrophil (“While the blacke horrors of the silent night, / Paint woes blacke face so lively to my sight,” sonnet 98). Daylight in the youth’s 23.  See Shakespeare’s “But day by night and night by day oppressed,” sonnet 28, and Sidney’s “While no night is more darke than is my day, / Nor no day hath lesse quiet than my night,” sonnet 89.

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absence proves as painful to Shakespeare’s speaker (“But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer,” sonnet 28) as it does to Astrophil (“In tombe of lids then buried are mine eyes,” sonnet 99). Sidney’s sonnet 99 derives from Petrarch’s sonnet 164, “Or che ’l ciel et la terra e ’l vento tace” ‘Now that the heavens and the earth and the wind are silent’. Italian commentators celebrated this poem for its profusion of echoes from Vergil and the Roman elegists.24 What seems remarkable is that Shakespeare’s treatment appears closer to Petrarch than Sidney’s does. However much Sidney follows Petrarch’s compositional structure (their respective octaves depict the lover’s sleeplessness, while their sestets record the onset of morning), Shakespeare alone summons from Petrarch’s model the dramatic motif of poetic labor. His poem unfolds in a space between the public sphere and his own imagination. Like Petrarch’s speaker, Shakespeare’s negotiates his poetry between a subjective experience and the rhetorical construction imposed upon it by competing discourses—between what the writer wants to say and the verbal constraints that finally shape what he actually says. The crucible that produces Shakespeare’s nocturnal sonnets 27 and 28 also includes Spenser’s sonnets 87 and 88 from Amoretti, generating some of the narrative action implied in the 1609 Quarto’s arrangement of the Young Man poems. Spenser’s poems recount a series of events spanning the beloved’s submission to the speaker (sonnet 67) and their wedding day celebrated in Epithalamion.25 The prospective bridegroom of Amoretti has departed from his beloved in sonnet 87 (“Since I did leave the presence of my love”) and sonnet 88 (“Since I have lacked the comfort of that light”). Echoes occur in Shakespeare’s sonnets: “to work my mind” in his sonnet 27 with “whylest I fill my mind” in Spenser’s sonnet 88; the rhyme of “sight / night / plight / bright” in both of Shakespeare’s poems (amplifying the monorhyme of “night” in Sidney’s sonnet 89) with the rhyme of “light / night” in Spenser’s sonnet 88; and the chiasmic inversions of “day by night and night by day oppressed” in both of Shakespeare’s poems with “For when as day the heaven doth adorne / I wish that night the noyous day would end” in Spenser’s sonnet 87. But the strongest resonance of Spenser’s narrative at this point in

24.  Daniello notes Petrarch’s imitatio of Dido’s sleepless night in Aeneid 4.522–32: “Imita in questo Son. il Poe. (quanto sia grave, misero, & inquieto lo stato de gliamanti descrivendone) Virgilio”  ‘Our poet imitates Vergil when describing how weighty, wretched, and unhappy the condition of lovers is’ (sig. 111r). Vellutello locates the imitatio during the speaker’s separation from Laura: “Fu il presente Sonetto fatto dal Poeta ne le sue notturne vigiglie”  ‘The poet composed the present sonnet during a nocturnal vigil’ (sig. 64r). 25.  For Spenser’s frenetic publication between 1590 and 1596 as representing his rejection of courtly pursuits, see Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life, 185–201 and 303–13.

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Shakespeare’s sequence comes from sonnet 86 of Amoretti, “Venemous toung tipt with vile adders sting.” There a malicious slanderer has intruded during the speaker’s absence and “with false forged lyes” manages to “stirre up coles of yre” in the beloved’s response. The poems of Amoretti then suspend the lovers’ projected happiness until Epithalamion unites them in marriage. In this present zone of Shakespeare’s narrative, the intrusion of a competitive, debased, or malign third party motivates a critical turn in the action. As we’ve seen, a similar turn occurs with the “suborned informer” in sonnet 125 at the end of the Young Man cycle. Earlier in sonnet 33, “Full many a glorious morning have I seen,” a cloud of indifference, estrangement, or rejection suddenly darkens the Young Man’s acceptance of the speaker. The poem’s octave presents the situation in neutral, even naturalistic terms as the sun is said to “Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye” and then “Anon permit the basest clouds to ride” over its face. The sestet applies this trope to the speaker’s predicament:

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Ev’n so my sun one early morn did shine With all triumphant splendor on my brow; But out alack, he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath masked him from me now. The exact specificity of this situation depends upon the meaning of “basest clouds” in line 5 and “region cloud” in line 12. Both seemingly refer to an interloper who has stolen the friend’s attention, whether another poet, another lover, a courtly flatterer, or a possessive mistress.26 The upshot in each case is that the Young Man’s gravitation toward this third-party’s arrival initiates the speaker’s fall from favor. Among the figurative possibilities in the trope of the sovereign sun is a homophonic play upon “sun” and “son” to designate both the Young Man’s filial position in an elite system of ownership and inheritance to which he is heir, and the speaker’s accessory relationship to him as a retainer, advisor, educator, and surrogate father who defers to his assigned roles for approval and reward. The greatest threat is the Young Man’s unpredictability, his license to act fecklessly and respond willfully. His privilege and prestige compel attendants to work around his willfulness. The poem’s conflict issues from the extent to which the speaker censors or disguises his reactions to the youth’s caprice. The speaker’s bow to this situation proves self-defeating

26.  As Vendler notes, this sonnet is the first to cite a flaw in the beloved (Art, 178).

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in the poem’s final line, “Suns of the world may stain when heav’n’s sun staineth.” Signs that the Young Man prefers others to him augur economic as well as affective consequences, including his loss of potential patronage support and the Young Man’s bestowal of competitive advantages upon other poets. In both cases the speaker acts to protect himself by expressing devotion to his friend. Each has what the other lacks. The poet-playwright looks to his benefactor for kindness and largesse, and the benefactor looks to him for rhetorical compliment and an encouragement to shore up his ego. Sonnet 35, “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done,” deepens the dynamics of this situation. In doing so, it examines the speaker’s inclination to misuse his writerly skills in service to the Young Man, as well as the latter’s power to inflict harm on him. Its argument begins with the youth’s faults, comparing them to commonplace defects in nature: “Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,” where the Spenserian “roses” and “fountains,” “thorns” and “mud” suggest a palinodic reversal of the sublime analogies cataloged in sonnet 9 of Amoretti (“Long-while I sought to what I might compare,” undermining Shakespeare’s parallels in “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”). Other analogies follow: “Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun” (where the late rare word “eclipses” may indicate some late revision) and “loathesome canker lives in sweetest bud.”27 Collectively these analogies register a change in the speaker’s idea of what his professional career might be. The insistent antitheses shatter any assumptions about a direct and untroubled access to patronage or benefaction as they venture into a wider sphere of calculation and quest for opportunity. In the second quatrain Shakespeare’s speaker reassures the Young Man that human imperfection is the norm—“All men make faults, and even I in this”—while portraying himself as “Authórizing thy trespass with compare.” This last phrase significantly dents the speaker’s writerly authority and his truth-telling responsibility. In its sixteenth-century usage the word “authórizing” means “to give legal force to; to make legally valid” (OED, sense 2), so that the speaker legitimates the Young Man’s shortcomings by comparing them to worse offenses. The speaker’s self-inculpation further complicates this problem, “Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,” with the participial “corrupting” and the late rare “salving” cancelling each other’s weight in a revisionary compromise.28 “Thy adverse party is thy advocate,” he declares,

27.  “Eclipse” occurs in Ham. 1.1.119, Oth. 5.2.98, Lr. 1.2.95, Mac. 4.1.28, and sonnets 60.7 and 107.5. 28.  The single occurrence of “salve” is in Cor. 3.2.70. Two possible misprints of their for thy (or possibly these) in the quarto, “Excusing their sins more than their sins are,” inject harsh criticism. If

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where the late rare “advocate” may indicate another revisionary compromise. The chiasmic “adverse/advocate” with its echoic “verse” points dimly to the speaker’s role as a technician of verse who has “adversely” turned his rhetorical skills against himself.29 By contrast the final line of the third quatrain, “Such civil war is in my love and hate,” nods yet again to Spenser’s (and Du Bellay’s) Ruines of Rome (“with cruell furie striving” in sonnet 10 and “turne to civill rage” in sonnet 23, where furie and rage forego their associations with poetic inspiration). Here the “civil war” of Shakespeare’s speaker appears wholly distant from any kind of poetic inspiration. Derived from his exercise of rhetorical skill, it in effect warns that this skill carries some moral risk. The speaker becomes a casualty of his own legerdemain. Sonnet 40 proceeds to revise the speaker’s estimate of his dependence upon the Young Man, and in so doing to revise his estimate of rhetorical skill. This poem identifies the Young Man’s trespass as an act of sexual improbity with the Dark Lady: “Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all: / What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?” As a “friend” who has stolen the speaker’s mistress, he embodies Petrarch’s oxymoronic rhetoric as a “gentle thief.” Though the speaker finds the youth’s indiscretion difficult to pardon, he declines to jeopardize his friendship and the social, cultural, and economic favor upon which his authorial career seems to depend. In the course of mounting his argument, his declaration of “all my love” in line 1 undergoes careful parsing, encompassing not only the Young Man’s relationship with the Dark Lady, but also the speaker’s self-love as he guards his prudential interests. In line 4 the question of how much love can be distributed gives way to the paradox of how “all” might still leave room for “more”: “All mine were thine, before thou hadst this more.” The second quatrain works through this paradox by contrasting the prepositional and conjunctive uses of “for” in the phrase “for my love,” which is repeated (with grammatical variation) across lines 5 and 6: “If then for my love thou my love receivest, / I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest.” The exact meaning of “for” can imply negation (instead of taking my affection, you take my mistress), defiance (in spite of my affection, you steal my mistress), or some kind of mistaken logic (because of my affection, you assume rights to whatever belongs to me, including my mistress). In a “their” refers to “All men” in line 5, the faults of others would seem less grievous by comparison with the Young Man’s faults. The usual emendation of their to thy (or, as Duncan-Jones proposes, to these) returns the burden of “sins” to the Young Man and intensifies the speaker’s self-criticism as he exonerates the youth. 29.  “Advocate” occurs in Cym. 1.1.76; WT 2.2.40, 4.4.724–26, and 5.1.220; and Tmp. 1.2.476, though also in R3 1.3.87.

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less antagonistic, more conciliatory sense, the word “for” can point to an innocent supposition (upon discovering that I love my mistress, you follow my example and you love her too), a hypothetical intention (in order to obtain my love, you plan to reach me through my mistress), or an honorific regard (in recognition of my love for you, you show courtesy to my mistress). Depending upon the specificity of “for,” this statement encompasses both blame (because you use my mistress for sexual pleasure despite my wishes) and forgiveness (because you use her for sexual pleasure, just as I do). At the end of the second quatrain, “But yet be blamed, if thou thyself deceivest / By wilful taste of what thyself refusest,” the blameworthy option poses a new hypothesis: if the Young Man confesses to a transgressive love after having denied it, he only deceives himself and exposes his own hypocrisy. His taste is “wilful,” and his act is less than honest. The quatrain’s unaccented feminine line-endings (“receivest,” “usest,” “deceivest,” “refusest”) register a sense of the youth’s stubbornness. In a quatrain of near-monorhymes, it catches the speaker as though he were aiming toward contrasting couplet rhymes, but then giving up and moving repetitively onward. In the third quatrain, the concessive clause “Although thou steal thee all my poverty” argues that it’s a greater offense “To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.” Here the slant rhyme of “poverty” with “injury” (evoking Astrophil’s self-deprecating slant rhyme of “soveraigntie” with “flie” in Sidney’s sonnet 71) betokens a breakdown in the poem’s metrical order. Unless either “poverty” or “injury” is a printer’s error, the slant rhyme furnishes an occasion for revision that the professional poet decides to forego. His demurral produces two effects. On the one hand it enables him to soften his aggression with a poetic blemish so as to humor rather than alienate his friend. On the other, it enables him to act out his aggression sotto voce as he beguiles the youth with a Petrarchan rejoinder: “Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.” At this point, he appears willing to convey his own triviality and expendability.30 The Young Man’s public advantage manipulates the speaker’s decision, and for purely pragmatic reasons the latter accedes to the outcome. But as though to double the point, he then traps the Young Man in an illusion of his own preeminence. Yes, the speaker says, his friend is a social superior and, yes, he must be respected even when he’s wrong. On the

30.  In the related sonnets 41 and 42, the speaker flaunts his argument that in losing the Young Man, he allows the Dark Lady to gain him. Duncan-Jones compares this sophistry with Astrophil’s rationale for his attraction to other women in Sidney’s sonnet 91. Sidney’s poem recycles Petrarch’s sonnet 16, whose traveling lover profanely argues that just as Veronica’s veil recalls Jesus’s face, so other women recall Laura’s image.

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one hand, this speaker is acknowledging the imperatives of a stratified world whose socioeconomic forces constrain him to honor the Young Man. On the other, he’s exalting the Young Man with a Petrarchan style whose absurd gestures in Sidney’s and Spenser’s poems have already exposed the follies of their respective lovers. As we’ve seen at the beginning of this chapter, the wayward Petrarchan rhetoric of the speaker’s heart and eyes in sonnets 46 and 47 captures this tension in its unresolved, off-centered effort to flatter the youth. In the larger context of Sidneian and Spenserian echoes, these poems seem preoccupied with the question of what constitutes good poetry, as though the author, by revising a once fashionable style of Petrarchan verse, were testing the worth of his poems as well as the value of reworking them for a sophisticated readership. From this perspective sonnet 53, “What is your substance, whereof are you made,” and sonnet 54, “O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,” question poetry’s power to defeat time and decay. The first represents classical forms of epideictic verse as but anticipatory “shadows” of the Young Man, evoking the poet-playwright’s representations of Adonis (in Venus and Adonis) and of Helen (in Troilus and Cressida):

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Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit Is poorly imitated after you; On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set, And you in Grecian tires are painted new. Sonnet 54 evokes Petrarchan discourse in order to perpetuate the Young Man’s beauty through a memory of his virtue (construed as a potency with lasting effect): “The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem, / For that sweet odor which doth in it live,” reminiscent of Spenser’s sonnet 26 in Amoretti, “Sweet is the Rose, but growes upon a brere.” Through poetry some fragrance of his beauty will survive after his death: “When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth.” Such verse will counter time’s destructive action, which is registered as obsolete by the obsolete verb vade ‘pass on’ (from Latin vadere ‘depart’). This verb itself captures a fleeting reference to both Sidney (sonnet 102, recounting Stella’s illness, “How doth the colour vade of those vermillion dyes”) and Spenser (Ruines of Rome, sonnet 20, recounting the fall of Rome: “Her power disperst, through all the world did vade”). Here Shakespeare’s recall of both predecessors effects a quiet transition into his eternizing sonnets 55, 60, 63–65, and 81. Sonnet 55 announces this topos by expressing the speaker’s confidence in his “pow’rful rhyme” as a guarantee of the Young Man’s immortality:

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“Nor marble nor the gilded monuments / Shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme.” The words “But you” in line 3 shift the poem’s focus to the Young Man: “But you shall shine more bright in these contents.” With the rhyme word “contents,” the speaker turns to the process and the product of his writing. A rhetorical term relating to printed books and legal documents, “contents” refers to the poem’s topical matter and thematic substance that now merge in its “pow’rful rhyme.”31 Form and contents “eternize” the youth, so that by calling attention to them the speaker calls attention to himself and his skills as a writer. His work will outlast time as a “living record” of his friend’s luminosity. This eternizing motif interweaves two classical antecedents, first from Horace’s Ode 3.30 (“Exegi monumentum aere perennius” ‘I have made a monument more durable than bronze’, where the singular monumentum haply overdetermines the misprinted “guilded monument” in Shakespeare’s 1609 Quarto, silently emended in later editions to the plural “monuments” to rhyme with “contents”). The second derives from the conclusion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (15.871–79), directly echoing Arthur Golding’s dilated translation of these lines in 1567.32 These echoes assert his speaker’s victory over time, as in Golding’s “the better part of mee” will survive in verses that guarantee “my name . . . so farre shall all folke reade this woork” (989–93). To the extent that sonnet 55 recalls this text, it reverses Petrarchan conventions about the beloved’s departure from this world. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, the speaker foretells his own death, after which the product of his pen may compete with verse yet to come from later pens. But by evoking Horace and Ovid, the speaker implies his professional engagement with still other antecedents. They include the Roman forerunner Vergil, the Italian successor Petrarch, and the English poets Sidney and Spenser. Reinforcing their currency, the spelling of “guilded” in the 1609 Quarto evokes a “guild” of poets whose members join in professional support even as they jostle with one another for a share of fame. 31.  The pluralized noun was introduced by Caxton in 1481 to indicate the “contents” of his printed Bible, and was subsequently applied in 1513 to the contents of legal documents; see OED usage 2 and 3. 32.  In book 15 of the Metamorphoses, Golding’s lines 984–95 correspond to Ovid’s lines 871–79; see Shakespeare’s Ovid: Arthur Golding’s Translation of the “Metamorphoses,” ed. W. H. D. Rouse (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 314. See also Propertius’s Elegy 3.2, as noted by Kerrigan. In his Palladis Tamia (1598) Francis Meres quotes in tandem both passages from Horace and Ovid (282a–b), implying that Meres derived the pairing from a manuscript of Shakespeare’s poem, composed before 1598, or that Shakespeare derived it from Meres, either composing or revising the poem in or after 1598. See MacDonald P. Jackson, “Frances Meres and the Cultural Contexts of Shakespeare’s Rival Poet Sonnets,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 56 (2005): 237–38.

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Of these precedents, the Spenserian ones deserve a closer look. Shakespeare’s strongest Ovidian echo in sonnet 55 occurs at the end of its second quatrain among other echoes from Spenser: “Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn / The living record of your memory.” While “sword” and “fire” call up Golding’s translation of Ovid in which “Nor sword, nor fyre . . . / Are able too abolish quyght” (15.985–86), the curious double possessive of “Mars his sword” points to Spenser’s archaizing syntax. The “living record of your memory” then summons Spenser’s Ruines of Rome, whose sonnet 32 celebrates the eternizing power of verse: “Hope ye my verses that posteritie / Of age ensuing shall you ever read.”33 Spenser contends that poems withstand the effects of time better than “these moniments, which not in paper writ, / But in Porphyre and Marble doo appeare,” simultaneously accommodating to his sonnet both the beginning of Horace’s Ode 3.30 and the ending of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His witty conversion of Horace’s monumentum (and Du Bellay’s “les monuments”) as moniment “warning” conveys a moral touch that assimilates his poem to a community of classical, Petrarchan, and Pléiade texts.34 Shakespeare’s third quatrain initiates another form of fellowship with Spenser by appropriating the latter’s nods to posterity:

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’Gainst death and all oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room, Ev’n in the eyes of all posterity. Here, in a series of tropes that associate the Young Man with poetic representations about him, the speaker affirms a style that is uniquely his own. His friend’s “pace” prefigures the metric quality of verse (and its internal off-rhyme with “praise” shadows its aural quality); his “room” prefigures its stanzaic pattern and that word’s Elizabethan homophony with “Rome” defines its linkage to antiquity; and “the eyes of all posterity”—echoing the incipit of Spenser’s sonnet 32—prefigures its potential readership. Shakespeare shares this readership with Spenser, in a literary history that reaches back through Du Bellay and Petrarch to Vergil, Horace, and Ovid and forward to their present posterity. The poem consequently enacts four sorts of contact at whose center stands the figure of Petrarch: first, a colloquy among

33.  See Hieatt, “Genesis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” 34.  We could add Ronsard to this list; he published his Quatre Premiers Livres des Odes in 1550 to challenge the “petriquarzant” vanities of his contemporaries. His concluding “Ode a ses muses” draws upon both Horace’s Ode 3.30 and Ovid’s Metamorphoses 16, as noted above.

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the Augustan poets Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, which in turn parallels a conversation between Petrarch and the ancients whom he had emulated; next, a dialogue between Du Bellay and Petrarch, which Spenser reenacts between himself and both poets as he tries to claim them for the English language; third, a repartee between Spenser and his English forerunners, especially Sidney, as each of them angled on his own terms to keep pace with what Petrarch and the ancients had achieved; and finally Shakespeare’s engagement with all these poets in the years immediately before the publication of Sonnets in 1609, circumscribing their contacts in this text. Ultimately Shakespeare’s revisionary engagement with Sidneian and Spenserian models slides into diminuendo at this point in the sequence. Some who accept that sonnets 1–60 bear signs of revision have conjectured about why these signs vanish around sonnet 60. Speculations range across the author’s loss of interest, the pressures of his theatrical commitments, his hurried effort to sell a half-revised collection of poems for publication at a time when he needed money or when he possibly risked being pirated by another publisher.35 Consistent with the kinds of borrowing from Sidney and Spenser that I’ve noted and their effects on the poems that we’ve been analyzing, I’d posit another suggestion. The author had simply run out of earlier poems that could profit from such revision. The persona of Sidney’s deluded sensualist and the dramatic context in which he pursues another man’s wife barely engages the layered psychological insights and overlapping social critique of Shakespeare’s later sonnets. Nor does the persona of Spenser’s socially, politically, and religiously reformed poet-lover. It would be hard to imagine Sidneian or Spenserian echoes imbuing the consensual promiscuity of the Dark Lady sonnets, or the moral (but not religiously reformed) understanding of sonnets 104–26, or the rival-poet sonnets assembled after the series of sonnets 1–60. As Sonnets moves toward its “eternizing” and “rival poet” motifs, the paired sonnets 57 (“Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire?”) and 58 (“Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure”) examine the passage of time from perspectives of the present. Both explore their speaker’s role as a homo economicus who confronts the old economic order of feudal loyalty with the new economic order of entrepreneurship, initiative, and self-determination. In each poem his interconnected social, literary, and amatory roles hinge on the word “slave” in relation to the Young Man’s autonomous “desire.” Their dramatic context alludes variously 35. See Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Arden Shakespeare Edition (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 11–21 and 57.

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to the youth’s security in his aristocratic milieu, contrasted with the speaker’s overt or covert anxieties about his own social derogation; the youth’s overbearing, even duplicitous enjoyment of dominance, limned by unflattering reports that the speaker dispatches about him; and the sexual urges and impulses of both the speaker and his friend, directed toward variously disreputable partners. For each meaning of his friend’s “desire,” the speaker’s self-identification as a “slave” takes on a new significance, whether designating his place in the social order and affirming his economic dependence upon the Young Man’s support, or indicating his submission as a writer to literary fashions and styles that define the Young Man’s tastes, or suggesting and then undermining his emotional ties to the Young Man. The argument of sonnet 57 sustains each prospect in turn, equally defining the speaker’s attendance upon his friend’s social eminence, or upon his literary preferences and tastes, or upon his recreational inclinations and sexual caprices. As these possibilities engage one another, they gather the poem’s social, literary, and affective codes into volatile proximity. The speaker’s matter-of-fact attitude registers a subdued skepticism toward each instance. In defending its logic, he exposes its inconsistency, all the while claiming only to repeat what someone else has said—sometimes the Young Man, sometimes the collective wisdom of others in commonplace adages. His compliance elicits metaphors of quantification and quantified spending, at once linking time to service, and service to payment while confirming the economic proposition that “time is money”: “I have no precious time at all to spend, / Nor services to do till you require.” The repetition of “Nor dare I” at the beginning of the second and third quatrains associates the worth of time with the maxim of submission: Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you . . . Nor dare I question with my jealous thought Where you may be, or your affairs suppose. A barely concealed slippage of syntax and semantics pressures the speaker’s defeated expectation. In “world-without-end hour,” for example, world may function as part of a Sidneian (and ultimately Ronsardian) compound adjective modifying the noun “hour,” which the speaker chides as a seeming infinity. This phrase would imply that the Young Man spends an unconscionable amount of time behaving as he may please. Or world may function as direct object of “chide” modified by the Sidneian (and Ronsardian) compound adjective “without-end-hour.” This phrase would imply that the

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speaker dare not question the world’s consensus about the Young Man as “sovereign.”36 Against a hint of fleeting insolence, the speaker’s designation of himself “like a sad slave” in line 11 qualifies the status accorded to him in line 1 as “being your slave” and in line 8 as “your servant.” To press this issue further, the momentary association of the vocative “my sovereign” in line 6 with the speaker’s “I” implies the latter’s self-mastery, against which his identification as “slave” appears nugatory. The dominant figure of this poem is occupatio, through which the speaker formulates a complaint that he pretends not to utter. The same figure governs sonnet 58, which iterates his status as “your slave” and “your vassal,” using these words to frame an economic discourse of “control” (= to record the Young Man’s expenditures of time in a roll-book) and “account” (= a reckoning or calculation of expenses):

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That God forbid, that made me first your slave, I should in thought control your times of pleasure, Or at your hand th’ account of hours to crave, Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure. With a slight adjustment of emphasis, however, the verb “crave” tilts the register of “account” from an economic to a moral register. The Young Man quantitatively regulates his account book of activities, but the speaker qualitatively judges and evaluates them through a rhetoricized account of events, in a form of verse that he masters with great care. By massaging his words, he calls into question his friend’s socioeconomic rights, “without accusing you of injury” (where “injury” functions in its legal sense of in-juria ‘something un-just, not right’). Conversely, he also calls into question his own rhetorical dexterity as he allows his rhymes to slide into prose rhythms. The feminine rhymes “pleasure / leisure” quoted above, for example, punctuate the first quatrain, while “injury” forms an off-rhyme with “liberty” in the second quatrain. Here the speaker seems to suppress his wit and relax his authorial control, relegating his friend’s “charter” of entitlements “that you yourself may privilege in your time / To what you will,” echoing the insouciant subtitle of Twelfth Night. The poem ends where its predecessor began, in a weakening of the speaker’s self-interest and a diminution of his agency: “I am to wait, though waiting so be hell, / Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.” “Pleasure” in the concluding couplet is simply “pleasure,” indifferently “ill or well” as opposed to the hurtful and 36.  “World-without-end” echoes from LLL 5.2.775. The phrase “my sovereign” returns to the figure of the young man as a sovereign in sonnet 33.

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demeaning “pleasure” of the first quatrain. Like so much else in the narrative, the poem sputters out in a vortex of broken confidences and betrayals. At what point does the poet’s work of revision end? Sonnet 60, “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,” offers an unusual density of generally rare Shakespearean words—main (= expanse of sea), crawl, flourish, scythe, mow—and specifically late rare words: sequent, eclipse, rarities.37 Its simile about sea waves projects a reference to Spenser’s sonnet 75 in Amoretti, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand, / but came the waves and washed it away,” which proclaims “my verse your vertues rare shall eternize.” ­Capturing Golding’s translation of Ovid (“As every wave dryves other foorth, and that that coomes behynd / Bothe thrusteth and is thrust itself,” Metamorphoses, 15.201–3), Shakespeare’s speaker seizes the topos of mutability:

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So do our minutes hasten to their end, Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. “Sequent toil” stimulates poetic activity as the speaker meditates that “Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth.” The verb transfix carries the primary Elizabethan meaning of “draw a line through, cancel out” (as in an editorial revision) while the rare noun flourish carries the meaning of “poetic or rhetorical embellishment,” a literary “flourish” that time’s hand now rewrites and emends.38 Corrective effects in sonnets 62 and 65 suggest that sonnet 60 is only an approximate terminus for the poet’s work of revision. In sonnet 62, “Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,” the speaker narcissistically allows “self-love” to determine not only his worth but also the worth of everyone and everything else, conveyed by the early rare word “surmount”: “As I all other in all worths surmount.”39 The poem’s third quatrain replaces the speaker’s narcissism with a stunning correction, appropriately signaled by the late rare compound-word “self-love”:40 37.  Frequencies of these words: “main” in Jn. 2.1.26, R3 1.4.19, Oth. 2.1.3 and 39; “crawl” in MND 2.2.146 and 3.2.444, Ham. 3.1.125, Lr. 1.1.39; “scythe” in LLL 1.1.6, H5 5.2.50, Ant. 3.13.195; “mow” in 2H6 3.1.67, 3H6 5.7.4, and Cor. 1.3.33 and 4.5.201; “sequent” in Ham. 5.2.54, Tro. 4.4.65, MM 5.1.375, AW W 2.2.48 and 5.3.196, Oth. 1.2.41, Lr. 1.2.96; “eclipse” in Ham. 1.1.119, Mac. 4.1.28, Oth. 5.2.97, Lr. 1.2.123, 128; “rarities” in Tim. 1.1.4; Lr. 4.3.23; Tmp. 2.1.59. 38.  “Flourish” (as a noun meaning “ornament”) occurs in R3 1.3.237 and 4.4.77, and in LLL 2.1.14, but also in Ham. 2.2.91. 39.  “Surmount” occurs in 1H6 5.3.191, LLL 5.2.659, and R2 2.3.64. 40.  “Self-love” occurs in H5 2.4.74, TN 1.5.82, and AW W 1.1.136, but also in 2H6 5.1.38 and the poems Luc. 266 and sonnet 3.8.

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But when my glass shows me myself indeed Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity, Mine own self-love quite contrary I read. This correction parallels Spenser’s adjustment at exactly the same position in the third quatrain of sonnet 35 (“My hungry eyes through greedy covetize”) in Amoretti: “But [my eyes] lothe the things which they did like before, / And can no more endure on them to looke.” Spenser’s poem reappears in that sequence with a single emendation as sonnet 83, where “And having it [i.e., as an object of possession] they gaze on it the more” becomes “And seeing it [i.e., as an object of vision], they gaze on it the more.” In this example, the original “having” projects the speaker’s egotistic possession of the beloved as part of his narcissistic self, while the revised “seeing” describes the speaker’s other-directed gaze and, consequently, his acceptance of the beloved as another person distinct from himself. Spenser’s redaction disinfects his speaker’s solipsism and accentuates his capacity for growth and altruism.41 So too in Shakespeare’s sonnet, an overhaul occurs when the speaker attributes excellence not to himself but to the Young Man who is his “other” self: “’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise.” Vision has advanced from appearance to reality, and to reality with a turn toward otherness. The speaker formulates this argument as he becomes a reflective “glass” for the Young Man to see himself and preview the effects of advancing years, “when my glass shows me myself indeed.” In physical appearance the “glass” provides a “gloss” for the speaker’s argument. By 1609, Shakespeare’s docket for revision may have reached sonnet 65, “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea.” This possibility seems registered in Winter’s Tale (1610?) by Camillo’s response to Leontes about poisoning Polixenes: “Nor brass, nor stone, nor parchment bears not one [i.e., not one example of an assassin who prospered after his murderous act]” (1.2.359).42 As it happens, the sonnet’s emphasis upon time parallels this play’s emphasis upon temporality. The latter is enacted in a long slow movement from Leontes’s early recognition (“I have too much believed mine own suspicion,” 3.2.148) to his belated redemption in act 5. And the sonnet’s emphasis upon self-defeating behavior likewise parallels the play’s depiction of its characters. The latter subvert their own self-interests, ranging from

41.  See William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 266–73. 42.  The play’s conflicts recall “the monarch’s plague, this flattery” of sonnet 114 and the “child of state” and “pitiful thrivers” of sonnets 124 and 125, while Leontes’s “still virginalling / Upon his palm” (1.2.125–26) summons the double entendres of sonnet 128.

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Leontes’s diminishment of his dynastic line to Perdita’s cautious distance from competing “with great creating nature” (4.4.88), and from Polixenes’s praise of hybridity as “an art / Which does mend nature” (4.4.95–96)— despite his position on class-determined pedigree—to Autolycus’s unwitting acts of doing good: “Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance” (4.4.696–97). Here, as in Sonnets, the buyout and payback depend upon a hermeneutic openness to difference and change. The literary genetics of Sonnets display a similar openness to change. In the speaker’s representation of his friend’s narcissistic behavior, the dialectic of self and other generates a moral awakening. This awakening may lead to mutual empowerment for both parties. The speaker approaches an enigmatic Petrarchism where his commendation of the Young Man accompanies his self-reproach, blurring his agency in the unfolding drama. Is he a subject who wills and controls what is happening to him in his friend’s company? Or are both parties the objects of interacting forces beyond their conscious control? At first the speaker deploys a perverse Petrarchism that appears seriously flawed. To his own surprise, however, he discovers Petrarchism as a site of conflicting interpretations whose irresolution prompts further interpretation. Different versions of Petrarch provide him with a writerly means to assert his public and private aspirations, especially ones that challenge conventional stereotypes of gender roles, class differences, religious commitment, political allegiance, and economic sufficiency. Whether Shakespeare’s speaker redeems Petrarchism or Petrarchism redeems him depends upon which versions of Petrarch subtend his poetry and in what ways.

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Mercurial Economies

I began this book with attention to the figure of Mercury in the work of Petrarch, Stampa, Michelangelo, Ronsard, and Shakespeare. Mercury’s assertive, self-interested, shape-shifting persona displays characteristics that these authors shared across their careers. They include flexibility, openness to innovation, sensitivity to context, and an awareness of different perspectives. These are qualities associated with successful market strategies, and they intersect with the rise of an entrepreneurial economics in early modern Europe.1 They also intersect with the competing claims of a Platonic aesthetics grounded in divine inspiration and of an Aristotelian aesthetics grounded in craftsmanship and skill. Petrarch’s Italian verse and his habits of composition, parsed in early modern commentaries on his Rime sparse, establish a model that Renaissance poets build upon. It constitutes in practice—though individual poets 1.  For the economics of European book-markets, see Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 107–57, and Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 123–63; for the French book-trade, see Floyd Gray, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); for England and northern Europe, see Ian Maclean, Learning and the Marketplace: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 9–24. For the development of an art market in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, see Michael North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 313

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often declare otherwise—a reproof of assumptions about divine inspiration and an endorsement of principles associated with rational choice and some measurable criteria of value. Its economic import migrates from a conventional reliance upon patronage in a gift economy to an involvement with market relations in an exchange economy. Petrarch conducted his work outside the dominant institutions of church, school, and court in his day, the better to expand his range of readerly contacts. Stampa contributed to the salon culture of sixteenth-century Venice but never divulged her attachment to any particular salon, the better to fashion a critique of its social and economic conventions. Michelangelo balked at the dictates of patronage enjoined by popes and princes, just as he declined membership in conventional guilds, the better to affirm his unique genius. Ronsard spurned the courtly precedents of Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais in his youth and urged his self-constituted brigade of aspiring poets to challenge the norms of aristocratic patronage. With the publication of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare entered London’s literary world and soon parlayed his talent and skill into a lucrative shareholding with Richard Burbage’s theatrical company that gave him the resources and security to develop as a poet-playwright. Where did these precedents lead to? Among Shakespeare’s English contemporaries, Michael Drayton (1563– 1631) offers an instructive comparison. With no university or Inns of Court education and with few courtly connections, Drayton found himself unable to crack the code for obtaining patronage or preferment. Except for his lumpish Harmonie of the Church (1591), his first three major poetic works appeared in print within a fourteen-month span: the pastoral eclogues of Idea, The Shepheards Garland (1593), the historical narrative of Piers Gaveston (1593), and the sonnet sequence of Ideas Mirrour (1594), individually dedicated to Robert Dudley, Henry Cavendish, and Anthony Cooke.2 None of these dedicatees offered sustained patronage. The pastoral eclogues of Idea, The Shepheards Garland clearly echo those of Edmund Spenser and especially Philip Sidney, and the commendation of the shepherdess Pandora in eclogue 6 evokes the Countess of Pembroke, “With mighty groves of holy Lawrell cround, / Erecting learnings long decayed fame” (70–71). The sonnets of Ideas Mirrour evoke those of Sidney and Samuel Daniel (with the titular “Idea” echoing the anagram of “Delia/Ideal” in Daniel’s title), but the question of who “Idea” might be—whether a patroness or a beloved or a fictive

2.  For biographical details, see Jean R. Brink, Michael Drayton Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1990).

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composite—remains unresolved through the text’s multiple reprints during the next quarter of a century. These reprints illustrate Drayton’s most notable characteristic as a writer: his dedication to revision. Over the course of six editions beginning in 1599 and continuing through his collected Poems of 1601, 1605, 1610, 1613, and 1619, he expanded, contracted, augmented, deleted, rearranged, and otherwise meticulously reworked the fifty-three sonnets (or “amours”) of Ideas Mirrour into sixty-three sonnets of Idea.3 The first and last versions of sonnet 7 in Ideas Mirrour, eventually sonnet 17 in the final edition of Idea, illustrate his efforts. Based on Petrarch’s sonnet 248 (“Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura” ‘Whoever wishes to see how much Nature’), perhaps with echoes from Ronsard’s adaptations of that topos in various revisions of Les Amours, Drayton’s rewriting eliminates verbal repetition, straightens the poetic argument, and attempts a “better” sonnet. Its original version features archaizing Spenserian alliteration: “STAY, stay, sweet Time, behold or ere thou passe / From world to world, thou long has sought to see.”4 Its final version offers a more colloquial account: “STAY, speedy time, behold, before thou passe, / From age to age, what thou hast sought to see.” Revisions in the sestet point in different directions. Here is the 1594 conclusion with its fivefold repetition of “Time” to emphasize the speaker’s focus on temporality:

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Now passe on Time, to after-worlds tell this,   Tell truelie Time what in thy time hath beene,   That they may tell more worlds what Time hath seene,   And heaven may joy to think on past worlds blisse. Heere make a Period Time, and saie for mee, She was, the like that never was, nor ever more shalbe. And here is its 1619 version with its single mention of “Posteritie” replacing the earlier repetitions of “Time”: Passe on, and to Posteritie tell this, Yet see thou tell, but truly, what hath beene: Say to our Nephewes, that thou once hast seene,

3.  Only thirty sonnets from the 1594 edition entered the 1619 edition, all much revised; over the years, thirty-three new sonnets joined the collection. See commentary in Michael Drayton, Works, ed. J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson, and Bernard H. Newdigate, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931–41), 5:137–44, 326–28. 4.  Quotations and their variants from Drayton, Works, ed. Hebel, Tillotson, and Newdigate.

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In perfect humane shape, all heav’nly Blisse;   And bid them mourne, nay more, despaire with thee,   The she is gone, her like againe to see. Instead the speaker resumes from the poem’s opening lines its rhyme word “see.” The word recurs internally in line 10, but now with a semantic shift to hortatory address: “Yet see thou tell.” In the same line “yet” indicates the speaker’s caution and “but truly” sharpens his injunction as he enjoins future readers: “bid them mourne.” The word “see” in the final couplet mocks the speaker’s confidence in the earlier 1594 conclusion: “Heere make a Period Time, and saie for mee.” The 1594 imperative “saie” evokes his sense of command and determination, while the 1619 “mourne, nay more, despaire” conveys his sense of loss and desolation. In the years that followed, Drayton inserted himself into patronage environments by modeling his work on that of various contemporaries. To Lucy, Countess of Bedford, he dedicated his historical narratives Matilda (1594) and Mortimeriados (1596) in the manner of Daniel’s Civil Wars. He also dedicated to her his mythological poem Endymion and Phoebe (1595) in the manner of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, along with what became his most frequently reprinted work, England’s Heroical Epistles (1597) in the manner of Ovid’s Heroides. Soon afterward Drayton lost the support of Lucy, and he turned his efforts toward public theater. Between 12 December 1597 and 29 May 1602, Philip Henslowe’s diary records authorial payments to him for twenty-six plays (mostly historical dramas, all nonextant except for Sir John Oldcastle, Parts I and II, 1599) written in collaboration with seven other dramatists (including Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Christopher Middleton, and Robert Wilson). Each play yielded between £4 and £8 to be divided among its collaborators.5 Between August 1607 and July 1608, he became an associate manager of the Children of the King’s Revels at the Whitefriars Theater before the enterprise fell bankrupt. Drayton earned no further rewards or recognition for his theatrical work. Nor did his prospects for patronage recover. With The Owle (published in 1604) he began dedicating his work to Sir Walter Aston, one of James I’s favorites, and continued doing so through his collected Poems in 1619. In the 1606 revision of The Shepheards Garland, he introduced—perhaps under

5.  At this rate Drayton’s average annual yield would have been £8.67, about midway between the yearly earnings of a manual laborer at £5 and a skilled artisan at £10.

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Jonson’s influence—twelve odes on various topics.6 His long chorographic poem about Britain’s rich natural resources, Poly-Olbion (1612–22) incorporates his celebration of England’s mercantile endeavors. In a 1621 elegy to George Sandys, Treasurer of the Virginia Colony and translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Drayton admits his own blunders as a seeker of preferment— “It was my hap before all other men / To suffer shipwrack by my forward pen” (19–20). In another elegy to Henry Reynolds, Esq., he constructs a lineage of English poets from “noble Chaucer” to his friend William Browne of Tavistock. Generous in praise of “learn’d [Ben] Jonson” (who according to Drummond “esteemed not of him”), he seems reserved about Shakespeare, commending only his “comicke vein” and “natural braine,” and about Daniel, deeming him “too much historian in verse” (119–28). Attaining neither the former’s success in print or on the stage, nor the latter’s in sustaining favor and patronage, Drayton could only lament his clumsy entrepreneurship in a clientage system that was nearing extinction. In France, the economics of early seventeenth-century publication followed patterns exploited by Ronsard decades earlier, but aesthetic preferences changed greatly. As in England, an increasing concentration of cultural authority in the capital city generated new economic relations. During the reign of Louis XIII, Paris fostered an especially homogeneous integration of its elite audience and readership in court and town.7 When François de Malherbe (1555–1628) moved there from Provence in 1605, his political sensibilities led him to promote an aesthetic credo for the courtly bureaucracy staffed by middle-class technocrats and provincial nobility.8 Malherbe composed no formal treatise on poetics. His precepts are rather to be inferred from reports by disciples such as Honorat de Racan and from his handwritten comments in a 1600 edition of Philippe Desportes’s verse. There his apodictic decrees convey a set of defined tastes and poetic values. In sonnet 1.43 of Desportes’s Les Amours de Diane, Malherbe points to the metaphor of the poet’s eye as a lamp that illuminates the beloved’s portrait and he sneers: “S’il y a rien au monde de ridicule, c’est ceste imagination” ‘If there’s nothing in the world more ridiculous, it’s this bizarre image’.9 Without further explanation, he underlines

6.  Among them, “To the Virginia Voyage” celebrates the chartering of the Virginia Companies as England’s debut on the stage of New World colonialism. 7.  See Erich Auerbach, “La Cour et la Ville,” in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Mannheim et al. (New York: Meridian, 1959), 133–79, especially in connection with Molière’s innovative use of the French noun profession in its modern sense noted above. 8.  See Richard A. Katz, Ronsard’s French Critics, 1585–1828 (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 66–73. 9.  Philippe Desportes, Diverses amours et autres oeuvres meslées, ed. Victor Graham, (Geneva: Droz, 1963), 88.

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words and phrases that he deems infelicitous or unworthy: “dévôt,” “pressé de quelque adversité,” “par mille et mille vers,” and “coupant mes cheveux.” Next to Desportes’s epigram “Je t’apporte, ô Sommeil,” he scrawls Froid. Malherbe’s objective was to prime his disciples for worldly success, the key to which would be clarity, accessibility, and respect for standard form. Ronsard, as we’ve seen, capitalized upon his many poetic assets with a view toward earning interest upon his investments in them. With Malherbe, “interest” comes to be seen in terms of a socially approved “self-interest” achieved through discipline and “self-control.” One gets ahead not by dazzling others or exceeding their expectations, but by displaying a polite, assured, well-bred competence and by practicing habits of prudence, predictability, efficiency, and constancy that temper one’s passions without extinguishing them.10 Internalizing an ethos of order and self-control, Malherbe’s followers reject the audacity of Ronsard as well as the vulgarity of popular culture to devote themselves to an ideal of rational simplicity. The opposite ethos prevailed in Italy. An increasing isolation of Italian courts from urban environments along with a resistance to territorial consolidation bred pockets of backwardness and eccentricity. Giambattista Marino (1569–1630), Italy’s most celebrated poet after Torquato Tasso, capitalized upon his singularity while moving from Naples to Rome, Venice, Turin, Paris (upon the invitation of the queen regent Marie de’ Medici), and back again in search of noble or ecclesiastical support. His extensive literary production compensated for his rejection of stable institutional structures. Among his collections of lyric verse, La Galeria (Venice, 1619) displays his visual sensibility as each poem focuses descriptively upon a real or imagined painting, drawing, or piece of sculpture in a mode that descends from Petrarch’s sonnets 77 and 78 on Simone Martini’s portrait of Laura. Here’s the second quatrain from his sonnet on an engraving of Narcissus by the Genovese artist Bernardo Castello: Non finto il fonte, e chi si mira in esso É vivo e vero, e vera é l’onda e viva; Se tace l’un, l’altra di suono é priva: Ch’opra sia però d’arte, io non confesso.11

10.  See the classic statement by Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 31–66. 11.  Giovanni Battista Marino, La Galeria, ed. Marzio Pieri, 2 vols. (Padua: Liviana, 1979), 1:13; for commentary, see James V. Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

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Its pool of water is not feigned, and [Narcissus] who gazes upon it is alive and true and its ripple is true and alive; if one stays silent, the other is deprived of sound; I don’t concede that it should still be just a work of art [and not reality itself]. The truth-defying, reality-violating, substance-challenging quality of the picture defeats the speaker’s expectations and elicits only wonder. And wonder is the goal of Marino’s La Galeria as its many disjoined speakers move from image to image in search of artful paradox. In Spain, the example of Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) signals yet another response to the early modern intersection of aesthetics and economics. Quevedo belonged to no literary salon or academy and, though he certainly pursued self-interests in his dealings with patrons, he made no effort to publish his work. In his lifetime he amassed a tremendous number of manuscripts but had seen only a small part of them through the press—and that part mostly belatedly: his picaresque novel El Buscón (1603, published 1626), his satiric El sueño del Juicio Final (1605, published 1627), and his political treatise España defendida (1609). Some of his poems circulated in manuscript and a few—chiefly satiric ones—were printed piratically. The bulk of his poetry was published posthumously in 1648 and 1670. Nor did Quevedo focus only upon his literary work. He pursued an active political career as secretary to the Duke of Osuna, henchman to Philip III’s privado, the indolent Conde Duque de Lerma, who himself was toppled by his own son, the ruthless Conde de Uceda. Quevedo cannily dissociated himself from each of them before each fell from power, and anticipating Philip IV’s accession to the throne, he attached his star to the latter’s privado, the Conde Duque de Olivares. Sensing Olivares’s impending fall a decade later, he retired to his country estate where he passed his time attacking political enemies and revising his poetic obras. It appears that Quevedo assayed several occupations while practicing one profession, that of poet.12 In Quevedo’s amatory sequence, Canta sola a Lisi, the topos of the beloved’s portrait governs a poem whose headnote reads Retrato de Lisi que traía en una sortija ‘Lisi’s portrait that he carried in a ring’. The poem’s structure deploys a feature common to many of Quevedo’s sonnets, namely the anaphorical repetition of its main verb in its octave and its sestet—in this case, traigo ‘I bear’. Here’s its octave: 12.  Robert ter Horst, “Francisco Quevedo and the Poetic Matter of Patronage,” in Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain, ed. Mary E. Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 182–202, especially 199.

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  En breve cárcel traigo aprisonado con toda su familia de oro ardiente, el cerco de la luz resplandeciente, y grande imperio del Amor cerrado.   Traigo el campo que pacen estrellado las fieras altas de la piel luciente, y a escondidas del cielo y del Oriente, día de luz y parto mejorado.13

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In a cramped jail I carry imprisoned, with its entire family of burning gold, the resplendent sphere of light and great empire enclosed by Love. I carry the starry field which the lofty beasts of shining skin feed upon, and hidden from heaven and the rising sun, an enhanced day of light and birth. Though the verb traigo seems to personalize the speaker’s voice and point of view, its repetition overrides both by shifting our attention to the portrait. Unlike Marino, Quevedo does not name its specific artist. His description proceeds obliquely, though his Petrarchan tropes seem reassuringly conventional. In the octave, gold = hair, stars = eyes; in the sestet, pearls = teeth, rubies = lips. But just when you think you understand the code, you discover features that baffle it. Mythic references seem to mark “las fieras altas” and “la piel luciente” at the end of the octave, but what do they allude to?14 Quevedo’s figurations are shot through with hyperbole, but at what expense?15 Do they deride the banality of Lisi’s beauty? the clichés of Petrarchan verse? the complacencies of an expected readership? the eccentricities of a distinctive style? The closer you look, the more obscurity you find. The poem opens briefly to transmit some outward clarity before receding inward to an Alhambra of erasure and self-cancellation. Quevedo looms as a solitary figure who challenges the dictates of his era even while yielding to them. In his aesthetic preferences and economic circumstances, he may best be defined by what he is not: he’s committed to neither the density nor allusiveness of Luis de Góngora and his followers; nor to the plain style of Fray Luis de Léon, whose poetry he collected and published in 1631 as an antidote to Góngorism; nor to the earlier austerity of Fernando 13.  Francisco de Quevedo, Obras completes, ed. José Manuel Blecua, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Planeta, 1963), 1:506–7. 14.  Blecua glosses the line as a reference to the constellation of Taurus. 15.  Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 192–221.

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de Herera; nor to the still earlier refinement of Garcilaso de la Vega. His independence puts him squarely in the company of authors from Petrarch to Shakespeare, but he remains indifferent to the commercial pressures that enlivened and beleaguered them. Mercurial in temperament, he repudiates their marketplace in favor of battling the odds in a moribund patronage system. In this book I’ve selected my case studies to exemplify typicalities. Gaspara Stampa’s poetic career unfolded in a precocious salon society that marked a gap between elite and popular culture. The author invites us to what seems an improvised performance, yet her texts display an intense engagement with rewriting Petrarch, reconfiguring her own premises, revising her options, and capitalizing upon them. Michelangelo, not a professional poet, wrote verse in the context of a gift economy to illuminate pressing concerns of his two- and three-dimensional art. Relationships between sacred history and its representation in bono and in malo come to define the author’s own personal history in bono and in malo. In this self-deprecating way Michelangelo uses the freedom of a gift economy to comment upon his stature as an artist whose value exceeds conventional patronage. Ronsard, a titan of experiment and development, pioneered in writing odes, heroic hymnes, elegies, epistles, chansons, mythic narratives, political discours, amatory sonnets, and a national epic. In dealing with such diverse materials, many of them beneath his high aspirations, Ronsard refuses to look down upon any of his projects. If on occasion he yields to condescension, he balks from sharing it with readers. Instead, you can feel him weighing each poem in the palm of his hand and deciding whether to auction it off on commission, to send it into print as advertisement for more substantial patronage, or to save and revise it for yet unimagined but still productive possibilities. The magnitude of his literary ambitions and the example that he had set for other poets to imitate or defy make him central to the concerns of this book. Finally there’s Shakespeare, who likely sought patronage early in his career but came to profit from adapting to a commercial ethos. In his dramatic work he summoned the energy and discipline to help form a theatrical company and sustain it, to recruit talented actors and give them scripts to play, to survive their professional egos and eccentricities and keep both popular and elite audiences coming back for more. Deploying such effort over time to get just the right result with just the right finish, broadened and deepened by trial and error, practice and perseverance, he also wrote and published poems for an expectant public, strutting and fretting his off-hours upon the page. Social and economic forces were aggressively restructuring aesthetic assumptions about furor and inspiration, craftsmanship and skill. What’s left to say

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is that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, no market economy could ever allocate these mercurial resources efficiently. Then as now, there would be only patient transactions by writers, musicians, and artists who shape and reshape their work, deep in thought, contemplating risk and reward in contextual economies.

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q WP rima o rks C ite d as ry Te x ts Antonio da Tempo. Francisci Petrarcae poetae excellentissimi Rerum uulgarium fragmenta . . . la uita & il comento supra li Sonetti Canzone & Triumphi . . . composto & compilato per il doctissimo Iurista Misser Antonio da Tempo. 2 vols. Venice: Domenico Siliprando, 1477. Ariosto, Ludovico. Opere minori. Ed. Aldo Vallone. Milan: Rizzoli, 1964. ——. Orlando furioso, secondo l’edizione del 1532 con le varianti delle edizioni del 1516 e del 1521. Ed. Santorre Debenedetti and Cesare Segre. Bologna: Commisione per i testi di lingua, 1960. Avalle, D’Arco Silvio, ed. Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini. Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1992. Bembo, Pietro. Prose e rime. Ed. Carlo Dionisotti. 2nd ed. Turin: UTET, 1966. Bible. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition. Ed. Lloyd E. Berry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Bible, Septuagint. Polyglotten-Bibel. Ed. R. Stier and K. G. W. Theile. 5 vols. Bielefeld: Velhagen; Leipzig: Klasing, 1875. Bible, Vulgate. Novum Testamentum secundum sancti heronymi. Ed. Johannes Words­ worth. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913. Brucioli, Antonio. Sonetti, canzoni, et triomphi di M. Francesco Petrarca con breue dichiaratione, & annotatione di Antonio Brucioli. Venice: Alessandro Brucioli e i frategli, 1548. Casini, Tommaso, ed. Il canzoniere Laurenziano Rediano 9. Bologna: Romagnoli dall’Acqua, 1900. Castelvetro, Lodovico. Le rime del Petrarca breuemente sposte per Lodouico Casteluetro. Basel: Pietro de Sedabonis, 1582. Daniello, Bernardino. Sonetti, canzoni, e triomphi di messer Franceso Petrarcha con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello da Lucca. Venice: Giovanniantonio de Nicolini da Sabio, 1541. Dante Alighieri. Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the “Vita Nuova.” Ed. Teodolinda Barolini. Verse trans. Richard Lansing. Commentary trans. Andrew Frisardi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. ——. Le Opere. Ed. Michele Barbi et al. 2nd ed. Florence: Società dantesca italiana, 1960. Davanzati, Chiaro. Rime: Canzoni e sonetti. Ed. Aldo Menichetti. Turin: G. Einaudi, 2004. Della Casa, Giovanni. Le Rime. Ed. Roberto Fedi. 2 vols. Rome: Salerno, 1978. Desportes, Philippe. Les Amours de Diane. Ed. Victor E. Graham. 2 vols. Geneva: Droz, 1959.

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——. Diverses amours et autres oeuvres meslées. Ed. Victor E. Graham. Geneva: Droz, 1963. Drayton, Michael. Works. Ed. J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson, and Bernard H. Newdigate. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931–41. Du Bellay, Joachim. Oeuvres poétiques. Ed. Daniel Aris and Françoise Joukovsky. 2 vols. Paris: Bordas, 1993–96. Egidi, Francesco, Salvatore Satta, G. B. Festa, and Giorgio Ciccone, eds. Il libro de varie romanze volgare, cod.Vat. 3793. Rome: La Società, 1908. Fausto da Longiano, Sebastiano. Il Petrarcha col commento di M. Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano. Venice: Francesco di Alessandro Bindoni e Mapheo Pasini, 1532. Filelfo, Francesco. Il commento deli sonetti et canzone del Petrarcha composto per Messer Francesco Philelpho. Bologna: Ugo Rugerius, 1476. Gesualdo, Giovanni Andrea. Il Petrarcha colla spositione di Misser Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo. Venice: Giovann’ Antonio di Nicolini & fratelli da Sabbio, 1533. Giolito, Gabriel, et al. Rime diverse di molti eccelentissimi Autori nvovamente raccolte. 8 vols. Vols. 1–3 and 5–7: Venice: Giolito, 1545–56; vol. 4: Bologna: Giaccarello, 1551; vol. 9 (actually vol. 8): Cremona: Conti, 1560. Guittone d’Arezzo. Rime. Ed. Francesco Egidi. Bari: Laterza, 1940. Horace. Opera. Ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1991. Jonson, Ben. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. Ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Marot, Clément. Oeuvres poétiques complètes. Ed. Gérard Defaux. 2 vols. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1900–93. Michelangelo Buonarroti. Rime. Ed. Enzo Noè Girardi. Bari: Laterza, 1960. Montaigne, Michel de. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Monte Andrea da Fiorenza. Le rime. Ed. Francesco Minetti. Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1979. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Ed. R. J. Tarrant. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Petrarch, Francesco. Canzoniere. Ed. Gianfranco Contini. 3rd. ed. Turin: Einaudi, 1964. ——. Canzoniere. Ed. Marco Santagata. 3rd ed. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2008. ——. Familiares. Ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco. In Opere, ed. Mario Martelli, 2 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1975. ——. Letters on Familiar Matters. Trans. Aldo Bernardo. 3 vols. Albany: State University of New York Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975–85. ——. Letters of Old Age. Trans. Aldo Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta Bernardo. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ——. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. Ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. ——. Le Rime. Ed. Giosuè Carducci and Severino Ferrari. Florence: Sansoni, 1899. ——. Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi. Ed. Vincinio Pacca and Laura Paolino. 2nd ed. Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Rabelais, François. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Mireille Huchon and François Moreau. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

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Ronsard, Pierre de. Les Amours. Ed. Henri Weber and Catherine Weber. Paris: Garnier, 1963. ——. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. ——. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Paul Laumonier. 20 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1914–75. Scève, Maurice. The “Délie” of Maurice Scève. Ed. Ian D. McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Shakespeare, William. Complete Sonnets and Poems. Ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ——. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Gordon McMullen, and Suzanne Gossett. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. ——. Shake-speare’s Sonnets. Ed. with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. The Arden Shakespeare Edition. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010. ——. The Sonnets. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ——. The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Ed. John Kerrigan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Sidney, Philip. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. William A. Ringler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Qveene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. Text edited by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki. Harlow: Longman, 2001. Spenser, Edmund. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Ed. William Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Squarzafico, Hieronimo. Li Canzoneti dello Egragio poeta Messer Francesco Petrarcha . . . Io Hyeronimo [Squarzafico] gli ho exposti. Venice: Piero Cremoneso (Petrus de Piasiis), 1484. Stampa, Gaspara. The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime,” a Bilingual Edition. Ed. Troy Tower and Jane Tylus. Trans. Jane Tylus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Sylvano da Venafro. Il Petrarca col commento di M. Syluano da Venaphro. Naples: Antonio Iouino and Matthio Canzer, 1533. Vasari, Giorgio. La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568. Ed. Paola Barocchi. 5 vols. Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1962. ——. Lives of the Artists. Trans. George Bull. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Vellutello, Alessandro. Le volgari opere del Petrarcha con la espositione di Alessandro Vellutello da Lucca. Venice: Giouanniantonio and Fratelli da Sabbio, 1525. Vergil. Opera. Ed. R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.

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q In dex

academies, 6 – 7, 35, 80 – 81, 199. See also institutional groups and associations; salon culture Adorno, Theodor W., 7 – 8 Ahl, Fred, 10n28 Alduy, Cécile, 20n53, 137n9, 138n12, 151n31, 158n17, 177n8, 180n16 Allen, Michael J. B., 3n4 amateurs, 7 – 8, 25; and Ronsard, 158; and Stampa 84 Antoninus of Florence, Saint, 41 Antonio da Tempo, commentary on Petrarch, 231 Ariosto, Ludovico, 12, 22 —career, 154 – 58 —editions and commentaries: by Dolce 167; by Fausto da Longiano, 155, 157; by Fórnari, 155 – 56, 162 – 63; by Pigna, 93, 156; by Ruscelli, 156 —French translations: anonymous, 157; by Desportes, 198 – 99 —habits of revision, 155 – 57, 162 – 63, 166 —impact upon Shakespeare, 244; upon Stampa, 93 —Orlando Furioso: Alcina episode (canto 7), 162 – 65; battles with the orc (cantos 11 – 12), 170; Bradamante’s laments (cantos 32, 37, 44), 166 – 67; canto 45, 167 – 68; Olimpia episode (cantos 9 – 11), 165 – 66 —Rime: in Giolito’s anthology, 157 – 60; sonnet 27, 160 – 62 Aristotle, 2 – 3, 85; and Aquinas, 40 – 41; and Castelvetro, 11, 72 – 73; and Petrarch, 37 – 39, 53 – 54; and Ronsard, 178, 199n8, 208; and Sidney, 256; paraphrase by William of Moerbecke, 53. See also craftsmanship and skill Ascoli, Albert, 54n45, 169n43 Augustine, Saint, 2 – 3, 47 – 48; readings in bono and in malo, 15 – 16

Baïf, Jean-Antoine de, 20, 198 Belleau, Remy: commentary on Ronsard, 173, 179, 180, 182, 185 Bembo, Pietro: and Della Casa, 73 – 74; discussion of Petrarch, 65, 72 – 73, 76 – 77, 79, 154, 156 Bernardino of Siena, Saint, 41 Bible —Book of Revelation 7:8 in Shakespeare and Jonson, 274 —Epistle to the Romans 5:20 in Michelangelo, 108 – 10; in Ronsard, 165 – 66 —Matthew 8:26 in Petrarch and Ronsard, 211 —Psalms 17 in Petrarch and Michelangelo, 107 —Psalms 22 in Michelangelo, 118 – 19 Binet, Claude: biography of Ronsard, 134 – 35, 146 – 47,  193 Biow, Douglas, 14n36, 60n10, 112n24 Black Death and the economy, 39 – 40 Boaistuau, Pierre, 205 Bodin, Jean, 19, 23 – 25, 171 – 76 book-trade, 7, 25, 313 – 15; and Ariosto, 155 – 56; and Ronsard, 134, 176 – 77; and Shakespeare, 221 – 22, 224, 265; and Stampa, 86. See also Giolito Brucioli, Antonio: commentary on Petrarch, 88, 92n35, 94, 228; influence on Michelangelo, 103 – 4, 109 – 10, 115, 117 – 18 Budé, Guillaume, 17 – 18, 24 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 11 – 12; commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, 11 – 12, 72 – 73; commentary on Petrarch, 95, 213, 227 Cavalcanti, Guido, 45 Celenza, Christopher, 3n4, 75n29

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Cheney, Patrick, 26n67, 223nn14, 17, 259n26, 267n7, 272n11, 276n16, 297n21 Chiaro Davanzati, 42; poems in Codex Vaticana 3793, 43, 46, 49, 57, 67 – 68 Colonna, Vittoria, 14 – 15, 101 – 3, 111, 121 – 26; sonnets 42 and 68, 124 commerce, 1, 12 – 13 commissions and consignments, 186 – 87, 190 – 91, 200 – 201,  207 commutative justice, 4, 116, 143 – 45 Conti, Natale, 149 Correll, Barbara, 30n84 craftsmanship and skill, 2, 321; and Petrarch, 10, 46 – 49, 63, 66, 72; and Michelangelo, 102, 115 – 16, 122, 125; and Ronsard, 134, 136, 143, 145, 155, 162, 173; and Shakespeare, 236, 245, 248, 256, 259, 261; and Stampa, 85, 99 credit, 24 – 25; and Petrarch, 70; and Ronsard, 137, 143 – 45, 169, 177 – 78 Culler, Jonathan, 8n11, 11n31, 26n68 Daniel, Samuel, 20, 221, 272 – 73, 314, 316 Daniello, Bernardino: commentary on Petrarch, 148, 211, 227, 250, 296n20, 299n24; model for Du Bellay, 166 Dante Alighieri: Inferno 9.63, 53; Inferno 25.9, 52; Paradiso 29.91, 123; Purgatorio 24.51 – 53, 62, 69; Vita nuova poem 15, 45 debasement of coin and value, 17 – 18, 24 – 25, 40 – 41, 113 – 14, 174 – 75 debt, 40 – 41, 126 – 27, 137, 174 – 75, 177 – 78 De Coste, Mary, 161n24 deferred action in Michelangelo, 102 – 3, 110 – 11, 114, 116, 123 Della Casa, Giovanni, 73 – 75, 76 DellaNeva, JoAnn, 72n25, 76n1, 159n19, 160n21, 166n37 Denisot, Nicholas, 140, 158 De Ridder-Vignone, Antonio, 166n38 Desportes, Philippe, 198 – 202, 212 – 13; and Ariosto, 199; epigram “Je t’apporte,” 209 – 10, 317; Les Amours de Diane, 200 – 201, 206 – 7; Les Amours de Hippolite, 205 – 6; Ronsard’s elegy to Desportes, 202 distributive justice, 2 – 3, 6, 143 – 44 Domenichi, Lodovico, 159 Drayton, Michael, 221, 237 – 38, 246, 314 – 17 Du Bellay, Joachim, 20, 291; and Ronsard, 136, 153, 157, 164, 166 – 68, 173, 182; and Spenser, 254, 291 – 93, 302, 306 – 7

Dubrow, Heather, 221n6, 244n4, 259n26 Du Moulin, Charles, 18 – 19, 24, 144 – 45 entrepreneurship, 7 – 8, 313, 317; and Michelangelo, 105, 137, 143; and Petrarch, 39 – 40, 54; and Ronsard, 20 – 22, 137, 143, 172, 175 – 77, 202; and Shakespeare, 26 – 28, 31 – 32, 39, 220 – 21, 245 – 46; and Stampa, 86 exchange economy and exchange value, 3 – 8, 14, 24 – 25, 314; and Michelangelo, 114 – 16, 125 – 26, 129; and Petrarch, 39 – 41, 59; Ronsard, 145 – 47, 170, 175 – 76; and Shakespeare 246, 251 – 52, 254 – 58, 268, 254; and Stampa, 86, 94 fair wage, 6 Fausto da Longiano: commentary on Ariosto, 155, 157n12; on Petrarch, 231, 296 Ficino, Marsilio, 3, 38 Field, Richard, Elizabethan printer, 25n3, 265n3 Filelfo, Francesco: commentary on Petrarch, 146 Fórnari, Simone: commentary on Ariosto, 155 – 56, 162 – 63 Freud, Sigmund, 102n7 furor, fureur, 2, 11, 321; in Castelvetro, 11; in Michelangelo, 85, 111 – 12, 114 – 16; in Petrarch, 10, 37 – 39, 63 – 64, 66, 72; in Ronsard, 19, 21, 134, 136, 145 – 47, 152 – 53, 155, 157, 162, 169, 172, 186 – 90, 197, 202 – 3, 207 – 8; in Shakespeare, 236, 238, 245 – 48, 256 – 57, 259, 268, 272, 292, 294 – 96; in Stampa, 85 Galvez, Marisa, 39n6 Garzoni, Tommaso, 12 Gelli, Giovanni Battista, 35 – 38, 136 Gesualdo, Giovanni Andrea: commentary on Petrarch, 62n12; influence on Ronsard, 148, 182 – 83, 191, 194, 206; and Shakespeare, 227 – 28, 231, 250n11, 277n18, 296; and Stampa, 84 – 85, 88, 96n37, 97n39 gifts and gift economy, 2, 6, 7, 314, 321; and Michelangelo, 14 – 15, 101 – 3, 111 – 14, 124 – 28; and Ronsard, 145 Giolito, Gabriel, 76; and Ariosto, 155, 157 – 60; and Daniello, 166; and Della Casa, 74; and Du Bellay, 166; and Ronsard, 155, 159, 166; and Stampa, 76 – 77, 84, 86, 90

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I N D E X     329 Greene, Robert, 26 – 27, 222 – 23, 249, 255 Greene, Roland, 28n77, 54n45, 144n20 Greene, Thomas M., 28n73, 281n23 guilds, 7, 14, 305. See also institutional groups and associations Guittone d’Arezzo, 42; poems in Codex Vaticana 3793, 43, 57 – 59, 64 – 66

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Hampton, Timothy, 17n45, 18n49, 169n46, 283n25 hermeneutic, 1, 14 – 17, 28 Holmes, Olivia, 39n6, 44n27, 57n3 homo economicus, 3, 9; Petrarch as, 35ff; Michelangelo as, 125; Ronsard as, 138, 143, 148, 157, 173; Shakespeare as, 246, 252, 283 – 84,  307 homo litterarum, 9; Petrarch as, 54; Shakespeare as, 246, 252, 284 Horace, 2, 4, 194 – 95; Epistle 2.3, 38 – 39, 67; Ode 1.22, 87 – 89; Ode 2.5, 160 – 61; Ode 2.20, 139; Ode 3.30, 134 – 35, 305 – 6; Ode 4.10, 211 – 12 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 260 Howie, Cary, 231n28 humanist commentaries: on Ariosto, 93, 155 – 60, 162 – 63; on Petrarch (see Antonio da Tempo; Bembo; Brucioli; Castelvetro; Daniello; Filelfo; Gesualdo; Silvano da Venafro; Squarzafico); on Ronsard (see Binet; Belleau; Mure) Imus, Ashleigh, 71n23 in bono and in malo: in Saint Augustine, 15 – 16; in Michelangelo, 15 – 16, 30, 103 – 6, 111 – 12, 118, 127 – 28, 321; in Rabelais, 145; in Shakespeare, 227 inflation, 17 – 19, 24, 59, 174 – 76, 257 institutional groups and associations, 6 – 7, 9, 13 – 14, 314, 321; and Ronsard, 20; and Shakespeare, 27, 29; and Petrarch, 9, 54. See also academies; salon culture interest, 18 – 19, 24, 143 – 45, 251 – 52, 318; and self-interest, 9, 232, 313, 318 – 19 investment, 20, 318; in Michelangelo, 20; in Petrarch, 40; in Ronsard, 134, 137, 143, 145, 202; in Shakespeare, 232, 248, 251, 269, 287, 297 Jodelle, Etienne, 20 Jonson, Ben, 26, 29, 223, 264 – 66, 274 – 75, 278 – 80; Poetaster, 266; Tribe of Ben, 274 – 75 Jossa, Stefano, 167n40 just price, 4, 6, 40 – 41, 145

Kalas, Rayna, 236n35 Kant, Immanuel, 6 Kaske, Carol V., 16n43, 238n42 Kirkham, Victoria, 9 – 10n27 Kritzman, Lawrence, 160n23, 165n36, 181n17 labor and labor theory of value, 3, 6, 8 – 11, 14 – 15; and Castelvetro, 11; and Drayton, 316; and Garzoni, 12; and Michelangelo, 104 – 5, 114 – 17, 119 – 20; and Petrarch, 10, 37 – 42, 54 – 56, 59, 62 – 64, 66 – 67, 73 – 75; and Ronsard, 22, 134 – 35, 139, 151 – 52, 173, 175, 179, 182, 185, 189, 193, 211; and Shakespeare, 252, 256, 272, 289, 297 – 99 Langer, Ullrich, 4n6, 11n31, 146n26, 150n30, 179n14, 188n25, 202n18 Logan, Marie-Rose, 18n48 Long, Kathleen, 181n17 Looney, Dennis, 154n1 Lorenz, Philip, 30n84 Malherbe, François de, 317 – 18 Malynes, Gerard de, 24 – 25 Mann, Jenny, 230n27 Marino, Giambattista, 318 – 19 markets and marketplaces, 3, 6 – 7; and Garzoni, 12; and Michelangelo, 16 – 17; and Petrarch, 41 – 42; and Ronsard, 145, 215; and Shakespeare, 28, 31, 246, 252, 256, 268. See also book-trade Martini, Simone, poems about: in Petrarch, 35 – 39, 62 – 63, 66; and Marino, 318; and Ronsard, 136, 149 – 50, 158 – 59, 190 – 91; and Michelangelo, 114 – 16, 122 – 24; and Stampa, 85 – 86 Medusa, figure of: in Petrarch, 45 – 53, 228 – 29; in Ronsard, 141 – 42, 181 – 82; in Shakespeare, 228 – 29; in Stampa, 89 – 92 merchants and mercantilism, 1, 6, 23, 28; in Florence, 100, 129; and Michelangelo, 100, 129; and Montaigne, 201; and Petrarch, 42, 54, 69 – 72; and Ronsard, 135, 169, 190, 198; and Shakespeare, 38, 31, 220, 255 – 56, 268, 286, 297; and Stampa, 13, 77, 80, 83, 87 – 89; in Venice, 79 – 80, 83 – 84, 88 – 89 Mercury, 1; in Garzoni, 12; and hermeneutics, 15 – 17, 28; and merx ‘merchant’, 2, 28; and merci ‘thanks’, 2; and mercy, 2, 28; in Michelangelo’s Archers Shooting, 15 – 17; in Ronsard, 19, 188 – 90; in Shakespeare, 28 – 30; in Stampa, 13

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métier, mestiere, mystery: 5, 21, 135 – 36, 186, 190 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 5 – 6, 14 – 17, 314, 321 —ancestry, 100 – 101 —drawings: Archers Shooting, 15 – 17, 103 – 4, 117; Christ on the Cross, 122 – 23; Ganymede, 15, 103, 111 – 12; Phaethon, 15, 103, 112; Pieta, 122 – 23; Tityus, 15, 103, 112; —friends: Brucioli, 101, 107n17, 109 – 10, 115, 117 – 18; Condivi, 100; Ghirlandaio, 101; Luigi del Riccio, 105; Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, 14 – 15, 101, 105 – 6, 108 – 21; Vittoria Colonna, 14, 101 – 2, 123 – 26,  129 —gift-giving, 101 – 2, 111 – 14, 124 – 27 Michelangelo’s poems: madrigal 130, 120; sonnet 58, 106 – 7; sonnet 61, 107, 118; sonnet 62, 107 – 8, 118; sonnet 72, 108 – 11; sonnet 74, 111; sonnet 77, 111; sonnet 79, 112 – 14; sonnet 82, 114 – 16; sonnet 90, 116 – 17; sonnet 94, 117 – 20; sonnet 151, 122 – 24; sonnet 159, 124 – 25; sonnet 230, 120; sonnet 259, 120 – 21; sonnet 260, 121; sonnet 285, 126 – 27; sonnet 288, 128 – 29 Migiel, Marilyn, 42n16 Monfasani, John, 3n4 Montaigne, Pierre Eyquem de, 201 – 2, 214 – 15, 251n12 Monte Andrea, 42; poems in Codex Vaticana 3793, 43, 46, 56 – 57, 66 Muret, Marc-Antoine: commentary on Ronsard, 134, 140 – 42, 146 – 47, 150, 162, 164, 172, 179 Najemy, John, 105n13 Noël du Fail, 175 Olivi, Pietro, 4 Oresme, Nicholas, 40 – 41 Ovidius Naso, Publius, Metamorphoses 2.227, 168, 305 – 6; Metamorphoses 4.781, 51, 56 – 57, 85n27, 134 Parabosco, Girolamo, 81 – 83 Parker, Deborah, 102n5, 108n18 Pastor, Joel, 69n22 patrons and patronage, 7, 9; and Castelvetro, 73; and Della Casa, 74; and Garzoni, 12; and Michelangelo, 14 – 15, 101 – 3, 125 – 26; and Petrarch, 9, 39n5, 68; and Ronsard, 20 – 22, 136 – 37, 153, 173,

176 – 77, 185 – 89, 192; and Shakespeare, 221, 243, 245, 254, 273 – 74; and Stampa, 13 – 14, 80 – 84,  92 Peletier du Mans, Jacques, 157, 160n22, 171 Petrarch, Francesco, 2 – 3, 9 – 11, 313 – 14,  321 —affinity with Plato, 35 – 37, 53 – 54, 59 —and Aristotle, 37 – 39, 53 – 54 —benefices, 9 —family name, 50, 53 —friends: Azzo da Correggio, 9, 43n24, 44n28; Geri Gianfigliazzi, 45 – 48; Pandolfo Malatesta, 9; Sennuccio del Bene, 48 – 49; Simone Martini, 35 – 38, 62, 66; Tommaso Bombasi, 68 – 69 —manuscripts: Chigi, 43, 65 – 69, 72; Vat. Lat. 3195, 43 – 45; Vat. Lat. 3196, 10, 35, 43 – 47, 55 – 59, 61,  63 Petrarch’s poems: Africa, 146 – 48, 213 – 14; Rime estravaganti poem 4, 44 – 45; poem 11, 48; poem 12, 48 – 49; Rime sparse canzone 23, 55 – 58; canzone 360, 68; sonnet 77, 35 – 37, 63, 66; sonnet 78, 37 – 39, 62, 66; sonnet 90, 49; sonnet 152, 58 – 59; sonnet 154, 62; sonnet 159, 36, 59 – 60, 62; sonnet 179, 45 – 48; sonnet 188, 61; sonnets 192 and 193, 61 – 63; sonnet 197, 49 – 53; sonnet 248, 62 – 63; sonnet 291, 65; sonnet 293, 66 – 67; sonnets 300 – 304, 67 – 68; sonnet 303, 68 – 72 Petrarch’s poems as models —sonnet 1: and Michelangelo, 125; and Ronsard, 208; and Stampa, 81 – 82 —sonnet 12: and Ronsard, 208 —sonnet 16: and Sidney, 303n30 —sonnet 20: and Ronsard, 146 —sonnet 35: and Ronsard, 148 – 51, 197, 203 – 4 —sonnet 42: and Ronsard, 160 —sonnets 77 and 78: and Marino, 318; and Michelangelo 114 – 16, 122 – 24; and Ronsard, 136, 149 – 50, 158 – 59, 190 – 91; and Stampa, 85 – 86 —sonnet 84: and Shakespeare, 231 —sonnet 92: and Stampa, 86 – 87 —sonnet 97: and Ronsard, 213 – 14 —sonnet 122: and Ronsard, 171 – 72 —sonnet 131: and Shakespeare, 226, 228 – 29 —sonnet 145: and Stampa, 87 – 89 —sonnets 151 and 152: and Ronsard, 184 – 85 —sonnet 155: and Ronsard, 237

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I N D E X     331 —sonnet 164: and Michelangelo, 103 – 4; and Sidney, 299 —sonnet 167: and Shakespeare, 226 – 27 —sonnet 169: and Sidney, 295 – 96 —sonnet 174: and Ronsard, 182 – 84 —sonnet 176: and Shakespeare, 276 —sonnet 179: and Stampa, 89 – 92 —sonnets 186 and 187: and Ronsard, 212 – 13 —sonnet 189: and Michelangelo, 127 – 28 —sonnet 192: and Ronsard, 206 – 7 —sonnet 193: and Ronsard, 203 – 4 —sonnet 196: and Ronsard, 160 – 61 —sonnet 197: and Stampa, 91 —sonnets 199 and 200: and Michelangelo, 117 – 20 —sonnet 224: and Ronsard, 180 – 81 —sonnet 231: and Ronsard, 182 —sonnet 234: and Stampa, 94 – 95 —sonnet 236: and Ronsard, 202 – 3 —sonnet 241: and Michelangelo, 110 – 11 —sonnet 247: and Ronsard, 194 – 95, 204 —sonnet 248: and Drayton, 315 – 16; and Ronsard, 137, 194, 204; and Shakespeare, 245 – 48, 250, 269 – 71, 290 – 92 —sonnet 267: and Shakespeare, 271 —sonnet 287: and Ronsard, 168 —sonnet 296: and Ronsard, 182 – 84 —sonnet 308: and Ronsard, 191 —sonnet 310: and Ronsard, 205; and Stampa, 96 – 98; and Shakespeare, 260 – 62 —sonnet 316: and Ronsard, 205 —sonnet 321: and Michelangelo, 107 —sonnet 342: and Ronsard, 191 – 92 —sonnet 349: and Michelangelo, 109 —sonnet 364: and Michelangelo, 128 Pigna (Giovanni Battista Nicolucci): on Ariosto, 93, 156 Plato: and Petrarch, 35 – 37, 53 – 54, 59; and Ronsard, 164, 208. See also furor and fureur Prescott, Anne, 25n63, 221nn5,9, 267n8 profession and professionalism, 2, 4 – 8; and Ariosto, 156, 161; and Castelvetro, 11 – 12; and Garzoni, 12 – 13; and Malherbe, 318; and Michelangelo, 5, 15, 101, 105, 114 – 16, 122 – 23, 126 – 27; and Petrarch, 2 – 3, 41 – 42, 47 – 50; and Quevedo, 319; and Ronsard, 21 – 22, 135 – 37, 139, 143, 156, 186, 201, 209, 214, 321; and Shakespeare, 29 – 30, 226, 244, 249, 251 – 52, 268, 272 – 73, 284, 286, 321 – 22; and Stampa, 83 – 84, 89, 99, 321 property and possession, 4, 31 – 32; and Shakespeare, 224, 228, 238 – 42, 258, 267, 282, 310 – 11

quantity theory of money, 175 – 77, 187 Quevedo, Francisco de, 319 – 21 Rabelais, François: Gargantua, 188 – 89; Quart Livre, 145, 188; Tiers Livre, 143 – 44, 152n33, 166, 174 – 75 Rebhorn, Wayne, 3n5 rent and rentier society: in Michelangelo, 100, 129; in Ronsard 20, 22 – 23, 100, 201; in Shakespeare, 282 – 83 revision, 8; in Ariosto, 155 – 57, 162 – 63, 166; in Michelangelo, 106 – 7, 108 – 9, 115 – 16; in Petrarch, 10, 43 – 44, 49 – 53, 67; in Ronsard, 20, 23 – 25, 134, 138 – 40, 156, 163 – 65, 171 – 73, 176 – 79, 185; in Shakespeare, 235 – 36, 238, 262, 273, 287 – 88, 301, 303, 307, 310 – 11; in Stampa, 13, 72, 76 – 77 Ronsard, Pierre de, 19 – 23, 314, 321; and benefices, 20 – 21; and brigade, 20; and Cassandre Salviati, 146 – 47, 152, 194; and Catherine de’ Medici, 23, 139, 193, 195; and Charles IX, 20, 174, 187, 190, 199; and Charles de Guise, 20 – 22, 177; and Claude Binet, 134 – 35, 146 – 47, 193; and Clément Marot, 136 – 37, 181; and the Comtesse de Retz, 193, 199; and family name, 141, 150, 209; and Hélène de Surgères, 193; and Jacques Peletier du Mans, 136, 157; and Joachim Du Bellay, 136, 153, 157, 164, 166 – 68, 173, 182; and La Possonniere, 133, 151, 166, 173, 178; and Marc-Antoine Muret, 134, 140 – 42, 146 – 47, 150, 162, 164, 179; and Marie de Bourgeuil, 194; and Maurice Scève, 136, 151 – 52, 166, 168, 172, 181; and Nicholas Denisot, 140, 158; and Remy Belleau, 173, 179, 180, 182, 185; and Saint-Cosme, 199; and Vergil, 146, 160, 168, 170, 172 Ronsard’s poetry and poetics: Abbregé e l’art poétique, 187; Discours à Pierre Lescot, 186; Discours de Miseres de ce temps, 188; Elégie à L’Huillier, 21; Elégie à Philippe Des-portes, 202; Epistre à Charles de Lorraine, 177; Franciade, 19, 133, 145 – 47, 151, 157, 168 – 70; Hynne à Charles de Lorraine, 177; Hynne d’or, 177 – 78; La Lyre, 19, 188 – 90; Le Procès, 21 – 22, 177; Les Odes, 19, 133 – 34, 136, Ode à Michel de l’Hospital, 135 – 36, Ode à sa muse, 134 – 35, Ode de la paix, 133, 135; Les Oeuvres, 20, 22 – 23, 25, 134, 138 – 40, 159, 164 – 65, 171 – 73, 176 – 79,  185

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Ronsard’s sonnets: Amours diverses sonnet 30, 207; sonnet 27, 208; Le Premier Livre des Amours chanson 141, 162; sonnet 1, 137 – 40; sonnet 8, 141 – 42; sonnet 27, 146 – 47; sonnets 70 and 71, 147; sonnet 73, 162; sonnet 94, 160 – 62; sonnet 103, 148 – 51; sonnet 108, 163 – 65; sonnet 125, 165; sonnet 138, 158 – 59; sonnet 147, 160; sonnet 164, 186 – 87; sonnet 193, 162, 165 – 66; sonnet 198, 167 – 68; sonnet 200, 152; sonnet 214, 159; sonnet 219, 171 – 72; sonnet 226, 152; sonnet 229, 153; Le Second Livre des Amours sonnet 32, 181 – 82; sonnet 37, 182; sonnet 40, 184 – 85; sonnet 64, 179 – 80; Sonnets pour Astrée sonnet 12, 190 – 91; Sonnets pour Hélène sonnet 1.1, 194 – 95; sonnet 1.2, 195; sonnet 1.3, 195 – 96; sonnet 1.9, 196 – 97; sonnet 1.26, 197; sonnet 1.31, 202 – 3; sonnet 1.49, 203 – 4; sonnet 2.1, 201; sonnet 2.3, 206 – 7; sonnet 2.26, 207 – 8; sonnet 2.36, 208; sonnet 2.43, 209 – 12; sonnet 2.55, 212 – 13; sonnet 2.68, 213 – 15; Sonnets pour Sinope, 184 – 85; Sonnets sur la mort de Marie, 191 – 92 Rore, Cipriano de, 81 – 83 Ruscelli, Girolamo: commentary on Ariosto, 156; editor of anthologies and Stampa, 76, 89 salon culture, 6 – 7, 13, 29; and Ronsard, 193, 198 – 202, 212 – 13; and Stampa, 13, 80 – 83, 92, 314, 321 Schumpeter, Joseph, 18n50, 23n55, 41n11, 174n4, 176n7 Shakespeare, William, 26 – 32, 314, 321 – 22; and Ben Jonson, 223, 264 – 65, 274 – 75, 278 – 80; and Chapman, Dekker, and Marston, 223, 264 – 66; and Christophe Mountjoy, 220; craftsmanship and skill, 221, 224, 229, 235 – 36, 245, 256; dating of sonnets, 221 – 25; furor and poetic rage, 238, 246, 268, 272, 292, 294 – 96, 321; and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, 243, 273 – 74; patronage, 224, 232, 243 – 44; professionalism, 232, 285; and Richard Field, printer, 25n3, 265n3; and Robert Chester, 264 – 65; and Robert Greene, 26 – 27, 222 – 23, 243, 249, 255; social status, 232; and Thomas Thorpe, 221 – 22; traces of revision,

221 – 22, 229, 235 – 36, 242, 244, 267, 285 – 88,  307 Shakespeare’s plays: All’s Well That Ends Well, 29 – 30, 289 – 90; Coriolanus, 294; Hamlet, 285; Love’s Labor’s Lost, 26 – 28, 238, 243 – 44, 309n36; Merchant of Venice, 28; Much Ado about Nothing, 248n8; Othello, 285; Romeo and Juliet, 28, 244; Troilus and Cressida, 29, 271; Winter’s Tale, 30 – 31, 311 – 12 Shakespeare’s poems: A Lover’s Complaint, 27, 258 – 59; in Passionate Pilgrim, 235; Phoenix and Turtle, 265 – 67; Rape of Lucrece, 26 – 27, 273; Venus and Adonis, 26 – 27, 243, 273, 314, 316 Shakespeare’s Sonnets: sonnet 8, 225 – 26, 228 – 31; sonnet 13, 292 – 93; sonnet 15, 293 – 94; sonnet 17, 290 – 92; sonnet 18, 294; sonnet 21, 297; sonnet 23, 294 – 97; sonnet 24, 225, 236 – 37; sonnets 27 and 28, 297; sonnet 33, 300 – 301; sonnet 35, 239, 301 – 2; sonnet 36, 287 – 89; sonnet 40, 239, 302 – 4; sonnets 41 and 42, 303n30; sonnets 46 and 47, 225, 239 – 40, 304; sonnet 49, 240 – 41; sonnets 53 and 54, 304 – 7; sonnet 55, 241, 304; sonnet 57, 307, 309; sonnet 58, 309 – 310; sonnet 60, 310; sonnet 62, 310 – 11; sonnet 63, 241; sonnets 64 and 65, 245 – 48; sonnet 71, 248; sonnets 73 and 74, 251 – 52; sonnet 76, 253 – 55; sonnet 78, 255 – 56; sonnets 82 – 86, 256 – 57; sonnets 87 and 88, 257; sonnet 96, 287 – 89; sonnets 97 and 98, 260 – 61; sonnet 99, 261 – 62; sonnets 100 and 101, 267 – 68; sonnets 102 and 103, 268; sonnet 104, 269 – 71; sonnet 107, 269, 273 – 74; sonnet 109, 275; sonnet 110, 275 – 76; sonnet 113, 276; sonnet 114, 277 – 78; sonnet 116, 279 – 81; sonnet 124, 281 – 83; sonnet 125, 289; sonnet 128, 225 – 28; sonnets 137 – 142, 225, 232 – 33; sonnet 138, 235 – 36; sonnet 144, 227 Sidney, Philip, 25, 224, 266 – 75, 286, 305, 214; Astrophil and Stella, Eighth Song, 266; sonnet 1, 256; sonnet 3, 253, 256, 297; sonnet 15, 253, 297; sonnet 28, 297n21; sonnet 47, 295; sonnet 71, 246, 291, 293, 303; sonnet 74, 27 295; sonnet 76, 253, 271; sonnets 88 and 89, 298; sonnet 90, 254; sonnet 91, 303n30; sonnets 98 and 99, 298 – 99; sonnet 102, 304

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University

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I N D E X     333 Silvano da Venafro, commentary on Petrarch, 88, 96n37, 231, 296 Smith, Adam, 6 Smith, Sir Thomas, Discourse of the Commonweal, 23 – 24 Spenser, Edmund, 26, 222 – 24, 286, 305; Amoretti, 259; sonnet 9, 293, 301; sonnet 35, 311; sonnet 67, 299; sonnet 69, 272, 292; sonnet 71, 287; sonnet 83, 311; sonnet 86, 300; sonnets 87 and 88, 299; Epithalamion, 287; Faerie Queene, books 3 and 4, 238 – 39; Ruines of Rome, sonnet 5, 291; sonnet 7, 293; sonnet 10, 302; sonnet 20, 304; sonnet 23, 302; sonnet 25, 254; sonnet 32, 291 – 92, 306 Squarzafico, Hieronimo, commentary on Petrarch, 92 Stampa, Gaspara, 13 – 14, 314, 321; and Baldassare Stampa, 90; and Cassandra Stampa, 76 – 77; civic ideology of Venice, 82 – 84; class structure of Venice, 79 – 81, 83 – 84, 89, 91, 97; and Collaltino di Collalto, 13, 77, 83 – 85; and Doge Andrea Gritti, 14, 78, 99; and Domenico Venier, 80 – 81, 83; marriage to Andrea di Giovanni de San Martin, 14n35, 78n7; musical styles of Parabosco, Rore, and Willaert, 81 – 83; and Pietro Aretino, 78 – 80; salon culture in Venice, 13, 80, 82 – 83,  92 Stampa’s poems: sonnet 1, 81 – 82; sonnets 55 and 56, 85 – 86; sonnet 86, 86 – 87; sonnet 111, 87 – 89; sonnet 113, 91 – 92; sonnet 121, 92 – 94; sonnet 140, 94 – 95; sonnet 155, 95 – 96; sonnet 173, 96 – 98; sonnet 179, 98; sonnets 205 – 219, 98; sonnets 221 – 73, 80 – 81,  98

Thorpe, Thomas, Elizabethan publisher, 221 – 22,  224 Tibullus, Elegy 1.3, 211 Tottel, Richard, 260 – 61, 219n1 trade, 129, 145, 168 – 69, 252, 254 Trent, Council of, 18 – 19, 97n40, 143 – 45, 152, 165 – 66 use value, 8, 41, 317 usury, 6, 318; and Charles Du Moulin, 17 – 18, 24, 144 – 45; and Michelangelo, 113 – 14, 144 – 45; and Sir Thomas Smith, 23 – 24; and Shakespeare, 28 utility value, 3, 4; and Castelvetro, 11; and Petrarch, 10, 37 – 42; and Ronsard, 134 – 35, 146 – 47, 170, 175 – 77, 198 – 99; and Shakespeare, 255 – 58, 272 – 73, 290 – 92, 304 – 7 Vasari, Giorgio, 5, 15n40, 100 – 102, 123 – 26,  129 Vecellio, Cesare, 12 Vellutello, Alessandro, commentary on Petrarch, 86, 88, 92, 94, 148, 228 – 29, 258, 296 Venier, Domenico, 80 – 83,  93 Warley, Christopher, 235n31, 259n25, 279n20 Warner, J. Christopher, 107n16, 219n1 Watkins, John, 28n75 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 69n22 Willaert, Adrian, 81 – 83 Wilson, Thomas: Art of Rhetoric, 25; Discourse on Usury, 24

Kennedy, William J.. Petrarchism at Work : Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare, Cornell University